Author: JP

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner,
That I love London so.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I think of her wherever I go.
I get a funny feeling inside of me
Just walking up and down.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I love London Town.

Hubert Gregg, 1946 

I’m consistently bemused by some of the things I see happening in large organisations; bemused sometimes to a point of morbid fascination. Over the last few years, one of the things that has captured my attention is the enterprise approach to “collaboration”. Now, before I begin….

Cambridge Dictionaries Online (selected by me as at random from the Google results) has the following definition:

collaborate (verb): to work with someone else for a special purpose

collaboration (noun):  when two or more people work together to create or achieve the same thing

It’s one of those words that means many things to many people, with the capacity to create vast emotional and even political overtones and undercurrents. Before I go any further, let me share with you what I mean by collaboration.

To me, collaboration is more than just “working together” (in fact, far too often, colleagues who “work together” can be seen working against each other, not everyone has grasped the concept that the competition is best kept on the outside); collaboration implies that multiple people produce something that the individuals involved could not have produced acting on their own. In its simplest sense, a collaborative act is a bit like making a baby. It takes two people with somewhat different characteristics and abilities to produce one. Neither is capable of producing the output without the assistance of the other. Technology advances have meant that some level of time-shifting and place-shifting is now possible, reducing the simultaneity inherent in the original scenario.

An aside: When I went to look up “collaborate”, the dictionary actually had two entries. One pointing to the phrase “work with”, the other pointing to “support an enemy”. How true that can be, albeit inadvertently,  in the petty politics that characterise many large organisations.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Calcuttan, but for some reason or the other I’ve tended to feel that there’s a very thin line separating collaboration from group or collective action. And I’ve been fascinated by both. If anything, my exposure to people like Howard Rheingold and his thinking in Smart Mobs (the site and the book) have served to enhance that fascination.

Collaboration (and its cater-cousin, collective action) depends on a shared concept and vision and a willingness to share per se. In many enterprises the concept of collaboration breaks down when the traditional barriers are met, the barriers of tribalism (don’t you dare help anyone who works for him!) of departmentalism (not my job), of selfishness and greed (I’m all right Jack).

Not surprisingly, most examples of social software tended to fail in the past, because there was more effort expended on creating and maintaining the complex barriers and walls that exemplified the guts and innards of the institution.

As is my wont of late, I intend to write a more detailed post about this, mentioning the F-work. So, Facebook and the Enterprise, Part 9:  will focus on collaboration.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this story in today’s Times, subtitled:

Banking giant scraps plans to charge interest on graduate overdrafts, bowing to campaign launched on social networking site

Yes, the site was Facebook. Collaboration or collective action? Your call.

There is a social revolution taking place, and it’s coming your way. In schools and colleges; in public service institutions; and now, even in the vast and august bastions of private enterprise.

We’ve been talking a good story for some time now, about how human beings are our most important asset, how knowledge management is important, how teamwork and collaboration are core values. Now, with the assistance of social software, these terms have the opportunity to start meaning something outside of textbooks and the hallowed halls of academe.

Recently I was reading an article in First Monday headlined Rearchitecting the Music Business: Mitigating music piracy by cutting out the record companies.

I haven’t had the time to read the article in its entirety, nor for that matter have I really done the whole issue the justice it deserves. But something stood out in what the author was saying, something that gave me that a-ha moment I always look for.

And that something was this paragraph, right at the end of the summary:

A key assumption in this presentation is that the costs associated with the current model of oligopolistic intermediation — as well as the artist lock–in that is its consequence — is at the root of the crisis in music distribution. The problem cannot be fixed without a major effort to break the grip of the music distributors over the system. If that rings a death knell for the music companies, so be it. Musicians and listeners, the core creators of value in the music business would gain enormously and a measure of economic justice would be attained. Using powerful Web tools has successfully disintermediated airplane ticket sales and may well do the same in residential real–estate sales and in both venues buyers and sellers can and will save considerable money and develop much more powerful ways to develop information links between those parties.

You must have heard that vile phrase by now: “Content is king”. I’d never quite assimilated the causal connection between “oligopolistic intermediation models” and “the artist lock-in” adequately before, and as a result I feel I can understand more about why people say things like “Content is king”.

Maybe the phrase needs reworking a la In the Kingdom of the Blind The One-Eyed Man is King…..

So said Clay Shirky in  this article over four years ago. I remember reading it shortly after it came out, and feeling excited about the promise that social software held. Headlined Social Software and the Politics of Groups, here are a few extracts to try and encourage you to read the original:

Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities — though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.

……

The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.

……

The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can’t be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.

……

Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network’s population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.

……

Any system that supports groups addresses this tension by enacting a simple constitution — a set of rules governing the relationship between individuals and the group. These constitutions usually work by encouraging or requiring certain kinds of interaction, and discouraging or forbidding others. Even the most anarchic environments, where “Do as thou wilt” is the whole of the law, are making a constitutional statement. Social software is political science in executable form.

While we have all this kerfuffle about usage and abusage of social software, while we have Blefuscudian polarisations all over the place, it is worth remembering that we have barely begun the journey. There is a lot for us to learn about how we operate as virtual groups, how we use social software; there is even more for us to learn about how to build and deploy social software.

Some of this learning will draw from ancient history; some of it will rely on the recent past; and some of it we will experience for the first time as we try things out. It is important for us to support all this experimentation with an open mind.

This is a very provisional post; even as I write it, I have this sense of having to tread barefoot very gingerly across a landscape strewn with broken glass. Not sure why. But sometimes that’s what blogging’s for. To expose what you’re thinking to other people so that you can learn from their comments, an open-ended peer review.

So here goes. You have been warned.

