Category: Four pillars

First catch your hare.

So wrote Hannah Glasse, in the recipe for Jugged Hare, to be found in her 1747 book The Art of Cookery. [When I first heard the quotation, I was given the impression, mistakenly, that it was a quotation from Mrs Beeton].

In today’s globalised knowledge-worker-dominated world, most enterprises have figured out that the “recipes” for the best companies start with “First get good people”. And even if they haven’t quite figured this out, they’re not going to admit it anyway. If you take the Napoleonic view you would argue that good isn’t good enough, you need to be “lucky” as well. While I have some sympathy for this view, I prefer to take the Gary Player position on it: the harder one practises, the “luckier” one gets. Good people, some luck, a lot of hard work called “practice”, with the right feedback loops to ensure that learning takes place. In an environment where learning can take place, with leadership based on Max Du Pree principles. Is that all we need to make the enterprise truly productive?

Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that simple? Sometime soon, probably after finishing the series I’m writing on Wikipedia, I may well start one on the Theory of the Firm. But for now I’d like to stop here and return to the main thrust of this post, Facebook and the Enterprise.

I’ve had the privilege of leading good people many times now, and I’m always trying to get better at it. To this end, I’ve regularly pondered on the subject of what precisely I would like to get better at. While this is not a comprehensive list, there are a few areas I know I would love to get better at:

• Identifying role models that would help me coach and mentor those that are new to the enterprise
• Providing simple tools to help them prioritise their time
• Having the right feedback loops in place to help them manage their performance

In all three cases, I tend to feel that something like Facebook has a lot to offer, as and when it is implemented properly in an enterprise.

People use all kinds of signals to communicate. From keeping doors open to shutting them. From answering e-mails promptly and diligently, all the way to “deleting them unread”. From being early for a meeting to not turning up. From giving their attention to not giving their attention. From listening to not-listening. All kinds of signals.

Some of the signals are intentional, some inadvertent. And we tend to be better at certain types of signals and crap at others. How else would you explain what passes for “performance management” in most large enterprises, where 95% of the workforce are “above average”? How else would you explain even the existence of execrable inventions like “forced ranking”?

I’m no social anthropologist, I’m sure there are a zillion people out there who know a lot more about the subject of how people signal to each other and why. What I do know is this: Social software has a role to play in signalling.

Sometimes I’ve read e-mails via preview panes and then deleted them later as part of a housekeeping exercise. And every now and then I’ve received calls from people really upset that I’d deleted their e-mail unread. This, despite the fact that I’d actually read them, and, more to the point, despite the fact that the deleted e-mail was over three months old.

Sometimes I’ve looked into e-mail flow within a firm, trying to understand something from the patterns that emerge. Suppose we imagine the world of enterprise e-mail like we would imagine a country’s economy. Domestic e-mail, that which stays within the enterprise’s boundaries. Exported e-mail, that which goes out. Imported e-mail, that which comes in. What would it be like to be able to model all this sensibly?

When I opened up my mailbox to my management team I spotted some fascinating behaviours. How some of them concentrated on reading my Sent Items rather than focusing on my Inbox. Why would this happen? I think it has something to do, analogously, with what happens with View Source. People love looking inside the hood, trying to see what makes something tick. And in the particular case I cite, they wanted to understand how I thought, and felt that they would learn most by studying my sent mail.

Maybe two years ago, perhaps a little longer, I looked at a company called Seriosity. They were in a fascinating business. They had a simple premise. People valued their time. E-mails stole time. If there was a way to make e-mails pay for that time, then something profound may start happening. Not all e-mails stole time, some preserved time and created new value. If there was a way of paying for this extra value, then something profound may start happening. And so the serio was born, a way of charging someone for taking your e-mail reading time, and for saying thank you if you found the mail helpful.

[Incidentally, there’s at least one Facebook app that tries to mimic the Seriosity concept, using a currency called a ven].

A utility like Facebook can also help enterprises with rating and recommendation systems, connecting peers and providing the facility to collect and share active feedback.

Opinion polls are also easy to organise and execute, as are prediction markets.

Responding to pokes. Accepting things, ignoring things. Changing settings for what appears in a news feed. Choosing the groups to join or leave. Using publish and subscribe models to access information, using tools like Seriosity to encourage and discourage flows on a very granular basis. Watching what people do in order to learn from them, in order to be able to point them out to others as good role models. Using active feedback loops to provide continuous “360 degree” appraisals of performance, using soft signals in order to encourage or discourage specific behaviours.

Please take all this with a very large pinch of salt. All I am doing is wondering about the possibilities, the possibilities of using social software to fix things that are fundamentally broken.

There’s something non-threatening, something non-invasive about the way we can signal to people using social software. When speaking of Instant Messaging, Stu Berwick, an erstwhile colleague of mine, used to say “It’s polite to be silent.” I found that profound.

In similar vein, I see something strange and wonderful happening in environments where there are long bar counters attached to walls. People walk up to such bars, sit down and chat with the people alongside them because it feels comfortable. More comfortable and less threatening, less in-your-face or in-your-space. Even though they’re actually staring at walls!

I think there’s something similar taking place in social software environments. There is an Alongside Feeling.

Flame away. I shall learn.

Sometime this morning I was quietly listening to Tina Dico, following up on a recommendation made by Sean. And one of the tracks reminded me of a song by Sandy Denny on an album called Fotheringay, by a band with the same name. I was brought up staunchly Wodehousian, so I have no choice but to pronounce it Fungy :-). It’s one of my favourites, but it’s a strange album. Nothing before, nothing after. A collection of people who came together for a reason, made some beautiful music, and then went merrily on their way again.

