There are billions of people who are now connected but whose primary tools are handsets, texting and email.

These people are very poorly served by our western tool sets – computers, the web and social software.

While the uptake of Facebook is impressive at around 300 million – this is nothing compared to the universe who rely on the handset, text and email.

Like Twitter, Posterous is amazingly simple to use. It gets around many of the barriers for the hesitant. Billions know how to text or use email. Now they can have a place to share and show what interests them without having to learn anything new or to buy anything more.

I suspect that the Posterous guys have spotted something huge here. They have truly been thinking about the “underserved” Clay Christenson concept. They also know that it is best to start with “Good enough”.

But Posterous also helps the Western Hard Core Blogger.

As a long term blogger and user of the western tool set – my use of Posterous has transformed my own participation on the web. I find it sooooooooooo easy to use. In particular it enables me to aggregate the best material that I can find on my blog and to ensure that what I post gets the widest distribution.

Here I think is the nub.

Aggregation in focused areas -  mine would include the emergence of the network (local and global) in all sectors – such as in organization of all kinds, food, media and energy  – is where content value is enhanced. I have my own ideas but they are made better when I add related ideas of others – not just as links – but in large chunks – for after all I have a lot of real estate. You can see in a second whether you wish to read on or not. A set of links is more of a mystery ride.

I am finding that my blog has much more depth for very little added effort – my readership is up both in terms of views and time on the page. So others seem to agree.

The other part of the value is in giving me better distribution. With one simple action on Posterous – I not only post to my blog but to Twitter and to Facebook where I have overlapping but often different readers. As the social web becomes every more real time, I can throw a bigger rock into the river and cause more ripples.

These features I think can help those in media who are also seeking more focus on their web offerings and who seek a wider following. Posterous will enable hard pressed TV and Radio staff add more value and widen their reach.

Like Twitter, Posterous is deceptively simple. But also like Twitter, I think that we will see that this simplicity is key to its potential power.

Is this not a lesson for all adoption? To own a car in 1900 was to demand that you also had a mechanic. Over time, cars inside became ever more complex, but using them became ever more simple. The more simple, the cheaper, the more people adopted them.

Simple isn’t it!

This slide shows what happens to children’s language as they approach Emergence in the 3rd picture on the right.

I think our use of Twitter can track this trajectory. At first it was me and a few friends that I knew from my face to face or blogging life prior to Twitter.

Then in the last 3 years, I have added a few more friends from the Twitterverse. These in my case have come mainly from Pub Media and from the Bryant Park Gang that Morphed into the Planet Money Gang.

I exclude myself from the many who merely add thousands of folks indiscriminately. I have added several hundred of these but I find that only 1 or 2 have been people that I have learned to care about or interacted with in a good way. The Dunbar number is not a nice to have but a Rule!

What I have immediately seen from the new lists that are emerging around the two and related areas of my interest – the PM/BPP Gang and Pub Media – is that I have some real gaps. Those that created the lists whom I like care for and admire have people that I don’t know and who don’t know me.

But it is highly probable that we will get on – your friend is my friend!

So we move toward phase 3. When we get a critical mass of Trust – Affection – Attraction then don’t we get close to “Emergence” being possible?

Andy Carvin’s NPR News List would surely make an incredible starting point for more experiment – now add to it his Pub Camp list and you have the 300 Spartans!

This then is power.

A large, talented and also diverse group that has a large bond of trust.

Such a group can surely take on the “Persians” of our time?

What hit me as I watched was the attitude of the young people in the film – do you ever imagine that they will feel comfortable in an organization that does not allow access to social media?

So if you don’t allow this – what’s your plan?

We have so little time that if we are to face our challenges directly and use Emergence as a process, that we have to know what to do. We have to know the science and hence the predictable rules?

Because we know the rules for electromagnetism, we can use them to change our world. My bet is that we we know the rules for how best to use the social energy of people, amplified by social media, we may change the world even more than when we first amplified our group potential when we acquired complex language.

Then we created consciousness.

We were able to discuss novelty into being – the very essence of Emergence. And for most of this time, all of this happened like this – face to face in small groups.

What might happen, if we can expand our circle from face to face to a global conversation but with the same intimacy? If the result 60,000 years ago was so momentous then – what might be our destiny now?

With our place in the world in such jeopardy, global warming, resource shortages, peak oil, political logjams – we don’t seem to be making any progress with our current way of “seeing” and “acting”. I wonder if our only hope to “see” our place more clearly and to “discover” solution that will work is to press for a larger process of Emergence. If we could harness a global conversation, what might be the result.

In parts 1 and parts 2 – I have done my best to offer a directional approach to this voyage of discovery.

