The Social Organization

How to Help People Adapt in a World of Change

2013-03-01T20:12:28-05:00

If the work world you exist in hasn't been disrupted yet, it's likely only because you haven't been paying enough attention. To start understanding some of this massive disruptions taking place, you need go no further than Mary Meeker's annual reports, which are nominally about the state of the web but really they are about the state of business and markets.

Much of this disruption is being driven by the increasing pace of technological performance. Most people generally understand how fast technology is moving. What I think many people don't recognize is how it affects individual, and thus collective, behavior. When people are faced with change that they do not understand they often become reactionary - cue the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s - driven by a need for solid footing in a world that no longer seems to make sense. When I think about the stereotypical snake oild salesman, it also rises out of the ashes of the rapid technical, social and economic changes taking place in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of industrialization.

We are again in a similar period - where the sands seem to shift daily and truth does not seem self-evident. We rail against Congress for being so polarized but in many ways, it also seems inevitable. People are looking for certainty in a world that seems complex and threatening to their livlihood and lifestyles. In this environment, certainty will often trump many things - including facts - and that creates even more risk and resistence.

My take on how we progress and adapt to the changing world is to stop focusing our lens on the technology, which is causing the changes driving anxiety, and instead focus our lens on the people and relationships required to make ourselves and our organizations successful. This has a number of benefits:

People are familiar and comfortable with other people. That comfortable base allows people to extend from there vs. find their way back to a comfortable place by starting with the changing environment.
Because technology and market access has commoditized, it is increasingly the strength and performance of humans that will differentiate organizations.

We need to stop telling people that they need to change and start asking more questions about people, relationships and networks - and then apply the technology that works best to support those.

The Social Business Log Jam

2012-09-14T13:12:20-04:00

Working in the social business field has become a frustrating place - the field is littered with examples and advice that should be a distraction but instead has become the focus of the market conversation. What's worse, is that the people who everyone is looking to as the innovators (and therefore experts) don't really get it either. A recent article in The Atlantic, Why the Social Media Revolution Is About to Get a Little Less Awesome, demonstrated this to me in spades. First of all, I do believe Facebook doesn't get part of the revolution that they created for the reasons I wrote about in Facebook's Black Ice. However, to then extend that logic and say that a phenomenal customer experience is antithetical to a successful business model is, well, a bit inane in my opinion.

What is wrong with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a raft of other social networks and the thinking behind them is that they are focused on scale, not value creation. The simple act of connecting a lot of people and then expecting value to flow from that is definitely a 'build it and they will come' mentality that from my experience does not work. Facebook is experiencing on a large scale what I caution clients about all the time on a smaller scale - building scale before you have created an environment that entices people to co-create and changes behaviors typically leads to a quick spike and then a cliff - because it looses peoples' interest.

But because of the scale, these networks have sucked the energy out of the market and distracted people into building Facebook pages and Twitter accounts but without any strategic thought around their business model, their relationships with different constituent bases and how these tools might impact the cost and returns of those relationships. So instead, organizations are paying consultants a lot of money to compare how many Twitter followers they have as compared to their competitors instead of realizing that we live in an environment of abundance and competition is no longer the yardstick by which you should be measuring yourself.

This strategic thinking is stuck in the industrial age and creating a huge log jam in the social business market. Social strategists are doing their best to stay afloat and on top of the logs but they seem to keep piling up. Instead of worrying about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or whatever other new social network has popped up, we should be starting our conversations with questions like:

What unique value does your organization create, or in other words what value is core to the business?
What value creation is outsourced or could be outsourced because it is not unique or core?
Who do we need to help us create that value and what type of relationship with them is ideal for efficient value creation?
What types of relationships do we have with different constituent groups today? Is there trust? Is it contextual or absolute? Would a better relationship generate more value?
Where do these constituent groups interact? What do they say about us when we are not in the room?
How can we build the relationships we want to have with these different groups in the most efficient way possible?

But no one is having these conversations with executives. Instead we are telling them they should blog and when they go glassy eyed or object we try to convince them why blogging is so important. No wonder this isn't working. And yet, these same executives are the ones we need to support social business initiatives in order to really transform our organizations. And some of them, despite our best collective efforts to make this about technology, are getting it.

At The Community Roundtable, we are kicking off a new research effort called The Social Executive to try and learn from both the executives who 'get it' and actively participate themselves as well as those who object so that we can understand how to better demonstrate the strategic benefits of social business in a way that is meaningful to them. So that we can all stop talking about The Twitter and all start building real relationships with each other. That will be a relief to everyone and it will allow the rest of the world to take us seriously.

