The Social Organization

The Community Landscape in 2016

It’s that time of year. Time to reflect about what has happened in the past year and where things are headed next.

It's an exciting time for TheCR team - as we end the year we are welcoming two new team members, soon to be three, one of whom is a VP of Sales.  That takes us from 7 employees to 10 - a pretty big leap for a small organization. For many reasons, this signals that both TheCR and the community industry is growing up. I watched my five-year-old head off to elementary school this fall and it feels like we’re on the precipice of a similar milestone with TheCR.

At TheCR and more broadly, we are no longer figuring things out or incubating ideas. We know how to run communities effectively and the market is ready to get things done. Here are some of my observations about what we can expect.

The Community Landscape in 2016

We know from our research that 70% of community budgets are approved by VP- or C-level executives. The community opportunity is now strategic, rather than a tactical mechanism of execution. That visibility is awesome - but I also believe the window to act upon it is limited. Community program owners have to reward that strategic interest with new revenue, effectiveness or innovation. If community programs cannot demonstrate value in terms the business cares about, executive attention will wander.

The time to scale community programs is here and it’s a huge opportunity for those of us in the space.

However, as communities go mainstream and more dollars are allocated to community initiatives, more players get involved. There is chum in the water and sharks big and small want a piece of it. The community market is attracting a lot of different players with solutions and services to sell. That’s a good thing - many of these players have a lot to offer and organizations will need them to scale. However, many of them don’t really understand the space - and that is a risk.

This happens in every market - it’s not unique to the community industry - and it can be a treacherous time. The CRM market went through a bumpy growth path as organizations and the vendors that served them made mis-steps, fought for attention and figured out what worked. The better the choices organizations make the more the community market will thrive. If organizations fumble about without clear direction and thoughtful approaches, achieving some hits but a lot of misses, the community market will suffer.

How fast will the community market develop? That will depend on a few things. Whether:

• 
  CIOs and their teams develop a sophisticated understanding of what software, infrastructure and integrations are needed to really succeed. (Hint: having a social stream is not sufficient. If social does not integrate with other communication, collaboration, content management, analytics, CRM and HR systems it will limit its potential value). The value of community architects is growing as this sophistication grows - people who can design the ecosystem in ways that maximizes value and minimizes confusion for individuals as they navigate it.
• Business owners understand how to manage these networks and communities effectively. We believe networked leadership and community management is the future of all management - we are not alone. Far too few people in leadership and management positions understand how to adapt their approach to take advantage of these new environments.
• Leaders use top-down organizational change methodologies that don’t inspire and reward behavior change at the individual level. The Future of Work is self-directed and the only way to adapt an organization to that future is to change how individuals operate within it.
• Community budgets grow. Community teams need reinforcement in order to scale and meet the needs of their organizations. Depending on each community team’s skill set any of the following are open to external guidance: strategy, planning, vendor evaluation, systems deployment and integration, training (for executives, managers, community team members/specialists and employees), playbook development, analytics and reporting, community architecture/UX, community management and moderation, advocacy program development and executive coaching. Community teams are in a unique position to help the individuals - including executives - within their organization change and are key to changing how organizations operate.

At The Community Roundtable, we obviously have a self-interest in seeing the market succeed because we help our members and clients address some of these issues. However, I also have a personal passion in seeing this approach succeed.

By evolving our organizations to adaptive networks, individuals have a great degree of choice in how they work and with whom. Communities provide individuals with both support and challenges, in a way that enables their potential. This is my passion - to help individuals define work on their terms, in a way that fulfills them and makes them happy. A networked approach to organizations is the way to deliver on that potential.

Here’s to an exciting 2016!

The Business Model of Engagement

Engagement is a hot topic. For those of you who have heard me speak, you know I think not all engagement is created equal and there is far too little focus put on the purpose behind the engagement. You can have high engagement and very little value - look no further than the comments on a general news site. The other common problem is you have no engagement at all, which happens far too frequently inside organizations where people feel like the only outcome of sticking their head up is becoming a good target.

