The Social Organization

Encouraging Loyalty and Advocacy Through Shared Value Creation

Customer advocacy and loyalty is the holy grail for many a CRM effort. However, I think the drivers of loyalty very often misunderstood.

This week I was looking at a CRM model with the customer at the center surrounded be a effecient and effective combination of tools and services. The goal was to make the customer experience smooth, easy and seamless. There is nothing really wrong with that vision (and in fact it strives for perfection of experience) and yet, I'm not sure it will get to customer loyalty. It asked nothing of the customer and made it as easy as possible for them. There was no shared value creation. The link between the provider and consumer was purely transactional and, therefore, weak.

When I think of loyalty, I think of the following:

• Green Bay Packers fans
• The Marines
• Alumni groups
• Developer communities

Last week, my toddler had on a t-shirt from my husband's prep school. She goes to the faculty daycare at that same school and yet very few of the faculty kids ever have on school gear. Arguably it would make more sense for those children, whose parents' livlihoods are dependent on the school, to exhibit more school spirit than my daughter whose family poured a lot of money and effort into the institution. Yet loyalty doesn't work that way. Loyalty is driven by shared experiences and contributions that are recognized and valued.

In your CRM model, if you do not allow for your customers to also make meaningful contributions to the value chain you will have a hard time generating loyalty. Effort, investment and sacrifice drive loyalty - not ease of use. If you provide the perfect solution there is no room for your customer's voice and needs and no reason for them to contribute.

What, other than money, are you asking your customers to contribute to your value chain?

 

Filters Alone Will Not Solve Information Overload

There is a lot of discussion around creating better filters to solve our information overload and also a bit of a backlash about filters - most notably Eli Pariser's talk on Beware the Online Filter Bubble and another great perspective from Graham Chastney. All of these discussions are important but I see information overload as primarily a human problem, not a technical one. A few years ago I wrote a post about scarcity and ambundance and I still think this is the fundamental issue at play with information. Humans are driven to hoard because our impulses were built for an environment of scarcity. We are worried that if we don't read everything - particularly if passed on through trusted social connections - we might miss something important and that makes us anxious. We mistake the available and accessible for the valuable.

Yes, technology can help with this problem by throttling the information we see but we still have that issue of human anxiety. To make headway against this pernicious impluse requires some challenging behavior change:

• Self awareness about our interests, needs, and priorities - both short-term which are in constant flux and long-term which need constant, if not deep, attention to acheive.
• Ability to translate priorities into information needs.
• Ability to connect our information needs tactically to how we set up our information environment.
• The consistency and time to adapt as our priorities do.

That is a tall order for most of us which is why I believe the problem of information overload will be with us for a while. It's a complex adaptive system and most of us have been raised and educated for a world of transactional processes which we can 'perfect'.  I've spoken before about decision-making in this new world - and I don't think most of us are ready for it. We want the security of knowing we are making the right choices which assumes a static context. The sand and information, however, is now in constant flux... which in many ways contributes even more to our need to hoard information so we can try to make a 'perfect' decision.

What to do? So far the only solution I've really found is to muddle through and get comfortable with turning off devices, knowing I'm missing things and trusting that if it is really important, it will circle back. This may also be why I still rely on my Moleskin to keep my priorities clear. Online it is too easy to dive down rat holes of information that, while fascinating, are not related to my priorities.

How do you keep yourself from needing to see and read it all?

Photo By Breibeest

Can Organizations Exibit Love, Actually?

It's a time of year where we cherish those we love... but our society's narratives around love can be pretty distorted. They involve passionate embraces, sex, physical gifts, weddings, and other fairy tales which while certainly part of it is not the core of what love is. To me, deep lasting love is mostly about recognizing another's vulnerability and partnering with them to fill in their gaps, thus making them feel that their vulnerability is alleviated through their partnership with you. It's when you expose your fear or anxiety about something and your partner intercedes to mitigate and address what you cannot and affirms your value in spite of it.

The result of that kind of love is both an intense emotional connection and stronger performance as a human. The negative emotional energy and increased time requirements of doing things one is bad at creates a drag on productivity generally.  In my personal life, having a loving relationship with my husband makes me a better parent, more productive at work, happier, and generally a better person.  That gift of love is wonderful but it also maximizes my potential and my performance as a human.

Looking at love from that perspective, it seems that if we want to maximize the potential of our employees, customers, and partners in the work environment we should, in fact, love them. Instead we tend to have processes that are not only not loving, they are downright hostile.

