While it might seem that there is no possible link between chickens and Enterprise 2.0, it turns out that there is a really good story about group versus personal productivity involving chickens:
William Muir, an animal breeder at Purdue University, wanted to increase egg production by selective breeding, and he tried to do it in two ways. Both involved housing hens in cages (groups), which is standard practice in the poultry industry. The first method involved selecting the most productive hen within each cage to breed the next generation of hens. The second method involved selecting the most productive cages and using all the hens from those cages to breed the next generation of hens. You might think that the difference between the two methods is slight and that the first method should work better. After all, it is individuals who lay eggs, so selecting the best individuals directly should be more efficient than selecting the best groups, which might include some individual duds.
The results told a completely different story. When Bill presented his results at a scientific conference, he showed a slide of hens selected by the first method after six generations. The audience gasped. Inside the cage were only three hens, not nine, because the other six hens had been murdered. The three survivors had plucked each other during their incessant attacks and were now nearly featherless… What happened? The most productive individuals had achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of their cage mates.
The first method caused egg productivity to perversely decline, even though the most productive hens were chosen each and every generation. The second method caused egg productivity to increase 160 percent in six generations, an astonishing response as artificial selection experiments go.
Excerpt from Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson
In the recently released “The State of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Q4 2009” by the 2.0 Adoption Council, “increasing productivity” was the leading business driver for adopting e2.0 solutions. “Productivity software” has historically been about personal productivity, a nebulous cloud of “tools people use to create and produce documents, presentations, databases, charts and graphs” and about Enterprise 1.0 style applications – very structured and top-down, like ERP, BPM and CRM.
What is being added to this mix is a set of tools to enhance community productivity: bottom-up, group orientated productivity tools. Like chicken farmers, companies win or lose based on the performance of their teams, not individuals. And increasingly on the performance of teams of teams, distributed teams of teams, and networks of customer communities and partners. For companies to outperform their peers, they need a platform for group productivity.
Nenshad Bardoliwalla points out that e1.0 and e2.0 applications, what I am calling personal, group and top-down productivity tools, are not a case of “either-or” but should co-exist and complement each other quite happily. For example, the order to cash process works perfectly well as a structured, top-down e1.0 application. The customer and the company will further benefit from an e2.0 problem solving collaboration process when an order is delayed.
So don’t be chicken, check out what Enterprise 2.0 applications can do for your company’s ability to improve and enhance group productivity.
For more on chickens, group productivity and innovation, see my follow-up post “Human Capital x Social Capital = Productivity and Innovation“
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Interesting. Chickens make and interesting and compelling connection. We have had group tools available for some time now… but it is not until we feel the squeeze of the shifting economy that we begin to say – we need to think about using them. Toyota comes to mind. It wasn’t until Toyota began to win that others started to think about their system seriously – and what they found was an entirely new culture… on based on system wide innovation and improvement.
I believe that one of the fundamental challenges is to teach people to engage in this new innovative culture. We need to shift assessment (measures) in our education, training, and performance systems to get people to leverage their networks and their ability to learn and innovate. We need to engage people in increasing their Edgility
This is fascinating… not only because I am a Indiana farmers’ granddaughter but because I made the exact same point referencing my experience rowing in college. To get swing – i.e. high group productivity – it’s more important that everyone be in synch then that everyone in the boat be ’stars’ and in fact you must subvert your individual ego to that of the group in order to achieve swing. Post is here: http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2009/11/achieving-swing.html
Thanks for bringing this study up. I find this dynamic really, really fascinating – particularly when you start thinking about how to design organizations, software, process, and management approaches to effect this type of productivity.
Meri —
Excellent message. Indeed groups are powerful forces. It’s odd to see when companies fail to leverage the fundamental qualities of groups and instead promote individual competition. It’s odd because the very idea of forming a company comes from the realization that you need many people to accomplish something big. And you hit the nail on the head — companies want to improve both individual and communal efficiency. So they have to think of both.
Perhaps the missing piece for many companies is that they don’t see that there is a difference between “group” and “community”. Some people call this “strong-tie” and “weak-tie” relationships. In a group, we have a common manager, mission, and set of activities. We are dependent upon each other’s success, and we regularly work together to achieve our common goal. Companies realize that we need to support the productivity of these groups (or teams). But many fail to realize that there are communities at work too — where people share common interest and even common fate, but they don’t work together. They might not even know about each other. But something connects them such that they would find mutual benefit to being aware of, and offering some help to their community members. Facilitating the productivity of these communities (people who report to different managers and don’t work together on a shared goal, but do share in common fate and faith) — that transforms the company into a much more productive environment overall.
BTW, I have one other connection between chickens and Enterprise 2.0: A few months ago I wrote a post discussing the vision of Enterprise 2.0 versus the reality of Department 2.0. Oliver Marks (Blogger on ZDNet) picked up on it and said that I was describing the “multi headed chicken syndrome”. Enjoy the read: http://olivermarks.com/blog/?p=7 and http://www.gilyehuda.com/2009/03/26/e2ord2/