Go Where You Wanna Go

You gotta go where you wanna go
Do what you wanna do
With whoever you wanna do it with

You gotta go where you wanna go
Do what you wanna do
With whoever you wanna do it with

The Mamas and The Papas, Go Where You Wanna Go (John Phillips, 1966)

MamasAndPapasIfYouCan

[Incidentally, I’ve never seen an earlier example of the marauding apostrophe. Not just errant and extant but hunting in pairs. I am told that the group became grammatically correct after their first album. They had to become politically correct even earlier: the toilet on the album cover had to be covered over, apparently. Read all about their cover shenanigans at the Dunhill site.]

I have an Indian passport. That in itself is not surprising, given that I was born and brought up in India. But I left there 33 years ago, and have lived in the UK since.

When I left the country, my mother asked me not to change my nationality; she was concerned that with the then political climate, I may find it hard to visit India at short notice if I changed nationality. So when I qualified for UK citizenship, I didn’t do anything about it. Which may not be a big deal for most people. But for a regular traveller like me, it adds capsaicin to the merest of journeys across borders. Take a look at the visa differences shown below, courtesy of the fantastic site VisaMapper.

If you’re a UK citizen, this is how the world looks in terms of visas:

Screen Shot 2013-12-31 at 14.42.51

If you’re a US citizen, things are about the same, except for Brazil. Dilma Rousseff is less than happy about being spied on by her neighbours.

Screen Shot 2013-12-31 at 14.44.59But if you’re Indian, many of the leaves that are green turn to brown. Incidentally, if you haven’t heard Simon and Garfunkel perform that song, just click and enjoy.

Screen Shot 2013-12-31 at 14.47.40

I love travelling, and have been privileged to work in jobs that require regular travel. And, given the brownness of the Indian visa situation, I’ve had to get a lot of visas. [I was a stamp collector as a child. I never thought I’d continue to be one this long ….. using a passport rather than a traditional stamp album].

Over the years that’s led to a number of interesting situations:

In 1981 I was snowbound in Russia, managed to barter my duty-frees and escape from Sheremetyevo’s transit area — I couldn’t bear to think of being cooped up there for perhaps six days. I made it to Red Square, along with a couple of Swedes who were heading back home from Thailand and who’d seen what I was up to. But we were apprehended there (while sampling the country’s vodka, of course) and were very closely scrutinised back at the airport till our plane left. Very closely indeed.

In 1985 I had one day to get a Greek visa prior to going to Spetses on vacation. I’d left it late. The guy at the Embassy was very helpful, but couldn’t help me. My passport was four months out of date, and I hadn’t noticed. Which meant getting a new passport of an evening in order to give me even the smallest chance of joining my wife in Spetses. To make matters a little more interesting, I was due to fly out of Belfast. [Long story]. We made the flight.

In 1998 I turned up at Frankfurt airport duly visa-ed, but with a minor problem. I planned to go there on day X, and later had to change my plans to arrive there on day X-1. An early meeting had been added to my schedule. Tough. Because my visa didn’t actually start till the next day. So I had to spend an hour at the airport cooling my heels with only the security staff for company. But once Cinderella time came around, I was let in.

There have been many shenanigans since, many close shaves. Part of the spice of life. At least one of them involved going to the Mexican visa official’s home one late evening in Austin, Texas, so that I could get to the Yucatan with my family. Another involved being let in to the Irish Republic on an emergency visa given at the airport, once the officer had heard me refer to my daughter as Orla. [Which is not surprising, given that’s her name].

But I came close to utter disaster a few weeks ago. One of the challenges of having so many stamps in your passport is that you run out of pages very quickly. You collect additional booklets like political donors collect awards. And each of those booklets has valid visas, for different countries. So my right to enter the UK indefinitely is in one passport, my 3 year Schengen is in another, and my 10 year US, my 5 year Japanese and 2 year Irish, for example, are in a third, the “current” one.

As life would have it, I’d been travelling so much that I forgot my “Schengen-visa-holding-but-otherwise-full-while-valid” passport en route Munich. Turned up there. Patted my pockets, my carry-on bag. Nothing. Nada. Left at home. UK visa? Check. US visa? Check. Schengen? Oops.

The border guard was very nice. No Visa? No Entry. I tried to explain. Have Visa. Just Not With Me. He smiled, agreed. And repeated what he’d said earlier. No Visa. No Entry. Brainwave time. Since I “had” the visa, except it was at home, on my desk, would he let me in if I got someone to take a photo of that visa and email it to me? Then I would Have Visa. And Enter.

