Author: JP

Blogs and organisational structures and Conway�s Law

Myrto Lazopoulou, who heads up the User Centred Design team where I work, pointed me at a recent post by Donald Norman reviewing Google’s usability. Who in turn led me to Mel Conway’s 1968 paper, which you can find here.

I found it fascinating. In Conway’s own words, his thesis can be summarised as follows:

Any organization which designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

The implications are interesting. An organisation that uses blogs and wikis and IM on a level-free non-hierarchical basis, where collaboration takes place over time and distance and silo and culture, will in time produce designs for “Conway systems” that replicate the communications structure. Is an organisation chart a Conway system? Is collaboration really that subversive?

In isolation, perhaps. But the adoption of social software and collaborative tools is counterbalanced by opposing factors such as Sarbanes-Oxley and its ilk, which reinforce hierarchies. The complexity of corporate law and tax structures also forces regional entity obeisance, again underpinning hierarchy. What Seely Brown and Hagel witnessed in China, was it despite the operating structures rather than because of them? I wonder.
Which leads me down a Chandleresque path, in terms of his suggested interplay between strategy and structure. Something to think about, how modern communications cultures will influence the organisational structures of tomorrow, despite post-facto regulation.

Blogging, value and vulnerability: a postscript

Aqualung Ric makes the point that blogging is all about relationships, and that relationships are all about vulnerability.

Doc Searls was talking to me about a conversation he had with George Lakoff; somewhere out of that conversation, they defined blogging as rolling snowballs downhill in comparison with prior forms of multiperson live conversation which sometimes felt like rolling boulders uphill. Doc commented about the way the snowball has no “ownership” by the time it gets downhill.

This too is an important aspect of blogging, the co-creation of value. But the value that is co-created is not ownable in the traditional sense. There is a delayed gratification aspect to blogging, a Goleman-like emotional intelligence; you have to do what you feel is right rather than work out how you will “monetise” what you say. Ideas are free, it’s what you do with them that may be monetised over time.

Talking about Lakoff, I found his work on anchoring and framing very interesting; the subject was introduced to me some years ago by a colleague, James Montier, and also touched upon by Barry Schwartz. Lakoff’s point that framing is about ideas and values sits bang in the middle of this conversation.

Blogging, value and vulnerability

Anyone who blogs must be prepared to be:

  • flamed or otherwise criticised
  • splogged or similarly left with some form of comment spam
  • ridiculed for actions or omissions

It goes with the territory, and I should not be surprised to face all three within a fortnight of going public. The flames have so far been incidental, largely on other sites that link to me. But they are flames nevertheless. The splogs have also been irrelevant so far, all I have needed to do is to moderate them away. And I am sure the ridicule will come.

This brings me to a point which I feel is material to bloggers in general, and I’d love to hear opinions from people “out there”. Can a blogger create value without making herself or himself vulnerable? Isn’t being vulnerable actually part of the process of creating value?

My guess is yes. In this respect I am reminded of the work of Professor Michael Power at the LSE. Some time ago he wrote a pamphlet called The Risk Management of Everything which you can find here. He’s a very interesting guy, I arranged to have lunch with him shortly after reading the document.

While he made many good points, the one that stood out for me (in the context of information) was his assertion that second-order risk management, itself often caused by post-facto regulation in an increasingly litigious society, was creating an environment that was driving out “valuable, yet vulnerable, professional opinion”. These are my quotes, and my apologies for not guaranteeing their accuracy, it has been a while since I read it.

Vulnerability is an essential part of any professional or personal opinion. It comes from not having certainty about the opinion expressed. Opinions presented with certainty must be one of two things: not opinion but fact; or, bigotry and propaganda.

I’m also reminded of another piece of apocrypha, one I really liked. Apparently Justin Hawkins of The Darkness was being interviewed somewhere, sometime and the DJ commented on how the band was perceived as enjoying themselves despite their meteoric rise to fame. And Justin is meant to have said “We take our music very seriously, we just don’t take ourselves seriously”.

There’s something in that for all us bloggers.

Cluetrain and social software and digital markets

People have sometimes asked me why I was so interested in Cluetrain when I was meant to be working in technology in an investment bank. So I’m going to do something that people who know me well dread my doing. Let you get inside my head -)

It’s simple.

0. Without information there are no markets period.

1. Without trust there is no banking, there are no capital markets. How did the word “bankrupt” enter the vocabulary, apparently sometime around 1550? Look here. Sounds like people met to have conversations while sitting on benches, and when someone broke their word, the rest broke his bench. The first Latin words that wannabe City gents learnt after doing various things to a table were Dictum Meum Pactum. My word is my bond. And reputation became collateral.

2. Without conversation there are no markets either. As per Cluetrain. Enough said.

3. Conversations are more about social than transactional, as both John Seely Brown and Doc Searls have pointed out in different ways.

4. Cyberspace is somewhere with different rules, allowing all of us an opportunity to redefine trust, make markets more open and transparent, yet prevent misuse and corruption. Larry Lessig had a lot to do with setting me right on all this.

5. All this was happening at a time when markets were losing faith with capital markets institutions, in one form or the other.

6. And usable social software was arriving on the scene.

And there I was working with talented people in a bank whose culture allowed us to try these things out. Serendipity.

Open versus closed information

I am privileged to work with many talented people, people who like thinking about what they are doing and why. As we began our circuitous route on to an internal blogosphere, two questions kept coming up.

One, should we start with an open approach to information and then close those bits and pieces that need closing….or should it be the other way around?

Two, should we enforce declaration of identity or should we allow anonymity?

I think that both these questions are critical in the context of a number of debates about information, particularly those that touch on digital rights, identity, security, privacy, confidentiality and the like.

I’d love to know what you think about these two questions, and am looking forward to comments that I can learn from.

In the meantime…. my gut feel is that DRM implementations that start with a “closed” approach to information are doomed to failure. I have always believed that knowledge management and information security are kindred spirits. You impute value to an information asset. You declare who can see it. You declare who can’t. You must start with a view that information is an asset that increases in value with reproduction and enrichment and evolution and adaptation. Start with free for all. Only restrict access when there is good and clear reason. And there will be good and clear reasons: confidentiality, privacy, regulation, commercial value, whatever. But it is easier and simpler to close bits when really necessary, in comparison with trying to open bits that default to closed.

I’d be interested in knowing other views on this, whether mad or wise.

I approach the second question almost as if it is the first question. Open is better than closed. There may be reasons for stimulating or encouraging anonymous behaviour, but I don’t find them easy to understand. [I am reminded of a 20s-30s book by Julius Henry Marx entitled “Beds”. Chapter One was headed Essay on the Advantages of Sleeping Alone. The page was blank. And in a footnote the Editor stated “The Author refrained from making any contribution to this chapter”. Or words to that effect…forgive me, it’s thirty years since I last read that book.

Looking forward to the wisdom and madness.