• The basic assumption of hierarchies is that some people are better than others. Creating this narrative is hostile to love and, by extension, hostile to optimal performance.
• We have 'professional development' plans for colleagues - the underlying assumption is that people need to be fixed versus supported to achieve maximum performance.
• Negotiations with customers often tend to be thought of a zero-sum games - if one wins, the other necessarily looses. In loving relationships, everyone wins.

Until recently I was pretty protective of my insecurities - after all I worked in environments set up to make me defensive and insecure. The drag from hiding those insecurities and weaknesses kept me from fully exploring what I'm really good at because I was so focused on managing my weaknesses and trying to be competent in everything. It's been an interesting personal revelation that exposing weaknesses in trusted relationships reduces that drag considerably and allows me to focus more time on those things that I perform well.  That equation change improves both my individual performance and really has an impact on team performance because as a team, we're better optimized. 

What does this look like in my work context?

• A manager encouraged me to leave a position, despite it being a personal loss for her, because it was limiting what I could achieve.
• A colleague volunteered for a project that, while I could do it, was making me anxious and unhappy because it required a lot of work that played to my weaknesses.
• A customer made a number of referrals to my work, but took the time to also make sure I was presenting the work in a way that looked after my interests, knowing I might not do that entirely well left to my own devices.

I'm not actually sure any of these individuals would ever say they love me although they are definitely all partners and friends, but they all acted in a loving way which increased my performance.

Talking about love in a work context makes people uncomfortable but mostly because I think society has the narrative of love wrong. I'm proposing that love has a performance quotient and those organizations who figure it out will be rewarded. We've figured out hard metrics... it's the soft ones that are where performance innovation lie.

Here's to more love in the coming year.

 

Social Media Overload, Anxiety & Polarization

The 2012 predictions are starting and I will likely participate - the end of the year is always a good time to assess and evaluate where you have been and where you are going. However, these predictions can often take on a doom & gloom feeling. Ross Dawson's Themes for 2012 are particularly anxiety inducing: more speed, more people, no privacy, revolt, cyberwars, exposure, and more polarization among other things. While I don't disagree with much of the analysis it does induce a high level of anxiety. This is not because Ross got it wrong, it's because our world has exploded with information, apps, access, people, content, and ideas.

People are assaulted with too much of everything. That makes us all very anxious. The human reaction to this anxiety is to crave clarity and certainty - to grasp for a bouy in a storm. Without some certainty and truth to ground us we feel completely out of control and bewildered. We look for those with clear and simple answers because it cuts through the sea of confusion. However, this is exactly where the biggest risk lies - while the world is increasing in complexity it is pushing more and more people to focus on simplistic truths as a coping mechanism. The more intensely people are driven to simplicity, the harder it is to make effective progress of any kind in an increasingly complex environment.

Complexity drives anxiety. Anxiety drives simplicty & polarization. Polarization blocks progress. Lack of progress creats more complexity. And the cycle intensifies.

Part of the reason that social networking has taken off is that people have dramatically scaled back the people and organizations they trust to those that they know personally, because those relationships are something they can still evaluate in a world of ever shifting information. But ironically, in a world where we have so much access to information it creates increasingly narrow perspectives. This cycle has to be broken to really address some of the vexing global issues that we face.

For me, the biggest challenge of 2012 will be to better understand how to use social technologies to reduce overload and complexity instead of add to it. This is absolutely imperative so individuals have the mental space to feel proactively in charge of their environments so that they can make decisions and move forward - and to open their minds to alternative perspectives.

 

 

People Are The Weakest Link

Last week, I presented a premise at the Enterprise 2.0 conference that because the costs of technology and human capital have flipped (relatively speaking), people are now the weakest link in organizational value chains. What that means is that those organizations that can most effectively optimize human performance will be those that win because their weakest link is stronger than that of their competitors. Belows are my slides and you can see the recording here.

Are You The Red Queen?

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However - and this is the real issue - organizations have been optimized for technology and infrastructure that typically has linear performance results - i.e. applying twice as much infrastructure or performance should yield twice as much performance. That has resulted in a culture of linear business modeling in business schools and strategy groups. I believe this has led us to dismiss and dramatically undervalue human performance.

What I know about people is that the human performance and success paths are anything but linear. It's very instructive to have a toddler right now because toddlers are performance machines (in terms of learning, adopting, and excelling at new things). The path is strewn with stops and starts, regressions, and surges - never mind the emotional meltdowns and ecstasy that sometimes goes along with this. As adults, this learning and development slows but it follows much the same pattern. 

Combine people into groups, communities, and networks and performance becomes even more complex. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of how to optimize group performance - it's why the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence exists. We have learned some things about building environments for ideal performance and again, I go back to looking at the research in education, parenting, and disciplining children.