He hummed. But he didn’t haw. He actually agreed with my proposal, on one condition. The photo would have to be emailed to him directly, not via me. So I got my daughter to put her iPhone to use. And I was let in that morning. That really exemplifies Germany for me, a culture that is far more about spirit than about letter when it comes to stuff like this.

Worse was to come. Just before Christmas, we decided to take a short break in Dubai. I’ve taken them before, and the hotel has always been able to sort my visa out in short order.

Not this time. Days passed and no visa. Nobody understood why. I pulled every string I could, and in the end managed to fly there visa-less. And when I got there, I found out why. Someone with a name vaguely similar to mine (not close, not close at all) was on a security blacklist; no one could decide what to do. So I was in limbo. Until I presented myself, they saw me and my family, and all was well.

Go where you wanna go? Chance would be a fine thing. There is something very broken with the visa system, especially when you see the crazinesses and anomalies something like VisaMapper shows up. So bizarre that it must be true.

When Greece won the European Championship a decade or so ago, Otto Rehhagel, the coach, is rumoured to have been given a truly wonderful bonus. The right to park anywhere in Athens, anytime.

People hanker after many things. Fame, fortune, good looks, talent, whatever.

Me? I’m a simple man. All I want is an instrument that lets me enter 200 countries at will on short visits. Have visa will travel. [And sometimes, usually inadvertently, but at least once advertently, have no visa will travel anyway].

Where do you go to, my lovely? A look forward to platforms in 2014

Where do you go to, my lovely? Peter Sarstedt, 1969

Where do the children play? Cat Stevens, 1970

Where have all the flowers gone? Pete Seeger, 1955

Platforms are a bit like Jabberwocky: to paraphrase Alice, they seem very pretty, but they’re rather hard to understand. I chose the songs above for a number of reasons: because I like them; because they answer the question “where” with answers that have to do with much more than just “place”; and because I could demonstrate some of the value of platforms like Wikipedia and Youtube simply and effectively by so doing. [Incidentally, Wikipedia needs your help to stay ad-free. Please donate. Now].

Platforms simplify interactions by removing frictions and latencies. By helping people connect and interact and transact, they exhibit what a good friend, Sheldon Renan, called “netness“. Sheldon describes netness as:

Screen Shot 2013-12-30 at 22.58.01

Another way of looking at platforms is by using the metaphor that another good friend, Doc Searls, gave us, when he spoke of the Giant Zero. People use platforms to do things they cannot do as effectively, as quickly or even as enjoyably elsewhere. With as little friction as possible, with the lowest possible latency. Simply. Easily. Where, when and how they want it to be.

Which brings me to my first point:

Platforms enable interactions with a minimum of fuss and bother

Now then. I use Wikipedia to try and explain my references, and use the Web at large when that is not possible. I use YouTube to connect to popular musical performances. I’m interested in many things that are essentially analog in characteristic: books, vinyl albums, photographs, memorabilia, art, recipes, musical instruments, things to do with Calcutta or India or the Raj, scientific instruments, things to do with printing and publishing, cricket, chess, it’s a long list. Those interests mean that I spend time discovering the right platforms: my alphabet goes abebooks, barneby, cricinfo, discogs, epicurious….

Why these particular services? Because they have the right “content”. And that matters. Content matters. When I worked in telcoland, people used to talk about “attach rates”. People tended to buy telecommunications and connectivity products and services from the provider who had the most interesting/compelling/comprehensive content. Which forced telcos to enter the content business or risk being disintermediated and pushed deeper into infrastructure and utility with consequent impact on competitive intensity and margins. Content rightsholders have therefore, not surprisingly, been at the forefront of copyright and intellectual property battles every time a new platform has come along and disrupted the living daylights out of part or all of their business. I say “rightsholders” because the people who get the money aren’t necessarily the people you think get the money. Take the music business for example. Some of you may remember this diagram from The Root a few years ago:

greatdivide

But that’s a whole ‘nother story, saved for another day. Incidentally, I love what I’m hearing about Iron Maiden. They tracked where the illegal downloads were happening: the majority in South America, principally in Brazil. And, as Business Insider put it, quoting Citeworld:

Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in

They figured out that they were the scarcity, that digital music was an abundance, and that they should, as George Gilder advised, make use of the scarcity as well as the abundance that was peculiar to the age they lived in. Well done Iron Maiden, more on this later. But it does bring me to my second point:
When it comes to platforms, content is king. But
That but is important. Because the world of content is itself changing, and changing dramatically. People are attracted by the content, drawn to it like the magnets Sangeet Paul Choudary speaks of. [I mentioned it in my last post, I’ll mention it again. If you haven’t done so, start following his blog, Platform Thinking. It’s excellent, and has helped me clarify my thinking on a number of these issues.]. But the content people are attracted by is not necessarily the content we’re traditionally used to. Sometimes the service per se is the content, as you could see in the core of iTunes. Andrew Savikas, some years ago, raised awareness of content as a service. Sometimes the value is not just in the content per se, it’s in the ability to access that content when, where and how you want it. If it isn’t easy to get to and use, if it isn’t simple and convenient, then even the “best” content can fail to act as a Choudary magnet. Which is why paywalls are often a bad idea, particularly when it comes to the next point about why content is different today:
Platforms are about networked content, not broadcast content
Tim O’Reilly memorably used the phrase architecture of participation nearly a decade ago. It is imperative we understand this shift and how we should view “content” as a result. Platforms enable interactions in networked rather than hierarchical ways, reducing friction and allowing new forms of value to be generated. These new forms of value tend to be the consequence of network effects, as the platform attracts more participants. Such network effects can only exist if the platform makes it easy for participants to create, share, modify, provide feedback on, and even recommend, content. The content becomes valuable because of the community that engages with it and creates new value with it. Digital infrastructure tends to commoditise traditional broadcast “static” content; as opposed to this, the same digital infrastructure can be used to enhance the value of existing content, and even catalyse the creation of whole new value streams. But for this to happen, people need to be able to engage with and around the content. Which brings me to my next point:
Platforms create value because of the “networked content” rather than with the “broadcast content”
Many years ago, Doc Searls and I spent a number of afternoons discussing this point from a variety of perspectives. We called it The Because Effect, when you make money because of something rather than with something. Broadcast models create value through scarcity; networked models rely on abundance. People who aren’t used to abundance models tend to try and create artificial scarcities, with predictably poor results. Phone locking, DRM and region coding on DVDs are textbook examples of such failures. As long as people are people, the core value is in the interaction. These interactions happen “around” the content, exemplifying what Jyri Engestrom (and soon after, Hugh MacLeod) referred to as “social objects”. Platforms need social objects to attract participants; without that liquidity, we miss the scaling that makes valuable network effects possible. Comments, reviews, ratings, recommendations, these are the lifeblood of platforms. So the platform has to be designed as openly as possible, reducing barriers to entry, providing the tools to create, edit, share, recommend, review, and simplifying access independent of location and device and timezone. That’s what people have come to expect. In fact we’ve just seen the beginning of all this, and there’s a long way to go. And so on to my next point:
To a platform, “everything is a node on the network”
First some history. Telco 1.0 was fairly crude. A directory of people. Ways of finding those people, simplifying access to the people in that directory: alphabetical listings, geographical listings, activity-based listings: groupings of different sorts and types. Means of communication between the participants. Initially post and telegraph. And a record of changes. For a century or so that was it. State-endowed monopolies with limited interest in innovation or even incremental change. [Mindsets that said: Why bother to improve on 1930s voice codecs if they worked?]