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

Ross Dawson, March 26, 2009 4:02 AM US PT

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.

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Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-up Repyoot.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.