After Vancouver lost the Stanley Cup – riots broke out. This is not new but what is new is that every aspect of the riot was caught on people’s cell phones. The normal anonymity that rioters have has gone.

The rest of the city has erupted in a new way in anger about the rioters. Over a million still photos have been put online and/or sent to the police and the city has declared that all who are recognized will be prosecuted.

It is also harder for Police to act badly too – A Toronto Policeman is being prosecuted for assault after the G 20 meeting. And the same happened in London.

I find it interesting – I think we are seeing the re-emergence of “Civic Policing” where the abundance of cameras, the use of social media – makes it harder for both vandals and police to behave badly. Of course this was always the case in small communities where we all knew each other and there were “Eyes on the Street”. But social media is enabling this in large cities now too.

I think that this is a good thing. Just as online anonymity gives Trolls a free pass – so it does in cities.

I had the pleasure of attending a very useful meeting recently on a very snowy day in Cambridge, Mass. But then most days are snowy in Cambridge this winter. The Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network covered ways to create successful online communities.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux cofounder of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Product Innovation at Deloitte’s Global technology, Media, and Telecommunications Group. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.

Here are some highlights from their research. First they found that bad practices in online communities are enjoying rapid adoption. We need to look at the human issues in online communities rather than just the tools.  Reciprocity is one key issue and a basic human reflex. If you act without reciprocity it can hurt the community so humans have developed a sense of fairness. There has been a lot of research to support. Fairness is even more important than transparency.

People can use a social framework or market framework to evaluate a situation. Key is getting people to use a social framework because it leads them to develop better connections and act more fairly. Sometimes money gets in the way of this fairness.  Companies want to set up ways to encourage community participants to use a social framework within their community. We also love status. This works well with communities but we need to be creative on this and allow for a refresh of the status ranking. People get disinterested if they feel they have no chance for status.

I created a three part series on providing my notes in more detail. Here are the links.

Creating Successful Online Communities – Part One: Overview

Creating Successful Online Communities – Part Two: Success Factors

Creating Successful Online Communities – Part Three; Research Findings

Millions of travellers have been stuck this holiday season. The question is what can you as a traveler and what can you as a supplier do about this kind of event.?

The lesson taken from this Christmas is surely larger than travel but also applies to any bad event – such as Skype’s system failure. You can imagine what your equivalent might be in your organization.

I can see that part of the answer is to be found in social media. Here is how the NYT ran their version of the story today:

While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.

Since Monday, nine Delta Air Linesagents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.

But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.

For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.

Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.

Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.

She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.

“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”

Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.

“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.

Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.

I recently posted about Trust and how important it is. Being silent is THE worst position. Even when you cannot offer a fix, offering an ear and the truth helps. Skype kept a running commentary about their problem and now that they have fixed it have shared the post mortem on their blog. Please look at the comments on the Skype blog – a lesson for us all.

I had been critical of Air Canada until this Christmas - but even they have upped their efforts on Twitter to work with clients and to offer sympathy when they could not help.

They still do promotion as you can see but look at the other tweets – Air Canada are starting to get how this can help their Trust levels.

Now Twitter is still an elite tool for the elite. But all new things start this way. I am thinking of all those who were in the information dark looking over their shoulder at those who were in contact and can see that it will not take long for Twitter and Social media to become the normal for how we find our way around problems. Here is a brief summary of my own travel hell. Where I reach out on Twitter and my friends help me.

This illustrates for me the next phase of using social media to navigate crisis. Right now an airline or your organization can use social media to communicate from your own perspective. But what if you could harness, as I did, the collective wisdom of the network?

In my case I could not be sure of what the roads were like in the last 4 hours of a 13 hour trip. I asked my pals for their opinion and in minutes got enough “TRUSTED” advice to make the call to stop. My pals may have saved my life. So what if an airline could use its followers to help each other look at local weather – hotel rooms – alternative routes etc – even put each other up? What would it take to have a real community of customers? For if you did – they could do this.

Again this demands a new relationship with your customer. A customer is no longer a person out there but a node in here.  If you can build up trust with an inner group, you can partner with this group in all sorts of ways.