Now we come to the hard part. What are the rules. For if social energy is as real as electro-magnetism, it will have rules.

That once we know them, we can make a break from mere speculation, techno babble and kumbya and design in the full power of social media to make this great link up that it offers. Then we can get to work.

In the prior posts, I have talked about the utility of this way of seeing the preconditions for human emergence.

We need a Container – the Circle of Concern. We need inside this a boiling mass of many connected points – the Circle of Influence.

We need to know what are the rules to produce the best container and the best circle of influence within it.

The Rules for the Container – What makes containers more powerful than others?

The container is a force multiplier. Like a boiler – the more pressure the more force and hence work. The ideal container is then an energetic multiplier that brings into play the full energy of human beings. All of them and every part of them.  It creates complete alignment and hence the full energetic force becomes available. So what does our observation tell us about when is their an event that brings all of people and all people together as one? Usually it is when we are at war – in a war of survival – like WWII.

Observation reminds us that Tribal Survival is the ultimate Circle of Concern.

So what in the modern era is Tribal? I don’t think that it is a group of sports fans. They are bonded by a conformity and by identifying with what others do. In a way sports fans may be people who would like more of a cause but have no other choice in the drab world we live in. It’s not the work force of a traditional organization. There is not enough equality in the rewards or risks. Also there is too much conformity demanded in most traditional organizations.

For we can also see that conformity is death to emergence. It was the added diversity that made up the gains in the last months of the Netflix prize. Really new ideas are by nature disruptive. Too much conformity hates disruption.

It can’t just be the folks on the web we feel most comfort with as well – for the same reasons of diversity. The Echo Chamber is where we get stuck in a repeating loop. We know that most disruptive ideas are mergers of other views and ideas.

A real tribe is much more complex and diverse. Diversity is the critical ingredient. So the challenge is how do you get people who are so different to work with each other?

Shared risk seems to be one way.

Designing social groups so that the risk is real and shared is how many older societies enabled this diversity to have its full power. You can see it in the Shield Wall or the Phalanx. All male citizens were in them. All ranks of society, all professions, all sets of personal values, all shapes and sizes. They were united by a shared danger. They relied on each other to get through this. And behind them stood their wives, their children. Behind them stood their culture and their identity as a group. All were at risk. All had to be contributors.

If you wish to feel this energy – here is a link to the defining moment of the South, as Lew Armistead gives the orders for his Brigade to begin Pickett’s charge. They fight not for slavery but for all they have. For “Virginia” known as “Our country”. In the scene preceding he shows the British officer the diverse nature of the men there that day – from aristocrat to farm boy – all points of view – all sorts – united as brothers “All Virginia is here” Armistead says.

I think that such a mix – diverse – contributing/participative – high stakes for all – makes the most powerful containers for human emergence. Don’t we live at a time now when this is again true? For if we don’t do the right thing, is not all at risk?

Tribal Issues defined like this make the best containers – the more that the threat is immediate, widespread and dangerous, the more power it has to produce the preconditions for emergence. The more that people can see that they can and should act themselves, the more that this energy is maximized.

The more the issue is truly life or death for the Tribe – the more contextual and rooted in the soul of the people  – the more that the solutions are participative the more powerful the container.

We don’t have to go to war to find this energy. What about people living in Detroit now? What about California? I am seeing that there is a group of people, with their backs to the wall, who have stopped looking “out there” for help. Who will not run. Who are going to create something themselves. They are banding together into a circle of concern that is “Their Country”.

I was in a meeting last week with some people who were telling of colleagues who were tired of the low risk route. “I want to die on a hill” said one. I don’t think he really wanted to die – but he did want to be connected with people in that way. Don’t most of us long for this kind of commitment. With it, trust is so high that emergence is possible.

Trust – real trust – comes from shared risk and shred experience in risk. With very high trust comes openness and with enough mass and enough openness comes emergence.

In summary here appear to be the rules for the optimal “Container” or “Circle of Concern”

• Tribal survival – where all are at risk and all can be rewarded – this then goes on to allow
• High levels of Trust – this goes on to allow
• Maximum Diversity – this then sets the conditions for
• Emergence

So now what might be the rules for the Circle of Influence?

The Rules for the Circle of Influence – What makes influence more powerful?

We know what the Circle of Influence has to look like – It has to look like this.

For emergence occurs in scale free networks and this is what they look like. So we have a check point – if your Circle of Influence does not look like this – it is not optimal.

Note that they have hubs of major concentration of “influence” (All these great slides come from Ricard V Sole’s – ICREA-Complex Systems Lab, UPF, Barcelona & Santa Fe Institute, USA talk at ECCS at Jerusalem Sept 2008). So we can expect our human energy networks to have this pattern.

