Author: JP

enough of fear and greed

A few days ago, I saw this story about people being advised to return their library books on time in order to avoid their credit ratings being affected.

library-17-10-2006

I think this is wrong. It’s like telling people not to do stupid things and stick them into Facebook in case their job prospects are affected. I understand that we all have to learn about the consequences of our actions, but I think we have to be careful here about the unintended consequences. If we carry on this way, all we are doing is enshrining the importance of the Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Get Caught. It’s worse than that: we are making sure that Fear and Greed remain the only two motivators.

I want to live in a world where people return library books on time because it’s the right thing to do. I want to live in a world where people do things because they’re the right things to do, and don’t do things because they’re the wrong things to do. Right and Wrong are far better motivators than Fear and Greed. So let us concentrate on teaching our children how to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, rather than learning to differentiate only between orange conical edible objects and wooden weapons.

And in any case I’m not sure that fining is the right thing to do. There must be a better way.

[My thanks to Feibao Production for the illustration].

Tweitgeist

Couldn’t resist this. Tweitgeist. A word cloud formed from scraping the words off the last 250 Twitter “tweets”.  Again, something I can see as having real value in the enterprise, especially if I can have multiple clouds, each showing a different population of tweets. Thanks to Pistachio for the tip-off.

Harold Leavitt RIP

It must be all of thirty years since I first read one of Harold Leavitt’s books, Managerial Psychology; since then, I’ve dipped into the book a number of times. But not as often as I’ve dipped into a more recent book of his, Hot Groups. Or, to use its more formal title, Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organisation.

Written by Leavitt and his wife, Jean Lipman-Blumen, the book encapsulated a number of studies they’d done in the 1980s and 1990s, looking at how social networks behaved in organisations, leading on from earlier research on group decision-making and small-group behaviour. [Incidentally, I’d read some of the works of Dr Blumen without ever realising that I’d also been reading her husband’s books. Her 1996 book, The Connective Edge, is brilliant.]

To them, “hot groups” were small, passionate, idealistic groups who, for a brief period, exerted disproportionate influence on the strategy and direction of a firm. They took care to look at how these groups formed, what made them tick (an overwhelming sense of shared passion, purpose, belief), why they operated at the speed they did, what made them die out.

I think their work on “hot groups” is greatly underestimated, something I am trying to put right in the book I am writing with Chris Locke. Over the years, I have watched these Mayfly Marauders arise and die many times in large organisations. Every now and then I’ve been part of such a group, and learnt the hard way how the immune system of the firm crushes such change agents.

More recently, however, I’ve realised something quite valuable. That “Enterprise 2.0” tools actually help hot groups survive and thrive, that we finally have immunity from the attacks of enterprise immune systems. But more on this later.

In the meantime, do go read the works of Harold Leavitt and his wife; they can teach us a lot about the human aspect of complex adaptive systems; the world is a poorer place for his passing, and my condolences go to his wife and family. I learnt valuable things from what Dr Leavitt wrote, and I’d like to acknowledge my debt.

Thinking about Push and Pull and Twitter in the Enterprise

There have been a number of comments on my recent posts re Twitter and the Enterprise; I thought it would be worth while spending a little time answering them in some detail. First, let’s take a look at the questions:

  • How can a system that uses messages restricted to no more than 140 characters be useful?
  • What’s in it for a Tweet consumer?
  • As the network grows, won’t the noise cancel out any worthwhile signal?
  • In a corporate environment, what’s wrong with e-mail and BlackBerry?

I’m going to answer them in a roundabout way, as part of a narrative rather than in some specific request-response manner. If you feel I have failed to answer the questions, do feel free to comment vociferously. [And no, I will not be restricting myself to 140 characters. This is a blog and not a TweetStream].

Let me start with terms like “Push Technology” and “Pull Technology“. They may mean a lot to many people, but for me they’re dangerous terms, helping to cloud the issue. Other than the architects of the systems in question, who cares whether a request for information originates from the client or from the server? Most people don’t know that the device in their hands (or on their desktops) is referred to as a client, and most people neither know nor care where the servers they use are located.  Yet, for some reason, every time the conversation moves to different forms of communication, we start arguing about push and pull.

I think we would be far better off considering Twitter as neither Pull nor Push, but instead as Pub-Sub, as Publish-Subscribe. The first and most beautiful thing about Twitter, as far as I am concerned, is that I only see the tweets of people I follow, people whose tweets I subscribe to. It is up to me to decide how many people I can follow. For some people this may be a Dunbar number, stabilising around 150, perhaps finding a Twitter adjustment to that number and raising it. Others may be Scoblesque in their reach, dissatisfied unless they push the 5000 limit (as in Facebook; I must admit I have no idea what the Twitter limit is).

So one way of avoiding increasing noise levels is to avoid increasing the network beyond one’s capacity. I can choose to “follow” (or subscribe to tweets from) just as many people as I am able to cope with. This is not something you can do easily with BlackBerry or with e-mail in general. There is a second way as well. I can choose whose tweets get sent to my mobile device of choice. For every person I  “follow”, I have a further choice I can make. Do I want to “turn notifications ON” for that person? What this means is this: Would I like to receive tweets from this person in SMS alert form as well? So again I can throttle the messages precisely.