• Marketing
• Crisis Management
• Problem Solving

Let’s play with this in later posts.

Here are my KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 session notes for 10 Principles for Successful CoPs by Stan Garfield.  Stan is a Community Evangelist, Consulting – Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and Author, Implementing a Successful KM Programme. I have heard Stan speak several times and always come away with useful knowledge. He created the SIKM community that has close to 500 members on a global basis. I have been a member for some time and there are some great discussions. Here is the session description. My notes follow.

“Based on his experience in creating, leading, and managing communities and communities programs, both inside and outside of organizations, Garfield defines and describes 10 principles for successful communities. He offers real-world examples and discusses tools while emphasizing key themes: Communities should be independent of organization structure; they are different from teams; are not sites, blogs or wikis; community leadership and membership should be voluntary; communities span boundaries; need a critical mass of members; start with as broad a scope as is reasonable; need to be actively nurtured; and more.”

Stan said that he was first in a professional community at Washington University School of Medicine in 1975. He was in the role of running community knowledge sharing sessions and there was no technology involved. This was new then. He found that communities work if people share a passion. He has been involved in many communities since then.

Here are the ten principles: One – Communities should be independent of organizational structure. They should be based on the content.

Two – Communities are different from organizations and teams.  People are assigned to a team. Communities are better with self–selection for joining and remaining.

Third – Communities are people and not tools. You should not start with tech features. A platform is not a community. Readers of the same blog are not a community but that might be a byproduct.

Fourth – Communities should be voluntary. The passion of members should be what drives a community.  You should make the community appealing to get members and not assign them to it.

Fifth – Communities should span boundaries. They should not be for a particular group likes Sales or IT. There is a lot of cross-functional or cross-geography learning that would be missed then. Diverse views help communities.

Sixth – You should minimize redundancy in communities. Consolidation helps to avoid confusion by potential members. It also reduces the possibility of not getting a critical mass. Reducing redundancy also enables more cross-boundary sharing.

Seven – Communities need a critical amass. You need at least 50 and likely 100. Usually ten percent are very active so you can get sufficient level of activity with 100 people.

Eight – Avoid having too narrow of scope for the community. Too much focus can lead to not enough members. Stan advises people to start broad and narrow if necessary.  Or start as part of broader community and spin off if needed.

Nine – Communities need to be active. Community leaders need to do work, often in the “spare time” at their regular work. This means that the leader needs a passion for the topics so he or she will spend this extra time. There needs to be energy to get things going.

Ten – Use TARGETs to manage communities. TARGET includes: Types, activities, requirements, goals, expectations, and tools. Each of these issues needs to addressed and explained to prospective members.  Tools are necessary, but the least important component, so they are placed last.

I think these are a very useful set of things to consider. Stan covered more useful details faster than I can type. You can get all the details about these ten principles at Stan’s website.

What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Nuno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

Email usage has dropped 28% in the last 12 months! (Matt Forcey)

A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year.  Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative?  Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period.  A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically.

When I used to have a real job, one of the things I hated about being on vacation was the dread of what woud face me in my email inbox. As it became easier to access email remotely, I began to check in every day just to keep the load and the surprises down. Today when accessing email remotely is commonplace nearly all my pals in the conventional workplace tell me that they do the same. (The full report is here)

The young, under 30, hardly use it at all – they don’t even use the phone.

But what about the rest of us who still work for and with organizations that make email the centre of the communications system? Can you push back and get more productive? Here are two well known people who have confronted this question and have won the battle.

My old pal Luis Suarez at IBM is best known for his war against email and the misuse of it that crushes productivity.

I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

Why and how did Luis do this? Here is a link to an excellent interview with Luis conducted by the Doyenne of the Social Media world in Canada, Nora Young at Spark (CBC Radio). The interview was almost exactly a year ago and as with this post was timed to appear as we all struggled back to work and a full email inbox.