What's interesting is that in most cases we diagnose the issue as a tactical one - we aren't providing good enough tools or spaces for people to engage in a constructive way.

The more sophisticated organizations realize that tools alone won't solve the problem and have started investing in the operational systems that include community management roles and training to ensure that when people engage they get real value from it. This is where I spend a lot of my time - helping companies understand how to build systems of engagement. But it's not a complete solution either.

Ultimately, to sustain engagement, the business model needs to generate more value for each of its stakeholder groups than they contribute. People need to feel like investing and contributing to the ecosystem will return disproportionate rewards to them. If it does, they will return to engage again and again and again.

The implications to business models are quite radical, however, and in a way most organizations cannot accept given their current leadership. This type of business model requires the organizations themselves to recognize revenue and value only after it has ensured each stakeholder group has gotten more value than it has contributed. Typically, organizations work to recognize as much value as possible, as soon as possible; when is the last time you heard a sales executive say 'We don't get paid until our customers feel like they have won'? This mentality leaves stakeholders feeling combative, not collaborative - whether they are customers or employees - and that does not lead to organic and frequent engagement because those stakeholders don't see the organization's success and their success as the same thing.

However, those organizations that do have the patience to be generative - making their stakeholders success a key part of their own business model - tend to reap far more in the end because every one of their stakeholder groups has a vested interest in their success. To me, that is a #winning strategy.

If you would like to see more about how I think about engagement, below is one of my recent presentations:

Rachel Happe - How To Drive Even More Engagement. from FeverBee Limited

Addressing the Eroding Power of the Social Web

I was fortunate to attend TEDxCamdrige last week and hear from a number of excellent speakers but the one that gave me the biggest pause for thought was Bruce Schneier, an online security expert.

I have been watching with dismay at how there is almost an inverse relationship between online social platform's popularity and its value to their users. This is fundamentally caused by the advertising business model upon which they are all sitting - requiring them to optimize the experience not for the good of the user (and often not even for the good of their advertising clients) but for the ability to generate cash - effectively squeezing users and blackmailing advertisers in a subtle dance so the balance is never so obvious that either objects entirely. As these services (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc) gain scale they have also attracted the government, and thanks to Edward Snowden we know exactly how much we are being watched.

Bruce Schneier articulated quite effectively how the balance of power has shifted away from individuals and their emerging conversations to traditional power structures that can now spy, optimize and take advantage of everything we do online - giving them powers unimaginable in the offline world.

This make me sad but it also gives me ammunition for my opinion that we - as both individuals and organizations - need to host our own parties so-to-speak. Use the large public networks for access to the stream but have the interesting, value-producing conversations on your own blog and your own community. If you don't, you will not be in control of your own destiny and your business model will be at the mercy of these huge online power brokers. Facebook and Twitter will allow people to see what is financially lucrative for them to see - not what creates and distributes real value to individuals or organizations.

 

Want Complex Behavior Change? Lower Your Standards

A couple of years ago I turned 40. Running a mile made me feel like I was likely to have a heart attack - it was more than wheezing, it was painful. I realized that I was at a precipice. I could either get in shape or spend the rest of my life couch surfing. That was not the kind of mother I wanted to be. It was not the kind of human I wanted to be.

Professionally, it was also clear that people and organizations had to change and adapt to our new connected and technology-enabled world. To effectively help my clients, I needed to really dig in and understand how to create a complex habit change.

So I started to run. On my 40th birthday. Painfully. Slowly. Incrementally.

These days I'm running 4-6 miles at a clip. That astounds me. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done that I have choosen to do. There are plenty of both silly and legitimate "excuses" to not run on a daily basis. The weather. A crazy tough schedule between running a business and my daughter's daycare schedule. The pile of laundry. Travel. The feeling of selfishness that I get every time I leave my challenging toddler with my husband yet again for a long weekend run. The stack of client work left to do. I have had to re-commit to running every time I lace up.

