Pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world

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I caught up this afternoon with Chris Bayley of Buffalo Canyon Consulting and we had a very interesting conversation about Web 2.0 in organizations. Chris asked me about the role of pilots, and in our ensuing discussion I refined my thinking on this a bit.

Examining how to run pilots plays a significant role in our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, with a full chapter on pilots and many aspects of our coverage of user adoption related to pilots. The center of our Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework is ‘Iterate and Refine’. Pilots and agile methodologies are critical to the ability of organizations to do that. Some companies are good at piloting, but many need to shift their attitudes and approaches to enable effectively establishing, managing, supporting, and closing down pilot projects.

Management theorists have drawn on complexity science extensively for the last decade. While there are many lessons from this domain, certainly a central one is that emergence (achieving outcomes by means that could not be predicted at the outset) is best fostered by allowing completely free scope within clearly defined parameters. How well you define the parameters and constraints within which activity happens, determines the effectiveness of the emergent process.

One great benefit of this is that establishing clear parameters can give great comfort to management. If they know that there are boundaries that will not be crossed, they can allow unfettered experimentation within that. At the meeting of museum and library directors I spoke at a couple of weeks ago, Shelley Bernstein of Brooklyn Museum said something very telling: “I have a very long leash, and I know exactly how long my leash is.” This is a great example of organizational parameters having been set (and very well understood), enabling fantastic innovation to occur within those boundaries.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the ‘iterate and refine’ concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it’s fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they’re not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance.