Author: JP

Note: This is the seventh in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. The fourth, Doing By Learning, looked at how work gets done in the enterprise, and provided the context in which such flows should be seen. The fifth delved into the subject of flows in detail, and introduced the concept of enterprise social objects. The sixth looked more specifically at the role of trust in the social enterprise, and raised the possibility of using social objects as catalysts for building tacit trust. This [hitherto unplanned] post continues with that theme.  The last three posts (in the series of ten) will then look at curation, filtering, innovation, motivation and radical transformation.]

Background

I wasn’t planning to write this post. But it appears that my last one, on trust in the social enterprise, struck a chord with many of you, and I wanted to share the conversations that erupted with all of you. Conversations that took place here within the comments, on Facebook and in Google+; there was further fragmentation as people pinged me by e-mail (not a medium I care for, but one that doesn’t appear to know when to depart the scene gracefully). Some people even preferred face-to-face engagement. Incidentally, I’m currently temporarily sidelined, recovering from an operation. As a result face-to-face interactions are limited. It’s during times like these that I see just how much of a blessing online communities can be. Of course face to face is desirable; of course eye contact and voice are wonderful; of course synchronous conversation is compelling and beautiful; but when we rail against online communities and “social networks” let’s also try and think about those who are actually more enfranchised as a result, overcoming physical, emotional, technical, social, economic or political barriers via such networks

Virtual Communities and Trust

There should be a law against using the phrase Virtual Communities without invoking the name of Howard Rheingold, the doyen on that subject, the onlie begetter of that phrase. [Howard, I hope you’re well. Sorry to have missed you this time around in SF. September?] In his seminal book The Virtual Community, an absolute must-read, Howard makes the following observation early on:

Social psychologists, sociologists, and historians have developed useful tools for asking questions about human group interaction. Different communities of interpretation, from anthropology to economics, have different criteria for studying whether a group of people is a community. In trying to apply traditional analysis of community behavior to the kinds of interactions emerging from the Net, I have adopted a schema proposed by Marc Smith, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, who has been doing his fieldwork in the WELL and the Net. Smith focuses on the concept of “collective goods.” Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group’s collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community.

The three kinds of collective goodsthat Smith proposes as the social glue that binds the WELL into something resembling a community are social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion. Social network capital is what happened when I found a ready-made community in Tokyo, even though I had never been there in the flesh. Knowledge capital is what I found in the WELL when I asked questions of the community as an online brain trust representing a highly varied accumulation of expertise. And communion is what we found in the Parenting conference, when Phil’s and Jay’s children were sick, and the rest of us used our words to support them.

That was written over twenty years ago. For me two sentences stood out, and stood out enough for me to want to repeat them here:

Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group’s collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community.

Nearly a decade later, Amy-Jo Kim, another regular WELLBeing, wrote Community Building On The Web. And smitten as I was in Howard’s work and in the workings of the WELL, I found Amy-Jo’s book fascinating. Another must-read. [Over the years I have lost count of the number of copies I’ve given away of these two books, The Virtual Community and Community Building On The Web. Buy them, read them, you won’t regret it.] [Disclosure: I know Howard well, I’ve met Amy-Jo a few times; I am not a shareholder in anything they do and have no financial interest in your purchasing the books].

Early on in the book, Amy-Jo says:

Communities come to life when they fulfil an ongoing need in people’s lives. To create a successful community, you’ll need to first understand why you’re building it and who you’re building it for; and then express your vision in the design, technology and policies of your community.

She then goes on to say:

A community can begin to take root wherever people gather for a shared purpose and start talking amongst themselves.

Incidentally, a dozen years ago, Amy-Jo described her nine design strategies as “timeless”. Time has proved her right.

