People are drawn to purpose and fulfilled by progress. Most organizations however have reduced themselves to pursuing projects and process. epic.io is a management hack that treats purpose as a platform, progress as a stream, and people as humans. It's basically a new foundation for organization. How fun is that?

Problem

Management through process has dehumanized organizations. Humans are motivated by purpose and autonomy, not projects and process. The result of conventional practice is an eroding return on assets and unprecedented employee disengagement. Individual organizations are demonstrating limited adaptability which becomes an ever greater risk in context of the increasing rate of change.

The rise of social and digital technologies holds promise with the opportunity for people and teams to find and use the tools that best work for them and transcend some barriers in space and time. The rise of this "shadow IT" however, also makes standardization, progress monitoring, and organizational optimization difficult.

As organizations begin to depend more deeply on the contributions, collaboration, and innovation of people within and around the organization it is clear that there needs to be a new way to inspire progress on what matters... both for organizational performance and a thrivable society. As noted in "Future of Management": "Vassals and conscripts may work hard, but they don't work willingly. This is a crucial distinction, for in a world where prosperity depends on creativity, an enthusiastic workforce will consistently outperform one that is merely industrious".

Solution

We're building epic.io is an emergent platform for purpose, people, and progress. It will launch shortly in early alpha. We believe everything has a purpose. Here's where we're headed.

Purpose as a platform

Purpose is what people gather around, so we put it in the middle. Whether it's the purpose associated with the organization's reason for being or the purpose associated with finding better office coffee, there's always a purpose. Comprised of a description, time frame, status, and related purposes, it is simple to setup and evolve as it needs to. Rather than becoming a container for items however, it becomes a node to which people can attach whatever moves it forward. Purpose is powerful.

Progress as a stream

Progress happens in many ways. Whether bookmarking sites of interest, clipping quotes, attaching documents, marking a task complete, updating a file, posting a comment or hosting a discussion... it's all a part of moving forward. Rather than requiring the use of exclusive tools however, epic.io allows all that activity to be associated with a specific purpose, effectively building a single stream of progress regardless of when, where, or how it happens. Each item can also be commented on, favourited, and even rated for the level of contribution it made. Progress happens.

People powered

It's people that create and connect to purpose. In fact, that's what organizations arise from. As such, this platform is about people. There is no organization account, except to be able to sponsor individual accounts and gather collections of purpose and people in order to profile progress and observe patterns. It is the people, individually, that make and evaluate progress, favourite a post, comment, and share. People make it happen.

Attention optimized

With progress streams aggregated around specific purpose the opportunity to observe patterns of real progress, real-time is raised to a new level. Granularity provided by types, sources, and rating of contributions, and by tagging and favouriting enable detailed filtering to the level of attention the user wants to pay - from simply following the pulse of a purpose to being immersed in every conversation. Signalling opportunities such as changing status of the purpose, reaching thresholds of activity or inactivity, or directly tagging other people and purposes can help to draw attention of who's needed, when they are needed. There is signal in the stream. We amplify it.

JALNA GOES EPIC! An illustrative story.

Jalna works in accounts payable for Behemoth Inc. While at her desk, she received an email saying a new sign had just been posted on her street telling drivers to slow down. She smiled because her young children had nearly been hit by a speeder two weeks ago. At the same time, she was a bit perplexed. She, as had other neighbours over the years, had tried calling the city traffic department to get a sign put up to no avail.

Curious, Jalna clicked through the link to a 'mission' her neighbour, Beth, had launched on epic.io. Apparently, Beth had shared it with some other neighbours, some of whom found some research on residential traffic fatalities, some took pictures of other signs in the neibourhood, some shared their stories from the street, while yet another shared it with the local councillor. Moved by the momentum, the councillor had posted to the mission yesterday saying she had talked with the traffic department and a sign was scheduled to go up 'tomorrow'. Today today Jalna's neighbour posted a picture of the sign.