The Circle of Influence is not an undifferentiated mass of people and connections. It will be made up of fractal clumps of “cells” that will lean towards being optimal in influential power. So it will not be about having 5,000 Twitter Followers but it will be about what is the ideal number to have to maximize influence.

Not this- You and masses of “friends”

But this – You and a a few close friends connected to other close friends in a huge scale free network

Another view of Scale Free – Thanks to Valdis Krebs

So the pattern is clear. It is lots of small networks hyper linked to others. We also know from the brain that the more links the better. Linking is good. More is better. Best is the most possible.

But what about the detail – how big are these cells and what are they like inside?

The answer to how big is not very big. We know how big is ideal and we know why as well.  All these little sub-networks are ideally bounded by the Magic Numbers of Fibonacci. Here is the most complete review of this new science of the nature of ideal human connections that I have been able to assemble

Here is Chris Allen’s research into group satisfaction:

Here is his observation about Guild sizes in WOW

We know what groups work best and under what circumstances. 8 is the ideal group where we find the tightest connection in the largest group. 144 is the maximum – likely that the power of the connection is much weaker at 144. Where is the most leverage? Likely at 34. This may be where the connection is tightest versus the reach. 2 – 3 – 5 may be too tight and too close?

Across all militaries the ideal unit sizes are:

• 8 – Squad/Section
• 35 – Platoon
• 150 – Company

There are thousands of years of experimentation involved in these numbers. They are not made up they have emerged!

So these numbers seem very small to all those that have 15,000 Twitter followers and think that they are connected. How do such small groups have the power to have massive influence?

I think the key rule here is “Influence”. Not Malcolm Gladwell’s idea of a few people who have a lot more influence that the rest of us – though I still know there to be merit in that.

I think that we come back to Trust again. If you are a real friend of mine and you ask me to look at something or to do some thing, it is a good bet that I will say yes. The rule then is to find the sweet spot between reach – total numbers – and influence – how much we trust each other.

Even small groups have a lot of total influence. H\here is an example of the reach if we assume that each of our “friends” has 4 friends

2 – 16

3 – 82

5 – 625

8 – 4,096

13 – 28,561

34 – 1,336,336

55 – 9,150, 625

89 – 62, 742,241

144 – 429, 981, 696

With 34 I can reach 1.3 million with a lot of power of influence. With 144 I can reach 429 million but I have doubts about the power of the influence.

Even with 8 I can reach 4,000 and be assured that I will have a lot of influence.

With a scale free network, it may be better to think small but to work to ensure that we have the best connections.

So here we come to the biggest challenge – Emergence demands diversity as well as connections. We can only trust people like us. If all our “friends” are in the echo chamber, we lose the chance. How do we make connections to other cells out there who are not like us? Even harder, how do we make Trusted connections to people not like us?

For true diversity is not about race or color but about values. Way out geeks or creative people don’t care much for money or efficiency. Hey many don’t even know what day it is. Those who need to win look at nurturers with contempt. Those who care about how things work and about people are mystified by people who don’t.

This is I think the most challenging part of the “Rules” and fortunately, my pal Stuart Baker may have found the answer here as well.

If we have a true survival situation, then we tend to get alignment. But what about a less do or die situation? Also even in a do or die situation how do we reduce the friction of the essential diversity.

Our bodies are very diverse and full of many separate and even opposing processes and entities. But there is a design that regulates the system to trend to homeostasis. Not a God – not a parent – not a CEO – but a simple regulating process that BALANCES the system.

In genetics, P53 is the “governor” of the system – it is the mechanism where the system defaults to homeostasis – it “moderates” or “facilitates” the interactions.

We have to find the “Governor” that will enable the different parts of the human soup get comfortable getting connected. Stuart Baker starts with an extremely simple model of what the gross differences are in the human mindset that makes up the full diverse human experience. It looks like this:

Humans can be grouped into 3 realms of mindset. Of course this is a very simple view but this is how science works we have to start here with simple. I will confine myself to the positive – there are shadow sides to these archetypes as well.

Pioneers – a few of us love ideas more than anything – no guesses as to who I am. We live in our heads. We would rather work for free if it meant that we could do more thinking and exploring. Organizations find us hard to “manage” – we tend to be quite fragile emotionally. We tend not to think enough about how people feel. We are intellectual – in that our minds are where we spend most of our best time. We look to the new. Creating the new is our most important thing. We hate the mundane routines of life. Often found in academia.

Nurturers – there are lots of us here – my wife is one thank goodness for me. We look out for others as a priority. We defend the hearth – many soldiers are here! We do for others – this is not just emoting. We are pragmatic in our care. We want to help people become all they can be. (The dark side is that we want to make people dependent on us)We are relational – in that we spend most of our energy on relationships. We are traditionally conservative. The new scares us. Protecting is the most important thing. Often found in government.