I've learned some things along the way about behavior change:

• Before you can change, you need people around you who think you are awesome.  Instead of looking at everything you do critically, they see and encourage your potential. I happened upon this - I found a boss, Susan Feldman at IDC, and my husband, Ted, about the same time. Before I met them, I didn't think there was any reason someone would think I was exceptional so I didn't object to being treated poorly. It turns out everyone is exceptional - and everyone deserves to be surrounded by at least a few people who understand that and encourage it. It is so critical that you find those people or be that person for someone else. Our organizations do a crap job of doing this for us - you must seek those people out yourself. By being with people who support you, you will start to believe that maybe you can change for the better - and you want to because they think it's possible.

• Reading The Power of Habit clarified some fundamentals needed for habit change: the mechanics of the change (what you will do differently), the belief that you can change and a community that supports and reinforces the change. This is one of the reasons I post my running to Facebook - to create positive social reinforcement from my community and make myself accountable to them. Find people who have made the same change you are looking to make - it is incredibly powerful.

• Micro changes (fractals again!) is what ultimately leads to big change. B.J. Fogg's Tiny Habits initiative got me started down this path but Beth Dunn gave this awesome presentation on Writing Like a God this year at Inbound13. You have to practice the change, in little bits, every day and you have to lower your expectations in order to do so. For me, I ran like sh*t for a long, long time. And that enabled me to run OK now.

• New research has discovered that willpower is a lot like a muscle. What that means is that learning to change one complex behavior makes it easier to change other behaviors. When we practice committing to a small change every day, over time we can increase the commitment. Related, Duhigg talks about keystone habits in The Power of Habit that then leads to secondary habit changes. For me, being a successful runner has reinforced the fact that I can choose my own destiny. I've let a lot of life happen to me. It hasn't been all bad but it has made me very reactive. The practice of setting a hard and very individual goal reinforced the belief that I can do the same thing in other areas of my life - and that belief is a large contributor to successful behavior change in the future.

• You need a trigger. For me, my 40th birthday was a milestone that caused me to wake up and decide that my current behavior was no longer acceptable. Your triggers will be different but ultimately it is as simple and as complex as making the decision to do something different.

• It is a long-term investment. Forget the 21 day rule of thumb that says if you do something for 21 days it becomes habitual. That was not the case for me. Over the last two years I've fallen off the wagon and got back on a few different times. I still don't feel like the change is so entrenched that it will automatically persist. I still have to make a commitment every time I go out, although it has gotten easier.

Reflecting on this at an organizational level, I also have a few thoughts:

• Our hiring and professional development structures are horrid. Supportive, not judgement-based mechanisms, are what we need for optimal achievement. That means the way we think about measuring education and training is all wrong too.

• The idea of the executive is outmoded. We need to think more in terms of coaches, not owners. Still incredibly powerful because they enable others, not because they amass riches themselves.

• The myth of the individual star is also wrong. I achieve because of the people around me - and hopefully vise versa - and my success is also their success. There should be acknowledgement and attribution of that. Instead because we are judged critically and individually, we are set up to compete against each other. In a competitive environment, we claim as much attribution as possible, which creates toxic cultures and arrests the very behavior that will make the organization or group radically more successful.

• Organizations need to accept people practicing and doing certain things like crap for awhile. This may be even harder to accept than failure. With behavior change you cannot fail fast because there is no failure, there is just crappy attempts until you become better.

My personal journey has been revealing, thought provoking and incredibly rewarding because I know now that I CAN do it - whatever it is. And that is worth much more than a few more hours of sleep... although I could use those too. I'm also starting to see much of what makes our organizational cultures toxic - and I hope my insight helps others see it too.

Have you changed a complex habit? What did you learn about yourself and your environment? I would love to hear!

Title credit goes to Beth Dunn.

The Importance of Getting to No

Getting to Yes is a great book about negotiating in a way that serves the interests of both parties. It is also the implicit goal of everyone who needs to collaborate with others in some way. For most of my professional life, the goal of getting to an agreement has been the pulse of almost everything I've done. It's a noble goal.