As Jalna took another drink of the office coffee she and everyone on her floor complained about, she started to wonder. If she posted a mission for "awesome coffee on the 15th floor" would she and her colleagues be able to find a way to make it happen? Within a minute she had the mission setup and sent to a couple of her closest colleagues and office-bound friends in other organizations, leading with the question of "what is awesome office coffee". Almost immediately she started getting some responses and examples from her other friends. The next day, when she checked back in to work, another colleague had found some case studies making the economic case of better better productivity through better coffee. By the end of the day there were over 100 posts on the mission from 40 different people from both inside and outside the organization and people were chatting about it - at the coffeemaker. At 9:30 the next morning she answered her phone. It was Liz, her manager, "Jalna, Bob just sent me this epic mission, or something. I'm not quite sure how this happened. It's great, but we can't just do it for this floor, because it's supplied to the whole building.". Jalna, took a breath, still nervous that she had rocked the boat, then said, "Well, why don't I change the mission? If I make it "awesome coffee for an awesome Behemoth!" would you send it off to whoever can decide?" Liz agreed, and like with the sign, a couple of weeks later, a decision was made to upgrade to awesome coffee in the next contract.

Over the coming months, Jalna posted more missions, some for work, some for the rest of her life. She found herself paying more attention to what she was doing and where she wanted to go. She also began seeing more mission coming from other colleagues and friends and started contributing to those that mattered most. While there were some missions that seemed preposterously out of reach, she found herself posting progress in unexpected ways and getting clearer on where she wanted to go. She also noticed office chatter shifting. There was more passion and more people talking about what they were doing. People of all levels, were having real conversations about making all sorts of things better, from new product innovations to buying better toilet paper. And, yes, by the end of the year, there was awesome coffee on every floor at Behemoth. Indeed Behemoth seemed a lot more awesome too.

JALNA GOES EPIC! An illustrative story.
Jalna works in accounts payable for Behemoth Inc. While at her desk, she received an email saying a new sign had just been posted on her street telling drivers to slow down. She smiled because her young children had nearly been hit by a speeder two weeks ago. At the same time, she was a bit perplexed. She, as had other neighbours over the years, had tried calling the city traffic department to get a sign put up to no avail.

At 9:30 the next morning she answered her phone. It was Liz, her manager, "Jalna, Bob just sent me this epic mission, or something. I'm not quite sure what's going on here. It's great, but we can't just do it for this floor, because coffee is supplied to the whole building through one contract." Jalna took a breath, still nervous that she had rocked the boat, then said, "Well, why don't I change the mission? If I make it "awesome coffee for an awesome Behemoth!" would you send it off to whoever can decide?" Liz agreed, and like with the sign, a couple of weeks later, a decision was made to upgrade to awesome coffee in the next contract.

Over the coming months, Jalna posted more missions, some for work, some for the rest of her life. She found herself paying more attention to what she was doing and where she wanted to go. She also began seeing more missions coming from other colleagues and friends and started contributing to those that mattered most. While there were some missions that seemed preposterously out of reach, she found herself posting progress in unexpected ways and getting clearer on where she wanted to go. She also noticed office chatter shifting. There was more passion and more people talking about what they were doing. People of all levels, were having real conversations about making all sorts of things better, from new product innovations to buying better toilet paper. And, yes, by the end of the year, there was awesome coffee on every floor at Behemoth. Indeed Behemoth seemed a lot more awesome too.

Practical Impact

Using purpose as a platform will have direct practical impact as follows:

Drive clarity of direction

Putting the purpose in the middle of organizations, projects, and initiatives invites challenge, discussion, clarification, and connection to the direction being taken. This enables individuals to tune their efforts to making the greatest contribution as opposed to limiting them to generic ideas of predetermined outputs. This in turn, is essential to transforming an organization from a collection of human resources, to a gathering of people dedicated to fulfilling common purpose.

Surface real patterns of progress, real-time

By aggregating streams of progress however and wherever they happen surfaces the real energy and activity around every purpose. The richness and granularity of these streams enables unprecedented pattern recognition associated directly with the directions people are pursuing as part of the organization. This pattern recognition is a vital asset in improving sensitivity and responsiveness to incipient instability and unanticipated opportunities. Comparative patterns among missions also provide unprecedented insight into how progress happens most effectively at the individual, team and organization levels as well as by stage, horizon, and type of purpose. These patterns are a similarly vital asset in driving self-improvement and optimizing collaboration in the journey of fulfilling an organization's ultimate purpose.