It turns out that emergent curriculum works better than curriculum that is 100% planned. Emergent curriculum is a balance between what the instructor wants to convey and what the students are interested in - it is a constantly evolving negotiation and conversation - not a one way presentation. It turns out this is quite a bit more effective because the lesson is given in the context that the student cares about and there is social pressure exerted by the rest of the class to care. The engagement of classes changes dramatically.

Another more established concept is positive discipline. The crux of this concept is that if your goal is to get someone to act in a certain way, the best means to do so is through partnering and mutual respect, not punitive action. Support, encouragement, and giving others the space to be responsible for the results of their own decisions is the best way to ensure lasting behavior change.

Currently organizations do not know how to account for this human performance pattern and because they cannot model and account for it, they cannot optimize it.  My position is that we need to figure out how to incorporate things like relevance, connection, loyalty, forgiveness and other human values into the balance sheets of our organizations. That may require a radical change in our current concept of accounting but I'm game, are you?

 

You Are Not All That & Why You Shouldn't Ever Believe It

I grew up in a unique position. My father was powerful - at least within our family's community - he was the minister of a 350-year-old church in Cambridge, MA. I sat at the "right arm of power" in that little realm. People liked me. I never trusted it because I knew it was due in part to where I sat in the community in relation to my father. To be fair, people were (for the most part) not explicit about this connection and didn't try to use it in a manipulative way but my position put me front and center.

I learned a few things from this:

• A person's position in a system is often more important than their own personality/skills/value in determining the amount of attention, influence, and popularity they get.
• Attention feeds on itself.
• People who get a lot of attention shouldn't take themselves too seriously - if you believe that you deserve the attention because of something you did yourself, you are often deceiving yourself.
• I really dislike obsequiousness - I'm not looking to form a posse - because it doesn't typically add any real value. It tends to be hollow because people are drafting on the attention you are getting.

The downside of this lesson is that I often discount people that genuinely want to connect with me but I think that is a fair trade for maintaining a realistic sense my own value. I've realized over the years that other people never learned this lesson and they feed off of the attention they garner because of their position vs. their value - essentially looking in a fun house mirror and believing that what they see is real. That reflection, of course, does contain elements of reality but it is deceptive.

Now that online social networks have enabled people to collect friends and followers far beyond what they would be able to do in the real world, it seems difficult for people to separate out the fun house mirror from the real mirror. For me, the real mirror is found in the in-person (i.e. offline) connections I make and the value I produce for which others are willing to pay or exchange for other value. It is perhaps why I distrust Facebook 'likes' and many freemium models - in those environments it is very hard to understand who really cares about what you are doing and people who are tailgating.

If you work in this space, it is worth evaluating both for yourself and for the organizations with whom you work how you determine what is real and what is drafting.

Picture by Susan NYC

The Value of Latent Ties & Communities

Weak ties are valuable to have - they will share information with us that we may not have otherwise discovered, answer simple questions, and expose us to new things that we never knew existed - but it is still pretty random, especially as we collect thousands of 'friends' online.

We cannot live without strong ties - it is how we create and transfer value.

However, I am intrigued by connections somewhere in the middle - the latent strong ties, the strong ties of those with whom we have strong ties, &  the connections that would be much closer if circumstances were different.

In Connected, Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler explain the surprising power of friends-of-friends to influence complex behaviors like obesity and smoking. Personally, I have been blown away by the value I've realized through latent strong ties - people that I once worked with, friends I used to live close to, family friends who I don't see as much as I once did.... people for whom our relationship has gone into hibernation mode.  When circumstances do bring us back together and provide a reason for us to re-engage, the relationship is as good as it ever was or better.

I believe in the concept behind Dunbar's number. I can't really keep track of more than ~150 people in any amount of detail. But what's interesting to me is that it is 150 people at any one time. Because I've held a variety of jobs in different markets and I've lived in many different places, I have a large number of latent strong relationships. What I've found surprising is that with those relationships I've left well, I've also left goodwill. When circumstances and context brings us together again, the relationship springs to life and is productive very quickly.

On an individual level, this is quite interesting but I also believe that this is why communities are so powerful for organizations. Communities sit at the sweet spot between strong & weak ties - big enough to allow for growth and innovation but not so big that people are lost and unsure of the social/political dynamic which can inhibit deep participation. Communities maintain relationships between the episodes of rich collaboration and latency and accelerate the ability to execute when new issues and opportunities arise. We often don't value the middle path because we see it as a partial solution and not necessarily as exciting or interesting as the extremes, but it is where long term sustainable value lies.