But yes is a horrible relationship builder. Yes is easy. I know - I'm a recovering people pleaseer - it is so much easier to say yes. Even when it's distracting, time-consuming, against your nature and counterproductive. It also sweeps issues under the rug - to mold, fester or dry up.

When we say yes we withhold our perspective and concerns, which are infinitely valuable for the other party to understand. When we say yes, we withhold the gift of our truth and make it harder for the other person to be self-aware. When we say yes easily, it is impossible to understand whether interests of both parties are really aligned - and therefore it is a risky, risky yes.

Like many aha moments this one slammed into me without warning one day when I asked someone with less power then myself to do something. She looked at me with fearful timidity and in a way that I knew she wanted to say no but was afraid of disappointing me. I realized that at that moment, I had the opportunity to significantly impact our relationship for better or for worse. If I gave her the space to say no comfortably, she would not only be relieved and grateful but she was more likely to be upfront and honest with me going forward - providing me with authentic feedback. Or I could project my disappointment and she would shrink from me and our relationship and would never tell me anything she didn't think I wanted to hear. And I realized she was giving me a gift - the opportunity to change the inflection of our relationship. And it hit me:

Flipping the dynamic I realized that how someone responds to no is a powerful indicator of the character of the other party and the potential of a relationship. Why wouldn't you want to figure that out as quickly as possible?

Most people don't take no very well and that is kind of a bummer because saying no means ending those conversations and arresting those relationships. But when you say no and instead of someone disengaging, they respond by digging deeper to find where you can collaborate, it opens up a world of possibilities and potential. Those are the relationships that transcend transactional exchanges and lead to rich collaborations where everyone wins. I want more of those relationships and the best way I know how, is to get to no as quickly as possible.

Unlocking Human Potential and the Risks of Gamification

Games are amazing vehicles for learning. Watching my almost three-year-old do puzzles is awe inspiring, not the least of which because she currently thinks of the alphabet as one giant puzzle that unlocks books, another thing she loves. That drive means that she has known her alphabet for a while and can now spell her first and last name with scrabble letters. She has learned this largely on her own, using iPhone apps which while I've downloaded for her to use, I do not encourage or discourage her use of any particular app. While she certainly gets exposed to her letters at daycare and at home, most of her learning has been motivated intrinsically.

Most adults can hardly even understand that kind of motivation, let alone access it. Why? Most of us have been pretty screwed up by extrinsic motivators for so many years that we don't even know what makes us happy any more.

First our parents set all sorts of expectations for us and while I am nowhere near a free spirited parent, the historical and more traditional method of parenting that my generation and previous generations grew up with was mostly a do-as-i-say-when-I-say-it-and-don't-ask-too-many-questions approach. In my case, my father (who I loved dearly) had expectations of me that were pretty misaligned with the child I was. He wanted a demure daughter who liked to follow the rules. I was impulsive and passionate. It created an internal conflict that still rages on and is not all negative but it clouded my ability to understand myself because I was so eager to please him. In many ways, his relatively early death has helped release me from that extrinsic motivator that kept me from accessing my own natural motivations - and my potential.

We then move on to school and work environments that are not set up to understand us, they are set up to make us conform to standards. The more standards we push onto kids - and adults - as they learn, the more our natural motivators are subverted and forgotten. And the more our potential is squandored.

As companies get excited about the ability to "gamify" work, I worry that they are just replacing or adding one system of extrinsic motivators (traditional performance management models) with another, cheaper model delivered through software. But that will not unlock the potential of human resources - to do that, they must re-discovered their intrinsic motivators and to do that, extrinsic motivators need to be removed to the bare minimum necessary to operate. For most organizations, it is impossible to remove all of the extrinsic motivators (salary, legal constraints, raises, promotions) but those core pressures exerted on human performance should be the first thing we evaluate before we add even more game mechanics.

Gamifying the wrong motivators is worse than doing nothing at all and in a world where we want to unleash human potential, we desperately need people that have the drive my daugter has in understanding the alphabet because she really, really wants to.