Providers – We bring home the bacon. We are very action orientated. We take care of business. We tend not to be very empathic. We tend to be transactional. We find most thinkers too airy fairy and we find many nurturers too whiny. We are active – we need to WIN. We don’t think much about the future and we need to get our information in simple chunks that we can act on right away. We spend most of our time competing. Winning is the most important thing. Often found in business.

Do you see yourself here? You can also see why it is so hard to get out of the Echo Chamber. What Pioneer feels good with the typical no sayer of the Nurturing type or the trivial mindless focus on winning today of the Provider? You can see my bais but please insert your own back – that is my point – this is a hard mix to bring together.

This is why survival is one of the ways of doing that.

But what about day to day life? How can we bridge and balance these opposing groups?

Here is Stuart’s huge insight. That this pattern is of course Fractal.

Inside each of us is a fractal of the whole. Like atom forming into molecules, we can see the linking and the bridging points.

In the Pioneer realm there are Pioneers whose tendency is either to Nurture or Provide. In the Nurturer and Provider realms there are those who tend to the other realms.

So then there is one more step to optimize the balance in this system.

This is a model of a client of mine – the PEI BioAlliance. A Cluster/Emergence Making Network of “cells” with a Circle of Concern of using research into how nature works to improve the economy and society that is PEI.

What we discovered was that we had to add the equivalent of P53 to the mix. The BioAlliance Inc – that lives in the Nurturer Realm – is a small 3 person organization that “facilitates the balance of the system. It Holds the Space. Its director is not the CEO – he is the Facilitator. He is responsible for maintaining trusted links and for creating the habit of trust based on the continual experience of its value in the day to day interactions of the group.

If you wish to know more here is a link to the story of the early trials and failures and the ultimate success of this venture.

In the centre is a board made up of all the parts and all the realms. Here issues of trust are worked out and here is where the larger value of the whole is often realized.

So ideally a p53 – a system facilitator ideally should be designed into a network that seeks emergence. This is what allows the most important aspect of all – there must be the full diversity of being human in play for the best emergent results. All 3 realms must be aligned.

Here is how Dr Chet Richards – John Boyd’s St Paul illustrates the challenge.

We have to use facilitation to get heree:

Whew! This is a long post and I have only really scratched the surface. So let’s close now with a summary.

• The optimal Circle of Concern will be about Tribal Survival – all must be in the zone of risk and reward
• The Circle of Influence – has to be a scale free network – no other design replicates nature’s precondition
• The Circle of Influence ideal cell size is small and relies on the links to scale – there is a design of reach and pull to optimize here – it will be found in the Fibonacci sequence
• The Circle of Influence must be diverse – we have to get out of the echo chamber – ideally all three realms must be balanced and included – this is very hard to do
• To get the best alignment/balance – we need a balancing agent/facilitating agent/p53 – this lives in the Nurturing Realm and must be very small – it is an agent not a CEO
• The live blood of an optimized system is Trust

I am going to take a break and then talk more about how this might be put in place. I will use 2 case studies and Stuart and Rory Francis and I are starting to make some short films about this too.

In my first post in this series I proposed that if we use the ideas of Emergence we might find the larger opportunity in Social Software – that it may help us solve many of our intractable problems.

That Social Software – if used properly – might have the same explosive impact on human society and our connection to the rest of the planet that the acquisition of complex language did 60,000 years ago.

If you are still with me – let’s remind ourselves of what drives emergence generally and then see if we can find the model for humans and then how Social Media may fit. What would using Social Software “Properly” mean?

To have Emergence you need 3 elements:

• You need some kind of “Container” - An Environment that is optimal for the Emergence in question. This can be physical such as the ideal environment for an Acorn to reach its potential as a tree Or it can be physical and energetic such as the physical and the social environment needed for a baby to be set on her way to reach her potential.

• You need a lot of “Optimal Contact Points“ – Emergence is all about patterns. To have patterns you need many points of connection. Computers are not able to become conscious because they don’t have enough synaptic connections. They have a few hundred – the human brain has billions. A Human with too small a social world cannot reach her potential. 3 birds cannot make a flock. A few breezes don’t make a hurricane. A few stars do not make a galaxy. No flow in water and you cannot have a vortex. When man had no complex language, he could not communicate widely enough to make much technical progress. He could not create patterns. A father might show his son how to carve a hand ax but an emergent breakthrough like a throwing stick or a bow and arrow would be beyond them. For without complex language enabling abstractions and enabling a large circle of participants the creation of patterns – abstract thinking and design cannot happen. For then, if it could not be seen and copied it could not happen

• You need a few rules that both shape the pattern and also keep it coherent. As we learn more about complexity, we are astounded by how few the rules are and how often they are so simple. With computers it is easy to model bird flocking now. But, to get the pattern, we also need the process of iteration and we need a computer to do the math. But to model, we need to know the rules. Nature always has rules. Nature’s rules always have a mathematical base. We now know the rules of Electro Magnetism. There will be rules for Social Energy as well. They will be few. They will be fractal. They will need to be iterated. This is not Kumbya – there will be a science here.