The importance of shared values and shared purposes

A good deal of my learning takes place through reading; it’s the simplest way I can find out what someone thinks and for that matter how someone thinks. With the advent of video, I’ve been able to watch people share their ideas, particularly with the assistance of communities like TED. [I’ve even been able to share my own ideas that way. Having the chance to speak at TED@SXSW this year, and at a TED Salon in 2010, was incredible. If you’re interested, here’s a link to my TED talk at Austin. ]

Despite all this, most of my learning takes place the old-fashioned way. Asking people questions and then listening to their answers. One of the people I have the privilege of knowing is Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Having been to a number of Forum events over the years, particularly in Davos, Dalian and Tianjin, I’ve always marvelled at the nature of the community that he’s built. When I wanted to understand more about the role of music in reaching across borders, I could go listen to Lang Lang, Gabriela Montero and Zarin Mehta share their thoughts and learnings. When I wanted to understand the implications of Wikileaks, I could go listen to Daniel Domscheit-Berg and then follow that up with a quiet lunch with Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis. Now I realise the incredible privilege I’ve enjoyed in having roles and responsibilities that give me access to such people and places; but none of it would happen unless people had visions for the communities they wanted to build.

With this in mind, and with a strong belief that the Forum represented so much more than people could see on the surface and in the media, I had a conversation with Professor Schwab about the role of trust in the social enterprise. His answer was very instructive:

In order to create a real community you have to first bind people together by a shared interest, then you have to bond them together through interaction and then you have to build/engage them into joint action.
This philosophy of binding-bonding-building is a basic principle for all that we are doing.

He then went further and pointed me towards the work of Howard V Perlmutter, enriching my journey of learning. So I’ve ordered a book by him, along with a treatise going all the way back to the mid 1960s. My thanks to Professor Schwab.

For a community to succeed it must have a shared purpose and shared values. Everyone agrees about that. But for some reason when we start talking about social commitments in business, things get less clear. For some reason people conflate for-profit with “bad” or “evil”, and non-profit as “good”. Over the years I’ve seen extremely well-run and socially-conscious for-profit firms, and extremely poorly run non-profits, and vice versa. It’s not the for-profit or non-profit tag that makes the difference, it’s the quality of the shared values and the leadership to embed those shared values into the everyday operations of the enterprise. That’s why I joined Salesforce.com, with its unique integrated corporate philanthropy model. The values inherent in that model permeate everything we do; every day I receive communications from Foundation employees sharing opportunities for me to get involved in social action; the people who work for the Foundation work amongst the rest of us; at the annual Dreamforce, coming up in September, customers and partners work closely with staff as they share the experience of committing time to Foundation activities; these values pervade everything we do; Marc Benioff has written more books on corporate philanthropy than he has on the cloud.

What your comments have taught me

Your comments covered a lot of ground. James Dellow chimed in reminding us of the term “social capital” and its importance in this context, something that resonates with the “collective goods” that Howard Rheingold referred to in his original Marc Smith schema. Francine Hardaway pointed out the intrinsic ability for digital infrastructures to extend trust networks, while warning us of the risk of being gamed by people who are not what they seem. As the sayings go: on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog/on the internet everyone knows you’re a dog. No one. Everyone. At the same time. Christopher Rollyson brought in Robin Dunbar’s work, and also reemphasised the impact of the Big Shift in increasing uncertainty and the consequent need for a greater dimension of trust. Chris Conder and Peter Van Den Auwera remarked on the “magic” that comes from being able to trust, with its inherent vulnerability and risk-taking. John Hagel and later Brooks Jordan underlined the need for a holistic approach [Brooks, incidentally, I’m a big fan of Christopher Alexander, have signed copies of A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order. I think everyone involved with building information systems should read Alexander as well as Jane Jacobs]. Tom Guarriello correctly identifies that my focus on trust was to quite an extent catalysed by my having to entrust my well-being to a group of strangers in a foreign land, while in hospital in San Francisco. David Chassels emphasised the role of object thinking in this context. Heather Gold took pains to ensure that I wasn’t suggesting that social objects act as mediators for trust, underlining the importance of vulnerability in personal interactions as a basis for growing trust. There have been more comments, but most of them have endorsed what I’ve already covered here.

So what did I learn?

Communities are meaningless unless they can do something together that they could not have done in isolation. The willingness and ability to take action is what matters. Trust is the glue that allows communities to act. During times of relative stability and certainty, there is a tendency to systematise and automate the building and verification of trust; that is dangerous. It becomes exposed in times of uncertainty, when credentials will no longer do. That’s when shared values and ethics and purpose come to the fore: without them the problem is one of morals, not systems. Identity is going to become more and more important, but it’s nothing more than “credentials”. What really matters is in the interactions between people in a community, the vulnerability embedded in those interactions, the risk taken within those interactions, the learnings, sometimes painful, that come from those interactions.

Trust is earned, often with the scars of learning. But trusting is important, more than important, it is imperative. Imperative because we need to come together in multicultural multidisciplinary multistakeholder ways, ways we’ve never come together before. Ways that require us to be willing to take risk, to make ourselves vulnerable, to trust.

We need to do this because mankind faces challenges that cannot be solved using the tools of prior paradigms, challenges that are genuinely global in nature, challenges that affect the well-being of our children, their children, their children’s children.

The Social Enterprise is nothing more than an enabling mechanism for helping us connect meaningfully with each other; and social objects are nothing more than catalysts in helping us experiment with trust.

In the end it’s about people. Us. The values and purposes we share. The values and purposes that can bring us together in community. Us. Our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable to each other, to be open with each other, to trust each other.

No man is an iland intire of it selfe.

[Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. The fourth, Doing By Learning, looked at how work gets done in the enterprise, and provided the context in which such flows should be seen. The fifth delved into the subject of flows in detail, and introduced the concept of enterprise social objects. This post looks at such objects in detail. In my next post I will look at filtering and curation. The last three posts (in the series of ten) will then look at innovation, motivation and radical transformation.]

Jonathan Sacks has an interesting article in the Times today, headlined It Is The End of a Dangerous Experiment; sadly, it’s paywalled. Written in the wake of the LIBOR scandal, Sacks emphasises the importance of morality in markets, a reminder that ethics cannot be legislated for, that a shared moral code is needed. He reminds us of the inherent weakness in the Invisible Hand proposed by Adam Smith by making reference to Von Neumann, game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As he puts it “Two or more rational agents, each acting in their own self-interest, will produce an outcome that is bad for both, individually and collectively“, something the Invisible Hand theory does not allow for.

Sacks makes a critical point about market economies: they can be risk-based or trust-based. Regulatory frameworks work well in risk-based markets, but not in trust-based markets. What he said reminded me of a recent speech by Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, at the Bank of England, headlined Tails of the Unexpected. The original paper, written by Haldane along with his colleague Benjamin Nelson, is available for download using that link. Haldane makes a similar point about risk and uncertainty, how many of the processes prevalent in the financial sector are based on assumptions of normal distribution in modelling risk, rather than using assumptions of fat-tailed distributions in conditions of uncertainty. When I read the Sacks article, my immediate temptation was to mash the two together, to describe the market as being risk-based or uncertainty-based, leading to the assertion that risk-based markets work well under strong regulation, but uncertainty-based markets need something more, something based on a shared moral code.

Trust.

We live in uncertain times. We have always lived in uncertain times. And we will continue to live in uncertain times. One of the key theses of the Big Shift is that as digital infrastructures permeate all over the world, and as public policy shifts towards greater mobility of resources, the speed of change increases as does the level of uncertainty. The need to move from stocks to flows, from experience curves to collaboration curves, from past actions to continued learning, all this is predicated on the growing level of uncertainty within global markets.

Uncertainty-based markets require an underpinning of trust in order to function effectively.

I’ve said before that trust is hard to legislate for: it’s also hard to automate. Unlike regulation: rules can be automated. [An aside. I’m reminded of Sugata Mitra’s wonderful pronouncement on teachers: A teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer. Rules can be replaced by systems. Trust cannot.]