How to Help People Adapt in a World of Change

If the work world you exist in hasn't been disrupted yet, it's likely only because you haven't been paying enough attention. To start understanding some of this massive disruptions taking place, you need go no further than Mary Meeker's annual reports, which are nominally about the state of the web but really they are about the state of business and markets.

Much of this disruption is being driven by the increasing pace of technological performance. Most people generally understand how fast technology is moving. What I think many people don't recognize is how it affects individual, and thus collective, behavior. When people are faced with change that they do not understand they often become reactionary - cue the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s - driven by a need for solid footing in a world that no longer seems to make sense. When I think about the stereotypical snake oild salesman, it also rises out of the ashes of the rapid technical, social and economic changes taking place in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of industrialization.

We are again in a similar period - where the sands seem to shift daily and truth does not seem self-evident. We rail against Congress for being so polarized but in many ways, it also seems inevitable. People are looking for certainty in a world that seems complex and threatening to their livlihood and lifestyles. In this environment, certainty will often trump many things - including facts - and that creates even more risk and resistence.

My take on how we progress and adapt to the changing world is to stop focusing our lens on the technology, which is causing the changes driving anxiety, and instead focus our lens on the people and relationships required to make ourselves and our organizations successful. This has a number of benefits:

• People are familiar and comfortable with other people. That comfortable base allows people to extend from there vs. find their way back to a comfortable place by starting with the changing environment.
• Because technology and market access has commoditized, it is increasingly the strength and performance of humans that will differentiate organizations.

We need to stop telling people that they need to change and start asking more questions about people, relationships and networks - and then apply the technology that works best to support those.

 

The Social Business Log Jam

Working in the social business field has become a frustrating place - the field is littered with examples and advice that should be a distraction but instead has become the focus of the market conversation. What's worse, is that the people who everyone is looking to as the innovators (and therefore experts) don't really get it either. A recent article in The Atlantic, Why the Social Media Revolution Is About to Get a Little Less Awesome, demonstrated this to me in spades. First of all, I do believe Facebook doesn't get part of the revolution that they created for the reasons I wrote about in Facebook's Black Ice. However, to then extend that logic and say that a phenomenal customer experience is antithetical to a successful business model is, well, a bit inane in my opinion.

What is wrong with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a raft of other social networks and the thinking behind them is that they are focused on scale, not value creation. The simple act of connecting a lot of people and then expecting value to flow from that is definitely a 'build it and they will come' mentality that from my experience does not work. Facebook is experiencing on a large scale what I caution clients about all the time on a smaller scale - building scale before you have created an environment that entices people to co-create and changes behaviors typically leads to a quick spike and then a cliff - because it looses peoples' interest.

But because of the scale, these networks have sucked the energy out of the market and distracted people into building Facebook pages and Twitter accounts but without any strategic thought around their business model, their relationships with different constituent bases and how these tools might impact the cost and returns of those relationships. So instead, organizations are paying consultants a lot of money to compare how many Twitter followers they have as compared to their competitors instead of realizing that we live in an environment of abundance and competition is no longer the yardstick by which you should be measuring yourself.

This strategic thinking is stuck in the industrial age and creating a huge log jam in the social business market. Social strategists are doing their best to stay afloat and on top of the logs but they seem to keep piling up. Instead of worrying about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or whatever other new social network has popped up, we should be starting our conversations with questions like:

• What unique value does your organization create, or in other words what value is core to the business?
• What value creation is outsourced or could be outsourced because it is not unique or core?
• Who do we need to help us create that value and what type of relationship with them is ideal for efficient value creation?
• What types of relationships do we have with different constituent groups today? Is there trust? Is it contextual or absolute? Would a better relationship generate more value? 
• Where do these constituent groups interact? What do they say about us when we are not in the room?
• How can we build the relationships we want to have with these different groups in the most efficient way possible?

