The Social Organization

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heading to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Why You Should Too

It feels like I've been going to the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a very long time. In reality, I first attended in June of 2008. It is when the enterprise market was just starting to pay attention to Twitter and I was on a microblogging panel with Laura Fitton, Chris Brogan,  Dennis Howlett & Loren Feldman... the full range of sunny to overcast in demeanor. It was a great panel but boy does it feel like a lot of time has passed! Chris is now a super star. Laura started OneForty.com and I started The Community Roundtable.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference has evolved just as much. Collectively we no longer need to discuss what microblogging is and, in fact, it has morphed into just another feature in a wide portfolio of social products. Like the market, the Enterprise 2.0 conference does an excellent job and evolving its topics and expanding as the market needs have changed. Last fall, they offered me the opportunity to help define the community management track and in Boston in June, the conference will have two tracks on community management - one focused internally and one focused externally.

Community management has quickly moved from an unclear activity to a strategic imperative for a market that has seen a tipping point in the use of social technologies for a wide range of business processes. I'll be kicking off the track by talking about the role community management has in the success of any social business initiative and why businesses of all sizes are working to figure out what community management means for them. I'm please too that the track will be full of case studies from companies activity using community approaches: Intuit, Cisco, Spiceworks, ArchSight and others will talk about what communities do for them and what new risks are introduced as a result.

If you are interested in how social tools and approaches are changing organizations - either from the IT or business angle, this is one of my recommended must attend conferences. Join me in Boston!

Disclaimer: I am on the Advisory Board of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

Photo credit to Stephen Collins.

 

A Vision of The Social Organization

We have a pretty clear picture of what a social organization looks like on the outside - marketing and sales becomes a pull rather than a push discipline and customers are much more involved throughout the customer lifecycle. But what does this new organization look and feel like on the inside? There are not many discussions of how employment and management structures change to become more agile.

There is more agreement on the issues:

• Slow moving, rigid organizations do not adapt to increasingly fast moving markets.
• Siloed information within organizations creates huge redundancy issues and makes efficiency difficult.
• It is quite challenging to hire individuals that can operate in large inefficient organizations and drive innovation or think differently and therefore organizations lack the 'best and the brightest' talent.
• Certain kinds of talent, particularly in the area of collaboration, are poorly identified and rewarded.
• Middle management is incented to protect their turf and hoard information leading to archaic corporate politics and huge inefficiency for the organization.
• The hiring and layoff cycles have created immense distrust of employers.
• Employees are increasingly stressed due to unease about their job stability, the deluge of information, and increasing responsibility to fund their own health insurance and retirement.
• Families with two working parents are strained for time. Families with one working parent are increasingly uneasy about the risk of one paycheck. Single adults are increasingly stressed because they are viewed as the employees most ready to work long hours.
• More and more individuals want to be in control of their own work life since the perceived risk of working for a large organization is not significantly lower (and may be greater) than the risk working for themselves.

Most organizations have a long way to go to be places that employees are clamoring to work for but in the new communications environment that clamoring employee enthusiasm will drive revenues and market share if it exists. That employee enthusiasm also drives alignment with corporate values and messaging, increases opportunities because all employees are advocates, an decreases risks because employees feel more individual responsible for protecting the interests of the organization.

So what might this organizational nirvana look like?

Employment becomes a cross between a long-term commitment and free-agency: The organization provides employee overhead (benefits) in exchange for a commitment to work a minimum number of hours on organizational projects.

Managers are either focused on professional development or projects: Managers no longer 'own' a functional piece of the business but either manage a group of employees to help them choose projects and navigate their career or they manage projects.

Employees and Project Managers Negotiate Work Commitments: Employees are free to self-commit to projects for which they are interested and have time. Project managers define project roles, time needed, and associated pay and are responsible for recruiting team members and managing the project to completion. Employees can work as little (as long as the reach the minimum required for employment) or as much as they feel they are able to at that time. Project managers can solicit specific employees or change the pay to get employee commitment. This has the side affect of paying more, not less, for tedious or unappealing jobs.

Employees Manage Their Schedules. If an employee has a family member with an illness and needs to work the minimum required, they choose their project commitments accordingly. If on the other hand, they have time and want more hours to maximize their income, they can choose a heavy schedule.

Employees define themselves by skill sets, attributes, and experience based on a published taxonomy so that project managers can find and solicit team members.

360 Degree Reviews. Everyone on a project gets to review the performance of everyone else, with some templates and guidelines to do so based on organizational values and goals.

Executive Tasks Are Earned. Based on the successful completion of projects that represent bigger and bigger pieces of business, executives earn the right to budget or more loosely defined (risky/innovative) projects. Some executives will continue to select projects with bigger budgets and some executives will likely continue to choose more innovative projects, depending on their interests.

A Senior Executive Team Is Still Necessary. The C-Suite will still set the overall strategic direction and priorities for the organization - with plenty of input. The C-Suite will also oversee the initiation of projects, the arbitration of issues between teams, and they will ensure gaps are being addressed.

All Projects Are Vetted, Prioritized, Budgeted and Scheduled. Any employee or customer can initiate a project but there are various committees, depending on the size and purpose of the project, that vets and schedules them. These committees are filled with project managers that rotate on and off of them, based on the interest of the project manager themselves in participating.

Customers Can Be Project Team Members. If a customer is particularly invested in a particular project and have the appropriate skills, they are incorporated into projects.