Trust is necessary for the efficient functioning of organisms in conditions of uncertainty. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent some time reading up on “incomplete contracts” in the context of firm theory. While I came across a number of papers on the subject at the time, the one that stood out for me was Erik Brynjolfsson’s December 1991 paper An Incomplete Contracts Theory of Information, Technology and Organisation. It allowed me to conceive of information assets differently; it made me think harder about the impact of designing information assets to be shareable, “flexible”; and it made me ponder over the consequences of having information assets controlled centrally. [An aside: Not surprisingly, that interest in firm-theory-meets-incomplete-contracts resulted in my meeting Erik a few years later, and, serendipitously, was given a further boost when I had the opportunity to spend time with Tom Malone soon after he’d written The Future of Work. Tom came to see me in hospital in San Francisco last week: Tom, if you’re reading this, much thanks.]

[While on the subject of hospitals — you may have noticed I’d gone quiet here for a while. It was because I’d somehow contracted a serious infection that needed urgent treatment in hospital, spent nearly a fortnight in hospital, and I’m still recovering. Many of you found ways of letting me know you cared, and I am immensely grateful for that. My salesforce.com colleagues were brilliant, they kept me in high spirits during what was a very painful and worrying episode in my life. Colleagues from my childhood, my early years and my more recent past also showed up, amazingly. Particular thanks also go out to Sheldon Renan, coming all the way from Portland, and to John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who found time to have a wonderful dinner with me the day before I was admitted to hospital. They helped provide grist to my mill as I lay supine for too long.]

Though some of you may dismiss it as “pop”, I liked the simple message in Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. An absence of trust leads to a fear of conflict which in turn reduces commitment, which makes for an environment where people avoid accountability and thereby leads to poor execution.

Teams, like firms and markets, thrive on trust.

The Social Enterprise is about raising performance levels in uncertain environments. Which makes trust a must. But trust cannot be legislated or mandated. How then are we to engender trust?

Society has had mechanisms for engendering trust for aeons. Some of these are based on transparency, openness and the power of inspection. Look at me, my hands are empty, I bear no weapons — the origins of the handshake. Some of these are based instead on “trusted domains” doing the introducing — as in the passport — Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary. Yet others used badges of achievement or honour — as in the coats of armour or the diplomas of the medical and legal professions.

But all these were structured and explicit means of engendering trust. I think people are a whole lot more complicated than that, and that we all have a slew of tacit ways of giving and receiving trust. And my hunch is that Social Objects have key roles to play in this regard. [For more on the theory of Social Objects, you may want to refer to these three posts. ]

When you trust someone, you make yourself vulnerable. This is true whether the you in question is a person, a firm, a market, humanity. By making yourself vulnerable, you engender trust. Vulnerability is the essence of trust.

One of the ways you make yourself vulnerable is by sharing. I make myself vulnerable when I share my thoughts here; over the years, people have written some fairly disturbing comments publicly as well as privately. If I wasn’t prepared to be vulnerable, I shouldn’t have chosen to share my thoughts like this.

The act of sharing helps build trust. When you get together with your friends and you discuss the books you read, the films you saw, the meals you ate, the places you visited, the things you experienced, you’re sharing. The topics you speak about are social objects, things you have in common, things that encourage commentary and opinion to be expressed freely and openly. And after a while, the “social object” isn’t the important thing, what matters is the relationship that forms as a result of the comments, the advice, the observations.

What’s actually happening is that you’re building strong bonds as a result of the things you have in common, bonds that help you stay committed and loyal to each other when faced with things you don’t have in common, where you don’t see eye to eye. To me the interactions are tacit ways of establishing and building trust.

At work, these social objects take on different guises. They’re not just films and restaurants and holidays and TV shows and concerts any more; they’re documents and spreadsheets and presentations and photographs and videos. As people work together, they share these objects, build communities around them, grow the moss of commentary around the rolling stone of the object. In some ways I am reminded of Erik Brynjolfsson’s “information assets”, which can be designed for central control or for sharing: a decision that affects, deeply, the sense of ownership that workers experience, which then informs their later actions and behaviour, influences whether they act as “owners” or not.