The Promise of The Social Organization

2012-06-22T09:57:33-04:00

Women are different than men. Women can do the same work as men. Women do things differently. Everyone should be treated equally. The debate circles on and on... and I don't tend to add my commentary very often because it has always felt like a false choice - to either assume women and men are the same or to assume they are different. However a couple of really interesting recent articles have appeared - the most lengthy by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic called Why Women Still Can't Have it All and a shorter one that hit closer to home by my friend Morra Arrons Mele in the New York Times called Here to Stay, and That's Good for Women. Stepping back, both of these articles are about a lot more than being working mothers - they are about a societal structure that is broken for the way we live today and THAT is what feuls the passion for the work that I do. I think the structure of work is hurting all of us, both individually and collectively.

Our current societal structures are designed with the following assumptions in mind:

We have to be together physically to get work done.
There is someone at home full-time to make sure dinner is made, dry cleaning gets picked up, kids are supervised after school and the rugs are vacuumed.
Children need the summer off to help tend the fields.
Children and adults need the training to do explicit, structured tasks.
Corporations sole responsibility is to earn a profit.
Scale (large organizations) are more productive than smaller ones.

It's been a long time since most of those assumptions rang true - our society has gone through some very dramatic shifts:

The Internet makes it dramatically easier to work together from different locations - and take advantage of talent wherever it is.
The women's movement and its legacy has insured that working women are not only common but it's as expected that women would work as for men. Most families have no one at home full time.
I have no fields near my house that need tending... and most other people don't either.
Explicit structured tasks are increasingly being done by machines. We now need people to use what is unique to humans - our creativity and empathy.
Both the positive and negative externalities of doing business are now easier to see - as is the reaction to them (Exxon & BP oil spills, BASF running zero waste plants, JC Penney supporting the GLBT community, etc) and organizations that don't take that into account will suffer for it.
Technology, infrastructure and market access is now being commoditized through cloud computing, new business models and social media.

Because of this disconnect, people are struggling to figure out how to make life and work fit together in a way that makes them feel sane and happy - and it's not easy. It would not be too hyperbolic to say that I consider it my life's work to help people and organizations figure out how to fix this so that our organizations work for us again, not against us. After all, what is the purpose of an organization if it is not contributing to our well-being in a substantive way? The organizations (whether for profit or not) that best align with how we want to live will be the ones that get the best employees, the best support - and the best results.

What do we need?

Explicit support and encouragement by organizations to work anywhere, which includes the responsibility and accountability to work independently.
Choice in whether our work is 30-40-50-60-70 hours a week so we can fit our work to our life, not the other way around (with the understanding that we also choose our compensation levels accordingly) - and that working less does not result in working on less important and interesting tasks.
School schedules that more closely resemble work schedules and expectations... or work schedules that can be adjusted to school schedules (see above)
Radically different view of education, hiring and employee training.
Companies that start with a purpose and then find the business model(s) that support that purpose.
Organizations that operated as loosely coupled networks (see Dave Gray's new book The Connected Company for more info on this)

There are examples of many of the above practices throughout different organizations - I am optimistic that we are beginning to see how this new organization is structured and operates. Look at Giff Gaff, Whole Foods, Amazon, WL Gore for examples. It's happening and those that understand the power in these new models have no particular need to share their lessons... but the rest of the world would be wise to work on catching up.

Facebook's Black Ice

2012-06-04T11:26:48-04:00

We have much to thank Facebook for - it has led the way in training society how to communicate in networked environments and has shone the technology community how to optimize communications technology for engagement. But Facebook has a big issue that is growing more acute with its IPO - its business model is in direct conflict with its networked-based engagement model.

From a business model perspective, Facebook is little more than a copy of existing media models with 68.8% of its revenue coming from text and display ads. This incents them to build functionality that encourages interactivity... but that is largely where it ends. This is highly problematic for organizations that are working to re-invent how marketing and communications is done, using interest and influencers to develop pull for products and services. To change the cost structure of marketing, organizations need to help facilitate communities and with them relationships between community members so that education and information can scale out, through chains of influence. Facebook has no incentive to support this new marketing approach because it directly conflicts with their advertising-based business model. The move by GM to pull Facebook advertising (but not their presence) was fascinating to me for this reason.