. That was Telco 1.0. Then came 2.0: Microsoft. Yup, Microsoft. The telco that dominated the directories, groupings, modes of communication and records-of-changes market for all business. They were the first to realise that if you had all those, all you needed to do was to remove one more critical friction: the ability to schedule meetings: and suddenly Robert would have an avuncular relationship with you. But try as they might, Microsoft could not dominate the home in the way they’d come to dominate the office. Which left a barn-sized door open for Telco 3.0: Facebook. Who saw that they could provide the directories, the ability to group, the facility to schedule meetings, multiple means of communication between participants, and a regular record of changes. Who saw that they could provide all this while reducing the friction and latency inherent in 1.0 and 2.0, by building all this lock, stock and barrel on internet infrastructure and moving from stocks to flows, as John Hagel and JSB would have put it. After all, wasn’t a news feed nothing more than a flow-based record of changes? Actually Facebook went a lot further: Telco 3.0 had discovered the importance of allowing interactions around content, moving from the broadcast to the networked model. As explained by Sangeet, people wanted to move from the linear “process” approach of the stocks world to the nonlinear “flows” world of interactions. To create the critical mass and nonlinearity of true interactions, facebook had to simplify how people could add content to the flow, how they could enhance, comment on, rate and review that content. Remember attachments in e-mail? Remember sending MMS messages? Those were the kind of frictions that facebook, friendfeed, twitter, instagram had to contend with. No contest.
So Telco 3.0 understood about stocks and flows, about the firehose, about the stream/filter/drain model, because they had to. Which is why it is instructive to study the underlying architecture of facebook, of twitter, of linkedin, of salesforce1. These are platforms that work on the premise that everything is connected, everything is a node on the network, everything can publish, everything can subscribe. Everything. People. Computers. Embedded devices. Even tweets can tweet. “Why haven’t you read me? Three of your friends have!” Which brings me nicely on to my next point:
As everything gets connected, the platforms that will succeed are the ones that get “netness”
The “entanglement” that Sheldon Renan spoke of is what will drive the value in the platforms of tomorrow. Knowledge that comes from the information about the information that passes as content. Who has seen/read/touched this? Who plans to? What do my friends think of this? What did people who did this also do? Are any of my friends going to the concert? Where are they sitting? Who has any experience of this? Who knows the answer to this? What should I use to do this? How do I do this? Whom should I ask? How do I know that she is the right person?
These are community-based values, not just based on “network effects”, but on the principles, values and conventions that allow people to choose to share things: their skills, their time, their location, their presence, their experiences, their passions, their interests, their needs and wants, their likes and dislikes, their social network, their inventory, their capacity, everything. But only if and when they choose to share, and only with the person or people that they choose to share with. Which brings me to my final point for now:
In 2014, platforms will start to focus on filters
Yup, 2014 is the Year Of The Filter. I’ve quoted Clay Shirky often enough, I’m going to quote him again. No such thing as information overload, only filter failure. So we have to design better filters. Provide tools that allow people to personalise and prioritise their particular piece of the stream. Provide the tools of provenance and entitlement and identity. [An aside: Next year, we will start seeing things have identity as well, from jet engines through to jetsam, from filet mignon to flotsam. Who made this? When? Where? How? Who inspected this? Who checked it? When? How? What’s the part number? What’s the serial number? You get my drift. When everything is connected, everything needs an identity, a provenance, all the associated certifications of membership and joining and pedigree and fitness.
In Platform Thinking, Sangeet also speaks about negative network effects. My take on this is simple: It’s what Yogi Berra said:
Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.
Too crowded? Sounds like filter failure to me.
So here’s to 2014, the Year of the Filter. Happy New Year, thank you for the time you spent reading this, thank you for visiting, thank you for your interactions with me, and with other readers, throughout 2013.
[Next year, I plan to spend time looking more closely at the stream-filter-drain model, and to discuss the implications for the customer and for business. I plan to do this while bearing in mind the inexorable shift of consumerisation; and yes, I will major on filters.]

