I saw another piece of stupidity the other day when a “Social Media Expert” claimed that his thousands of friends on Facebook and Twitter made him such an expert and that he could teach you how to have that many friends as well. In other words that having lots of Friends was the goal!

Of course people like him make these claims based on nothing.

A few of us do read and those of us who do have long known of the work of Robin Dunbar. Those who care to do some work, know that there is a lot of science that underpins how humans live in social groups and that there is an underlying math that is well known.

So for those that don’t have time to read here he is in 16 minutes on Youtube offering you the science that shows why:

• Our social personal limit is about 150 people
• How this came about
• That we have layers of intimacy inside this limit
• That there are layers beyond it but that are not intimate
• That meeting face to face – is crucial to maintaining these relationships and that they degrade if not enhanced with face to face
• That men and women use two very different types of social grooming to maintain their networks – women need to talk and men need to do
• That the folks who claim to have thousands of friends are nearly all men with poor social skills in the real world

So for all you Social Media Experts and HR professionals and Organization Design Folks here is Dunbar:

What is value? Usually it is something that is scarce. What is scarce today? Certainly not content which is why all the attempts to make content pay are doomed. Content has never been more plentiful. In fact we are approaching the point where content is all but infinite.

The Value point then becomes finding content that means some thing to each of us. So Search is a Holy Grail here. And it is very valuable. But can we rely only on algorithms?  I do not think so.

This week two people that I respect and trust a lot Craig Newmark and Jeremiah Owyang have put their own stakes in the ground saying that ironically it will be a screen of named people in our social orbit that will be the final layer of screening for meaning. That our impersonal transactional world will return to a personal world where reputation is key. There is enough convergence to call it now I think.

What you are about to see is how the world will be organized in the future. It’s official now!

This is the new Org Chart.

The Inner Circle is your Trusted Space – moving out from this is a gradient of Trust and Intimacy – These rings have numeric boundaries. The Inner Circle is limited to 8. The next ring for you is 34. The outer ring is of course 144. If you look up to the diagram above the “Donut”, you will see the Fibonacci Curve. There you will see that these numbers are the boundaries of the curve – this is how nature organizes all complex systems. The Dunbar number is 144. (Not 150 by the way) We know that 8 is the ideal team size. We know that 34 is the ideal large team.

To the left I have added the “Permaflower” – this is the organizing model for Permaculture. I think that this may be the model that we use to organize the Natural Organization.

Here is how Craig opens his piece:

People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.

This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.

Everyone gets a chance to participate in large or small ways, giving a voice to what we once called “the silent majority.”

Here is how Jeremiah describes it:

Here is how a Permagarden is layed out:

Here we see the idea of a gradient in the hierarchy more clearly. Inside the network are of course sub networks. In Permagardening, these are called Guilds. They are reinforcing groups of diverse species. Toby Hemenway is the source of these lovely garden images.

Talking about guilds here is how Chris Allen has shown us how Guilds form in WOW.

In this slide you can also see the leverage that the Fibonacci Sequence can give you. Imagine your 8 inside the Trusted Space. Imagine that you have 4 good friends in the next circle who have 4 friends who have 4 friends and then 4 more – that is 4,096 people. A group of 34 with 4 friends gets you 1.3 million. 144 gets you 429 million.

A small group can have huge social leverage. Enough I think to so anything.

Many of us are starting to see that there is math that underpins human community – The Dunbar Number and related math that defines the hierarchies of trust are gaining credence as being “real“.

I think that they should be: for surely all else in Nature that is about relationships has math? Light, Gravity, Water and Heat etc. So why would there not be Math that supports how Human Relationships work?

I was re-reading my favourite text the other day – Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language – and I was stunned, but not surprised, to learn that not only do we humans have a gradient of Trust governed by math but that there are limits in the physical space as well beyond which, we fall out of community. Naturally these limits are hardly known, least of all by architects and maybe hardly at all by any of us who wish to design a physical space that promotes a healthy human community.

Alexander brings up this topic in the section on Small Public Squares (Pattern 61). He asks why so many public squares are dead space?

Here is the Space Magic Number #1 – 70.

• We cannot make out another face much over 70 feet away
• We cannot hear another person properly over 70 feet away

Any space that exceeds this – Piazza San Marco and Trafalgar are exceptions because they are a nexus in a large city and get filled to the right density – feels un social.

