Category: Four pillars

Have you read David Freedman’s recent piece in Inc. Magazine’s September 2006 edition? You should. It’s been doing the rounds in some of the microconversations I participate in, and I’m glad it came across my radar screen.
Freedman headlines his article What’s Next: The Idiocy of Crowds. OK, that got my attention.

He then starts the article with:

Collaboration is the hottest buzzword in business today. Too bad it doesn’t work.

Now I wasn’t just attentive. I was committed. Very intrigued. Very very intrigued.

Here’s some more quotes to intrigue you:

• As James Surowiecki nicely puts it in the title of his best-selling book, it’s “the wisdom of crowds,” and it’s a glorious thing. Or it would be, if it weren’t for just one little problem: The effectiveness of groups, teamwork, collaboration, and consensus is largely a myth. In many cases, individuals do much better on their own. Our bias toward groups is counterproductive. And the technology of ubiquitous connectedness is making the problem worse.
• What he glosses over, however, is the often spectacular way groups fail in the context of organizations.
• Things only get worse when a team is charged with actually making a decision.
• What’s more, these electronic group decisions can be even more brain-dead than in-person meetings. The biggest problem: the fear of dissenting is magnified in a Web, e-mail, or instant messaging exchange, because participants know their comments can be saved and widely distributed. Instead of briefly offending six people at a meeting, you have the chance to enrage thousands.
• According to a recent article in The Guardian, every three seconds a Wikipedia page is rendered inaccurate–or more inaccurate than it was to begin with–by a hoaxer, ignoramus, or malcontent.

By the time I finished reading through the article, I wasn’t intrigued any more. And not incensed either. More like apathetic. So why do I post this? The usual reason. This kind of thinking will gain currency, especially when amplified by traditional media, unless people like us push back.

Freedman manages to take a swipe at collaboration and teamwork, at social software, at democratised innovation, the whole nine yards. Where he does give praise, it has the feeling of being faint and damning.

So here’s my take on Freedman’s piece:

1. Deciding isn’t doing

There was a book written many years called Five Frogs on a Log which first described this analogy to me. Five frogs, sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? Five, because deciding isn’t doing :-)

We should not confuse group decision making with groups working. Collaboration and consensus are two entirely different things.

2. Consensus comes in many forms

• Simple Voting, with an agreement that the vote is binding on the group, no chads anywhere
• Weighted Voting, same as Simple except that the boss is always right
• Soft consensus, agreement amongst all those who cared or bothered to turn up
• Filibuster consensus, agreement from all present in response to being bored out of their wits
• Real consensus, where group members are given the opportunity to voice their concerns and misgivings in private, prior to a group decision that all will support in public

3. Real consensus is made far more possible by the use of social software
Patrick Lencioni, in his “fable” The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, makes the point far better than I could; all I am doing is placing the argument in the context of social software:

• Unless there is trust within a team people are unwilling to be open
• Unless people are open they won’t express their doubts and misgivings
• Unless they express their doubts and misgivings they won’t feel they were party to the decision
• Unless they feel party to the decision they won’t commit to it
• Unless they commit to it execution is all but impossible

Read the original; my summary doesn’t do it justice. Lencioni’s arguments are very useful in the context of social software. Here’s an offbeat reason why:

In the past, firms had relatively low attrition. Job mobility was low, and gold watches and carriage clocks abounded. In such circumstances, consensus really worked. People voiced their misgivings openly, then went with the majority view after debate. Why? Because they knew that their peers and bosses would remember their sacrifice and their commitment to the team. Institutional memory.

Now, as we live with far higher attrition and job mobility, the institution has no memory any more. Sacrifices are not worth anything, people move, bosses move, there’s an I’m All Right Jack Every Man For Himself culture. Consensus is therefore hard to achieve, and infinite loops of decision-making and second-guessing and third-guessing abound.

In addition to the institutional memory problem (which is primarily about sacrifice) there is also a time-and-space problem. The infinite loop mentioned above is now able to move to new levels of infinity a la Cantor. People are often travelling and in different timezones.

Social software can be used to solve all this. It captures the context, helping absentees “get up to speed”. It captures the conversation, allowing concerns and issues to be aired and recorded. Institutional memory is therefore preserved regardless of attrition. It solves the space and time problems, along with more modern “unproductivity tool” problems such as Which Version Are You Looking At? and I Can’t See That On My BlackBerry and “Sorry, my signal is fading and I have to sign off”.

So Mr Freedman:

• Deciding isn’t doing.
• Consensus comes in many forms.
• Social software aids consensus.

I need a bit of advice. I’d like to make my blog more accessible, easier to read, simpler to play with. There are a number of things I’m thinking about right now in this context, roughly listed below, in no particular order:

• Getting rid of the Categories bit on the sidebar, replacing it with a shorter list of tags
• Ensuring that those tags are the same as on my Technorati profile
• Reclassifying all my posts according to those tags
• Reclassifying my blogroll into some sort of grouped list
• Adding a CoComment-style feature, maybe CoComment itself
• Bringing LibraryThing back
• Adding a Where am I bit
• Making sure I have a Contact Me clearly visible
• Providing an excerpt for each post, and only making that excerpt visible
• Finding a way for people to be able to listen to my posts
• Finding a way for people to read my posts in other languages

Then I thought to myself, why am I trying to do this on my own? Why can’t I just ask you? What would you have me do in order to make this blog more useful to you? [And yes, “shut up and just go away is a perfectly valid answer”…]

There are also some things I have felt uneasy about doing, like adding a Digg facility. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. But I’m wary of it, as wary of it as I am with putting advertising on the blog. Something inside me doesn’t like something about it, and I have to figure out why. Again, comments welcome.