I have long had a complaint about Page functionality in this regard - it does little to help a community manager welcome new 'likers', connect people to each other, curate content or carry on a topical conversation over a period of time (there are 3rd party plug-in that do a better job at this). That functionality would really help brands engage in a more involved conversation with their markets and change how they approach marketing. Instead Facebook, through its functionality, encourages brands to treat their Facebook pages as simply smaller channels that are similar to their big channels, albeit with a bit of interactivity.

On the user end, I've noticed the need for revenue growth in my stream, which is increasingly filled with page updates vs. updates from my friends. While there used to be a degree of control over my feed, that control seems to have diminished steadily. This is another huge risk for Facebook and every user will have a tipping point when they feel like Facebook has just become one large advertisement and they start to either visit less and less or they un-like Pages in an attempt to see more of what they really care about.

Finally the biggest risk that Facebook has is their networked engagement model itself. While growing, it provided a huge positive feedback loop that allowed them to grow geometrically and very, very quickly. That same dynamic can turn into a negative feedback loop as users jump ship.

Watching the Facebook story play out has made me wonder whether they really understand the changing business environment in which they themselves helped to create - or whether they do understand it but are now caught in the catch-22 of the innovators dilimma; they had to start with an advertising model because that is what corporate customers understood but now they are so dependent on the advertising model that they cannot get themselves out from under it. Either way they are increasingly treading a fine line between keeping their users engaged and providing real value to corporate clients and there are plenty of traditional corporate clients to help hold them back.

Encouraging Loyalty and Advocacy Through Shared Value Creation

2012-03-13T16:29:16-04:00

Customer advocacy and loyalty is the holy grail for many a CRM effort. However, I think the drivers of loyalty very often misunderstood.

This week I was looking at a CRM model with the customer at the center surrounded be a effecient and effective combination of tools and services. The goal was to make the customer experience smooth, easy and seamless. There is nothing really wrong with that vision (and in fact it strives for perfection of experience) and yet, I'm not sure it will get to customer loyalty. It asked nothing of the customer and made it as easy as possible for them. There was no shared value creation. The link between the provider and consumer was purely transactional and, therefore, weak.

When I think of loyalty, I think of the following:

Green Bay Packers fans
The Marines
Alumni groups
Developer communities

Last week, my toddler had on a t-shirt from my husband's prep school. She goes to the faculty daycare at that same school and yet very few of the faculty kids ever have on school gear. Arguably it would make more sense for those children, whose parents' livlihoods are dependent on the school, to exhibit more school spirit than my daughter whose family poured a lot of money and effort into the institution. Yet loyalty doesn't work that way. Loyalty is driven by shared experiences and contributions that are recognized and valued.

In your CRM model, if you do not allow for your customers to also make meaningful contributions to the value chain you will have a hard time generating loyalty. Effort, investment and sacrifice drive loyalty - not ease of use. If you provide the perfect solution there is no room for your customer's voice and needs and no reason for them to contribute.

What, other than money, are you asking your customers to contribute to your value chain?

Filters Alone Will Not Solve Information Overload

2012-03-02T10:22:33-05:00

There is a lot of discussion around creating better filters to solve our information overload and also a bit of a backlash about filters - most notably Eli Pariser's talk on Beware the Online Filter Bubble and another great perspective from Graham Chastney. All of these discussions are important but I see information overload as primarily a human problem, not a technical one. A few years ago I wrote a post about scarcity and ambundance and I still think this is the fundamental issue at play with information. Humans are driven to hoard because our impulses were built for an environment of scarcity. We are worried that if we don't read everything - particularly if passed on through trusted social connections - we might miss something important and that makes us anxious. We mistake the available and accessible for the valuable.

Yes, technology can help with this problem by throttling the information we see but we still have that issue of human anxiety. To make headway against this pernicious impluse requires some challenging behavior change:

Self awareness about our interests, needs, and priorities - both short-term which are in constant flux and long-term which need constant, if not deep, attention to acheive.
Ability to translate priorities into information needs.
Ability to connect our information needs tactically to how we set up our information environment.
The consistency and time to adapt as our priorities do.

That is a tall order for most of us which is why I believe the problem of information overload will be with us for a while. It's a complex adaptive system and most of us have been raised and educated for a world of transactional processes which we can 'perfect'. I've spoken before about decision-making in this new world - and I don't think most of us are ready for it. We want the security of knowing we are making the right choices which assumes a static context. The sand and information, however, is now in constant flux... which in many ways contributes even more to our need to hoard information so we can try to make a 'perfect' decision.