Evoke innovation from everyone, anywhere

When people connect to a purpose and understand the direction they are in the best position and most motivated to be able to bring their greatest contribution to its realization. Further, by enabling people to follow any purpose of any scale from anywhere, and granting them the ability to feed the record of their contributions however they happen, it is easier for more people to make more meaningful contributions. If P&G is already sourcing 50% of its innovation from outside of the organization, what else could be possible if more people were more able to connect and contribute to a purpose that you have in common?

Optimize organizational performance and evolution

By inviting a culture of purposeful progress driven by the people of the organization the potential exists for every individual to make a difference where it matters most to them. Whether that difference arises in serving the customer, improving the office environment, innovating in operational processes, the opportunity of sharing that purpose with others and making progress, will self-regulate in the context of the organization itself. If no-one shares in the purpose, there will be limited activity and progress. Those things that resonate however will be likely to gather attention and contributions leading to clarity and completion. That experience will encourage further self-directed participation and progress evolving the organization from the inside out, and if opened to the world, from the outside in. Management will have become distributed and obsessed with people, purpose, progress, and the patterns they produce.

MOONSHOT: Reinventing Leadership

Everyone has been a leader in some context, at some point, of something. Leadership is not the domain of a select few but the potential of humanity. The most adaptive organizations will see flashes and flows of leadership in all areas of the organization. epic.io will surface and nurture that leadership in a number of ways. First every individual account has the same primary privileges. There is no account-level hierarchy meaning everyone enters on the same level. Anyone can post any mission they want. This means they can create a mission related to any aspect of the organization, they are not bound by organizational structure. No matter how big, or how small, anyone can choose to make something happen that matters to them. Interest driven participation. People can choose to follow and participate in any mission that matters to them. Again, they are not bound by organizational structure. Once following a mission they can participate in exactly the same way as everyone other person following that mission, increasing the likelihood that they will be driven towards their most inspired contributions. Peer-based feedback. There are 3 ways to 'respond' to any post made on a mission: comment; favourite; rate. These provide for a range of feedback with the feedback of each user having the same value as that of every other user. This begins to surface how and where value is created as determined by the people themselves. Leaderboarding. The previous aspects enable leaderboards on each mission recognizing that leadership can in fact arise from any participant. Determined by a dynamic algorithm that seeks to balance the types of participation in every mission, leaders are determined based on their contributions to each mission individually. Leadership then, is recognized as it happens, when it happens. It's not granted with a title. It's what's demonstrated. It's something everyone can demonstrate. It is no longer a position to aspire to, but a element in everyone's journey in making their greatest contributions - in working on what matters - in making progress on purpose. Through epic.io leadership becomes evident in the creation and completion of missions, participatory leadership in other's missions, and through feedback on individual posts.

MOONSHOT: Taking the Work out of Work

"Work" is that stuff that we have to do simply because we have to do. As articulated in Dan PInk's "Drive" It is those things that have lost all meaning, those things where we have no autonomy in how it is accomplished. More simply, it's that what makes Jack a "dull boy". That changes however when we are reconnected with the purpose of our mission and freedom to make progress in the way we best know how. This is a primary inspiration behind epic.io and what led to using purpose as a platform. Furthermore we focus on progress as opposed to activity, reinforced by Amabile and Kramer's findings that, "progress" is a primary motivator. Together these two foci converge on motivation, arguably the most important ingredient in taking the 'work' out of work. Additionally, several design elements of epic.io encourage a sense of community and deliver unexpected rewards through a badging system which will recognizes aspects of participation that amplify acts of community, participation and play.

