Superpowering People : Designing The Collaborative Digital Organization

Today, people organize themselves and influence each other with a reach, immediacy, and scale few could imagine just a few years ago. Furthermore, the experiences they get from using various digital services in their daily lives shape their behaviors as consumers, thereby increasing their expectations on all products, services, and businesses they interact with.

Despite this increasing pressure on businesses, most of them are running on autopilot. This is especially true when it comes to how employees collaborate with each other inside the organization, as well as with external stakeholders. They are still clinging on to legacy communication tools such as physical meetings, phone calls and, to an overwhelming extent, email. And make no mistake - email is perhaps the worst tool for collaboration.

To change this situation, it is not enough to deploy new digital tools. It's a people thing. People won't change unless they see a clear reason why, and get the proper support to do change. This is why businesses must change their assumptions about what motivates people. They need to invest in supporting changed behaviors and new ways of working. They need to change the communication culture, starting with how management communicates. And last but not least, they need to equip their employees with the same kind of digital superpowers they have as consumers.

In this book, the author Oscar Berg describes what to change, why, and how. He provides an overview of the tactical challenges that businesses face when it comes to collaboration today and introduces some very useful frameworks for dealing with these challenges.