All your customers, voters, members, suppliers – the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle – as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!
The Rubicon is that – whether you like it or not – the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.
So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation – your brand – the trust you have – is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.
You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.
As with Dominos – using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.
Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then – I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture – they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response – they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.
They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.
They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?
But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan – “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?
The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.
Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” – a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” – an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.
This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.
To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.
This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.
The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?
Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this – in fact who hate it – to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.
The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:
ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.
“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”
The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.
Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.
The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:
Listen before you Speak – The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this – you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.
Participate not Pontificate – To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world – many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans? You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.
Importance – Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found – This is all about whether you are going to live or die – As the Coke folks say but more gently than I – Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast – the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?
Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.
Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.
Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.
A couple of days ago, as the FASTForward 09 conference opened, I had the opportunity to sit down with Clay Shirky, author of the book “Here Comes Everybody – the power of organizing without organizations” and a consultant, professor and writer. I wanted to bear down a little bit on some of the core ideas in his recent book and examine how his premises impact what management needs to understand and do with the new set of conditions created by an interconnected digital infrastructure that supports all communications and management of information – the lifeblood of an organization’s operations.
As a way to get into the issues, I asked Clay to offer his perspective about how the Web and its interconnectedness is affecting knowledge-based work.
Clay feels that it matters enormously how directed or undirected the knowledge work is. If the purpose of the knowledge work is to discover or extend something as directed by management, then the focus is on R&D. That of course is quite useful and goes on all the time (it’s a great example of what we think of as normal work, and can be highly collaborative or not so much, or anywhere in between).
But … Clay notes that this is not the really radical change that is coming to the interconnected knowledge-based workplace. The really radical changes become apparent when the work turns to finding or creating something new, something really different, when the direction is aimed directly at stimulating and supporting innovation.
Generally, knowledge work is designed to accomplish certain defined objectives, or accomplish specific purpose(s). And yet, particularly in today’s fast-moving world, conditions change like the weather and can strongly impact how accomplishing a purpose is addressed. Dave Snowden, a well-known complexity and knowledge work specialist, likes talking about how the notion of a ‘crew’ can operate well in complex conditions … the members of a crew know their roles, have specific knowledge at their disposal and can swing into action and deploy their knowledge in a wider range of configurations depending upon current and future conditions. However … the effectiveness of a crew structure depends upon the purpose or mission having boundaries; for example a start point, a destination, a flight of so many hours, favourable weather conditions, and so on … not straying into unbounded or undefined conditions
What about fast-moving and ever-changing flows of information, or being pushed by demanding clients and markets to stray into territory wherein an organization has not clearly thought through or designed the boundaries, and where accomplishing the purpose or mission is threatened by inadequate response ? This is where social networks come in … they make it possible to have crew-like work in less-well-defined, less bounded conditions. Social networks in a knowledge workplace provide a new foundation or substrate that enables crew-like work that is not so bounded at the edges … purpose-driven flow, much like gossip in social circles with the differentiation that the chatter, the back-and-forth exchanges, are aimed at the purpose of the work and the (eventual) accomplishment of objectives.
As Clay and I discussed the ways the Web and the new set of conditions are informing and impacting this less-bounded work, I offered the observation (with which Clay agreed); rather than following the long-established lines of reporting relationships on an org chart, in networked conditions “our agreements are our structures”.
Clay elaborated: The development of the first formal org chart is contentious, but one of the contenders is David MacCallum, whose initiative included five rules. Rule #5 begat the fundamental assumption about reporting relationships (upward), that information should only flow through hierarchical reporting relationships so as to avoid embarrassing people (typically upwards, as the embarrassment came from not knowing, not being up-to-date or using bad information to make decisions).
This led us into discussing the effectiveness and responsiveness of the traditional hierarchical structure. While the need and desire of the upper management to know what’s going on for their business as a whole and the need of line managers to know what to do is critical, in effect the traditional hierarchical model does not deal with today’s information flows fast enough or well enough. We don’t have to take a moral or an ethical view about whether hierarchy is “good” or “bad”, we just need to recognize that it is less and less efficient and effective in conditions of continuous and accelerating flows of information.