MOONSHOT: Increasing Trust

Trust has inertia built from experience. By changing the experience of work and leadership as described in the two moonshots above, epic.io will increase trust based on the experience and results from self-directed collaboration around common-purpose. There are at least two-stages to this happening. First, trust goes both ways. It needs to be built among those controlling convention to experience positive improvements and results from new approaches and among those trying new approaches being authentically enabled to experiment with the new approaches. The first phase occurs in the adoption of epic.io itself. By starting with even the smallest of initiatives such as finding better office coffee, improving recycled content in office products purchased, or finding new non-threatening opportunities to use epic.io trust can be developed. As these missions unfold, leadership is demonstrated, and results are realized, trust will increase. The more this happens, the more space opens for this approach to be taken. Next, as it grows, the increasing trust will spread from trust of a 'tool' to a more basic trusting in each other. People will begin to see that the world won't fall apart when people are allowed to pursue what matters to them, and in fact, that it generates greater performance from individuals including themselves which translates to greater performance of the organization.

First Steps

Your 10 steps to an adaptive organization:

Sign-up for epic.io alpha invite (or go ahead and build your own platform)
Start by posting some simple, near horizon initiatives that you are making happen
Set notifications and progress alerts
Make some progress
Play around
Invite some colleagues you are collaborating with
Play around and make more progress
Reflect on implications and opportunities for purpose as a platform in your organization
Do a little dance
Respond to what you learn

Credits

Development: Dan Williams and James Walker

Design: Alan Smith, Adam King

Experiential inspiration: Everyone I've every worked with, everything I've ever done

Theoretical inspiration:

Drive, Daniel Pink

Power of Pull, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison
Future of Management, Gary Hamel
Viable System Model / Heart of Enterprise, Stafford Beer
The Courage to Lead, R. Brian Stanfield
The Web of Life, Fritjof Capra

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September 24, 2010 at 1:01pm

Stav Tapuch

Alife Kohn really wrote the best book on this topic. "Punished by Rewards" is a brilliant book.

October 1, 2010 at 11:58am

Michael Lewkowitz

Thanks Stav, have added to my list to read.

September 24, 2010 at 2:47pm

Matt Shlosberg

Michael -

This is an interesting concept. When do you think your site will be up for everyone to see and experience?

October 1, 2010 at 11:56am

Michael Lewkowitz

Hi Matt, thanks for the comment. We will be live with a private alpha in the near future with a public beta opening likely late this year or early next. Thinking about using this space to help encourage feedback on some of the core concepts. Will also extend alpha invites to those particularly keen on testing and willing to experiment with raw prototypes when it's live.

September 24, 2010 at 11:24pm

Ellen Weber

Thanks for sharing this Michael. I will look forward to seeing this site as well. The book you listed by Alfie Kohn' is a classic on this topic - I agree.

Kohn holds that measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning--Researcher Linda McNeil quote in Alfie Kohn piece http://bit.ly/cfI2Ee. His Twitter address is @alfiekohn and while he speaks to learning in educational systems, there are many similar concepts common to workplaces.

Kohn is to learning systems what Godin is to social media! Look forward to seeing more Michael.

October 1, 2010 at 11:53am

Michael Lewkowitz

Ellen, thanks for this. I knew Alfie Kohn's work from the unschooling part of my life. Will dig in further to the rest of it. Thanks!

October 1, 2010 at 12:02pm

Michael Lewkowitz

INVITES >>>
For those in this community who are interested and willing to work with raw prototypes I'm happy to provide invites for when the private alpha goes live. Just let me know with a quick comment, tweet, or email and I'll add you to the list. Cheers!

October 3, 2010 at 12:24am

Dhiraj Gupta

Michael,

Purpose/Progress/People are great words and good words, pregnant with meaning. But can that change the face of Web 2.0?

Purpose/Progress/People gives the reason why Wikipedia is successful but that is 200000 people, the contributors to Wikipedia, from a population of close to 2 trillion netizens or .01%. Apply this to an enterprise size of 10000 and you get just 1 person, a size too small to be reliable. Prof. McAfee has emerged these figures. I would say any figure less than 100% may be unreliable in establishing facts within the enterprise.

I do not wish to appear a cynic. However, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have accumulated a history. I pray you shall overturn this history. That will give you access to a market in excess of USD 100 billion. The market is starved for meaningful collaboration. Its virtues are known. The means are simply not there. The words you have used are promising but the breakthrough nature of your means is not clear.