Yes, 2013 was the year of the platform. And there’s more to come in 2014

What I said last year

The headline of my closing post last year, written on 30 December 2012, was “…and then you win….Gandhi, platforms and 2013″. In the two posts on either side of that one, I’d majored on platforms as well: On habanero dosas, platforms and makers and On platforms and sharing. I’d fairly and squarely nailed my colours to the platform mast a year ago, when it came to choosing themes for the year ahead. Here’s a quote from that year-ago post:

Platforms enable ecosystems. They are “multi-sided” like exchanges and marketplaces, focused on simplifying interactions between participants. As David Weinberger said recently, the smartest person in the room is now the room. In 2013, there’s going to be a room born every minute. A very smart room. Those rooms are going to demand support for their interactions and their creativity, as they change the way they live. That support is going to come from platforms. Platforms. Open, adaptive, enabling. Allowing ecosystems to be formed and to flourish.

Other predictions I’d made: subscription, search, conversation and fulfilment

Let’s stay with the topic of predictions for now. A decade earlier, I’d said:

I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing/syndication, search, fulfilment and conversation.

Those sentiments were paraphrased and re-published when I set up the public-facing version of this blog eight years ago, in the section About This Blog. And when I started writing external-facing posts regularly, this is what I had to say:

I’ve been fascinated by information all my life, and, serendipitously, been allowed to work in the information sector for most of it. The Moore-Metcalfe-Gilder Laws continue to have their effect, and with telephony becoming software, I feel we’re at a wonderful inflection point in the sector. And what I want to do via this blog is to catalyse conversations about some of the things that really matter to me in this context. How search, publishing, fulfilment and conversation become the core applications of the future. How we can prevent the unintended consequences of walled-garden approaches to content. How we can avoid DRM holding up innovation. Why identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are important. Why emergence theories and “democratized innovation” matter. How we can take advantage of the opportunities that mobile devices offer us.

Putting all this in context

Let’s take a wander down memory lane.

When I started work 35 years ago, the term “knowledge worker” was already a couple of decades old. And I was meant to be one of those knowledge workers. Here’s what I’ve been using as a definition of “knowledge worker”:

A knowledge worker is a person who interacts with people and/or information in order to create, curate and/or consume knowledge

People buy from people. People sell to people. People teach people. People learn from people. People work with people.

People interact with people.

Knowledge workers are no different. But the environment in which the knowledge worker works has changed, and changed dramatically. In my first job, most things were still very “analog”. I had a physical desk, with an in and out tray. People used to send each other letters called inter-office memoranda or memos. These memos were usually typed, on typewriters. The person sending the letter wasn’t usually the typist, that was the work of someone else, sometimes called a stenographer (if the person “took dictation”) or a typist; an aggregation of such people was called a “secretarial pool”. Memos went from person to person inside strange orange envelopes, designed for re-use, with the ability to scratch the previous recipient’s name and add a new one. If you were a regular recipient of internal mail, you would find yourself scratching your own name off.  Sometimes the envelopes were green or even white, these were “special”. The way memos went from person to person was special as well. You had your own pigeonhole, your inbox. If you were senior then your name would have a yellow highlight through it. If you were really senior then your name would be in CAPITAL LETTERS and highlights as well. And if you were really really senior you had your own office.

There was a telephone on your desk, but all you could do was make internal calls. For which you had a telephone directory of internal extensions. If you were senior you could call out. If you were really senior you could call out internationally.

If you were not at your desk people would take messages for you. Write them on slips of paper, leave them on your desk. The only way you knew someone had called was if you went back to your physical desk and read the physical piece of paper. [One year, soon after I came to the UK, there was a message left for me to “Call Liz, urgently”. My boss at the time was a woman called Liz. Assuming it was her, I called the number and asked for Liz. And found myself apologising profusely before I quietly put the phone down. Buckingham Palace did not take kindly to oiks like me calling and asking for Liz. I’d been had. Royally.]

Computers existed, but not PCs. If you were lucky, you had a “dumb” terminal on your desk, connected to a mainframe somewhere else. Personal productivity tools for document creation and management did not exist. Neither did spreadsheets, nor simple database programs. Presentations were usually done using overhead projector cells, which were “transparent” copies of something that had been created on a typewriter. E-mail existed, but principally text-only, we didn’t even have SMTP as an RFC, much less a standard, then. And it didn’t matter anyway, because your dumb terminal was only connected to the mainframe some floors away. You could dial-up the modem remotely, using a 4800 baud line, and watching paint dry while you sent “screens” forward and back. The “screens” were how you referred to a screensworth of data on a “green screen”, usually with a maximum of 80 characters width and 24-25 lines depth. Most of that space was given up to field names and delimiters, so that a screensworth was actually very little data being passed. It’s not just screen real estate that was scarce, so was bandwidth, so was memory, so was processor power, so was everything. Everything was vetted and cleansed before it went anywhere, because scarcity ruled.

These non-PC computers had text management programs that were based around SGML. WYSIWIG probably hadn’t even been invented as a term. You “wrote” documents in a markup language (initially using punch cards, later using electronic files); the printed outputs came back later … if they printed. Errors in the source document led to pages and pages of listing paper waste, you didn’t even have the facility to test-run the source document.

When you wanted to “know” something, you asked for a report. Which meant making a small set of choices in order to receive a ream of listing paper, one day later, most of which you didn’t need. There was no ability to schedule meetings except in analog form. You were invited to a meeting via a typewritten memo. You called an extension to say you were coming. And you turned up. Or not. There were stationery cupboards with things called pens and pads and erasers. Staplers. Typewriter ribbons. SnoPake correction fluid. Sellotape. Scissors. And files. Lots of them. And bloody great filing cabinets to put them in. The bigger your cubicle, the more filing space you had. There was no such thing as a conference call. And nothing portable or personal. It was less than ten years since Marty Cooper had called Joel Engel, it would be another ten years before the mobile phone went mainstream.