So can we posit what the essence of these 3 requirements may be to offer us a chance of seeing the true workings and the real potential for Social Software? I think we can. In this remaining part of this post, I will point directionally to where I see the answers. In the next post I am going to speculate about the details.

So stripped back to the essentials I think that we can see the Container and the Connections in the following single picture. This model is from BreakOuttheBox

I see this as a “Sun”. I think that the “Container” is the Circle of Concern. Inside the Container is the “Mass” the boiling energy of the interactions of people that are connected around the Circle of Concern or as I think it is better put – The Intent. Not its mission – its Intent – it should move naturally and energetically to the Intent.

So what then is the energy that shines out of the container and grips the hearts and minds of the people?

There is surely a gradient here. Cubs fans are energized by their team. Employees of a well know brand enjoy being connected to it.  But would they die for it?

Many parents will die for their kids. Men in combat will die for their small circle of mates.

So if this is the gradient, is there a sweet spot?

I think that there must be.  I suspect that most of us want more than to work for shareholder value or for the abstraction of a bureaucracy. We long for a real cause. I suspect that many of us are sports fans because we long to belong to a cause that is larger than ourselves but cannot find it in our day to day life.

Does our past and our nature offer us a clue for the rule here?

In tribal times there was no separation between work and life and play. There was no separation between family and work. There was no separation between the people involved and the collective reward.

But today we are so splintered. Only parts of us parent, partner, work, play. Our energy is fragmented.

My bet is that the ideal is to re-align most of us back as a whole. For example, in the really depressed cities in America such as Cleveland or Detroit, all could get together to “Re-invent” their city to provide all with a livelihood and a future.

The answer to the ideal Intent or Circle of Concern is that it will include most of our total needs and our identity. It will help us align our energy more fully.

A great sun has also to have Mass. So what might this be in human and social terms? What is the Circle of Influence?

We can see this in two simple examples. A single mum or a single acorn has a very slim chance. They don’t have enough mass. A Tribal Family and an Oak Forest do have the optimal mass. They offer a very good chance of continuing life and expanding complexity – emergence.

But while the container has to have some scale and mass, in human terms, the scale has to be made up in fractal segments that are still small enough to keep the human connections viable. Healthy cities are really collections of villages or neighborhoods. Prison and large high schools are not healthy because they don’t have human scale subsets. Most traditional organizations are not healthy because they are not made up of tribes and or neighborhoods. Departments are not tribes!

Also there must be diversity. An oak forest is made up of many living things – it is the opposite of a monoculture. In Permaculture, no plant is planted on its own. They are planted in “Guilds” – natural diverse groupings that support each other in complex ways – adding nutrients – keeping predators away etc. Permaculture is an intentional way of replicating the optimal design of nature.

So following this rule, a modern family – 2 parents or less and children is not diverse enough to offer the kids a broad enough world view. School is often a monoculture as are most workplaces. Diversity in not about race or disability etc. We have got distracted by our post modern view of the world. Human diversity is about world view and POV.  Are you out going or shy? Are you a natural Early Adopter or maybe even a Laggard? Are you an ideas person or a pragmatist? Are you a warrior of a nurturer? This is our true diversity. A healthy group contains all of these types.

For Emergence depends on the synthesis of difference. As we all know, connecting a lot of this kind of difference productively is a major major challenge. I will have a lot to say about how we might do this in the next post for this is an area where we need more than good intentions. We need good process.

So the Mass part of the human ideal container needs an ideal scale for humans and it needs the maximum world view diversity.

Bottom line – the ideal Container has an Intent that can fulfill most of what we need to make us whole as a person. The ideal Mass inside the Container is a network of fractal units of people that are very diverse but united by the Intent and are highly connected. Like a brain!

In the last post in this series, I will share with you work that helps us know what the rules are for the ideal human fractal components will be and also how to make connections that work across the barriers of human diversity.

What is the ideal scale of influence? What will naturally help say the warrior, the geek and the nurturer connect productively?