My father’s lifetime was contained in one job. I will probably have seven. My children will probably have seven —- but in parallel, not like my sequential efforts.

As the cost of travel and communications continues to drop, and as social networking begins to impact our lives, I think we may see the same thing happen to bands. In my father’s time a musician belonged to one band. In my lifetime musicians belonged to seven. My children will see musicians belonging to seven bands at the same time.

So maybe we’ll see many Fotheringays. A group of people who come together for a small number of sessions, do one album and move on. I tend to think of Fotheringay as an “orphan album”, in the sense that it doesn’t connect easily to a single other artist or group.

I have many albums. Very few of them are orphans. In fact, off the top of my head, I can only think of three others:

Blind Faith: Blind Faith
Super Session: Bloomfield, Kooper and Stills
On the Road To Freedom: Alvin Lee and Mylon Lefevre

I can hear the purists screaming already. How dare you mention Fotheringay and On The Road To Freedom in the same breath as Blind Faith and Super Session? Relax, take it easy. What the four have in common is their orphan status, there’s something very-individual-yet-everything-is-miscellaneous about them. If I was forced to be pedantic I would give Blind Faith and Super Session a whole category to themselves.

Of course, there are other albums that share this characteristic. They’re called live concerts for a purpose. So my Woodstock and my Concert for Bangladesh are orphans as well, except that I can classify them as concert albums.

Do any of you have favourite non-concert orphan albums?

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

Robert Herrick, Upon Julia’s Clothes

Liquefaction. A word to savour. Sensuously sliding off the surface of your tongue. Liquefaction, the process of liquefying; the process of turning something that was not a liquid into a liquid.

For the last day and a half, I was ensconced with my team at work, seeing where we’re trying to go, reviewing how we’re getting there, working out what we can do better. All made more enjoyable because we had the privilege of Doc working with us.

Jeremy and his team spent some time showing us the things we’d been able to do with Tiddlywiki, and the discussion moved on into one of my favourite subjects, the flow of information. I was stressing the importance of not building walled gardens with our applications, making sure that our applications allow customers to import or export their information simply, and in standardised ways.

Something about that conversation stuck with me, and I pondered on it later. And this is where I went:

At one time all assets were physical. When we wanted to exchange assets all we could do was barter them, albeit at some rate of exchange we could discover or determine. When the idea of money came along, everything changed, and the barter economy went away. Since money could operate as a medium of exchange, it became possible for us to convert our physical assets into something “liquid”.

I was struck by the liquid concept. When we convert physical assets into this thing we call money, then something strange happens, very similar to what happens when, for example, soil liquefaction takes place. Something hard and physical undergoes a structural change. One of the words used to describe this changed substance is cohesionless.

Now money went through a number of iterations along the road from physical to digital, growing up from being a store of value to being a medium of exchange and a unit of account. People wailed and moaned and gnashed their teeth as something physical and real became something representational and digital. One of the words used to describe what happened to money along the way is that it became commoditised. And people did not like it. It didn’t feel like it was theirs. So some held on to the gold, some kept the banknotes under their mattresses, some insisted on cheques forever and a day. But in the end everyone went digital.

Something similar is happening to information. All we can “own” is the conventional representation, the token for whatever we convert into digital form. We don’t own the digital form. It’s just an ocean of bits. You can keep track of what you put in before it became digital water, you can keep track of what you took out as digital water, but while it’s there, it’s just water.

Just water. Not my water and your water. Not text water and video water and audio water. Not black water and white water. Just water. Pure water.

Water which we can use to do many things, which we can mix in different ways, which we can mash up and recombine and repackage. Water which we can do all these things with because we have avoided polluting it.

When money became water, we kept the tokens, the conventional representations and ownership symbols, we kept them out of the water.

We have to do the same with information. With everything digital.

The tokens have to be kept out of the water.

This story, about tiny South Pacific islands and internet domains, intrigued me.

At first glance I thought it was nothing more than digital snake oil, someone trying to make a quick buck by selling an unusual top-level domain name related to an unheard-of island country that can’t be found on the average school globe. At least I’d heard of Tuvalu. But Tokelau?

Well, it exists. There are only 1500 people who live in Tokelau, a collection of  three islands in a remote part of the South Pacific. More than four times that number have emigrated, and the prime reason for emigration seems to be a lack of options, a lack of access.

By becoming a connected nation, they appear to have:

(a) added to their GDP significantly

(b) improved their healthcare access and delivery

(c) made a difference to their education system

(d) allowed their expatriates to remain in touch more effectively

It’s heartening to note that there’s such a clear health-education-welfare pattern.

What else do they do? They talk to each other using internet telephony. They download music and they watch videos. And they have started using social networks.

Sounds about right. There is so much we can do when we get connected.

Connected, not channelled. 

James E. Robinson, III:

Give a kid a firewall and you protect him for a day. Teach a kid to surf and you protect him for a lifetime

In so many places and in so many ways we have to stop the give-mode and move on to the teach-mode. In a completely different context, sometimes I think we get the whole concept of aid wrong as a result: how many studies do we have to read that tell us that a dollar of trade is worth a hundred dollars of aid?

Giving per se is not a bad thing. I tend to think of human beings as fundamentally altruistic rather than selfish, man is a social animal. But sometimes, the process of giving actually creates a dependency; instead, we should be concentrating on developing the people we give to, be it in the classroom or even in emerging nations.

Way back in 1974, I remember a maths teacher of mine telling the class, upon meeting them for the first time:

From today, you will impress me, not by the answers you give, but by the questions you ask

It’s all about education, access, empowerment and opportunity. Whether in education, enterprise or government, the answer’s the same. The web provides us immense opportunity to extend all this. Unless we continue to get it wrong in the context of Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet (which we are wont to do).