In most enterprises, there is a Same-Old-Faces feel to the early adopter set for pretty much anything; a small proportion of the populace are sufficiently risk-hungry, open-minded, bored, curious or just plain nosy enough to get involved in anything and everything.

Not so with Web 2.0. I’ve had the privilege of being able to watch “Enterprise 2.0”, as it now gets called, experimented with, made a fad off, written off, subverted, faced off to and rounded up by lynch mobs a few times now, and this is the strangest observation I can make.

The people who get involved in Web 2.0 are Not The Same Old Faces. And that made me think. Why is it? What makes this group of Unlikely Lads get involved? My hunch was that it had something to do with lowering of the barriers to entry, a democratisation of access. But I wasn’t sure.

While all this was going through my mind, I was also learning from my children. Finding out little bits of what made Generation M tick(if you prefer, replace Generation M with Generation Y, it’s the same thing). How come they’re so comfortable with Mobile, Multitasking, Multimedia, Massively MultiPlayer, and whatever other things we can make M stand for.  This time around, I thought it had something to do with generational needs for tribal badges, badges that stood for the way they discovered and explored their boundaries. Badges of rebellion, like every generation before them.  Or so I thought.

And then something strange began to happen. Generation M began to enter the workplace. Now I had a new problem: The Not-The-Same-Old-Faces people were mingling freely with the Generation M entrants. And they were living happily ever after.

And that made me think. Maybe there’s something different going on here. Let me see what the two groups have in common. Maybe it’s about not being able to participate, and then being able to participate. If anything, my lowering-barriers-to-entry hunch was getting stronger.

But I couldn’t freeze frame or time-shift, everything continued to move along. Social networks came and blossomed, and I watched the way these two groups took to the new phenomena. And it was nothing like Plaxo or Spoke or even LinkedIn, these people didn’t have two business cards to rub together. Didn’t have one business card to rub together. And didn’t care either. It wasn’t about “I know someone who does”. It wasn’t about Little Black Book. It wasn’t about Degrees Of Separation.

So what was it about? Speaking strictly from an enterprise perspective, I wasn’t sure. So I kept watching. When CyWorld came along it didn’t scratch the enterprise surface. When MySpace and Bebo entered the scene, there was barely a dent. Flickr and YouTube did make a dent, but only in the most control-freak environments. [The early anti-Flickr stuff was a bit like being told you shouldn’t use the toilet if you had a bladder problem, because that constitute disproportionate use of a common utility].

After Facebook entered the enterprise scene, everything changed. And continues to change. And I think it has something to do with enfranchisement.

It is just possible that we’re seeing the advent of Union 2.0, or maybe I should call it Workr. All past models of collective action were based primarily in the manufacturing and services sectors, but the model didn’t travel well. So when it came to the knowledge worker, collective action was not possible. The organisation structures and management styles and financial processes and HR policies were all descended from the Assembly Line Ape. And the knowledge worker didn’t fit that evolutionary process.

Web 1.0 tools began the process of empowering the individual; Web 2.0 took it further, transforming tools of personal consumption into tools of personal production. But this power could be divided and conquered by The Enterprise Man, because there were some things missing.

There wasn’t a community. There wasn’t a meeting place. There wasn’t a reason to meet. There weren’t rituals and rites of passage. People didn’t know who else was around. Search costs to find like-minded members were prohibitive. While smart mobs existed, they only roamed in the free spaces between the walled gardens that Enterprise represented. And and and.

But fire walls do not a prison make. So over time, these marauding smart mobs made it into the enterprise. Much worse, they’ve found allies inside the enterprise walls. Even worse than that, they’ve found allies amongst their customers and their partners and their supply chains.

We’ve been speaking about “The Extended Enterprise” for so long that we shouldn’t get het up when it finally turns up. The trouble is, it’s turned up in a nonhierarchical beyond-the-firewall way, and this scares many people.

Enough rambling. You get my drift.

What Facebook represents is a collective, many collectives, overlapping collectives. The 21st century Trades Union movement for knowledge workers. No longer held hostage by a single trade or profession or company, switching roles between employee and partner and customer. Individual and collective.

There’s a long way to go, but I’m excited. Because of the potential this holds. The potential to give voice to people who haven’t been heard, who don’t have a voice. The potential for the collective to address the “disenfranchisement long tail”, empowering a plethora of people who have hitherto been subsumed into the enterprise fabric…. if they managed to make it in in the first place.

We have the potential to re-enfranchise people who have been left out for a variety of reasons, ranging from the physical through the emotional and even financial to the downright scoundrellous political. Yes, it’s re-enfranchise, not just enfranchise.

In a more formal and less provisional post I shall try and address how something like Facebook in the Enterprise can make a positive impact on enfranchisement and diversity and corporate social responsibility. In the meantime, do tell me why I’m wrong, why this post is so much horseshit, why you disagree. I am interested, and want to flesh out my arguments in a more reasoned manner by the time I get to write Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 8: Re-enfranchisement.

Flame away.

Cadbury’s used to make a chocolate bar called a Wispa. Some four years ago it was withdrawn, for some enterprise reason or the other. You know how these things happen.

Anyway, since its withdrawal, fans have clamoured for its reinstatement, but to no avail. Their voices lacked coherence, they weren’t visible.

In the post facebook world all this changed. The pressure group, all 14,000 of them, became visible and vocal. Via Facebook.

And Cadbury’s listened.

The chocolate bar will be reintroduced in October.

Markets are conversations.

I think I’ve already said this, but my memory is not what it used to be. Anyway, my next post on Facebook and the Enterprise will focus on the issue of enfranchisement. Watch this space.

Update: Here is a link to the story in the Herald Tribune.