TEDx Talk Titel: How to grow and lead collaborative networks

It’s been already almost two years, since I have been invited to do a TEDx Talk at Continental Sibiu Romania. An awesome team brought this inspiring keynote format to the organization. Together with other great leaders, we had two wonderful days with great exchange, Leadership Talks, Young Talent Sessions, personal meetings with local and regional leaders and plant managers.

I could also meet many of our incredible GUIDEs and supporters of the past projects in this plant and from nearby other locations.

The big evening event with the TEDx Talks took place in the CINEGOLD Theater downtown. The fully booked audience made it easy to create this unique TEDx atmosphere and deliver our keynotes.

A big Thank You to Dr. Frank Edelkraut, who greatly supported my preparation not only with his book „Inspiring! Kommunizieren im TED-Stil“ – which I would recommend for anyone, giving speeches or keynotes.

Impressions and Moments

Here are some impressions of that day, a short Video-Consolidation (full version is only internal) of my talk and the slides to review.

Not the original script, but insights around my TEDx Talk:

with images of the original slides used… with many links to clarify and deepen the understanding of used terms and experience I talked about.

How networking changed my life

Do you remember your first internet WOW-moment?

In 1997, during my expatriot stay in USA, I was playing around with ICQ, one of the early chat tools. You could press a button to be connected to anyone online around the world. I remember having great conversations with total strangers. I learned about their cultures and the many things we had in common. Like people in Kazakhstan who met at the beach, or that the big thing for ladies in Iran was plastic surgery…

To be able to connect to virtually anyone on our planet with a click seemed to me like a huge step for mankind. All we needed was the tool and a common language – to „see“ each other, to learn from each other and start a better understanding, eventually reaching peace worldwide.

What I learned from Change VIPs …

While thinking on how to leverage the power in an organization, I learned from …

•John Kotter, who talks about a dual operating system for organizations

•Nassim Taleb talking about „antifragility“ – things getting better by stressing them

•Dave Snowden created the cynefin framework on how to work with complexity

•Prof Peter Kruse talked about exponential growth of networks and power-shifts

•Simon Sinek introduced the “Golden Circle” – start with why… putting a strong focus on what drives us

•Dale Carnegie told us how we can create impact and become a better leader ( e.g. Working Out Loud)

I became more and more curious about this “digital network” thing
(and what we can experience with social media)

The reputation of social media

Here is a hook – not only managers in organizations are quite critical about social media! Many call it waste of time with cat videos, food photos and many risks like shitstorms. Security Experts warn about privacy and data protection. People celebrating there egos, influencers who do not really make out world a better place with what they do.

Many suffer from too much information coming at a rising speed. Once helpful Algorithms are now distracting us and „just“ keeping us online.

there is a lot of waste out there – how can that be a new level of communication?

Strange enough, we can not deny that Social Media is not just a hype of some crazy ones.

There are many examples on how Social Media had been of incredible help by its fast and boundary-less opportunities. We learn faster, help each other, organize rescues, laugh and cry together and achieve outstanding collaborative results …

I asked myself, how could we use the social mechanisms
to get things done better, do reach people and collaborate.

Let me inspire you on how to use social networks can drive transformation:

What we could achieve in organizations:

In 2011 I was invited to our headquarter to become part of our global team to introduce Social Networking to our whole organization. For this I tried to establish the first global network of change agents – we called them GUIDEs.

About 400 of them could be won to experiment and role model a new way of sharing knowledge, collaboration and social learning. We experienced the power of inter-cultural passion, the richness of diversity and how even friendship could grow just by sharing and collaboration based on strong values.

Our Start event has been one of my best days in my life: 200 passionate GUIDEs from 36 countries…

We learned a lot about Networks and Communities
and what people need, to join forces in purely digital channels.

We used open blogs to share our topics to the wider audience, we used forums to discuss and deepen our knowledge and wikis for summaries and consolidated results. This co-creative, open way made others curious to join us. It also helped us a lot to work asynchronously as we had to deal with various time zones. That by the way is a great competence now, where so many work in home office.

Sharing enabled us to learn faster, reduce risks and find shortcuts to more sustainable solutions – together. The transparency of open collaboration not only reduced resistance but built trust, as people could see not only who is doing what, but also how we do it and how we interact .. Social, trust based…

New Work Style

Starting in 2017, our organization drove a global migration project including all office tools to become highly integrated and cloud-based. Being one of the project leads, I took the chance to re-empower not only the global GUIDE network, but wanted to try a whole network organization.

Intrinsically motivated people across the organization supporting each other and the project goals. This time not only individuals, but also local teams acting on eye-level, without hierarchy.

