HR operations for organizations make a fine art out of developing job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, duties, and key performance indicators.

They’ve led to management layers and mechanical thinking, and sometimes to zombie businesses that work to the script but can miss essential opportunities.

In effect, they’ve developed cogs for factory structures. This ‘division of labour’ model, whilst not necessary entirely obsolete, can have the effect of doing business today a lot of harm.

The problem with cogs is that a cog out of alignment can halt a whole machine. Cogs are geared to work in a pre-prescribed fashion, they’re passive processors, part of ‘the system’.

Many a corporate structure today is based on a structure comprised of cogs.

One of the principles of Visceral Business is that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’; we help organizations adapt to become socially calibrated so they’re more strategically connected and dynamic.

As we become more networked in general, as the lines between inside and outside the co-created business become blurred, I have a hunch that we may look at mechanical business models one day and see this way of organising as having as much sophistication as a set of meccano.

By comparison, corpuscles are rapidly adaptive receptors that respond to mechanical pressure or distortion. They balance introvert and extrovert stimuli within the corporate body as a whole, based on a combination of shared imperative and free will.

And because they’re adaptive, they can coagulate.

In business management today, there are strong arguments emerging to think of people as corpuscles not cogs, as vital, dynamic and highly differentiated elements of ability, and to work with them in this way.

Evidence is emerging to suggest incorporating (quite literally), the biological nature of human networks into business strategy, that strong organizations are ‘super-organisms’ as Nicholas Christakis, talking about the power of social networks at the RSA, described them last week.

Matthew Taylor, writing in the RSA blog yesterday, expanded on this by referencing the RSA’s Connected Communities project, and saying ‘it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.’

Coagulation, at a very primal level, breeds creativity. It happens when corpuscles cluster together through shared purpose and affinity and, today coagulation doesn’t just breed creativity, it breeds profit.

Have a look at this video of a talk Robert Scoble gave recently at Stanford. Making some leeway for the slightly amusing subtitles, it hints at the way social business is going and makes the point compellingly that how we need to be thinking and organising today, how people work and how ideas spread now, is a biological business.

Businesses can gain ground today by re-imagining their business frameworks to be less about structures and more about genetics, by thinking about making a move from managing cogs to cultivating corpuscles.

Organizational structures are highly interconnected, and as we move away from the mechanical concepts of organization they’re becoming more permeable; as such, I think they’re going to be more capable of spreading ideas through affinity, by receptive people as a process of osmosis and by working with the talent connected to their brand, both inside and outside the walls of the organization.

What are your thoughts?

There’s a significant difference between metadata, messages, stories and conversations that impacts on how we take ourselves to market and organize when being social.

Attention spans are being strung out these days by the mass of information available on the web, leading to the rising value of metadata as a currency of information.

RSS feeds, web trends, information visualization, analysis tools, the output of most social monitoring platforms, they’re all sense-making mechanisms that reflect a growing dependency that we have on metadata.

As connection, co-creation and learning iteratively through social networks are happening increasingly at scale, metadata is an aggregator and, as many a frustrated advertiser might testify, as the mash-up that everyone makes it’s drowning out many a marketer’s individual message. Which is partly why advertising spends are going down and social media spends are going up.

And a migration to metadata has another knock-on effect, namely the need to distil large volumes of insight into a good story. Storytelling and the telling of an ongoing narrative’s becoming crucial to powerful communication when the plain truth is simple messages are hard to hear and stories are by comparison more captivating.

At The Story event in London last week, about 400 people each took a day out of their lives (that’s more than a year of life in one room) and gathered together in London to hear and think about stories. Stories being told had their day as an antidote to information overload and overcomplication. It was a day that went refreshingly back to basics, a day of reminiscing, stirring deep seated memories of communities and cosy camp fires.

The Story was a great success and the level of interest in it was perhaps an indication of how we have deep and unmet needs, as Matt Locke who organized it put it, to connect with the ‘visceral emotions that good storytelling can create’.

How well any one or any organization tells a story reflects the kind of valuable experiences they can engender. It reflects the degree to which anyone might want to get involved with it, and stay involved.

Yet the key to a good story goes well beyond having a good storyline. Subtexts support storylines and give them breadth, depth, relevance and intrigue, the subtexts make the story one that’s fascinating, one that lingers in the mind.