No internet. No PC. No mobile phone. No ability to schedule events. Everything analog, hardcopy, disconnected. Search was a manual thing in a confined space. No ability to collaborate or share.If something could be repeated, it would be repeated. No learning. Nothing. Nothing but a pile of interactions that were lost as they happened. With frictions and latencies abounding.

Platforms that enable interactions

Fast forward to today, and it’s a whole new world. What I saw as “conversation” a decade ago is now the feed, the stream: stream processing has become (forgive the pun) mainstream. The firehose of the stream needs filters in order to become useful, in order to allow people to create and curate knowledge and value. Which means you need the ability to subscribe to people and things you’re interested in, to separate them from the rest of the noise. “Subscription” is fine for situations when the need is regular; “search” (and good, global search) is what you need for the ad-hoc as opposed to the routine and regular. Search and subscription are used to enhance conversation in order that the knowledge worker has the information needed to act. Which is where fulfilment comes in.

What I saw as search, subscription, conversation and fulfilment is now available on steroids, as we move into the stream/filter/drain model that is the essence of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. And Salesforce1. Which is why I am so excited by what’s been happening in 2013, and what’s to follow in 2014.

Today’s leading platforms are all about enabling interactions. “Social” is about making those interactions easier, in terms of discovery of value within the network; it’s about signalling the interactions of value, using the RTs, the Likes, the +1s, the votes, the ratings, the reviews. It’s about doing all this not just with the what, but also with the whom and the where and the when. Which is where the metadata associated with the interactions comes in. And where “mobile” enters the fray.

These interactions are becoming more and more valuable as we move from simple networks to the “internet of customers“, as we move from connected computers through documents and sites through people through devices through concepts to a connected everything. And behind every single thing in this everything is a customer.

The stream is the place where interactions happen. The filter is what makes the interactions valuable. And the metadata allows patterns associated with person, place, time, topic, to be surfaced and understood, initially as correlations, and later, after deep investigation, from a causal perspective. There’s a whole new world of analytics that has opened up as a result.

Why is all this happening now?

The industry I joined all those decades ago was, like the Gaul of Asterix and Obelix, divided into three parts: general systems; telecoms; embedded systems. People still argue about why those divisions happened, but they did. It took the best part of two decades for the distinction between IT and telecoms to disappear; it’s taken the best part of another two decades for the distinction between general and embedded systems to feel the same pressure. Now you can make a phone call using javascript; now you can control an actuator or a sensor using javascript. So the distinctions are fading.

This is happening at a time when everyone and everything is getting connected, and when it’s possible to identify, auto-geo-locate, auto-date-and-time-stamp, everything. It’s happening at a time when finding out what your friends think is cheap (though it may still be relatively hard to find out just who your friends are…. one friction at a time). It’s happening at a time when the cost of CPU cycles, storage and bandwidth continue to decline apace.

And it’s happening at a time when we are truly moving from the hierarchical to the networked world, from stocks to flows, from the linear process to the nonlinear interaction as the way value is created.

We’ve spoken about this for decades, it is now part of the way we work.

What next?

In 2013 we saw the maturing of the stream, the filter and the drain. We saw people stop worrying just about interfaces and concentrate on interactions as well, and on the “UX” of those interactions.

There are still many frictions and latencies to remove from our interactions. More ways to add stuff to our streams. More ways to remove stuff from our streams. Other ways to add, improve and refine our ability to filter. As individual producers, consumers and curators of knowledge.

There are still many silos to break and bring into the stream, demolishing the swivel-chair integration of the past. We have to be able to “act” within the stream and not have to leave it to take action.

In my next post I will spend time on expanding on this. Subject, of course, to your comments and what I learn from them. If I see a lot of comments come quickly then I’ll definitely write the post before the year-end. It’s up to you to let me know whether I’m doing something useful or wasting your time and possibly mine.

A coda

While writing this post, I noticed that someone else had linked to one of the year-old posts. Went investigating, and found this site, Platform Thinking. Excellent stuff. And the video at the end of the post is well worth watching. I will make references to what they say there in my next post.