We delved into the subtitle of Clay’s most recent book … “organizing without organizations”. Clay stated that by using that phrase he did not mean the wholesale replacement of hierarchy. He clarified; we used to regard group action as a priori proof of someone instantiating and organizing the action. He offered an example, citing the case of the Chinese government’s concern about a widespread negative reaction in the blogosphere to the possibility of devaluing yuan, and its conclusion that someone must be behind this. There wasn’t … it was a case of a large-ish number of people noticing the issue and commenting on it and connecting and hyperlinking as only the “blogosphere” can. The point ? We need to start getting used to seeing and noticing organic organization around issues and content.
We then turned to talking about the major implications for leaders and managers when considering what they will need to do to develop and sustain effectiveness in the new set of conditions. Again Clay used a story to set out an example .. the day after Obama was elected and Change.gov went up (during meltdown, wars, etc.) the #1 question was re: medical marijuana. It is not the case that there is automatic legitimation just because a crowd voted it up to the top, as in a ”closed” ( for the purposes of this post a community in which a large majority of members are focused on a range of issues in defined domains) community like Digg, where the implication might be that Obama should be taking marching orders from the “community”. Rather, the legitimizing issue for leaders is demonstrating to the community an effective response to the community’s “are you listening ?” *
In these new condition, Clay suggests leaders need to listen (much more closely than before), clarify what needs to happen and why, and engage in real ways with their constituents. In effect, they need to state clearly “we have heard you, but that’s not the top priority for the following reasons – and here’s why”. These tending-towards-democratic conditions resulting from the mass adoption of the Web ensure that communities and leaders and managers will continue to wrestle with what makes a group outcome legitimate.
In the past and in traditional hierarchies, not responding or staying silent on difficult issues were often used as ways of controlling group action. Clay suggested, in closing, that leaders and managers will need to give up the fantasy that silence still provides effective control …
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* see Shirky’s discussion of the complex issues presented by the “09 F9″ digital key furor and the subsequent community leadership issues encountered by Digg / Kevin Rose, pp. 290-91, Here Comes Everybody – the power of organizing without organizations, 2008
Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist / analyst at Forrester whom many know as an energetic voice in the area of Enterprise 2.0, points to a new initiative (Change.Force.com – A Citizen’s Briefing Book) by the Obama administration. In the first few paragraphs of his analysis, he states that in his exchanges with executives he is experiencing more openness to the use of social technologies, and hence of some greater degree of transparency with customers, employees and other stakeholders.
A Wisdom of Crowds tactic being adopted by the new administration … interesting idea, we’ll see how it plays out.
I just learned from Leverage’s Mike Walsh that Obama will receive a briefing from the top voted ideas that were submitted by the American people each evening see Change.Force.com (a play off) . This method of keeping in direct communication by ‘listening’ to the citizens leans on voting style technology similar to Dell’s Ideastorm. My colleague Josh Bernoff will be pleased, as he requested this feature a few months ago.
You’ll need to login and register (I suspect they can use IP addresses to determine point of origin within US) in order to confirm location but that’s not completely accurate. How can Obama extend this further? Make a similar site for all other nations to submit ideas for foreign policy. This doesn’t come without challenges of course, the system could be gamed, and there’s no promise he’ll make changes based on our feedback, we’ll see.
I talk to the executives of the world’s largest brands, after Obama won the election, I get a lot less push back –it’s rare I have to have discussions now about the validity of social technologies.
Of course, social technologies still come with risk, but for some reason this feels really good, we’re all a bit more connected and the internet helps to bring us together.
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I’m not surprised. if I were the leader of an organisation, I would just get on with it, as it seems clear to me that the permanent and ubiquitous presence of the Web in our lives is creating what is effectively a new sociology of expectation, namely of at least having a voice and to some degree being "heard" by hierarchical leaders in our societies’ institutions.