The onward march of metadata means reading between the lines can get easily obscured. We seek dominant narratives that can crowd out important insight and subtexts. This rich granularity, this silt within the storyline is where you’ll find the staying power that insiders and true advocates know of, the value that well goes beyond the initial hit-and-run headline.

The interesting correlation is that business models are increasingly becoming dependent on working the fringes of their stage to generate value too.

Communicators have a duty of care to seek out equivalent truths in order to fully support them, the type of communication that goes well beyond easily broadcastable tweets and obviously packaged facebook pages.

Alongside the clarity of a storyline is the part that includes involvement from others, the part that makes messages and stories into fascinating dialogue and compelling conversations.

This part involves an understanding of who’s telling a story and how it unfolds, and understanding the nature of one’s social storytelling voice. That social voice is a significant identifiable aspect of a brand’s identity, something that many organizations are only just beginning to appreciate they might need to determine and develop.

Because somewhere, in amongst all the information, the goal for how sustainable businesses take themselves to market and organize involves initiating conversations that are multi-dimensional now.

Conversations that can draw out the nuances beyond the dominant narrative and become valuable learning experiences, each different, all connected by a common thread are part of what Robert Scoble, in a brilliant piece that’s music to our ears here, has called ‘the coming age of molecular information’.

Atomistic messages are ineffective when planned to stand alone in a worldwide web; advertising is being replaced by networks of active and passive recommendations, by the semiotics of the web (which doesn’t have a commercial break) and by affinity, relevance and trust. These are the attributes that story-telling can bind together that go well beyond the ‘drive the message’ mindset of old style marketing, or trying to sense out a singular message out of metadata.

Scoble’s identified that technically we’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to curating and parsing large volumes of related information well, whether it’s metadata, messages, stories or conversations.

In the meantime however, everyone on the web has an opportunity to look at their inbound and outbound communications, and ask themselves how the metadata, messages, stories and conversations they’re involved in are weaving together. That common purpose is the kernel of a terrific story, and a whole raft of meaningful relationships, that are waiting to happen.
What’s clear is simplistic ways of information digestion, whatever the label, can only take us so far.

All our communications skills of the past millennia suggest that it’s the visceral experiences that matter and that mean we internalise the message, and those experiences come from how the information impacts against us, in what context, how, and who with.

Questions about the nature of human connectivity are now at the epicentre of what constitutes and creates personal, commercial and social value.

How will leaders connect with stakeholders in order to be able to do their jobs, and what are the appropriate business models with which to develop connectivity to build business?

Many organizations are yet to integrate the benefits of network effects fully into their business models. As I watched the social media discussions at Davos last week from the comfort of my own desktop, what I observed was a group of decision-makers, however, becoming increasingly aware of the impact that social media is going to have, that when they make their decisions there may be, at least metaphorically, other people in the room. Social business is bringing with it a big shift, and the key is that it involves going from messages to experiences.

There’s no doubt that C level curiosity around this is subject has been aroused; it’s becoming palpable, but whether it’s a pandora’s box or a burning platform is unidentified and uncertain. As Jeff Jarvis tweets, what’s the endgame of ‘FT’s @johngapper sitting on floor; Facebook investor standing: Davos democracy’?

‘Who claims that open is good?’ Steve Jobs has said, and it’s a good question, but as Don Tapscott countered in the Davos session, ‘companies have to undress for success’. When it comes to positioning this, in fact the ethics matter as much as the technology. Blatant integrity might be better, more nuanced and more appropriate, than open.

From ‘Veni vidi vici’, Julius Ceasar and the first days of empire, to ‘ipod, iphone, ipad’, and the liberation of the individual through gadgetry, this is an iterative process. It has always been this way. Now is the time to open up to the experience with integrity.

Carver Mead, a leading computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, once said, “Listen to the technology; find out what it’s telling you.” Biz Stone has said the same thing about Twitter. At a NESTA session in December, Biz talked about how he’s spent the last two years listening to Twitter, telling him what it wants to be.

Technology is a finite game. It will ultimately solve all the problems it’s capable of addressing, now matter how shiny and new it seems now. What’s a more infinite game are the opportunities of human connectivity, all the shades of creation that are possible to conceive collectively.

