I spoke this week at Avectra’s User and Developer Conference (AUDC). It was awesome conference. I can’t even put my finger on it entirely, but the energy and learning and interactions all seemed…accelerated somehow. Well done, Avectra!

Anyway, on Tuesday I did a session on Humanize, and after the session someone came up to me and asked, “So if you had to convince a management team to make their organization more human, could you boil it down to one thing? What could you tell them they would get out of humanizing their company?”

Great question.

My answer (off the top of my head; I hadn’t tried to boil it down to one thing before): agility.

We all say that we want more agility. We want our organizations to be “nimble.” This is particularly true in today’s social world. But we say it as if it’s just a matter of intention. Like no one ever thought of this before. Like up until now we all felt that agility and being nimble was a BAD thing, but now we’re seeing the light. I don’t think so. I think we’ve always liked nimble and agile, but over the years we’ve created organizations that are not. You’re not going to think or “intend” your way out of a problem that you acted your way into.

We need better organizations. We need organizations that are run on very different principles, with cultures, processes, and behaviors that are NOT the norm right now. That’s what we are saying in Humanize. Human beings are innately nimble. That’s why we have thrived as a species. We adapt, change, shift, as needed. Social media has also been tremendously nimble. It changes, scales, shrinks, and morphs just as it needs to.

So now is the time to make our organizations that way. We chose our four human elements (open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous) because they reflect the power of both human beings and social media. These are elements that will enable agility.

Nilofer Merchant, an idol of mine, wrote a book that we listed as a “must read” in Humanize, called The New How. It’s about collaborative strategy. She blogs on HBR (and on her own blog) and she’s writing a series about new rules for the social era. She gets it:

The world has changed; how we create value has changed. Organizationally we have not. It will be wholly insufficient to put the word “social” in front of existing business models and expect things to change. Instead, we need to imagine the fundamental enterprise anew for the social era. Lean, adaptive, community-driven organizations, built for speed, will thrive.

That’s what you get by becoming more human as an organization.

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