What to do? So far the only solution I've really found is to muddle through and get comfortable with turning off devices, knowing I'm missing things and trusting that if it is really important, it will circle back. This may also be why I still rely on my Moleskin to keep my priorities clear. Online it is too easy to dive down rat holes of information that, while fascinating, are not related to my priorities.

How do you keep yourself from needing to see and read it all?

Photo By Breibeest

Can Organizations Exibit Love, Actually?

2011-12-13T16:33:21-05:00

It's a time of year where we cherish those we love... but our society's narratives around love can be pretty distorted. They involve passionate embraces, sex, physical gifts, weddings, and other fairy tales which while certainly part of it is not the core of what love is. To me, deep lasting love is mostly about recognizing another's vulnerability and partnering with them to fill in their gaps, thus making them feel that their vulnerability is alleviated through their partnership with you. It's when you expose your fear or anxiety about something and your partner intercedes to mitigate and address what you cannot and affirms your value in spite of it.

The result of that kind of love is both an intense emotional connection and stronger performance as a human. The negative emotional energy and increased time requirements of doing things one is bad at creates a drag on productivity generally. In my personal life, having a loving relationship with my husband makes me a better parent, more productive at work, happier, and generally a better person. That gift of love is wonderful but it also maximizes my potential and my performance as a human.

Looking at love from that perspective, it seems that if we want to maximize the potential of our employees, customers, and partners in the work environment we should, in fact, love them. Instead we tend to have processes that are not only not loving, they are downright hostile.

The basic assumption of hierarchies is that some people are better than others. Creating this narrative is hostile to love and, by extension, hostile to optimal performance.
We have 'professional development' plans for colleagues - the underlying assumption is that people need to be fixed versus supported to achieve maximum performance.
Negotiations with customers often tend to be thought of a zero-sum games - if one wins, the other necessarily looses. In loving relationships, everyone wins.

Until recently I was pretty protective of my insecurities - after all I worked in environments set up to make me defensive and insecure. The drag from hiding those insecurities and weaknesses kept me from fully exploring what I'm really good at because I was so focused on managing my weaknesses and trying to be competent in everything. It's been an interesting personal revelation that exposing weaknesses in trusted relationships reduces that drag considerably and allows me to focus more time on those things that I perform well. That equation change improves both my individual performance and really has an impact on team performance because as a team, we're better optimized.

What does this look like in my work context?

A manager encouraged me to leave a position, despite it being a personal loss for her, because it was limiting what I could achieve.
A colleague volunteered for a project that, while I could do it, was making me anxious and unhappy because it required a lot of work that played to my weaknesses.
A customer made a number of referrals to my work, but took the time to also make sure I was presenting the work in a way that looked after my interests, knowing I might not do that entirely well left to my own devices.

I'm not actually sure any of these individuals would ever say they love me although they are definitely all partners and friends, but they all acted in a loving way which increased my performance.

Talking about love in a work context makes people uncomfortable but mostly because I think society has the narrative of love wrong. I'm proposing that love has a performance quotient and those organizations who figure it out will be rewarded. We've figured out hard metrics... it's the soft ones that are where performance innovation lie.

Here's to more love in the coming year.

Social Media Overload, Anxiety & Polarization

2011-12-05T13:57:39-05:00

The 2012 predictions are starting and I will likely participate - the end of the year is always a good time to assess and evaluate where you have been and where you are going. However, these predictions can often take on a doom & gloom feeling. Ross Dawson's Themes for 2012 are particularly anxiety inducing: more speed, more people, no privacy, revolt, cyberwars, exposure, and more polarization among other things. While I don't disagree with much of the analysis it does induce a high level of anxiety. This is not because Ross got it wrong, it's because our world has exploded with information, apps, access, people, content, and ideas.

People are assaulted with too much of everything. That makes us all very anxious. The human reaction to this anxiety is to crave clarity and certainty - to grasp for a bouy in a storm. Without some certainty and truth to ground us we feel completely out of control and bewildered. We look for those with clear and simple answers because it cuts through the sea of confusion. However, this is exactly where the biggest risk lies - while the world is increasing in complexity it is pushing more and more people to focus on simplistic truths as a coping mechanism. The more intensely people are driven to simplicity, the harder it is to make effective progress of any kind in an increasingly complex environment.

Complexity drives anxiety. Anxiety drives simplicty & polarization. Polarization blocks progress. Lack of progress creats more complexity. And the cycle intensifies.

Part of the reason that social networking has taken off is that people have dramatically scaled back the people and organizations they trust to those that they know personally, because those relationships are something they can still evaluate in a world of ever shifting information. But ironically, in a world where we have so much access to information it creates increasingly narrow perspectives. This cycle has to be broken to really address some of the vexing global issues that we face.