Thinking about forgiveness and relationships and work and pleasure

They say a dog’s not just for Christmas.

That’s the way I feel about forgiveness. It’s something I think about every day, not just at Christmas. It’s something I’ve been thinking about in the context of how relationships work.

One of the authors and thinkers I’ve been dipping into lately is Gregory Bateson, often quoted as saying:

A business is best considered as a network of conversations

Stowe Boyd referred to that quote some months ago in a post on the Future of Work in a Social World, and it reminded me that I must delve deeper into Bateson’s work. But park that to one side for now, I digress.

Regular readers will be aware that I’m a big fan of the Cluetrain Manifesto; I find it hard to believe that it is now fifteen years or so since the publication of the manifesto. Messrs Locke, Searls, Weinberger and Levine have my immense gratitude for making sure my eyes stayed open when they could have been in the act of shutting.

The manifesto is full of memorable phrases; one that has stayed with me “front of mind” is:

Markets are conversations

I’ve spent time talking to Doc Searls about this particular phrase, especially in the context of how conversations exist and flourish because of the relationships they represent. Which is why, borrowing from those sessions with Doc, I have been known to intone the mantra:

Relationship before conversation before transaction

Again, regular readers will also know that I’m a big fan of Peter Drucker’s work. He too is someone I can quote from frequently and at will; two of my favourite Druckerisms are given below:

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

And:

The purpose of business is to create a customer.

I’ve tended to take these four statements together as part of one holistic model. People buy from people, people sell to people. It’s people who do business, not brands, not organisations, not companies. People. Business is conducted as a series of conversations between people; those conversations take place because there are relationships between the people involved; those conversations can, when appropriate and relevant, lead to transactions. Markets are conversations in aggregate, taking place across a network or multiple networks. When those conversations take place, transactions ensue. What is real in those transactions is the product that is bought or sold, the service that is provided. That’s what’s real. Money is an end result, a way of portraying those transactions, and not to be confused with the transaction.

Everything that we consider business begins with a relationship of some sort. For decades, perhaps longer, we’ve lived with weak relationships between institutions and the customers they serve. In many cases the institution did not even know who their customers were; those that did get at least that far failed soon after; they recognised customers only via complex hieroglyphics bestowed by the institution: customer account numbers. But even they failed to evolve any further, refusing to view customers in the context of the products and services they’d contracted for. A rare few enterprises got to the point of knowing their customers as well as the products and services they’d acquired; but they had no sense of who their customers really were, in the context of their interests and preferences, their needs and wishes, their dreams and aspirations, their experiences and their intentions.

So the very idea of a customer relationship is one that was rudimentary to the modern enterprise until a couple of decades ago. No relationships. No conversations to speak of. But there were transactions aplenty, and so nobody cared.

That’s changed; businesses are finding that customers do care about the relationship, that they do care about the conversation. Capital that had been consistently invested in optimising back-end processes was now slowly being deployed into improving customer engagement. Into knowing more about customers. Into simplifying conversations with customers. Into reducing friction and latency between customer and company.

Investment was being funnelled into systems of engagement as well as systems of record, to use the phrases popularised by Geoffrey Moore.

[An aside. I have wondered about the recent statements about the centre of gravity of IT expenditure moving from the CIO to the CMO. I’ve been CIO at a number of institutions, and I think the construct is false. We should analyse IT budgets according to the sponsor for the investment and expenditure. Most of the time, the CIO is not the sponsor. For much of the past, the primary sponsor has been the COO or CFO. In capital market institutions, the “front office” would flex their muscles and insist on a reasonable dollop of the capital being made available to develop their business (in terms of new products, services, markets, customers) rather than have all of it driven by the “back office” of operations, finance and risk. In this context, what I see happening is that sponsorship is moving from COO/CFO to CMO/CEO, away from process optimisation to business growth, away from systems of record to systems of engagement. Which is not surprising, given the level of investment made in systems of engagement for the previous forty years].

Where was I? Oh yes, the shift of investment into systems of engagement. Into facilitating conversations between customer and business. [In fact, into facilitating conversations between customer and partner, customer and supply chain, customer and distribution, even customer and customer].

Facilitating conversations.

Which occur as a result of relationships.

Relationships. Which is where my interest in the role of forgiveness comes in.

Relationships make the world go round. I’m very tempted to quote John Donne here, so I will.