Knowledge work involves the use of many digital information assets. Some of them are very structured and architected and form part of workflow, with formal steps and approval processes. For sure these are enterprise objects and they form a critical part of workflow. But they’re not social objects, and I’m not talking about workflow.

I’m talking about posting a draft for a talk and saying hey guys, could you tell me what you think of this? does it work for you? how can I improve it? I’m talking about reading a medical report and saying I really don’t like the look of this, there’s something not quite right about it, my sixth sense is on overdrive and I need your help. I’m talking about looking at a customer complaint and saying you know what, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree, I think this is not a router problem, it’s a credit problem, that’s why we’re not solving it. I’m talking about oops, I’ve got an unexpected opportunity to pitch to the ceo of an aerospace company about what we can do for them. but it’s in fifteen minutes. does anyone know of any work we’ve done in that sector? and when you get five different responses with attachments I’m talking about the comments that let you choose which one is best.

I’m talking about ways of sharing, of collaborating around information assets, ways that tacitly engender trust.

They involve social objects. But the objects aren’t important per se, what matters is the quality of the interactions that ensue as a result.

Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison speak of participants, interactions and environment as the key components of creation spaces. These participants need to trust each other. The environment helps them deal with explicit ways of building trust. You need the interactions in order to deal with the tacit ways of building trust.

When trust is formalised and structured and regulated it can be gamed. Identities can be victims of theft, so to say. [Although every time I hear that phrase, I am reminded of Mitchell and Webb’s wonderful skit on Identity Theft, a must-listen.

More and more, what we need is a more personal experience of trust, one that is tacit, one that is based on interactions and experience. But this is hard to scale. Unless we learn more about the value of digital social objects, information assets, in this context.

 

 

[Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts about the Social Enterprise and the Big Shift. The first post provided an introduction and overall context; the second looked specifically at collaboration, working together; the third looked at optimising performance, enjoying work, working more effectively. The fourth, Doing By Learning, looked at how work gets done in the enterprise, and provided the context in which such flows should be seen. This post delves into the subject of flows in detail, and introduces the concept of enterprise social objects. In later posts I will look at the social objects in detail, and then move on to filtering and curation. The last three posts (in the series of ten) will look at innovation, motivation and radical transformation.]

Introduction

This is not a post about workflow. We’ve had workflow. And, while everything was stable and predictable and change was glacial,workflow was enough: institutions focused on unit costs, they made use of scale within experience curves. Size mattered. First-mover advantages were high. And money begat money. Monopolies formed regularly; regulators formed to control those monopolies; the two went into standoff; and innovation died.

This is not a post about process either. We’ve had process. Again, process was great when change could be prevented. The day before yesterday, as part of the Alan Turing centenary celebrations organised by the ACM, Alan Kay appears to have reminded people about what he said four or five decades ago: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. He also appears to have referred to the amendment he made to that phrase much later, when he said: The best way to predict the future is to prevent it. It’s a sad truth but true. Standardised processes work best when there is no change.

There was a time when industry participants had such control over the market they could prevent change. Monopoly and complacency work together to militate against change. If you prevent change, you prevent invention. You prevent innovation. Sometimes you can pretend that change has taken place by using lipstick assiduously on those of porcine persuasion; sometimes that even works; but that’s not sustainable.

This is a post about collaborative flows, the flows that make up the Social Enterprise.

Implications of Doing by Learning

I wasn’t sure I should write this section; I know that a number of readers will object, and they may even stop reading this post, and perhaps even this blog, as a consequence. I mulled over it for quite some time: while there are shock jocks and trolls around, this blog has been about encouraging active engagement and participation. But, having thought hard about it, I have come to the conclusion that I must share these thoughts, that they are important and germane to the subject under discussion. You have been warned.