So please talk to me. Let me know what I can do to make things better, easier, simpler. What I should stop doing. What I should start doing. I’m still experimenting, it’s barely six months since I started blogging externally. And I’d like to get better at it.

If you use the Comment route then others can see what you say, and that may trigger other thoughts and suggestions. But if you feel uncomfortable with that route, then by all means write to me. I can be found at [email protected]

Thanks a lot.

Some months ago I referred people to a document produced by the US Department of Defense on opensource.

The very existence of the document intrigued me, given its source. I guess I didn’t feel that an organisation like the DoD was likely to be open-minded about opensource. Shows how wrong I can be.

I said I was intrigued. And I began dreaming of what ifs.

What if I was trying to convince people of the value of social software, what kind of organisation would I like to see as a “poster child”? What kind of “reference site” would make people sit up and think “Hey, there’s something going on here, and we want some of it?”

And I thought to myself. We really need a poster child that fulfils the following characteristics:

• Very command-and-control, very hierarchical
• A global brand with high brand recognition amongst the Fortune/FTSE/DAX/CAC whatevers
• Known worldwide for its secretiveness and hush-hush-ness as well
• So silo-ed that its right hand really didn’t know what its left hand was doing
• In fact so silo-ed that it didn’t know there was a right hand and left hand, or wouldn’t admit to it
• A business that had a demonstrably high reliance on quality information
• Operating in multiple geographies, timezones, cultures and languages
• Wondering how to reinvent itself as the world seemed to change faster and faster

If we could find this elusive poster child, then we would all find it easier to demonstrate the value of social software to C-level executives in major organisations worldwide.

I told you I’d been dreaming.

Well, I stuck that dream in the back of my head. Filed under wait-and-see-because-truth-is-stranger-than-fiction.

Then, a few days ago, while walking around the blogosphere, following a trail laid by Mark Berthelemy, I found an interesting document. Not sure which of the people he links to mentioned it, but it was there somewhere. So thanks, Mark.

Maybe, maybe, we have the possibility of finding that elusive poster child. Just maybe.
Titled The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, it is written by D. Calvin Andrus of the CIA.

CIA. Interesting. Let’s see how they do against my “poster child” checklist. Command and Control. Hierarchy. Global brand. Secretive. Business based on information. Global multicultural operation. Desperately needing to reinvent itself. Etc etc. Hmmmm.

It’s quite an interesting paper, particularly since it is written for an environment that could not be more hostile towards openness and collaboration, hostile by design and by nature.

The bibliography is also interesting; A reference to George W Bush is a sine qua non, so no surprise. I’d expect to see references to Claude Shannon and Alan Turing and Benoit Mandelbrot and Bob Metcalfe. Even Adam Smith. I’d only be mildly surprised to see Steven Johnson and Deborah Gordon, and only slightly more surprised to see Ward Cunningham – Bo Leuf and Larry Downes – Chunka Mui. But I wouldn’t expect such a document to refer to Jane Jacobs, what a delightful surprise.
Within the document (and I’ve only read the 30-page version) Calvin Andrus dismisses classical reorganisations as variants of Titanic deckchair rearranging; provides a reasonable summary of the critical success factors of complex adaptive systems, and even suggests a technology stack that has active feedback loops at the top of the stack…..
Some of it may seem Social Software 101, but do remember the audience it was written for. We are not in the business of preaching to the converted, but in converting those who can’t or won’t listen. I have definitely learnt from it, and a number of you may find it useful as well.
If the CIA, or for that matter any major grouping of intelligence services, can truly grasp the value of social software, then there is hope for all of us. I look forward to finding out more about this experiment, and will try and get in touch with the author.

If it is, then please see what you can do with this link. If you find yourself in a country that hasn’t shown up as a visitor to the page, go ahead and correct that.

Nothing serious, not a chain letter, no money involved. Just an idea of how things move around and how long they take.

Following my post on The Economist’s article on truthful inflight announcements, Peeter Marvet pointed me at this story in a Toronto blog. Fundamentally someone at the Economist wrote to a number of bloggers, inviting them to cover and “scoop” the story, as a seeded experiment.

Wow, I said to myself. This is what a connected world feels like. Not sure where Peeter is, my guess would be Estonia. He reads something in a Canadian blog about a magazine published in the UK experimenting with the blogosphere. Wow, I said to myself.
So I read Michael Seaton‘s post, and assumed that the “scoop” link sent to him would open up the DRMed story, so that I could share it with all of you.

Wrong.
I’m glad the Economist is experimenting; but there must be better ways of doing this. Why not just let a few trial stories go out there free-to-ether, stories they think are eminently linkable, and see what happens? See whether they get a spike in digital subscriptions correlated to the linkers’ locations. Whatever.

Update: Michael Seaton commented on this post, and has now provided the entire article on his blog. Thanks, Michael. And thank you again, Peeter. [BTW was I right? Is your blog written in Estonian?]
There is much to learn about all this. We need to move from Seeding-as-Marketing to Recommending-as-The-Only-Way.

Buyers will make their intentions known, either overtly or covertly; marketing has always been about reducing the buyer’s search costs and simplifying the decision to purchase. There is no better way of reducing buyer search costs other than recommendations from trusted networks. Independent trusted networks.

The independence is as important as the recommendation.