A very modern form of disenfranchisement, being denied a networked identity, may become the ultimate social sanction of this century. That kind of ban from the cloud may have the same tarnish as the casting out of convicts to the far flung reaches of Australia two hundred years ago, as just as far an isolation away from the heart of a new civilization. Do we want that, especially at a time when one of the biggest risks we create as we emerge from seismic change, is a lack of education literacy that leads to us creating two societies, not one?

To help answer the question, Chris Brogan’s ‘The Third Tribe’ community launched this week. Chris Brogan, the man behind the move towards more human business, has a price for connectivity and membership to his tribe in the form of a monthly subscription. Subscription however doesn’t create a community, it creates a service, and with it comes a different ambience.

My friend Ed Brenegar’s put it like this ‘popularity in a free environment does not necessarily equate to value in a paid one’ and social connectivity means cost equations have changed. Purchase and purpose are more related, they come together via shared commitments, and purchase might take many forms and currencies – time given, attention focused, contributions made, as well as cold, hard cash.

The old school calls to consume don’t count for as much as they used to, whilst generative connections are growing in value.

I’ve paid upfront sight unseen for the value of being part of collaborative initiatives I believe in. There are causes that are redefining what participation in not-for-profit initiatives can mean and what it’s capable of achieving, and there are communities worth investing in heavily simply because of the quality of the leadership and freedom of connection.

Trust is the synaptic fluid of social business. In that context I think Chris Brogan, as a Trust Agent and because his stock in trade is his humanity, has erred. Trust is an intimate thing and monthly subscriptions are what we do when buying a network utility.

For anyone who wants to monetize social connectivity like in Davos, the key lies in differentiating value delivery appropriately, in understanding where brokerage can be paid for and value consumed, and where service and facilitation that’s free are crucial to delivering co-created value.

There are a number of industries where liberating co-created value is an increasingly important item on the agenda. The government burden of management in face of budget cutbacks, the healthcare requirement to develop insights that can make R&D cheaper, all business that benefits from streamlining business processes that can remove overhead, that knows that pump-priming marketing an increasingly expensive activity.

Old business models are yielding fewer returns. Generative listening is an antidote to the velocity of today’s overloaded information flows. The action potential contained within committed, visceral and trustworthy human relationships, that’s at the heart of the social connections, has never been more important. It’s the synaptic fluid of social business.

There’re a few moments in history when one great age gives way to another. As the industrial age gives way to the digital one, Seth Godin’s Linchpin may quite possibly be a book that marks the crossroads and becomes a crucial link in the chain of business development.

Quoting Doug Rushkoff, Seth Godin mentioned in his opening address about Linchpin that the Dark Ages were an under-appreciated chapter in history, the impetus for a renaissance , a blossoming of art and cultural expression. In a similar way in this depressed economy, Linchpin may be a turning point for the human being, the industrial cog in the factory machine.

In the globally connected world, Linchpin can be viewed as an important call for our evolution.

Since Seth Godin wrote Tribes last year, a book that turned accepted norms about brands and organisations upside down, the social media revolution that’s happened since has been in many ways a well-meaning banner in need of a business case. Linchpin is the book that seeks to address that.

The economics of Adam Smith and the industrial age decreed that wealth is created by the division of human labour. This has charted our commercial course for the last two hundred years and is described by Seth today as being a ‘race to the bottom’. The digital age, he argues, in my view absolutely correctly, will generate wealth through the creation of sustainable social benefit, by solving interesting problems and leading, all of which requires new skills and capabilities.

Welcome to the contribution economy as a route to wealth generation. Whilst established organizations can find it difficult and slow to change, this is the place where the seismic shift of being digital and the implications and possibilities for businesses that social connectivity creates are carrying on regardless.

Linchpin focuses on the granularity of where future excellence will come from, the individual people and catalysts who are making a difference, as a complex, connected, global society creates new value for unique and differentiated DNA. Seth set this point out in ‘Small is the New Big’ and ‘Linchpin’ is another step in the same direction.

The essential point is that, as we start to make sense of a new commercial matrix of transactions and relationships, the crossroads that marks the real start of the digital age has two pathways.

One is for businesses built on interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. They’re likely to be consigned the fate of the wage slave, both separately and collectively.

The other is for those that generate value through making visceral connections and actions that move people. They will ‘create art that changes the nature of the recipient’. They will engage in activity in which ‘the best that can be done is not already known’ and they’ll encourage the talent of the best people around them, the Linchpins, to do it. They will be the safer bets for investment.