So here is Space Magic Number #2 – 300

• Any space with more than 300 square feet per person will feel “deserted”
• So a space with a diameter of 100 feet needs 33 people in it to feel ok
• So a space with a diameter of 35 feet needs only 4
• A space with 60 feet needs only 12
• It’s hard to get 33 or more people into a public space at any one time – it is much easier to get 4

I wonder – do these numbers then tie into what we know about group satisfaction – (Chris Allen)

My bet is that there must be a link between these two sets of numbers.

Forming the best groups in the best spaces will surely have an impact on the power of these groups. This then raises another question. Might getting the group size and the group space optimized have an impact on group power?

Do these numbers have any connection with Adoption?

Might knowing more about ideal groups and ideal spaces address the question that we all have – How can I optimize my power in the world?

Our model until now has been to use money as a substitute for social power.

Are we close now to seeing the Social Power Model? I think so.

In my follow up post to this, I will share a Fractal Model of how we have found social adoption to work in a university setting. If this is Fractal, then the social design we see in a University should match all fields of social groupings.

We may be getting close.

I have just returned for working in Alaska with the hub station of a small network of stations – APTN.

They have the key challenge of having one player at the centre. The result is that all are in a stressful competition. Resource levels are low for all and all wish that the others would do more.

My advice has been to think about how they might move to a Chaord where, instead of one station being in the centre, that they have a small unit, like Visa like the PEI BioAllince Inc. to act on behalf of all.

The slide show is my best attempt – I am no graphic designer – to out the problem out in a visual way and to show how a Chaordic alternative might look and work.

My sense is that such a design could work regionally for all states and all stations and that maybe a larger version might act for all of Public Media in the US.

For right now NPR for radio – is sort of in this central spot – serving the system but also a player. This is how I see Charordic alternative.

But this is not confined to public radio or TV – I see this as a universal idea – just as Henry Ford created the ideal organization for the industrial era – so Dee Hock has created the organization for our own time. Just as the Ford model became the norm for all things – so will the Chaord.

This is how to get more for less. This is what I believe Enterprise 2.0 will be.

In the last post in this series I will give you a taste how how Rory is seeing how this could change agriculture. How we might shift from a multitude of atomised serfs, called farmers, whose value has been captured by a handful of distributors.

The opportunities seem limitless – how about a school board organized like this? What might happen then? How about health in a region organized like this? What about government itself?

How can the small be big? Well we have seen how guerrilla forces have solved that paradox – they use networks to take on the large machine militaries of states.

I came to Prince Edward Island, population 140,000 in 1995 in the hope that I could find the answer ofr a society. How could a tiny state, half the size of Iceland, be a player in the world economy?

I was very lucky to find as a client a man who had the same dream and Rory and I have worked with each other – been friends, shared the ups and downs of life ever since. 12 years ago, he was the deputy minister for Agriculture. He could see that a tiny place like PEI could not hope to compete as a commodity producer in the big box world of food of our time.

One of the mad ideas that we had, was to see if there was a way that we could use our then disparate ag research community as a base to build a global capability in looking inside plants fish and animals. Could we use our knowledge rather than our land mass?

As a new comer, I had noticed that PEI had a number of labs looking into, food,  plant health, fish health, animal health – all run separately by 2 levels of government and by the university. All on their own were small and had a real struggle to get resources. All competed with each other for scarce research money. On their own, they were never going to amount to anything and in the end they would destroy each other.

We also noticed that they all were within a block of each other.

Could we form some kind of network? Could we find a mission for the network? Could we be a Chaord?

Calling this “The Belvedere Group” – the road that connects them all is called Belvedere – we got all together and had many many meetings. All thought this a great idea. It even made it into the Throne Speech – but in the end we failed. We could not get it to work.

It took several years to work out why we failed. Why when all could se the value, when all said they wanted it – why did we fail?

We failed because we missed a key part of the design of a Chaord. The organizing organization cannot be a player. The Bank of America could not have been the manager of the Visa Chaord. Visa was. Visa was a neutral body whose only role was thesupport the larger whole.