The overhead of organizing in this way has been too high in the past, particularly for very large organizations. However, technology - both enterprise functional software as well as networked communications software - has made the overhead of managing this complexity much easier.  Models similar to this exist in the professional service world - the big management consulting, marketing, and accounting firms. I think it's time to test it out in more traditional organizations as well.

Generally we need to get away from the parental model of the organization to one that views employees as partners and both treats them and expects them to act like adult peers. This will require an adjustment for many employees as well - there are many people who like the easiness of just being told what to do but that makes them sub-performing employees which organizations can no longer aford if they want to compete globally.

This model also introduces new issues and risks - what are some of these issues in your mind?

Update: One emerging model that I really love is uTest - for more on their business model innovations, built around community, read their latest update here.

Social Media Algorithms, Context, & Decision Making

 
I started my career working with large enterprises on decision-making processes around new product development. It's an area filled with ambiguity and risk but requires executives to make huge bets on a future they cannot see. It also takes years to get valid feedback on whether investment decisions were right and those decisions are very often group decisions with limited accountability back to any one person. It is a squirrely business at its best and for that reason often called an 'art'. But I learned a lot about business decision-making in ambiguous environments. Enterprise decision-making in the social space is very similar.

One of the cardinal sins in decision-making is not understanding the biases and context that underpins the information you have. You will never achieve perfect information but it is absolutely critical that you understand where the information you do have is coming from and how you are selecting and prioritizing the information you find. Understanding the gaps in information is just as critical as understanding the information you have - it helps identify potential risks and mitigate them.

One of the issues that I find, generally speaking, with social media monitoring tools is that it is very difficult to understand the scope of what you are looking at and therefore challenging to make good decisions with the information. Talking about this issue recently caused me to have a striking aha moment about what has bothered me about Google for so long: the algorithms are considered 'secret sauce' and very tightly controlled. This is highly problematic for decision-making because whether it is search engines or social media monitoring solutions we absolutely need to understand what we are looking at (and what we are not seeing) and how that information has been prioritized for us. Without that context, our decision-making is biased toward to proclivities of the tools we use and that is extremely risky.

We don't even like eating chocolates without knowing what is inside... how are we to make good decisions if we don't know how we got to the information we have?

Photo by waldopepper

Learn Community Management From Leading Practitioners

Each year at The Community Roundtable, we publish a report on what we have learned with our members during the previous year. Our members are leading community, social media, and social business practitioners at a wide range of organizations - from the very large to the small and agile. The report is a huge undertaking but we feel it is important to document and consolidate what the leading practitioners know so that we can help the market better understand the discipline of community management.

The State of Community Management 2011 is part research document, part reference document and it helps executives and practitioners:

• Understand the scope and complexity of the community management discipline
• Provide a training resource to new community managers
• Better plan for and support social business and community initiatives
• Improve the management of current social initiatives
• Find inspiration and new approaches to common challenges

This report could not have been developed without the perspectives of TheCR Network members, the insights from experts we have had as guests (follow them via our Twitter list), and the support of the report sponsors: Acquia, Enterprise 2.0, Farland Group, Igloo Software, Moxie Software, Rosetta, and Social Media Today. We have done our best to curate and assemble those perspectives, insights, and support in a way that provides you with a valuable resource. Please, in exchange, consider these individuals and organizations if they offer expertise or tools you need.

Click to view and download the report.

Women and Leadership in Technology

It's been an oft discussed issue: the lack of women in executive management positions in the technology industry. I don't really have an answer to this other than to say the industry in general has to mature a bit because the go-go-go and vaguely frat boy culture of most technology organizations makes them unappealing to lead for many women. I think, for that reason, a lot of women choose not to take part in the management of them, regardless of how well qualified they are. It's mostly a cultural, not an expertise issue from my perspective. I believe culture creates far more difficult barriers to change than anything else in organizations - and it is mostly un-articulated and not proactively considered or facilitated in so many companies.

But women are obviously in the tech industry and a recent TechCrunch article Why Women Rule the Internet really bothered me because it was quite focused on the opportunity for women in online shopping. While that is an opportunity, there is so much more - and so many more important aspects of the technology market - that women are also involved with. But the leadership challenges remain.

Having gone to one of the Seven Sister colleges what I know is that a hugely disproportionate percentage of leaders in politics and other industries are graduates of women's colleges. Women's college graduates:

• Make up 1/3rd of female board members of the Fortune 1000 
• Are twice as likely to earn Ph.Ds
• Are 20% of women in Congress

But women's college graduates only make up only about 2-4% of all women graduates. Clearly while women can receive a great education at many places, these schools do a better job at preparing women for leadership positions.

The problem with women's leadership in technology? Women's colleges like my own Alma Mater, Mount Holyoke, have been almost completely absent from the discussion despite educating Jean Sammet who helped develop FORMAC and Susan Kare who designed the first Macintosh graphics.

Traditionally, computer engineering and information technology has not been seen as a liberal arts discipline but with the advent of socially mediated technology as well and its ubiquity in everything we do, I think it is high time that women's colleges took on the challenge of educating and preparing women for leadership positions in technology. In fact, another recent TechChrunch article spoke about the need for both engineering and liberal arts backgrounds to be represented in order to build world class technical solutions and stated that only 37% of technology executives and heads of product have engineering degrees. This jives with my experience that only a portion of executives in the technology companies I've worked for come from engineering.

So where are the women's colleges in this field? Mount Holyoke, I'm looking at you.