Regards,

Dhiraj

October 5, 2010 at 8:23am

Michael Lewkowitz

Hello Dhiraj,

I believe the breakthrough nature of this approach comes back to a reclaiming of what is natural in human collaboration.

Management practices that have developed over the last decades have been shown to dehumanize collaboration, treating people as a 'resource' to be used as efficiently as possible in mass-producing a product. On the other hand, people intrinsically still move towards common purpose, pursuing what they are interested in whether a local community activity, hobby, sport, etc. Increasingly, organizations are opening up that flexibility internally. At the same time, applications from the social web are both ideally suited to enabling more natural/human collaboration, and their utility is what is giving rise to the "shadow IT" phenomenon referenced below.

At the intersection of these two threads is where I believe a substantial opportunity exists to compel a new wave of human collaboration. I think we are headed in the right direction with what's below but exactly how to do it will be very tricky. This is where specific input and feedback will be very helpful in shaping the most effective solution.

My hope is that this community can help shape what's created.

October 9, 2010 at 12:50pm

Dhiraj Gupta

Hello Michael,

You have clarified that your breakthrough relates to the intersection between collaboration and social web. Does that mean it may not be as clinical as collaboration or as personal as social networking but will strike a via-media? Do people look for the family feeling in the work environment? Is the desire so strong and overpowering that they will migrate en-mass to a new tool? Remember, the present utilization of tools within the enterprise is an abysmal 25% or so. That is the reason for failure of collaboration. For the tool to succeed in delivering the Management goal of success the utilization must be 100%.

We do agree on one point and that is that the future lies in leveraging technology for all interactions. The point we differ on, and here I must acknowledge I do not even have a solution but I am trying to appreciate the merit of yours, is whether your work is guided by a philosophy. What I see are words which come together in a notion as follows: 'People' will respond to the content of your system to 'process' their need for 'progressing' the organization. My contention is: Is that a strong enough notion to sustain a drive for success, i.e., unite the efforts of distributed people and deliver results over time?

To clarify, what I could believe in is a philosophy anchored by accepted human behavior, e.g., if people try and try again and again then success follows. If you claim such a philosophy is implemented I would next convince myself on the force you release to get people to:
- unite,
- try doggedly, and
- use your System for the above.

Further, your work would have toi be serious to qualify as a System. It must, for example, offer means to store lessons and convert them into learning. Presently I am unable to get an answer to this line of enquiry from your hack.

Regards,

Dhiraj

October 10, 2010 at 2:55pm

Michael Lewkowitz

Personal motivation, from the motivation, seems to come primarily through the autonomous pursuit of self-selected purpose and the realization of progress along that path. This is what the system aims for. Through usage, patterns of success and failure should become evident by type of mission, by person, and by team. How people build tools to extract learning from the system remains to be seen, but the data will be instrumental in supporting them.

October 8, 2010 at 1:17pm

Marc Dangeard

This is brilliant, this is very much in line with what chaordic organizations are about, and I am convinced that this is where the world is going. Great idea I will be looking for the beta, I can't wait to see what comes out.

October 8, 2010 at 2:37pm

Michael Lewkowitz

Thanks Marc! Yes chaordic organizations are another excellent reference model. Will send you an invite as soon as we have the prototype live. Cheers!

October 15, 2010 at 1:44pm

Duncan Holmes

Hi Michael: Great concept and I can see how it would work well. As a process person I find some of the words confusing (purpose, mission) but that is mainly because I use them in a particular concept. Certainly did not block my understanding of what you are proposing. Lets make it work.
Duncan

October 18, 2010 at 1:47pm

Duncan Work

Hi MIchael, This is really excellent. I especially liked these statements:

“Rather than becoming a container for items however, it becomes a node to which people can attach whatever moves it forward.”

“Rather than requiring the use of exclusive tools however, epic.io allows all that activity to be associated with a specific purpose, effectively building a single stream of progress regardless of when, where, or how it happens.”

“There is signal in the stream. We amplify it.”

This will be great for innovative, fluid organizations that ‘push power to the edges’ and to meta networks everywhere – which really need this.

I can’t wait to try it out and see it in action!

Duncan