One of the key tenets of the Industrial Age (and of the theory-of-firm models that emerged as a result) is the division of labour. [As long as my readership in the UK and India exceeds that in the US and Canada, I can and will spell labour that way!]. The principles of division of labour were built on the concept of specialisation. And specialisation is a classic “knowledge stocks” concept. As we move from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows, from the experience curve to the collaboration curve, these principles will come under intense pressure.

This is not a new thing. We have been experiencing a blurring of lines between professions for some time now, driven by the move from stocks to flows. Professions used to be founded on a number of tenets: a code of honour, the values and ethics that bound the professionals together; the knowledge stocks that were gained during extended periods of formal study; and the experiences that augmented those knowledge stocks. We will still have professions in the future, but they are likely to be less dependent on the knowledge stocks — instead, my sense is that there will be a deepening, an enriching, of the codes — the values and ethics — that made that profession tick. I cannot help but feel that these professional codes have weakened over the past century, and that trust has been undermined as a result. This trust will have to be regained by the doctors, the lawyers, the financiers, the teachers, all of us who built our worth on knowledge stocks and experience curves while allowing some of the core values (upon which the professions were founded) to decay. Hippocratic oaths. Innocent until found guilty. Freedom of expression. Learning not teaching. Word is bond. That sort of thing.

If you’re interested in the implications for such professions, a good place to start is Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions, already approaching a quarter of a century in print.

The fundamental differences between workflow and collaboration flows

This is important. If there is one idea I want you to take away from this post, even if you stop reading it shortly, it is this: the way we work has changed fundamentally. Root and branch.

Let me try and explain. Workflow is like trains. Every company had its own train set. Little engines and carriages and cabooses; perfectly formed lines and switches and signalling; miniature stations and marshalling yards. The whole kit and caboodle. And trains “flowed” around the system. Always on the lines. Linear. Well-behaved. A system entire of itself. Isolated. But no matter, especially if you operate a monopoly or near-monopoly. What was important was that the trains ran on time. Safely. Sometimes.

Workflow worked exactly like the train sets. Formal fits and starts. A series of static pieces tightly coupled. Coupled only where coupling was possible. But always tightly coupled. Change was a nightmare and considered unnecessary. Faster horses.

Workflow tends to have clear start and end points. Timetables. Efficiency experts. Clipboards. Clocking in and out. Journeys with limited variability, limited choices. All rigorously controlled “for the sake of everyone’s safety”. You know what I mean. [No matter that we’ve had glorious failures in all these industries dominated by process. It couldn’t possibly be the fault of the rigid processes.]

Customers were important, but needed to know their place. The trains were in charge. In fact, if you looked carefully, you’d find that during the golden age of trains, the trains had more rights than the customers. Not that long ago, the laws and bye-laws of British Rail were patently clear:

• the ticket I bought did not guarantee me a seat
• the ticket I bought did not guarantee that the train would run on time
• the ticket I bought did not even guarantee that a train would run
• in fact, the ticket I bought wasn’t mine to keep, even that had to be given up on demand

Those were the days. Days when process was king, workflow worked. And people were kept in their place. It was possible to connect the different train sets up, if everyone used the same standards and protocols. This didn’t always happen, but proliferation was relatively low for the most part. Most of the workflow you see is like trains, relatively standardised, a challenge to integrate across systems, but not impossible. There were occasional failures at scale, akin to the design of electrical plugs and plug-points around the world. To think we consider ourselves to be civilised while living in adaptor hell.

Workflow, like trains, worked in well-defined, closed systems.

Enough about workflow. Collaboration flows, on the other hand, are like rivers and oceans. No rails to go on. No clear start and end points. Free to entry to all comers, regardless of the size of the vessel. Timetables existed, but they were looser. Boundaries existed, but much of the space was “public”. Of course there were regulations and laws, but they were more suited to a global environment, since the majority of the space was public.Vessels could and did come in all shapes and sizes and power and capacity. The barriers to entry were low. Regulations were more like the commons, designed to ensure that multitudes could participate without let or hindrance. The challenges were in dealing with blockages, with pollution, with selfish use, with the “tragedy of the commons”.