Part 3 – The Rules and the Emerging Science

What you might ask is “Emergence”. Here is an example of how each of us as humans acquire the scale free use of language:

Let me explain – I have a one year old grand daughter now so I am re living all of this. At around 9 -12 months, the child starts to make sounds – it is training the muscles. At about 12 – 18 months, it starts to use single words – Dada is usually first – so unfair but easier to say than Mama. It starts to use simple connectors such as “It” “a” “. 18 months – 24, the child adds a few direct verbs and qualifiers such as “more”. Then, as if by magic Emergence!. The child starts speaking in whole sentences – the full acquisition of the structure of language has been achieved. In some cases children are all but silent until this point and one day they can speak full sentences.

How does this happen? The child needs a few simple but essential environmental factors to be in place. I will come to these at the end of this post becuase they are directly related to what may be needed to have Social Media offer us this opportunity for Emergence as well.

One more example.

An oak tree produces many acorns. Only a very small number grow to become a tree. All the potential of the tree is inside this tiny thing. To have Emergence so that it can become a tree, there has to be a number of environmental factors that offer the acorn, the best shot at reaching this potential. You can imagine with me as to what some of these might be. Not get eaten by a squirrel – falling far enough away from the parent or being dropped by a squirrel – the right soil/moisture – not being eaten by a deer – not being mowed by me etc. If enough of the factors are in place, then the acorn will become a tree.

Now here is a vital insight, once it gets to a certain size, it gets very robust and only man cutting it down with a saw or a big fire will prevent it from growing further and living a long time. It is vulnerable only for a relatively short time at the front end.

There is more. An acorn has more potential than a tree alone.

Under the right environmental circumstances, one tree will lead to another until there is a small wood. With a small wood in place, more Emergence! The wood bursts into a complex forest that not only has more trees but a huge supporting other ecosystem that itself depends on and supports the oak first. Such a forest is tremendously complex and long lasting and offers all its normal inhabitants the optimal environment for more scale and less risk.

So Emergence leads to more complexity and to more resiliency.  The resiliency is the reinforcement of the environmental factors that support the inhabitants of the system in reaching their full potential.

I am not clear about the ideal factors for Oak Trees. But the ideal factors for allowing children to reach their full potential are now known. My bet is that what works for infants works for all people. If we can be clear about what these few factors are, then we can see how Social Media might be used by us to go way beyond where are are right now.

An irony is that this little boy’s name is Acorn.

The link will take you to the research that has captured what Acorn and all of us need as human babies to set off on the pathway to our full potential or not. For if we don’t get the key factors we stall – stall for life.

Here are the key factors for our optimal development in simple form – as I list them, think of how your work place lines up or not to them. For this is what we all need all the time to be at our best as primates and humans.

• Culture is the most important environmental factor - The family culture has to offer the child a mix of clear boundaries of what is not allowed and yet also the child must be allowed a lot of room to explore inside these boundaries. It is Boundaries and Freedom. The child must be listened to and must have “conversations” with her parents. Very authoritarian parenting – all orders and all rules and all about the use of power over – is a huge shut down. All permissive – you choose baby is very unsafe and also leads to trouble in development.

• Touch Is the main pathway to getting the neurons to line up the right way. Recall – we are Primates. For all Primates Grooming is the essential social bond that not only mediates stress and but mediates power differences. Touch is the first step. Tone of Voice is related to Touch. For humans, gossip has replaced touch in adults. The key to gossip is being listened too! We know from the Romanian orphanages, that babies that are only tidied up and not touched in a loving way not only cannot thrive but often die! Transactional relationships are really really bad for us.

• Emergence is all about Patterns connecting to scale free – so how many words a child years by 2 is the last factor - Kids whose development cannot be stopped have heard up to 50 million words by 2. Kids who will  never develop fully will only have heard 10 million by the same age. They can never catch up

What we do know about Emergence is that it is Fractal. The key factors that support “Growth” do not change for scale. And also, that the chances of the key factors being in place, rise when there is a critical mass. An Oak forest offers the best shot for all who rely on its factors versus an acorn, a squirrel, a hawk, a truffle and a pig on their own.

When I saw the first slide in this post the other day – a light bulb went off for me. If this is how we acquire language and the optimal path for our own growth as a human, then the power of these connections inside the right social container could lead to something really special. The Netflix Prize story got me even more excited – for this showed how groups of people being connected had a major result as a consequence of the properties of Emergence.

If I am right, then we surely stand on the edge of a great awakening? Something like this happened 60,000 years ago, when humans acquired complex language itself. What might this mean for us? I can’t know. But we do know what happened 60,000 years ago. Human development exploded as did our ability to manipulate our world. Until then we were simply one of the species.

Now I fear that our reductive mindset based I think on our reliance on engineering rather than on Growth as the main process for getting more is putting us at risk as a species. Our only chance I think is to work with nature. If we as humans can find the best social container, we may have a chance.