The questions I have are this: How many latent relationships can a person have and how could we better understand the 'Dunbar's number' of an organization?

Picture by Slawek Puklo

Modeling Behavior & Strategic Patience

I recently started running. I've started trying to run a lot over the course of my life - probably at least 10 different times. I've never gotten past 3-4 runs in the past but today I just finished my 8th run and I've been at it for three weeks now. I'm greatly encouraged by this and I give a lot of credit to a little iPhone app, C25K. But there is something much bigger at work as well. I recently hit 40, I have a toddler who I want to have an active mother, and people all around me are getting their exercise in - modeling their behavior visibly.  It wasn't all that direct a path though - Jim Storer, my business partner has been at it for well over a year now. My other social media/business friends including Christine Perkett, Dan Brostek, Kyle Flaherty, Tamsen McMahon, and others have been at it even longer in most cases. Collectively they all provided a steady drumbeat of behavior that I already knew I wanted to adopt. If I think about BJ Fogg's behavior model of ability, motivation, and trigger I always had the ability to start, my social connections built up my motivation, and turning 40 provided the trigger.

So I've started running which is great and I've found a program that is working for me so far which is also great. What is really most interesting however is the internal mental change and the impact of modeling on others. My husband has always been more of a runner than me and used to regularly run races. His running has tapered off in recent years because of a crazy schedule and some injuries that have made running impossible at times. What is interesting is that I've verbally encouraged him to get back to his regular running for years but the effect was not nearly as great as me starting to run even though I have not really been pushing him. Call it guilt, call it peer pressure but he has run much more in the last few weeks than he has in the last year. While I could have guessed this might be the outcome, the power of it actually happening has a profound mental impact that may be the lock in I need to keep at it myself. Inspiring yourself is great, inspiring others is amazingly powerful.

Changing someone's exercise and health habits is a pretty complex behavior change to make but it is similar in scope to some of the changes we as community managers and social strategists are hoping to inspire in our organizations. This morning, as I was running, I was thinking about the people I know who are best suited to this task and they are hard to come by - individuals that understand how big and complex the task is and yet are not overwhelmed by it and know that it starts with one footfall. They also realize that those first metaphoric runs may feel more discouraging than encouraging but they have the faith to keep at it because they understand how change happens. It is not with dramatic fanfare. It is with a small change, made visible - over and over and over. Those pebbles dropped again and again into the lake will eventually cause ripples on the other side. It requires a strategic mind paired with the patience to keep dropping pebbles in the water.

In the latest issue of Time, they had an article on The New Greatest Generation - mostly generation X military leaders who have been faced with very complex, political tasks instead of what has traditionally been more a use of brut force. They are committed, purposeful, strategic and deeply pragmatic. It's no wonder some of the leaders I've been so impressed with are veterans. If you are looking to be a social strategist or to hire one, look to build the qualities of these veterans cited in the article. Small changes - repeated often and made visible - are what lead to real change. It's deceptively simple and profoundly challenging to pull off and needs strategic patience because on any given day, change may not be apparent.

Image by Sheffield Tiger

Decision Making in a Networked World

Social media has made the complexities of the world visible and much harder to ignore both for individuals and for organizations. And the complexities are many and everywhere as the world becomes more globally connected and transparent. For a majority of people, these complexities drive a craving for certainty because they are too big to fathom or process. This drive for certainty, in turn, creates stalemate and paralysis in group decision making which is disastrous to constructive progress. The evidence of complexity (the Wall Street crash around derivatives and mortgages, the economic melt downs in European countries, the Arab Spring, budget stalemate in the U.S.), and of the reaction to this uncertainty (the polarization of the U.S. political discussion, Al-Qaeda, the Oslo shootings) are everywhere.

So how do we move forward and how do we make decisions in this environment?