If you can imagine traditional workflow to be about trains and collaboration flows to be like rivers and oceans, I have succeeded. I will go to bed happy.

Rivers and oceans also work. They don’t need connecting up, they’re already connected up. People do make journeys on them, but the start and endpoints are infinite, granular.

Collaboration flows, like rivers, work in open, inclusive environments. A dammed river is called a lake, not a river. However you market it.

 Piracy

I thought I would just write a footnote on this originally, but decided to make this more prominent. The rivers versus trains analogy also allows a better understanding of safety and security.

There was a time when brigands and robbers and pirates abounded everywhere. People have been accosted by brigands on horseback. Wagons and stagecoaches have been plundered. Cars have been held up at gunpoint. There’s even been a Great Train Robbery. As long as people have used different forms of transport to go from A to B, and as long as the “cargo” they’ve transported has been perceived as valuable, there’s been a market for attacking the transport.

When we speak of piracy in the context of physical goods, the underlying assumption is that we’re talking about ocean-based piracy. And there is some, particularly off the coast of Somalia, but not restricted to that. Yet, despite the “dangers” of piracy on the high seas, if we take US overseas trade for example, over 99% of US overseas trade by volume, and over 64% of the trade by value, used ocean-going transport, according to the US Bureau of the Census.

So despite the perceived dangers of piracy on the high seas, ocean shipping remains the primary basis for trade. Why is this? Because people have understood the risks, know how to deal with them, how to mitigate them. How to cross the oceans safely and securely.

So it is with the internet. So it is with the public cloud. So it is with the flows of the Social Enterprise, based on the internet and the public cloud.

 What actually happens in the flows

I hope I’ve moved you some way from your prior conception of flows, since it would have been based on workflow. By now you would have just about started feeling comfortable with the view that workflow is static and linear and based on tightly coupled stocks of knowledge and division of labour, while collaboration flows are dynamic and nonlinear and based on loosely-coupled flows of knowledge with limited (and declining) division of labour. But you aren’t there yet, because I’ve worked at taking away a long-standing and faithful friend of yours without really explaining the replacement. So here goes.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. The oceans and rivers of collaboration flows include all these conversations. The conversations themselves are manifestations of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral. Sometimes they lead to transactions, surfaced by the capability as seen in the context.

What are these conversations? There’s nothing special about them. Here’s a loose classification of the types of conversations one would see in the workplace:

• Questions needing answers (Hey, how do I do this? Here’s how. Where can I find this? Here it is. Who really knows this? Here’s who)
• Sharing of experiences (I just installed this app, and it was *useless*. Here’s why. I just read this book and it was *fantastic. Here’s why)
• Feedback (I really found your answer helpful. I couldn’t have done this without you.)
• Social filtering (I rate this answer more than the others. I think you should see this so I will +1 it or Like it or RT it.)
• Status reporting (I’m here doing this, I’m there doing that)
• Alerts potentially needing action (If THIS then THAT, coming from a litany of sources)

You get my drift. Normal everyday conversations; people asking each other about what and where and how and why. People sharing their experiences. People giving feedback. Alert and response systems. Normal everyday conversations.

These conversations have been going on for aeons. But there’s one major difference. And that is this: the conversations are recorded. Persisted. Archived. So they’re auditable. Searchable. Findable. Besides this, there are other significant differences:

• The conversations are made visible immediately , in real-time
• They come wrapped in context, auto date and time stamped, author identified, location mapped, topic tagged
• The context can be enriched by other participants
• They’re channel- and device-independent; conversations can start in one medium, move to another. They can start on blogs, move to twitter, move to synchronous sound.
• They’re time- and space-shiftable. Synchronous and asynchronous. Mobile in design.
• They work on “publish-subscribe” networked models rather than broadcast and hierarchy

By now you should be getting a flavour of what collaborations flows are. They’re how people learn: they consist of the questions and answers and feedback loops and pointers and alerts. Work is done as a result of that learning, as the enterprise builds and extends its capacity to learn, and to keep learning. The lessons used to be in the stocks of knowledge. Now the lessons themselves are in the flows of learning.