So what container and how might social software help?

In the next post, I will get more specific about how we might translate these factors and Social Software into ideas about what the opportunity is. In the 3rd post in the series, I will share with you some brilliant supporting work that reveals how we might make better connections between us as a very diverse population. How we might solve the challenge of how to connect the geeks to the bureaucrats and to the business people – all of who have a very different world view.

Part 2 follows here

In the final stretch the breakthrough came when many of the teams joined forces – the big difference was made by adding teams that up to then had “got it wrong”. A great story of this competition is on Wired.

The secret sauce for both BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble was collaboration between diverse ideas, and not in some touchy-feely, unquantifiable, “when people work together things are better” sort of way. The top two teams beat the challenge by combining teams and their algorithms into more complex algorithms incorporating everybody’s work. The more people joined, the more the resulting team’s score would increase.

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“It’s been quite a drama,” said Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt at Monday’s awards ceremony. “At first, a whole lot of teams got in — and they got 6-percent improvement, 7-percent improvement, 8-percent improvement, and then it started slowing down, and we got into year two. There was this long period where they were barely making progress, and we were thinking, ‘maybe this will never be won.’

“Then there was a great insight among some of the teams — that if they combined their approaches, they actually got better. It was fairly unintuitive to many people [because you generally take the smartest two people and say 'come up with a solution']… when you get this combining of these algorithms in certain ways, it started out this ’second frenzy.’ In combination, the teams could get better and better and better.”

Ironically, the most outlying approaches — the ones farthest away from the mainstream way to solve a given problem — proved most helpful towards the end of the contest, as the teams neared the summit.

For instance, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (methodology here) credits some of its success to slicing the data by what they called “frequency.” As it turns out, people who rate a whole slew of movies at one time tend to be rating movies they saw a long time ago. The data showed that people employ different criteria to rate movies they saw a long time ago, as opposed to ones they saw recently — and that in addition, some movies age better than others, skewing either up or down over time. (Finally, someone has explained why Snakes On A Plane seemed more fun at the time than it does now.)

By tracking the number of movies rated on a given day as an indicator of how long it had been since a given viewer had seen a movie, and by tracking how memory affected particular movie ratings, Pragmatic Theory (later part of the winning team) was able to gain a slight edge, even though this particular algorithm isn’t particularly good at predicting which movies people will like when run on its own.

Another example: According to Joe Sill of The Ensemble, Big Chaos (the Austrians who also became part of the winning team) discovered that viewers in general tend to rate movies differently on Fridays versus Mondays, and certain users are in good moods on Sundays, and so on. The team essentially devised a three-dimensional model that incorporated time into the relationship between people and movies.

Taken on its own, the fact that a viewer rated a given movie on a Monday is a horrible indicator of what other movies they’ll want to rent — a crucial part of Netflix’ business (it says its recommendations are better indicators of what people will rent than their “most popular” lists). But combined with hundreds of other algorithms from other minds, each weighted with precision, and combined and recombined, that otherwise inconsequential fact takes on huge importance.

“One of the big lessons was developing diverse models that captured distinct effects,” said Sill, “even if they’re very small effects.”

This approach is the opposite of how we have been taught to solve problems. There has to be a plan and a few smart folks working to the plan.

What I see here is the power of setting in place the conditions that allow for “emergence”.

Science and Research is going to explode by going down this path.

What will be needed are great supporting tools – watch this space!

Here is a link to his brilliant post that shows the linkage for adoption to the Kubler Ross Stages of Grief. For to adopt SM, your old world view has to die. Do you see yourself along this continuum? Scott has much more in his post – please go there.

I bet that many organizations are also having the same internal conversations and being as frustrated as he is.

Looking at where the death threats are is a more productive area of discussion.

For public media Death lurks here – We have to have a much wider based and much larger public that thinks that we are not merely important but VITAL to them. If we don’t we wont make it.

“Wider based” means that we have to break out of our current demographic – of on TV being over 50, mainly white middle class and well educated – on radio of being over 40 and the same.

The challenge of doing this has been the restrictions of our “Air”. We have only 24 hours and one place on the dial.

So to change programming enough to bring in a very different demographic is to piss off the existing foundation with no real chance of adding the new. Example, the CBC have quite good show on the Native Canadian world – my bet is that most of the traditional audience switch off immediately and that First Nation’s people are not going to be tempted to become enthusiastic listeners of the CBC based on one program. This type of programming is lose lose. For NPR it was a new hip morning show called Bryant Park. What station in its right mind will drop Morning Edition for a new entrant aimed away from its main audience?

So long as Public Radio and TV have a secure foundation on their Air – they cannot expand their audience.