For me, the biggest challenge of 2012 will be to better understand how to use social technologies to reduce overload and complexity instead of add to it. This is absolutely imperative so individuals have the mental space to feel proactively in charge of their environments so that they can make decisions and move forward - and to open their minds to alternative perspectives.

People Are The Weakest Link

2011-11-22T11:45:29-05:00

Last week, I presented a premise at the Enterprise 2.0 conference that because the costs of technology and human capital have flipped (relatively speaking), people are now the weakest link in organizational value chains. What that means is that those organizations that can most effectively optimize human performance will be those that win because their weakest link is stronger than that of their competitors. Belows are my slides and you can see the recording here.

Are You The Red Queen?

View more presentations from The Community Roundtable

However - and this is the real issue - organizations have been optimized for technology and infrastructure that typically has linear performance results - i.e. applying twice as much infrastructure or performance should yield twice as much performance. That has resulted in a culture of linear business modeling in business schools and strategy groups. I believe this has led us to dismiss and dramatically undervalue human performance.

What I know about people is that the human performance and success paths are anything but linear. It's very instructive to have a toddler right now because toddlers are performance machines (in terms of learning, adopting, and excelling at new things). The path is strewn with stops and starts, regressions, and surges - never mind the emotional meltdowns and ecstasy that sometimes goes along with this. As adults, this learning and development slows but it follows much the same pattern.

Combine people into groups, communities, and networks and performance becomes even more complex. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of how to optimize group performance - it's why the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence exists. We have learned some things about building environments for ideal performance and again, I go back to looking at the research in education, parenting, and disciplining children.

It turns out that emergent curriculum works better than curriculum that is 100% planned. Emergent curriculum is a balance between what the instructor wants to convey and what the students are interested in - it is a constantly evolving negotiation and conversation - not a one way presentation. It turns out this is quite a bit more effective because the lesson is given in the context that the student cares about and there is social pressure exerted by the rest of the class to care. The engagement of classes changes dramatically.

Another more established concept is positive discipline. The crux of this concept is that if your goal is to get someone to act in a certain way, the best means to do so is through partnering and mutual respect, not punitive action. Support, encouragement, and giving others the space to be responsible for the results of their own decisions is the best way to ensure lasting behavior change.

Currently organizations do not know how to account for this human performance pattern and because they cannot model and account for it, they cannot optimize it. My position is that we need to figure out how to incorporate things like relevance, connection, loyalty, forgiveness and other human values into the balance sheets of our organizations. That may require a radical change in our current concept of accounting but I'm game, are you?

You Are Not All That & Why You Shouldn't Ever Believe It

2011-10-27T09:42:36-04:00

I grew up in a unique position. My father was powerful - at least within our family's community - he was the minister of a 350-year-old church in Cambridge, MA. I sat at the "right arm of power" in that little realm. People liked me. I never trusted it because I knew it was due in part to where I sat in the community in relation to my father. To be fair, people were (for the most part) not explicit about this connection and didn't try to use it in a manipulative way but my position put me front and center.

I learned a few things from this:

A person's position in a system is often more important than their own personality/skills/value in determining the amount of attention, influence, and popularity they get.
Attention feeds on itself.
People who get a lot of attention shouldn't take themselves too seriously - if you believe that you deserve the attention because of something you did yourself, you are often deceiving yourself.
I really dislike obsequiousness - I'm not looking to form a posse - because it doesn't typically add any real value. It tends to be hollow because people are drafting on the attention you are getting.

The downside of this lesson is that I often discount people that genuinely want to connect with me but I think that is a fair trade for maintaining a realistic sense my own value. I've realized over the years that other people never learned this lesson and they feed off of the attention they garner because of their position vs. their value - essentially looking in a fun house mirror and believing that what they see is real. That reflection, of course, does contain elements of reality but it is deceptive.

Now that online social networks have enabled people to collect friends and followers far beyond what they would be able to do in the real world, it seems difficult for people to separate out the fun house mirror from the real mirror. For me, the real mirror is found in the in-person (i.e. offline) connections I make and the value I produce for which others are willing to pay or exchange for other value. It is perhaps why I distrust Facebook 'likes' and many freemium models - in those environments it is very hard to understand who really cares about what you are doing and people who are tailgating.

If you work in this space, it is worth evaluating both for yourself and for the organizations with whom you work how you determine what is real and what is drafting.

Picture by Susan NYC