Hot on the heels of our several posts on the article about Cisco in Fast Company, I just ran across this video from a presentation and Q&A he carried out at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
My emphasis below … I am reminded of Euan Semple’s classic post about implementing social computing (The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?), and I don’t doubt that one of, if not the, the hardest part is senior managers and executives getting used to the idea of less or different control.
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Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chambers is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed.
My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it.
Chambers believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it.
-[ Snip ... ]
Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches.
The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.
With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes.
“If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”
Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat shared with us a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I find the first part more interesting.
There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter. I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other. Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.
There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication technology expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.
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Deloitte’s organisational consulting has for some time now been involved in employee engagement and organisational change, and so its practitioners in those areas will understand more of the emerging sociology of the networked workplace environment than the other major consulting firms. And of course, not to miss a beat, all the other major firms will all be out there now telling customers they have found a new ball to kick around, i,e, social computing. They will come up with logical responses wherever there seems to be a growing market. But beware of these firms’ response, in my opinion. If you want to know why, email me.
Is the general awareness of the effects of using computers, the Web and the easy sharing and consumption of information flows beginning to reach a critical mass ? Bill’s blog post would seem to suggest so.
And I’ll argue, as I have done for some time now, that the spread and penetration of social media use into organisations large and small will lead to some major changes in the practice of leadership and management (Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?, FASTForward, January 10, 2008) and slowly but surely the impact will be (or should be) the increased democratisation of many organisations.
My favourite astrologer does not agree … but we all know horoscope forecasts are somewhat suspect, right ? But short-term, I can see the logic … in uncertain and ambiguous times, many people like the feeling of increased certainty offered by direction and control. Just ask Lou Gertner what was the hardest part of the IBM turnaround in the early 90’s .. he’ll tell you "upward delegation"
But indeed some form of democratisation reaching through a wide range of human activities, including work in an enterprise, seems inevitable. The only alternative, I suggest, is the eventual use of information technology to control almost everything knowledge workers do, reducing computing activities to completing forms and updating various reports. That does not seem too likely, but I suppose its true that you can’t predict the future.
Do you want your workplace to become more democratic than it is today ? How will your workplace engage you a year from now … two years from now … five years from now ?
I’ve used this quote from business strategist and futurist Stan Davis before, but in this context I am not ashamed to repeat it because there are some very long term shifts underway for all of us, as the Deloitte study is beginning to recognize. The media we use to work and interact with others is fundamentally different than it was at the end of the do com boom, and it ain’t going away.
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While there wasn’t something called social media or social computing back then, here’s Stan Davis on organizing in the future, from the 1987 book Future Perfect:
"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.
What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."
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Here’s Stan catching up to the Web 2.0 world ("catching up" isn’t quite the right term … outlining what he think with respect to the most recent development so n the Web is probably better
Decision-making over the past quarter-century has continually moved from the center to periphery, down hierarchies to where decisions are carried out. Current technologies, especially of the Web 2.0 world, have moved that decision-making even further, overwhelmingly beyond firms’ boundaries and into the physical and mental space of the customer.
The differences between the two worlds are striking.
Whereas information is still hoarded and protected in companies, it is freely shared and reused in the connected Web 2.0 world. Hierarchy and command still rule the day in most organizations, while individuals are self-organizing, loose and flat.
Other shifts are from command & control to adapt & evolve, from provider-generated to consumer-generated content, from vertical to horizontal organization, and from an ‘audience-’ to a ‘community-’ approach to customers.
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
FASTforward Blog Guide to Twitter
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
On September 29 from 1-2 p.m. EST, the FASTforward blog hosted a great conversation with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website covering the intersection of politics and technology.
Highlights of the discussion, which touched on issues of transparency, collaboration, risk management and more, are available here.
FASTforward 08 Video Coverage
Be sure to catch dozens of great interviews from last year's FASTforward. Among the topics discussed between host Jerry Michalski and the speakers, panelists, attendees, and contributors to this blog: enterprise 2.0, search, the user revolution, the future of content, and much, much more.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