Digital transparency means personal reputation increasingly supplements corporate reputation and it’s the people behind the business that are its equity more now than ever. Linchpin is a manifesto for those that want to play that kind of part in business and how it develops from here on in.

There’s a catch of course, in that the greatest challenge we have to tame doesn’t come from the ecosystem around us but from within ourselves, from the lizard brain, the resistance, that’s an incarcerating force and a limiter of potential.

Linchpin is a dare to dream big, personally, professionally, collectively. If the factory approach now is a ‘system to take in the ordinary’, then the Linchpin philosophy is a call to awaken the genius within. It encapsulates the challenge of being social, which is to inspire others and it does it with great style. The marketing alone for Linchpin is a masterclass all by itself.

As is usually the case with Seth, the message is a deceptively simple one whilst being, at the same time, hugely significant. It’s his prescience and crystal clear insight that makes Linchpin such a gift in itself, brave, raw and challenging.

Seth Godin launched Linchpin in New York City last week on a cold January morning and it was a thrill to be there. He is a master of making people feel special, of inspiring others and, as Jacqueline Novogratz said at the time, of telling it how it is.

A hat-tip to Shawn McCormick for the picture.

Look around any airport departures area and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands, of logos. Destination stations are an iconographists nirvana.

Those excitedly stating the day of the brand is over need only wander through an environment like this to think again. Brands are signposts, identities encapsulated, and put in your face to say ‘buy me’.

With more information coming our way than ever, these signposts are a shorthand to navigate quickly, to help make the most of blink decisions, to tune in or tune out in a nanosecond.

If a brand is distinctive and recognizable it serves a helpful purpose by standing for something an audience can recognise. So much for brands as signposts.

Some brands go further than this. They’re recognisebly a signal, a conversation, and not just a company. They’re brands coming to terms with two-way dialogue and enabling their people to have those conversations in real time. These are the types of organizations I like to work with.

Enabled by social technology and communications, these brands recognise that data is the new oil, a new lubricant for business performance, and that data streams flowing back and forth are a vital force, a lifeblood.

By monitoring and understanding perceptions, they’re also honing their abilities to move according to dynamic information, they’re going off the page to be fleeter of foot than a business plan, tuning into their ecosystem to become biologically more agile than their peer group. They’re gearing up to be the mainstays of their communities.

But even these are not necessarily businesses with a pulse. There’s a difference between making a noise and generating a powerful experience. And the key to powerful experiences? They linger and they can be recalled.

Measuring click throughs, page rates and dwell times are of course useful in terms of signal measurement, they can determine some signal strength, but a visceral business can also possess the scope to harness the action potential within a relationship, and it is retrospective analysis and recall that registers the depth of an impression. That’s what tells us when something has moved us.

Digital media may be inching towards real time dialogue, but it’s still not built into the way many organizations interconnect with their users. We have a long way to go. While we’ve been busy looking forward at brave new social futures over the last year, there is, as yet, little recognition of the power of harnessing hindsight, and the importance and the opportunities to be gained from retrospective search.

Particularly at this time of the year, as we take stock and gather perspectives on the last one, it becomes easier to realize what things stood out as making a difference. If something can’t be remembered, it’s questionable to define it as having had much of an impact.

The way the web has virtually eliminated the cost of transaction means without this kind of visceral interrelationship it’s arguable whether any value creation has taken place.

Truly social businesses will have memories, something to incorporate into the communications equation. Along with dramatically reducing the cost of distribution and transaction, the web also dramatically lowers the cost of organization. Enterprises and ideas with a pulse are the ones around which people convene all over the world, and the ones that people want to flock to.

It is their strength of vision that’s the differentiator within these enterprises. Being able to connect with a well articulated vision lies at the heart of ability to move people and engender commitment within them. What lies beyond the bottom line is the anti-factory mantra and what’s likely to generate the most out of people.

If the social web powers new levels of relationship and lowers the cost of transactions, then inspiring movement figuratively within people is a big part of its potential. And, as mentioned in this blog before, if the hashtag defines new meeting points around which interests can accumulate, so new value can be found in enterprises that connect, that pulsate, inspire and organise people in this way.

