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Archive for October, 2009

I was inspired recently by this post by Adrian Chan on his Gravity 7 blog.  He describes a curious social dynamic that shows up vividly in social media – flow.

In the early days of the WELL, when we were first involved in – and simultaneously observing – the participation of members in multiple conversations on a wide range of topics, we found that we could configure our software so that members could build itineraries for their visits, and that a well-designed itinerary (the so-called “conflist”) – along with some selections of conversations to visit or ignore – could provide the flow necessary for a quick, efficient and satisfying session – a min-tour of their favorite communities and discussions. In brief interrupts of their work days, WELL members could take a quick dive into the WELL with minimal distraction and maximum flowiness.

That was how it worked with the relatively tiny population of the pre-Web WELL and the comparatively primitive text-only interface of Picospan. Today, the  social flow for a typical user must map across numerous platforms and communities at a variety of paces.

The idea of a lifestream or an information stream is getting a lot of attention with the massive adoption of social software with the “status report” format. Users post their latest activity or discovery or witnessed event. Others respond or ignore and then post their own status. It all blends together in a stream of reports and responses. If you’re in the stream, you’re reporting, reading and sometimes responding or repeating items to your own audience.

Watching “from the river’s edge,” as Adrian describes it, puts enough distance between the user and the conversation that information and learning can be drawn from it. Reports flowing in the stream may contain nuggets of information – links to blog posts, to videos, to people, to websites – that can be snagged and put to use. These nuggets can be passed along to different communities, maybe outside of that particular stream or for sure outside of that community.

Flow is an important element of social interaction and there are ways that a tool can be configured or a suite of tools can be related so that the user experience brings a maximum of it. When interested clients express fear of a scattering of attention and a sinkhole for work hours, I explain the goal of flow and how it turns those concerns upside down.

In this presentation, Dan Pink at the TED conference in July 2009, makes the case that traditional carrot-and-stick incentives only work in a narrow range of business applications, and that what truly motivates workers to do better and to be more loyal are:

• autonomy
• mastery
• purpose

Indeed, using social media as a business tool, in providing the means to communicate and share at a social rather than mechanical level, offers some of these rewards.

I’ve been commenting on the social impacts and responses to the evidence for climate change for 5 years. Before that, I toyed with the idea of building a global dashboard on the Web where all the parameters relevant to the warming situation could be checked daily. But things were changing so slowly – I thought then – that a dashboard would look to static to hold anyone’s attention. Today, such a dashboard would be much more dynamic.

Today many many groups have put together programs to influence government and involve fellow citizens by displaying irrefutable evidence of change happening right now, not in the future.

Still a majority of our fellow humans are either unaware of advance of global warming or simply refuse to be concerned about it. Many of those people are unaware of acceptable alternative practices and technologies to what they are used to. They believe the question is, “Will most of humanity choose to go without electric light?”

The question the new greens are asking is, “How do we replace the coal-burning plants to ensure base power needs are met while cutting deeply into CO2 emissions?”

Stewart Brand, launching his new book Whole Earth Discipline, spoke of the need to “rethink green” and accept the lesser of two evils – small, 4th generation nuclear power that has negligible carbon footprint compared to coal plants.

I was part of a very vocal anti-Nuke group in the 70s, before and after Three-mile Island. I did research in the library of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency. I was strongly opinionated. But I’ve also seen and been part of huge advances in technology over the past 30 years. And I’m convinced that coal could destroy us.

So, I hope we will all keep an open mind and get our priorities straight. We don’t have time to argue the fine points for years on end. We need to see and stimulate real action and change.

Following up on the post about the priority of culture over strategy in organizational planning, I’m drawing from another of the acknowledged gurus, this time from the non-profit universe: Beth Kanter. I’m also a subscriber to Beth’s Blog, which is a constant treasure trove of good stories and ideas, often by guest bloggers.

In yesterday’s post, Beth was about to facilitate a discussion that she titled ”Creating a Culture that is not Afraid to Fail.” She wrote,

I’m defining failure as a social media strategy or program implementation that wasn’t perfect or didn’t work as well as you expected especially the first few times you did it.   This happens quite frequently with social media, especially in the early stages.

We set unrealistic outcomes, don’t have a methodology for learning or sloppy strategy implementation.  We get poor results.  We’re quick to proclaim that social media doesn’t work, feel some shame, and drop it.  We look at the wrong measures or unrealistic outcomes. We don’t value the learning and use that insight to improve the social media strategy the second or third or fourth time around.

Like riding a bicycle or a horse, you can’t call it failure the first, or second or third time you fall off. You only learn to ride either of them by getting back on and trying again. Some of this persistence must live in the organization’s culture. If its social foundation isn’t strong enough, the first failure of a social media initiative may lead to abandonment. In an organization where social learning is recognized as precious, failure is regarded as part of a learning process. New approaches – maybe new tools – will be tried. There will be patience for social changes to adapt to the technology and sharing of observations.

On Facebook and on Twitter, Beth posted this query: ”How do you create an organizational culture that is not afraid to fail? “

Read her blog post for the details, but in summary the responses suggested the following:

(1) Must come from the top: reward learning

(2)   Unpack the fear of failure through internal discussions

(3)  Make learning the norm

(4) Emphasize what works

(5) Start small, early, and reiterate

I’ve been subscribed to Luis Suarez’s blog for almost a month now. I usually give a blogger a month’s trial to convince myself that they’re worth following. His job is to help educate, encourage and guide IBM employees in using social tools productively, but much of what he does is expose other peoples’ work and discoveries for his blog readers.

I’ll probably be commenting on his writing from time to time because – on a much greater scale than mine – Suarez is going about the same task – supporting better organizational use of social technologies.

The current article has an irresistible title: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.  I’m in complete alignment with Suarez when he says:

To me, social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.

He’s talking about the culture of organizations and how they are changing to adapt to the evolution of business, technology and culture beyond the organization. This is the Big Shift I refer to on the Context page of this site. Suarez posted his thinking about “how collaborative your corporate culture needs to be in order to embrace these social tools. ”

As he tends to do, Suarez uses his writing to lead to someone else’s article or paper or video presentation, which you may or may not find as enriching as he does. But his truth in this case is that social computing and the culture of the organization will have more impact on strategy than the other way around. So when an organization talks about putting together a social media strategy, their starting point should be a frank assessment of their culture and its compatibility with what the strategy would have them do.