Also loyalty and more important financial and voting support merely based on liking content is no longer enough. When I came to Canada in 1972, I was used to the BBC and became a fanatic PBS watcher. There was no other source of good content then. Now there is tons of great content elsewhere. The old tie to content is much weaker.

So how then can Public Media avoid DEATH? How can it expand its reach to a much wider and diverse public? How can it deepen the connection beyond the relatively weak one of content?

An answer is appearing in the work of 70 plus stations working in the 32 worst hit markets in the US where the Economy is destroying the middle and lower classes. In this project – called Facing the Mortgage Crisis – stations are working with each other to pull together/convene groups of community support into a platform that can help people cope with this the greatest crisis to hit most Americans since the 30’s.

This is where the DEATH threat can be answered and this is where Social Media and the whole 2.0 perspective is invaluable.

Here stations are helping people who do not and will NEVER watch our mainstream Air. BUT they do interact with our specialty Web Sites that are focused on this issue and hence on them. More we do a lot face to face. Sometime at the station and many times in libraries and other places of trust such as churches. More, we give the community partners a face and a voice too.

It is the 2.0 web that is at the heart of this ability to offer something meaningful to people who will not connect to our traditional content on our traditional air. Ironically, as the crisis affects all, many of the white middle class are now in the same boat. They too use our 2.0 world as a new resource. In time a common crisis, as in war, brings all together. All people share a common fear and grief. All wonder what to do and how to keep going? All worry about their kids.

I predict that something great can emerge from our web – but it is not about getting more people to watch Nova or listen to All Things Considered.

So what then was my CIO’s Death fear?

I offered up this to chew on. They are in the mutual fund business. Their funds are sold by brokers who do not work for them.

Trust in Brokers, in the market and even in the idea of getting rich by punting in the markets has been weakened. Fund managers still tout their ability to realize performance that can only be achieved by taking huge risk.

What would happen to their business if we had a 1933? After the crash in 1929, the market recovered as it is today. But like today, the market came back independent of how people lived and how the economy at the human level existed. It was a second bubble. The market crashed again and the great depression hit full force. Employment did no rebound until 1941. Stock prices and activity in the market did not return until 1954.

What if we have another 1933 in 2010? Would such a collapse end all faith in the current financial system? What is the risk of that happening – 10% – 30 % – 50% – 60%  – whatever the risk is substantive and worth planning for.

My idea of his DEATH threat was that if they did not do something to show that they could be trusted, that if we had a 1933, they would disappear as did most people like them in 1933.

So how could they become legitimately trusted? How could they hold onto to a public that had lost trust in the system? My advice was this.

Most people are fiscally illiterate. Most know nothing about household economics in the Greek sense of the basics of the human financial life cycle. People know nothing about how to save and why, borrowing, cash flow, how mortgages work, compound interest. Most know nothing about the value of and how risk works. Why you can take risks early but not late in life etc. If they did most would not be in the trouble that they are in now. Most think that it is normal and to be expected that they can get Maddof returns year after year not seeing that such returns imply impossible risk.

The entire fund business is like the food business – we have been trained to seek something that is not sustainable – double digit returns for ever and cheap food forever. Can we train people to be more real? I think not but people can train each other.

Most people now are waking up to the fact that they don’t know enough about money and how it affects their life. They are hungry to learn more. To take control over their financial lives, just as many today are using the web to take control over their health.

What if this firm was to set up a foundation to act as the Trusted Place on the web where people could teach each other all these things?

Here is where all the rules of 2.0 would come into play. The web, interactivity, social groups, partners – the whole gamut of 2.0 is here. By learning how to do this here, the old firm will also then see with new eyes what else they can do back in the mainstream.

I asked in closing what would this mean in terms of the brand and the industry if they were to do this? What if they did a really authentic job of providing the trusted space where people could help each other take back their financial power?

He could see in a heart beat that this would change the relationship – just as I am seeing signs that FTMC is changing the relationship with Public radio and TV.  At first the two worlds of the “Academy” and their traditional business would be separate. But over time there would be some kind of convergence. For who of us knows as much as we should and who of us does not have something to offer?

In time the very nature of the business would change too as will in the end mainstream TV and Radio – but this way the change would be shaped by the active participation of millions of people formerly known and “audience” or “Clients” who right now don’t even have a name.

For what is the label for a person who is part of the ecology that is the new wider enterprise?

So what do you think? Can you radically change your foundation offering without killing the golden goose? Think GM or the Newspapers – all their cash flow came from the old – but DEATH was waiting for sure. How could they have found another part of life where they could have added real value and so attached a much bigger group of people to them?

I am sure that there is an answer. Do you have one?