Brands with pulses are essentially experiences, whether they are corporate or personal brands. The best ones are powerful experiences, they are fabric of life brands and linchpin ingredients in people’s lives.

it’s interesting to think how all this will affect marketing in the future, whilst this is being typed at 40,000 over the mid Atlantic, and I’m travelling to meet up with a #linchpin of some magnitude.

Interesting too, maybe, to think what your brand is about. Is it a signpost, a signal or a pulse?

Doubt over how social media improves productivity is a common question. Surely, dabbling around in social media doesn’t allow anyone to do any real work. As 2009 comes to an end, the year that will probably be remembered as the big bang of the social revolution, it’s a good time to think about a social sense of productivity.

Social productivity might mean a number of things from here on in. It might refer to the enormous potential to serve up the kind of aggregated information that connectivity can create, more information consumption pushed through bigger pipes.

That’s a kind of productivity, save for Michael Arrington’s prediction however, that ‘the rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly’. This is the kind of productivity that can mean the death knell for hand crafted content, an age of what is, in effect, even more passive consumption fuelled by neurospin and a continuous conveyor belt of content.

However much this may be a possible productivity scenario, it’s not an appealing one, and it’s still very much a product of the factory mindset, that thing that arguably the social media revolution allows us to, and needs to, change.

So another question is can being social improve productivity by creating a contribution instead of a consumption economy, and value that comes through solving problems instead of consuming resources? As we shift from a preoccupation with factory structures to more seamlessly networked organizations, will the ability to lead, to build, to influence and resonate, with contributions made within a network help alter the lens which we use to define what productivity is?

2010 may well be the year of a great ‘attention crash’ to use Marshall Manson’s phrase. Think of 1929 but without the money. It may be a year of sense-making and lead to an active screening out of content, which is already happening, the like of which we’ve never seen before, bringing with it big implications for marketers. What way for productivity then?

The rise of Twitter has heralded a simple truth essentially that, long as there is the # hashtag, one’s state of mind will triumph over marketing. Hashtags allow people to collect around what matters to them more than how they identify themselves through brands. Hashtags make shared and common experiences sticky. So what does that mean in terms of productivity, when endlessly hurling output at a market ceases to be of value in the way it used to be because it can’t connect with that.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs set out a trajectory for the evolution of the human species that places self-actualization at its peak. It is a framework for enlightenment, enabled by ‘morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts’. Free distribution gives greater access than ever before to self-actualization, it creates the opportunity to find and develop new forms of value.

And Theory U from The Presencing Institute suggests that to make something of the social potential that exists in 2010 means looking at productivity as a generative experience, and shifting from factory indices of productivity to a networked and social alternative.

Productivity is different in an age influenced by social media. Social communication is not about ‘driving the message’, it is permission-based. Neither is social productivity about pushing output. Social productivity rises exponentially when formative experiences and iterative, real-time learnings create a mutual and co-created value that comes from developing new insights and implementing the solutions that come from them collaboratively.

The premium that comes from social productivity is that generative listening and receptivity can create a real desire to contribute and to be present. Goodbye big marketing spend, this is what brands in 2010 can most benefit from. This is a new kind of productivity, a social productivity coming from iteration, reciprocity and interconnectedness. This is productivity that supercedes consumption and allows for self-actualization in all its stickiness as the most potent marketing proposition there is.

If your business is based on community (which one isn’t), maybe reframing it to be productive in a social sense is worth looking at. A social sense of productivity has enough potential to dominate the agenda of new marketing, as long as in 2010 we are productive enough to develop the skills to let it to happen.

Hat-tip to Mike Baldwin for co-creating the graph with me. Best wishes to you for a very productive and fulfilling new year.

While it’s long been acknowledged that brands live primarily in the minds of those who perceive them and, as the residual impression one has of a brand, those impressions cannot be owned, it’s interesting how much marketing management still perceives branding as an inside-out kind of exercise.

In the not-for-profit sector, where having a cause to believe in is a large part its DNA, many marketers find it difficult to truly connect with the people for whom the cause has meaning, and where, sadly, institutionalized participation can mean little more than giving at arm’s length.

Child’s i Foundation changes all that. With an inspirational founder, Lucy Buck, and a mission to be a social community first and foremost, Child’s i is dealing with the desperate plight of child abandonment in Uganda where abject poverty means that every year, hundreds of abandoned babies are left to die, by the side of the road, in bus shelters and car parks, by desperate mothers who have lost the means to cope.