Respecting the diversity of our many regional cultures and engaging our colleagues to join in, we questioned all classical methods and formats, to be more digital, more inclusive, more engaging and people oriented.

Next to our great IT experts, we invited colleagues to establish 4 different networks, closely interlinked:

• We calculated with about 800 GUIDEs as Change Agents – end ended up finding about 1400 supporting us
• We created a new role of 150 Knowledge Brokers to find out about and spread the constantly updating knowledge
• 50 dedicated Business Representatives ensured we are really creating value for our business
• And the biggest group of 350 cross-functional Local Evergreen Teams to drive local adaptation in each location with people from Communication, IT, HR and others

With this self driven network power, we migrated around 1000-1500 colleagues every day – for 6 month in 500 locations > New Work Style Story with Videos

The result of this decentralized network organization of more than 4000 people:

• 71% of our employees have been (very) satisfied with the migration
• our provider congratulated to the highest adoption rate in industry at that time
• and training provider called our social learning „once in a life time experience“  – all made true by passionate people working in collaboration networks.

We could prove that networks perform great
in complex and dynamic projects and initiatives of global size,
but also smaller projects.

•What is needed to succeed:

• Transparency – sharing ideas, progress, questions, results as a way of communitcation
• Participation – feedback way beyond surveys, but real-time within open networks
• Faith – trusting our people, handing over responsibility and being available to support

A social platform is a technical fundament. The features of Social Platforms allows fast and scalable involvement as well as easy consolidation. The two main pillars to drive engagement have been Transparency and Participation.

To engage people without disciplinary power, we needed to exemplify and role mode
– giving trust, asking for help, sharing our struggle and offering ownership takeover.

Digital Impact of Collaboration Networks in Organizations
Identify trends, mitigate risks, scale responsiveness and innovation while creating connectedness

• TRANSPARENCY (process) – inviting, making curious, approaching
  it is needed to give insights on why we do things, how we treat each other (being attractive to join) and aligning what we do
  (Think about Picasso: seeing the final picture does not teach you much, seeing him getting paint, setting up the scene, seeing the tools and how he uses them… will be a great learning journey)
  > By sharing early insights, our ideas, struggles and questions, people get curious and join in. > Power of Sharing
  > My network filters the information stream with likes, comments and hashtags – reducing it to a digestible amount
• RELEVANCE
  Sharing starts as simple as giving feedback with a like or comment – the more doing it, will show what (and when) is relevant for people I trust. Technically this can be used as a filter to focus on „relevant“ information only – without missing out or enormous effort screening all the information.
  > giving feedback in social platforms needs training… like, comment with „thank you“, comment with a specifice reference, writing a referring own post with additional aspects, valuing the others insights
• RESONANCE – exponential growth… a movement
  Once there is enough activation – things can exponentially grow. No need for a “OneSizeFitsAllTopDownRollOut” with classical resistance, but a purposeful, sense-making movement doing, whats best with the needed variations to respect local or group specific diversity.

Levels of Ownership & Participation in Organizations through Digital Collaboration Networks*

*digitally connected colleagues working together, to solve complex tasks via social interaction (blogs, forums, wikis, likes, comments, hashtags)

Rising Ownership & Participation

• The more inclusive Participation is, the more Engagement and Ownership people take over
• If you are part of it, have influence or are even invited to take own decisions – peoples passion goes way up
• By openly asking our colleagues what they need, where they struggle and inviting them to work with us, more than 25.000 people supported our transformation.
• #respecting people’s diverse situations, by involving people – on eye level – we built great solutions together, learned from each other … and them building it, resistance went down and commitment up

The Social networks helped all
to learn from each other
and celebrate great solutions

Reputation is a lot more about listening and building trust by our actions

Digital Reputation is not trying to become an influencer by self promoting, sharing selfies and putting you in the center.

Digital Reputation is all about sharing to help others, putting the spotlight on others, showing appreciation for what they do, enabling this collective brain to cocreate, connecting people and fostering their exchange. A network is like a brain – the more active neurons, the more powerful

Digitial Reputation should be the outcome
of being a trusted person others want to work with

We live in very dynamic and uncertain times, We are all connected and the challenges demand for an orchestra of solutions.

Our classical organizational setup keeps failing. If we put our ego away and listen to what people or customers really need.if we start using the power of digital collaboration networks…

Digital reputation opens doors, connects people, reduces risks,
drives innovation and builds relationships that matter – beyond physical limits

Digital reputation is key to create impact in our connected world

Trust in your people – there is unlimited potential in connecting our brains and power!

• Complexity is not a threat, if we collaborate openly
• Nature is all about dynamic and complexity
• Transparency and Participation helps to find better solutions
• Trust in people – they will astonish you!
• Build a digital reputation so we can connect all those great people trying to shape a desirable future – together