• We have to suspend the notion that we know anything definitively, like an anthropologist does when observing another culture.
• Separate out respect for individuals from opinions about their behavior or decisions. Personally for me, I find many behaviors and decisions interesting, fascinating, or funny. Some of the people I respect the most, I think do odd things but we ALL do or believe things that others see as odd.
• We have to understand that when we feel right, we may be wrong. See this TED video of Kathryn Schultz on Being Wrong - she makes a great analogy about how being wrong is like being Wylie Coyote after he runs off a cliff but before he looks down. We still feel right even when we are wrong and are not on solid footing, right up to the moment we are aware that we are actually wrong. It's an extremely dangerous place to be.
• Proactively seek out other perspectives and build counter-arguments for your position. Test your ideas with the assumption that you are wrong.
• Identify decisions you think are wrong and find cases for which those same decisions would be right.
• We need to be certain less which is a hard lesson to learn because most of us, for most of our lives have been trained and rewarded for certainty. Instead, as this HBR article Why Being Certain Means Being Wrong by Ted Cadsby recommends, take the stance that your perspectives are hypothesis and are provisionally true.
• Know that everything you believe to be true is based on your unique experiences and perspective. It is quite possible for something to be true for you and wrong for someone else. 
• Spend time learning something entirely new that is not job related. It will make you more comfortable with the feeling of uncertainty with a risk-free endeavor and that will help make you comfortable with uncertainty in more important domains.
• Because each of us individually cannot have all the experiences necessary to find the answer to complex problems, we must work in groups. Understanding older concepts of GroupThink and new concepts like collective intelligence will help create effective decision-making structures.
• Learn how to use images, art and drawing to facilitate discussions around complexity. This is one of my favorite graphic drawings about education reform.  Art allows for abmiguity and complexity in a way that text and language cannot alone.
• We need to move forward boldly and make decisions despite incomplete information... but also be prepared to change our path. It's easy to just shut down when faced with an environment in which you can never be certain or absorb all the information available. But if you are a leader, you need to accept the uncertainty and move forward anyway. 
• We need to accept that moving forward may often mean a compromise or an imperfect path, both of which will not make us 100% happy particularly if we are asked to support it.

These are some resources and strategies that I've found work for me. But, in the spirit of the point, I'm not sure I'm right. What's your take on how to make decisions in today's economic and political environment?

A big thank you to Luis Suarez from IBM who pointed me to the TED talk and the HBR article and to Nancy White for introducing me to the power of imagry in facilitation.

Image by  DanCentury

 

Communities - The New Strategic Imperative

By now most of us have a rough understanding of Moore's Law and the exponentially increase in the processing power of technology:

While this increase in technical productivity has been celebrated liberally over the years and has generated huge amonts of value and wealth, it has changed the cost structure of businesses in ways that put increasing amonts of stress on people. Unfortunately human cranial capacity does not evolve quite so fast - changing over millions of years, not hundreds:

What does that have to do with social media?  Well, networked communication channels have existed for quite a while but there usage was limited - IRC chats were typically frequented by the more technically inclined, for example. But as organizations have applied technology and their operational speed has increased, humans - not technology & tools - became the biggest limitation to innovation and productivity. With that change, individuals have become more and more stressed because their processing capacity has not evolved. My hypothesis is that social media took off when it did in large part due to the strain being put on individuals to keep up with the pace of technological change. Social media has created an immense improvement in the speed of which individuals can share information and make decisions. This is great as it reduces some of the stress on the individuals in the system.

The problem? Technical processing power will continue to increase and once everyone is social tool-enabled they will end up in the same spot where they were before - as the biggest limitation to operational speed. What then? Humans cannot go faster and faster without breaking the quality of their decision-making and judgement. So while social communications channels will persist, their value to the organizational system will plateau. For those most connected now, they are the canaries in the coal mines - completely overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them from a myriad of communication channels.

This leads me to the conclusion that a strategy of faster will no longer be effective and, in fact, it will eventually lead you to crash and burn. What humans need and what will give an organizational competitive differentiation is the time and space to build quality products and services that are rewarded with higher margins. The way to acheive that time and space for people to do their best work is through highly trusting relationships with customers - and it is the only way. Customers must trust that by giving your company time to build a quality product or effectively support them, they will be better served.

That has some pretty broad implications. It means that to win, organizations will have to:

• Focus on building relationships first, rather than focus on the products and services first
• Educate and expose customers on internal processes so they understand and have realistic expectations of delivery
• Build in boundaries that allow individuals to slow down and focus
• Build trusted relationships with employees such that they not only don't feel pressure to go faster but are incented to make sure they are thorough and inclusive in their work

Communities are one of the few ways to scale some aspects of relationship development and building. Those companies who are ready for this next phase of operational effectiveness are busy investing in relationships today and not worrying quite as much about the short term ROI.  Those organizations too focused on the short term, transactional ROI of social media may find that they missed the boat as social media effectiveness flattens because their customers and prospects are off building deep, rich relationships elsewhere and, at the end of the day, those customers and prospects only have room for a limited number of those relationships.

It's time to fundamentally rethink how value is assessed, created and distributed and how we think about our competitive landscape.

Want to hear more about this from me? I'll be presenting these and other thoughts at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on Tuesday, June 21st in Boston.

What do you think? Are you personally feeling stressed? Do you think your organization wants to keep its foot on the gas to the exclusion of quality? Which companies have always done this relationship piece well and have they prospered?