Child’s i is a social organization with the spirit of ‘by a community, for a community‘ at its heart. So when it came to thinking about the brand, we looked to our community for guidance about what it is about Child’s i that resonated with them too.

Focused on making connections that move people, with strength of vision and clarity of purpose, Child’s i is an example of just how much can be achieved by doing this. When four of us got together in a room to think about the essence of Child’s i, we had a tweet-up too and what it generated was a fantastic conversation.

We can believe in brands we’re a part of. Child’s i is a team of fantastic people, with a wide range of diverse skills from all over the world, each with the desire to create a positive change and contribute time, money and love, the kind of contribution that we can all appreciate. It’s a work in progress that we can see happening in real time, and that sense of being in something, a dynamic movement and force for change, is the glue that keeps us participating in the cause together.

As a social organization, with over £100,000 raised so far this year, and with Lucy’s achievement of winning the Vodafone World of Difference Award recently under her belt, Child’s i is creating an impact. The lease on the first transitional centre for abandoned babies is signed and Lucy’s going to Uganda to set it up next week.

I’m honoured to be Child’s i’s Trustee for brand communications and community because it is a brand to believe in and what they can be like. Our brand tweet-up recognized our aspirations, that one day, all charities will be made like this as the next generation of not-for-profits and all brands can be, too, as a manifestations of promises made, as organizations with brands that stand for intentional social benefit and of purpose beyond product that people can really buy into.

Child’s i has immense talent all around it, passionate people that are creating meet-ups and innovative fundraisers, on and offline. It’s the people who show up and contribute that make it special and unique, it creates formative experiences, and the impact of connecting and generating a dynamic solution to a pressing problem is a deeply fulfilling one.

If you’re interested in what we’re doing at Child’s i, please join in by checking out our awesome Buy a Brick wall for our home. We’d love with some delight to welcome you as a part of our community and for you to see the difference that we all can make collectively.

The idea that our brands are the sum total of the perceptions of others who experience us has never been more relevant. Twitter lists are a significant step towards the social integration of our identities into the wider ecosystem.

If you really want to know what marketing in 2010 might be about, this is a pretty good place to look.

And thanks to everyone who’s put me on their list.

Dopamine controls the flow of information in the frontal lobes from other areas of the brain. It is commonly associated with the pleasure system, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate a person proactively to perform certain activities.

Dopamine disorders can cause a decline in neurocognitive functions, especially memory, attention, and problem-solving. Reduced dopamine concentrations in the prefrontal cortex are thought to contribute to attention deficit disorder. Without enough positive experiences, the reach and the action potential of dopamine as a neural transmitter becomes limited.

I mention this because behavioral science and economics hold some possible answers to questions about how can we improve the efficiency of resources and quality of care across public and commercial services, and for many the answers can’t come soon enough.

In the midst of public spending cuts and ongoing recession, the burden of management of government agencies is magnified. It may become potentially overwhelming. The need exists to find new ways to free up resources, to work together on the continuous improvement of local communities, to create more efficient and collaborative gain.

Couple this burden with a disengaged and increasingly cynical public constituency and it’s enough to generate a severe social dopamine shortfall, however. There are already signals of cognition and engagement diminishing, of collective problem-solving running the risk of impairment. Many people neither know nor care about what potential exists in their communities and the benefits of local management beyond their own doorstep.

And it’s in this context that the lively, warmly welcomed and stimulating session at the London’s DataStore Workshop (@londondatastore) happened on Saturday, a great initiative led by Emer Coleman and the GLA Data Team and facilitated brilliantly by Paul Clarke. (Thanks to Emer too for the pictures used here).

GLA’s Help Us Free London’s Data #londondata discussed the why’s and how’s at the heart of a more open approach to data, what it might take to make it happen and a great bunch of intelligent people gathered to get the ball rolling. Alongside the hmg.gov.uk.data initiative, this is a fine approach to shared problem-solving, using data to unlock the hidden value of social communities collaborating in public services and looking at practical data-driven applications that can find new ways to manage them.

Yet the aches and pains of an impasse were evident. Developers are ready to get excited and make things, but the ease and convenience of accessing the data to do it is limited. Local government may dream of a reduced cost of management, but open data opens up risk and well as reward. In this context, to a behavioural scientist, the dopamine is already on a bit of a downslide.

