I recently attended our organization’s first town hall meeting under the tutelage of our new president. He spoke about the recent confluence of transformative identities and disruptive technologies that have come together over the last couple of years, leading him to believe that we will cure several major cancers in his lifetime.
I’m hopeful that I am a part of a place that can leverage new computational firepower, quantitative analysis of bio-specimens, and disruptive genome technologies to advance existing paradigms and cure this awful disease.
Your Organization Doesn’t Get It… Yet.
But in the interim, I’m rather dumbfounded and annoyed that more organizations aren’t leveraging disruptive technologies to enhance the way they communicate, organize and operate their businesses.
Even now, after all the hoopla around “social” has died down (a bit) and we know so much more, companies are still insistent about “integrating some of that social media stuff into our marketing.” Never mind leveraging disruptive social technologies to enhance business intelligence by listening to customers (patients in health care), conducting market research, solidifying customer service, managing a community and more.
I get it. I really do. I understand that your organization is big, siloed, doesn’t get social and so on and so forth. I also understand that most people don’t like change. Change is hard.
The Opportunities are Endless
But in a world where disruptive technologies give us the ability to potentially cure cancer, why can’t we leverage digital/social solutions to put an end to pointless meetings, collaborate across teams, dissipate important news or information, etc.?
Top-down hierarchical institutions wont always be the norm and the power of open source projects is becoming increasingly evident. Rule-followers and drones might keep their mouths shut and do what they’re told, but the industrial revolution is over and those people don’t impact meaningful change anymore.
Linchpins who ask hard questions, challenge the status quo, and demand to be pushed outside the comfort zone do. How do we scale the work that they do – the value they bring to the institution? How do we share it? How do we leverage it?
Oh, You Want Some Examples?
- Cross functional information sharing – What if there was an easy way for front line people to communicate issues to upper management, and then for upper management to share noteworthy changes to the PR/Marketing department?
- Increased Office Efficiency – What if instead of an hour long status meetings (# of people in meeting x how long meeting lasts) where people go around in a circle and say what they’re working on there’s a sharepoint employees keep updated where others can go and see what projects are relevant to them?
- Internal Networking – Most companies organize employees in such a way that all the account executives sit together, the creative sits together, the IT sits together. What if there were internal forums where employees could bond not just over their job description, but other things that interest them. Wouldn’t something like that unlock new collaborations and opportunities to learn and become more well-rounded employees?
How about?
- Increasing internal brand awareness
- Idea generation (brainstorming via Google docs anyone!?)
- Facilitating the spread of research, insights, etc. and making the information more accessible
The list goes on. And on.
What’s Next?
As we gradually come to understand how disruptive social technologies can enhance our own internal communications perhaps we’ll see forward thinking organizations take it a step further. Can you imagine MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering all leveraging these disruptive social technologies to enable their respective physicians, physicists, geneticists and more to collaborate with the other institutions in an effort to cure cancer?
The future is now. Don’t let your organization fall behind.
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You may have seen this before, but I just did a report on it for school: QR Codes for medical identification when first responders get to the scene of an accident or other emergency: http://www.imedicalapps.com/2011/09/connectyx-technologies-adds-qr-codes-medflash-ephm-service/
It’s nice to see what one considers a marketing technology used not only as a functional tool but to improve process.
@Emily – Though I feel like QR codes will come and go relatively quickly in favor of something more advanced and more aesthetically pleasing, I think this is a great example of a disruptive technology improving a process.
I think it’s ridiculous patients have to fill out 5 forms every time they go to a hospital, new doctor, etc. Personal Health records should be digital, sync’d, stored in the cloud, etc. for ease of use and identification. Sure there are limitations (HIPPA will always ensure plenty of red tape); however, I think our generation will be more apt to sacrifice privacy for increased efficiency and personalized care.
Much like all our new technologies and platforms of late, we move slowly to start and when we’ve hit critical mass everybody jumps on board. People need success stories, case studies, examples of how it has been done before to make an organization/operational/technological shift. It takes people like you, companies like those in Silicon Valley and internal voices of reason to influence a shift. It will come, just not soon enough for the already enlightened like you.
I often see colleagues spend 15 minutes crafting the perfectly worded email, when the same thing could’ve been said in 20 seconds via instant message channels. The inefficiency frustrates me, but I’m just glad the communication is happening at any level.
All fair points. And as someone who would write multiple reports while leading conference calls I can only imagine how inefficiencies eat away at your soul.
I guess my issue is that I genuinely believe the evidence is out there and that too many internal leaders get caught up waiting for critical mass, fearful of making a mistake. A little guts go a long way.
Back in my banking days (read: during my summer internship), I was amazed at some of the crazy banking technology that was out there in the world. Whether it be online banking systems, banking locations where you spoke to your financial adviser via video, or the ability to transfer money with the swipe of your phone. The craziest part to me was where these technologies were flourishing. Countries like Nigeria (where paying someone selling goods in a market was simply easier when you could do it via phone) and Finland (where I guess people are so spread out that staffing a full bank just doesn’t make sense) are blowing us out of the water.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with that…other than to say I feel your pain. It’s scary to be “first” at anything, but, if nothing else, you’ll be the first to fail, which means you’ll be a step ahead of everyone else.
I think Jake’s right in that most organizations (especially big organizations) are often scared to jump on board until something reaches critical mass, but it’s also disappointing that despite moving slower, these big organizations have the resources to make big, important changes happen. Changes that can transform entire industries. And yet they don’t.
And you’re exactly right. If you fail first, you can make adjustments and you’re that far ahead of everyone that will still have to navigate and tweak along the way. And you’ll probably get “karma points” for trying to be out front of the pack.