And there’s something else about all this stuff. It’s easy to do. A child could choose to “follow” someone, to stop “following” someone, to turn notifications on or off for someone. Try it for yourself. Stop “following” me, I won’t be offended.  Add me and then subtract me, no problemo. The point is, managing your twitterspace is easy. When you compare it with the effort you have to make in order to create mail filters, it’s apples and oranges time.

Actually, when you compare e-mail with Twitter, there is also something quite different about the mode of communication. You send e-mail to a person or a group of people. You send a tweet to Twitter, not to a person or people. It’s less intrusive, less in-your-face. The recipient always chooses. It’s side-by-side rather than confrontational.

As in the case of Push and Pull versus Pub-Sub, memes matter. I think we risk losing some of the value of Twitter when we use terms like “consumer”. Twitter is part of a different mindset, an altogether different paradigm. A paradigm of creation-participation, not production-consumption, democratised and not elitist. In Twitter everyone’s a participant, everyone follows and is followed. Everyone tweets. No one forces you to tweet, but once you get used to what is going on, you’ll find yourself tweeting away.

And don’t worry if it doesn’t come easily. Think of every one of the new communications vehicles as if it was a new musical instrument: you’re not going to be able to pick it up and play straightaway, you need to experiment, you need to learn, and you need to practise.

Some people try and answer the twitter-defining question “what are you doing?”. Some will use twitter to alert people to other things they’re doing, such as posts on their blog. Some will use the facility to push their wares, their opinions, their ideas, even their urls. There is no right or wrong. If you like what someone is tweeting, then maybe you turn notifications on for them. If you don’t, then maybe you stop following them. It’s up to you.

If I’m a participant rather than a consumer or producer of tweets, I still need to answer the question “What’s in it for me?”. If I don’t want to share, then I don’t need to share, and what I will get is precisely nothing. There is nothing in it for me unless I share.

Once I choose to share, a number of potentially valuable things can happen, depending on what I share. Let me try and classify them simply:

I can share what I intend to do, as in: I am about to take a cab from Midtown to Upper West Side. Other participants can then comment by saying “Avoid Broadway, the traffic’s awful around 72nd St, best to take West Side Highway and Henry Hudson Parkway“. Or by asking “Let me know how the traffic is, I need to go uptown later.” So when I share what I intend to do, people can share their relevant experience, or ask that I share mine. So in an enterprise context I could say “Planning to get a bunch of people together to discuss identity” and others could comment, write directly, offer advice, signal their interest,  commit to participating, and so on.

In similar fashion, I can share what I am doing; I can share what I have just finished doing; I can share what I am thinking of doing. In each case the value propositions for the enterprise are simple:

  • people who are interested in the same things as you can reach out to you
  • people who have information that may be germane to what you are doing can give you that information
  • people who have experience in what you are doing can share that experience with you
  • people who can learn from what you are doing can “watch” you

All this happens in process haikus, restricted to 140 characters. All this happens in “real time”. All this happens in a pub-sub way.

As David Weinberger said, hyperlinks subvert hierarchies. Assembly-line thinking was never meant to enter the knowledge-worker industry. Tools like Twitter will help us define the new enterprise.

All we need is to keep our minds open and be willing to experiment. I am constantly amazed by the enterprise’s immune system in this context: too often, there is a clamour for change from the grassroots and from senior management, but it can be resisted all too easily by a large and fundamentally moribund midsection.

Continuing with the theme of Twitter in the Enterprise: Twitter and Agile

[Note: This post is a follow-up to my two previous posts on the subject over the last day or so].

I can hear the doubters and scorners now. “We don’t need another tool”. “Why don’t you concentrate on new business models instead of all this tripe?” “I have enough information already”.

So why am I intrigued by Twitter? First and foremost I think it’s about the question that Twitter poses:

What are you doing?

I know, I know, people use Twitter to pose questions, not just answer them. And they ask and answer a whole slew of questions, not just “What are you doing?”. But just for a moment, I want to concentrate on this Twitter-defining question. In fact I want to refine it a bit:

What are you doing right now?

Why do I think this question is important to “the enterprise”? To answer that, I need to take you on a little wander, to something that John Seely Brown and John Hagel said some years ago:

Push systems — characterised by top-down, centralized and rigid programs of previously specified tasks and behavior — hinder participation in the distributed networks that are now indispensible to competitive advantage.

More versatile and far-reaching pull systems —characterized by modularly-designed decentralized platforms connecting a diverse array of participants — are now starting to emerge in a variety of arenas.

As pull systems reach center stage, executives will have to reassess almost all aspects of the corporation.

Don’t get too hung up about the push and pull; while it is important, the really important bit is the decentralized platform with diverse participants. Which is where Twitter comes in.

I heard the two Johns speak some years ago at Supernova, when they were just about to publish The Only Sustainable Edge. At the time, they were fresh from a study tour of China, mainly looking at manufacturing there. And something they described stayed with me: it was the way teams collaborated in a motorcycle factory that they’d visited and studied. The teams were agile, collocated, with line-of-sight of what was happening around them, and the empowerment to participate and assist their colleagues.

This concept of collocated line-of-sight is something that permeates a lot of Agile thinking. But sadly collocation is not always possible, and sometimes not even desirable. [More on that subject later].

What I see in Twitter is this: The ability for members of a distributed peer workforce to describe precisely what he or she is doing, and to share that description.

Out of this, I can foresee enterprise magic happening. Geographically dispersed team members are able to help each other out because suddenly they have line of sight of each other’s tasks, activities and processes.

More on this later. Comments welcome as always.