So, what to do? The gap between intended and actual benefit of an initiative like this will be a margin of some measure until data visualizations and the proof points of data applications can inspire imagination, the dopamine required to encourage release of more data, to create a tipping point.

From the GLA and London DataStore’s point of view the crucial audience is the public agencies in London that have problems to solve. As the risk of stating the obvious, they have to ‘get excited and release things’ and, importantly I think, to be given the social capabilities to know how to deal with the consequences.

In Jonah Lehrer’s excellent book ‘How We Decide’, he describes how a real and specific value has been identified at the heart of learning from one’s mistakes and how the process of decision-making starts with fluctuations in dopamine. Errors are internalized by dopamine neurons, and the consequent shortfalls provide the stimulus to realize it. This is an iterative and formative feedback loop.

The dopamine neuron is an urgent and primal pulse. Put it together with data that’s open and it offers opportunity for local community management to improve, to do more with less, in ways that local and public services can benefit from.

At the heart of it all though is a new mindset, where public agencies re-evaluate what they stand for. To be favourably looked upon as adding value in an economically squeezed environment they have to see themselves as facilitators, instead of process managers, they have to have brands that champion their local communities, not themselves, and they need to learn to work like retailers of their local communities and their capabilities by harnessing the power of open data.

The reiterative learning that open data development can provide has the ability to insulate local public agencies from perceived management incapabilities. The creative value of @londondatastore and the developer community can really help visualize the benefits of this.

Navigating the way towards ease and convenience through use of data is a journey and it’s of paramount importance.

Congratulations are due to the whole GLA Data team involved with @londondatastore for the steps taken on Saturday. Now let’s work out where the biggest wins are so that data and dopamine combined can improve the health and function of public services, local community management and get us to the results we need.

Picture: The time is going by Neto Simões

The UK economy’s been reported as shrinking by another 0.4% over the last quarter. Contrary to how many predicted it would be, the expected step out of recession here hasn’t yet happened.

France and Germany have turned a corner allegedly, so the productivity margin between us and other major European countries is increasing.

That’s not good news and being last is not fun.

180 years ago, we were cutting edge. The UK hit the industrial revolution first. We had railways first, good plumbing ahead of the rest, our postal services began first, we industrialized first; we have old, cumbersome infrastructure to deal with.

At a deep psychological level, the UK has a lot to lose as a result of this recession, a loss of global prestige, a sense of established identity. Britain’s been a splendidly isolated island, uninvaded for 1000 years, while multicultural Britain is a newer, more vibrant and mixed up phenomenon.

Retraction back to what is known is tempting when traditional cultural assumptions are tested. I think the fascination with Nick Griffin is maybe because he represents that lack of desire to give up perceived superiority.

The shift from industrial to social ways of doing things in the UK involves dealing with entrenched industrial infrastructure and a shift in our ideas around communities. That’s the case in a lot of places but is arguably more pronounced here. We’re tackling the shift head on, together with the shame and iniquity of having to ‘learn to tolerate inequality’. At a global level, I wonder what side of that particular divide UK plc might end up on.

The pain of recession may be more acute here than elsewhere. The cathartic hope though is that it’s also a spur to adaptation, so we accept game-changing as a must-have more than a nice-to-have and, in doing so, experience a sense of renaissance.

The renaissance of crossing the threshold of decay back to vitality and growth is a powerful turnaround. Visceral responses, that twitch in the gut when something feels real, is a synaptic bridge to the excitement of new life. Combine future potential with past understanding and evolution towards a constructive directional path, and rebuilding Britain becomes possible.

The best of both worlds literally comes from the ability to combine the equity of a distinctive heritage with the potential asset value of what is now possible. That’s the kind of streamlined social cohesion that’s social business.

There’s a cultural paradox here – traditional British reticence, stiff upper lips, glorious independence and a preference for personal space have made us quite good at being social with computers. Twitter thrives in the UK, especially in London. We have some of the best creative minds and practitioners of social initiatives on the planet mile for mile. So this is the time for social business design to take Britain out of the industrialized doldrums. Adopting the principles of social business can encourage self-sustainable networks that balance themselves commercially, so that they are more streamlined and effective and can create the edge we need.

The commercial and social future potential of the UK will undoubtedly be affected by whether or not we do this and how well we do this. There lie the highs and lows of being first and last.