This learning tends to be manifested through instances that use digital objects that get embedded in the conversations. Documents. Presentations. Links to web sites and video and audio. Proposals and orders and bills and invoices and payments. Ideas. Complaints. Every one of these things is an “enterprise social object” around which learning takes place.

The social objects attract commentary. Comments, ratings, further links and references. The “hyperlinks that subvert hierarchy”, another Cluetrain classic. The rolling stones of the enterprise social objects gather the moss of commentary. The ability to gather the moss and make sense of it is part of the ability to learn.

I shall spend more time talking about the enterprise social objects next time round. In the meantime, this earlier post of mine, and the series in which it was placed, should help you chew on the idea.

Let me now close with a summary of the characteristics of collaborative flows.

The characteristics of collaborative flows

•  Inclusive rather than exclusive, low barriers to entry
• Nevertheless, associated clearly with identity, not anonymity
• Designed for sharing, for community
• Secure: full audit log, archived, persistent, searchable, retrievable
• Instant, real-time
• Yet shiftable in time and place, so that asynchronous work can be performed
• Carrying contextual metadata cheaply
• Embedded with enterprise social objects that themselves attract commentary and revision
• Able to operate in and across multiple channels
• Subscriber- rather than publisher-powered
• Built to internet and public cloud standards
• Transparent, inspectable
• Built to make use of communal ability to learn rather than individual stocks of knowledge

I hope, by the time you’ve read my next post, you’ve begun to get a real feel for collaborative flows within the social enterprise. [And I hope to have learnt where my thinking has gone astray via your comments and your criticisms)

Still trying to learn about how best to construct an unGoogleable question.

Today’s question is: Whose voice is this?

I don’t want the name of the character. I want the real name of the real person doing the reading.

Now if someone gets this in 30 seconds of Googling, I will have to go back to the drawing board all over again!

 

 

 

Most of you will know the Neverseconds story by now, it’s been top of the global Twitter trends for some time today. A story ostensibly not about brands or about money. But a lesson for brands and for money.

Neverseconds is a blog. Written by a 9 year old girl. She took photographs of her school meals and wrote about them. And what she wrote was largely positive.

Then a newspaper came along, wrote about her, criticised the dinner ladies, seemed to threaten their jobs. And all hell let loose.

The local council stepped in. Via the school, they banned the girl from posting photographs of school meals. So she said Goodbye in classic fashion, with a blog post.

And the twittersphere was aghast. They rallied. Argyll and Bute councillors had their fifteen minutes of fame.

And then the head of the council appeared on radio, undid the ban.

And if I wasn’t writing this now, I could probably follow some of the story on television. It’s already on Wikipedia, as a 21st century example of the Streisand Effect.

To top it all, one of Martha’s reasons for starting the blog was to collect money for charity: collected funds have grown tenfold since the council debacle. So there’s a silver lining or two.

You will see a million critiques of the whole incident, all more learned than mine. So that’s not what this post is about.

All I want to highlight is one aspect: the multichannel nature of the incident.

• Began on a blog.
• Grew via newspapers.
• Went viral on Twitter.
• Hit Wikipedia.
• [Probably] Hit TV and cable. If not now, soon
• Brought to a close (at least for this chapter) on radio.

And I didn’t even mention screens and devices and form factors.

Life happens. Life happens without regard for channels and devices and form factors.

We learn about life in stories. Stories that happen without regard for channels and devices and form factors.

Time-shifted. Place-shifted.

The #neverseconds story should be looked at by all who seek to “control” their customers through “channels”.

Neverseconds. A channel-hopper.

[Martha, hope your life returns to normal soon, and that you continue to enjoy life as a nine-year-old. And please keep with the blog]