No man is an iland intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the Main; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

What a beautiful poem. … because I am involved in Mankinde. The sooner we learn that we are all involved in Mankinde, the sooner we will begin to solve the problems we’ve been unable to deal with thus far.

Relationships are between human beings. Irrational, unpredictable, given to a diverse array of desires, prompted by a diverse array of motives.

Human. Warts and all.

One of the most beautiful things that makes us human is our ability to forgive. And to forget. Two conscious acts. Acts born of true relationship, “covenant” rather than “contract”. [In a contract relationship, when something goes wrong, the question is “who pays”, how is recourse to to be obtained. In a covenant relationship, on the other hand, when something goes wrong, the question is “how shall we fix this?”].

The act of forgiving takes place within a relationship. It is a conscious act that requires sacrifice by all involved. It is a conscious act that all involved to make themselves vulnerable. It is a conscious act which requires and involves trust.

It is difficult for me to explain human relationships (or for that matter even begin to understand them) without emphasising the importance of the vulnerability, the sacrifice, the trust of forgiveness. Of forgiving, and of being forgiven.

I have been forgiven much. And I have forgiven much. I am privileged and blessed to have a good family where forgiveness is practised; to have friends and colleagues where this continues to be true.

So when I think about designing systems that enable conversations to flow and grow, to become more effective, I think about the role of forgiveness. In order to forgive, I must be able to forget. What does that mean in today’s world? In time to come, part of the act of forgiveness may well come to include the ability of the forgiver to expunge the record of that which has been forgiven. How many times have you seen a conversation go nowhere fast, when age-old transgressions are dredged back up? That’s not the sign of forgiveness, that’s not the sign of a healthy relationship.

Our ability to forgive is an integral part of our humanity. As we build frameworks that enable better conversations, we need to understand, and design for, this ability to forgive.

That’s why I spend time thinking about the teenager’s “right to be forgotten” and what that would mean. How the official record is sometimes expunged of entries, how convictions are “spent”. How people are “pardoned”.

These are all instruments of human engagement, at work and at home, for business and for pleasure.

There was a time when institutional memory was a constant, when attrition was low, when people stayed in one job all their lives. So when a person “took a bullet for the team” the others remembered, not just when it happened, but for years to follow. They were the institutional memory. Today, when it is more common for people to change jobs regularly, institutional memory is weakened. The conversation-enabling frameworks we build are going some way towards solving this problem, by allowing institutional memory to be persisted, archived, searched, retrieved.

That’s a good thing.

Similarly, our ability to turn parts of the conversation into social objects that can be rated, reviewed, commented upon, enhanced, augmented, shared and re-shared is fundamentally a good thing. Our ability to have that conversation asynchronously as well as synchronously, face to face as well as remote, these are also good things. Our ability to embed that conversation with images, documents, sound, links, that too is good, as conversations get enriched. And the metadata that is available for all this allows us to glean rich insights, see patterns we could not have seen earlier, improve our planning assumptions, understand root causes of problems better.

Transaction costs drop dramatically as a result, as we find it fast and easy to find the right person, the right product, the right company, the right service, the right anything. Not just find it but negotiate to acquire/bond/engage with it, with the knowledge of what our network thinks of it (whatever it may be).

There are many things that are made more effective as a result of technological advances. But to remain effective they need to bear in mind that in the end it’s all about us.

Human beings.

Connected by a series of relationships.

That emerge in a network of conversations.

Some of which lead to transactions.

Some of which are represented by the end-result of money.

We have to remember we’re human beings. And as human beings, one of the most powerful things we do is to have covenant relationships, not contract ones.

Covenant relationships have tacit components to do with trust and sacrifice and vulnerability and forgiveness.

We need to learn how to model all this, this ability to trust and to make ourselves vulnerable, this ability to sacrifice, this ability to forgive, in the systems we design to conduct business. Because those abilities are what make us human. And business is conducted between humans.

In weeks to come I will be spending time looking at “incomplete contracts” from this perspective. Feel free to share your wisdom and learnings and experiences with me, using whatever channel makes you comfortable; I promise to reflect everything I learn in succeeding posts.

 

 

Truth, fiction and jet lag

You may have noticed that aviation in the UK is throwing a little tantrum today.

Flight delays and cancellations. Because of a “technical fault”.

And here I quote:

Screen Shot 2013-12-07 at 14.58.20

Difficulty switching from night time to daytime operation.

Now that’s what I call jet lag.