Rory’s job back then was Deputy Minister for Agriculture. He was a player. In the end the Feds, the private sector and the university could not allow another player to be in charge. It would not matter who it was – if UPEI had been in the centre, all the rest would have balked too.

Years later, we put the idea back on the table. This time Rory was an independent. This time we set up a distinct organization – The PEI BioAlliance Inc. – staff of 3 – to act as the Visa for the group. Here is the how it all looks:

Here you have the classic Natural Organization

The dense inner circle are the power partners. In this case two levels of government – the funders – nearly 30 (now) private companies, two education bodies – the outer layer of suppliers and other folks – like me! is all included.

Inc.’s job is to make all these connections work even better. Each part remains individual but is part of the whole. So a lab seeking a grant can base their position in the context of a richer environment. The Federal and Provincial Government can be at the table right from the beginning as talk bout resources begin. The barriers of understanding between the money and the labs have been reduced. The private sector has direct connections to the research and vice versa.

Common needs like how do we attract talent to a small place are dealt with on behalf of all. Here is the key story in this challenge that many small places also face. A common brand like Visa is has been built  and is being sustained.

So what are the results?

This trend continues. We could never have got the resources that we can get today if we had not found a way to act together.

So why should you care about this story?

So long as radio and TV stations see each other as being separate, they will shrink. They do not have to give up their identity to be part of something bigger.

So long as farmers see themselves as separate, they will be serfs.

So long as each division sees itself as being separate, the larger organization will die.

This is Enterprise 2.0

In my next post I will go a bit deeper and share more details of the model and how to get there?

All of us who have worked in conventional organizations know what “More for less” means when our CEO tells us that that is our goal. It means big layoffs. It means those that remain will have more work to do. It means that the competition for scarce resources inside the enterprise will become even more deadly.

This was the fate of Easter Islanders. As resources became ever more scarce, civil wars became pandemic. As resources became more scarce, the more they were squandered on grandiose projects to propitiate the Gods. Until all the wood was used for making and moving statues – so that there was none left to make boats and hence be able to fish.

That is where many organizations are going today as the economy tightens. It is where nations are going too.

Divisions fight each other inside organizations. People fight each other inside of departments. Institutions spend what they have on projects that look good but don’t help. The need for control at all costs goes up. The real work doesn’t get done. The future is jeopardized.

Is there a better way of getting more for less? Yes there is and it is more than a model. It is out there and it works.

Of course being revolutionary, few saw it for what it was and almost no one except a handful have copied it in spite of it being so successful.

You use it every day and never think about it.

More than 30 years ago, the new credit card industry was in chaos and a man called Dee Hock was asked by the Chairman of Bank of America to make work.

His huge idea was the Chaord. A system connected by a set of DNA or Principles rather than directed from the centre. A system with a small group in the centre who job was to work on behalf of all members to grow the value of the larger system. Bach who used the Chaord in his music described this process as:

“Not the autocracy of a single stubborn melody on the one hand.  Nor the anarchy of unchecked noise on the other. No, a delicate balance between the two; an enlightened freedom.”

For the big problem was that each bank wanted to have  global card system of its own – the control thing. What Hock could see that was that there was not enough money in the world to do that. But if all banks could become members of a system – the system could act as the connector. In this way the network effect could help all. Point of sale terminals added by one bank would serve all. ATM’s added by one bank could serve all.

He could also see that such a system need not impinge on the unique identity of each member. They could keep their own brand and their own IT systems. All they had to do was to meet a small number of performance standards and use a co brand in common.

The staff at Visa International, until the IPO, worked for a non profit! Their role was the support the interests of all the members.

So in practice, each member got more for less and all the actions of each members added resources to the whole.

Dee Hock’s great dream was that this well proven model would become the norm for all organizations. His tragedy is that it remains largely unknown, not understood and not adopted.

Until recently. On PEI we have been deliberately using this idea to build a new Bio Science capability. Like the banks starting Visa, there were many competing groups, labs, companies etc that all saw the other as the competitor. All were small and could not get to critical mass on their own.

In the last 10 years we have found a way to use the Visa model and the results are in.

In my next post I would like to tell you what happened so that you can see how you too might use this model.

Here is a pdf that will tell you Dee Hock’s story in his own words. The forgotten gospel!

dee-hock-the-chaordic-organization