But no one is having these conversations with executives. Instead we are telling them they should blog and when they go glassy eyed or object we try to convince them why blogging is so important. No wonder this isn't working. And yet, these same executives are the ones we need to support social business initiatives in order to really transform our organizations. And some of them, despite our best collective efforts to make this about technology, are getting it.

At The Community Roundtable, we are kicking off a new research effort called The Social Executive to try and learn from both the executives who 'get it' and actively participate themselves as well as those who object so that we can understand how to better demonstrate the strategic benefits of social business in a way that is meaningful to them. So that we can all stop talking about The Twitter and all start building real relationships with each other. That will be a relief to everyone and it will allow the rest of the world to take us seriously.

The Promise of The Social Organization

Women are different than men. Women can do the same work as men. Women do things differently. Everyone should be treated equally. The debate circles on and on... and I don't tend to add my commentary very often because it has always felt like a false choice - to either assume women and men are the same or to assume they are different. However a couple of really interesting recent articles have appeared - the most lengthy by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic called Why Women Still Can't Have it All and a shorter one that hit closer to home by my friend Morra Arrons Mele in the New York Times called Here to Stay, and That's Good for Women. Stepping back, both of these articles are about a lot more than being working mothers - they are about a societal structure that is broken for the way we live today and THAT is what feuls the passion for the work that I do. I think the structure of work is hurting all of us, both individually and collectively.

Our current societal structures are designed with the following assumptions in mind:

1. We have to be together physically to get work done.
2. There is someone at home full-time to make sure dinner is made, dry cleaning gets picked up, kids are supervised after school and the rugs are vacuumed.
3. Children need the summer off to help tend the fields.
4. Children and adults need the training to do explicit, structured tasks.
5. Corporations sole responsibility is to earn a profit.
6. Scale (large organizations) are more productive than smaller ones.

It's been a long time since most of those assumptions rang true - our society has gone through some very dramatic shifts:

1. The Internet makes it dramatically easier to work together from different locations - and take advantage of talent wherever it is.
2. The women's movement and its legacy has insured that working women are not only common but it's as expected that women would work as for men. Most families have no one at home full time.
3. I have no fields near my house that need tending... and most other people don't either.
4. Explicit structured tasks are increasingly being done by machines. We now need people to use what is unique to humans - our creativity and empathy.
5. Both the positive and negative externalities of doing business are now easier to see - as is the reaction to them (Exxon & BP oil spills, BASF running zero waste plants, JC Penney supporting the GLBT community, etc) and organizations that don't take that into account will suffer for it.
6. Technology, infrastructure and market access is now being commoditized through cloud computing, new business models and social media.

Because of this disconnect, people are struggling to figure out how to make life and work fit together in a way that makes them feel sane and happy - and it's not easy.  It would not be too hyperbolic to say that I consider it my life's work to help people and organizations figure out how to fix this so that our organizations work for us again, not against us. After all, what is the purpose of an organization if it is not contributing to our well-being in a substantive way? The organizations (whether for profit or not) that best align with how we want to live will be the ones that get the best employees, the best support - and the best results.

What do we need?

1. Explicit support and encouragement by organizations to work anywhere, which includes the responsibility and accountability to work independently.
2. Choice in whether our work is 30-40-50-60-70 hours a week so we can fit our work to our life, not the other way around (with the understanding that we also choose our compensation levels accordingly) - and that working less does not result in working on less important and interesting tasks.
3. School schedules that more closely resemble work schedules and expectations... or work schedules that can be adjusted to school schedules (see above)
4. Radically different view of education, hiring and employee training.
5. Companies that start with a purpose and then find the business model(s) that support that purpose.
6. Organizations that operated as loosely coupled networks (see Dave Gray's new book The Connected Company for more info on this)

There are examples of many of the above practices throughout different organizations - I am optimistic that we are beginning to see how this new organization is structured and operates. Look at Giff Gaff, Whole Foods, Amazon, WL Gore for examples. It's happening and those that understand the power in these new models have no particular need to share their lessons... but the rest of the world would be wise to work on catching up.

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?