Luis’ main issue with email is that it makes it too easy for someone else not to care or know if you are busy and to impose work upon you or to engage you in their politics at no real cost to themselves. For instance – if I was to send you a large document as an attachment – there are many steps that you must take to read it – and then it all gets even worse if you wish my comments etc. Far easier to share a document. For instance, how many times have you got a “Cover my ass” CC or BCC? When what was really needed was a real debate? How many tomes have you been really busy and have a colleague impose a deadline on their stuff on you? This is the kind of behavior that Luis objects to.

Or what about all those newsletters that you don’t have time to read? Or those missives from on high from senior management that tell you how great they are or how we all have to ull up our socks?

Luis is not the only person pushing back. Jason Fried CEO of 37 Signals has an impassioned plea about how the workplace itself crushes productivity.

Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name, “Hey, come a check this out. Come over here.” And like before you know it, it’s 4:00 and you’ve got nothing done today. And this is what’s happening all over corporate America right now. Everybody I know, I don’t care what business they’re in. Like when I talk to them about this, it’s like “Yeah, that’s my life.” Like, that is my life, and it’s wrong.

And so I think that has to change. If people want to get things done, they’ve got to get rid of interruptions.

Email is just part of this uncritical work culture that forces many to do their work after hours at home!

So what do Luis and Jason offer up as an alternative?

Luis still thinks that email has a place – in calendar management and in private one on one matters such as salary etc. But he has found that he can push back and negotiate a better way for nearly every category of work. Want me to work on your document – then share it with me! Have an issue to solve – open a conversation in public! Want to avoid being put upon by others – work in public so that people can see when you are busy – so if you use shared documents – people can see you are editing or drafting.

The whole point is to learn how to protect your time.

Jason has  the same advice.

So, this isn’t really a plug, but we use our product called Campfire, which is a real time chat tool. That is our office. Campfire is our office, and that’s a web based chat tool where there’s a persistent chat room open all the time. Anyone who has a question for anyone else in the company posts it there and in real time, everyone else can see it if they’re looking at it. But if they’re busy, they just don’t pay attention. And then if non one responds, then that means someone is busy. Not like, I’m going to keep calling their name until they turn around. That’s what it’s like in most offices. Or you ring someone and they’re not there and so you call their name, and they’re not there, so you go to their office and you bang on their door. If someone doesn’t respond in Campfire, it means they’re busy. And unless it’s a true emergency, where you really need an answer right now, then you just let them be and they’ll get back to you in three hours. And the truth of the matter is, there are almost no true emergencies in business. Everything can wait a few hours. Everything can wait a day. It’s not a big deal if you get back to me later in the day for me to know right now.

And the other thing about interruptions and calling people’s names, and ringing them on the phone and stuff, it’s actually really an arrogant sort of move because you’re saying that whatever I have to ask you is more important than what you’re doing. Because I’m going to stop you from doing what you are doing for me to ask you this questions that probably doesn’t matter anyway. So, we’re very cognizant of this, and we make sure that we only ping people, that’s what we call it, digitally and in ways that will not really get in their way if they’re really busy.

He uses his own tool but of course there are many tools that we can use – the tool is not the key it is the idea of working in public that is.

How do you get others to play? Well if you are Jason – it’s easy you are the CEO! But Luis is not the CEO. He publicly told the world that this was his intent. He pushes back and negotiated with his own team and colleagues – and the value of this spread out.

Here is a mind map from Luis that shows you his process and his results

A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?

Is this better?

If so – why?

If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?

So what’s my argument?

Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.

I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.

So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.

I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.

How did this occur?

My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.

How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….

There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!

But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.

Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.

For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.

But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.

Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.

But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.

What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.

As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……

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Thanks to Paul Thomas, guest-blogging at the Cognitive Edge, a networked organization focused on applying complexity theory in practical ways to complex issues and organizational problems.

(Dr Thomas is founder of the complexity theory think-tank organization DNA Wales, Head of Leadership at the Business School, University of Glamorgan and is also the BBC Wales ‘Business Doctor’. Paul works with private and public sector organisations of all sizes, including multi-nationals, trying to show them there is another way to run the workplace.)

The title is lifted from the Cognitive Edge blog (extract below).

I have not yet read the Macleod Report (I’ve skimmed through it) ) but it seems that the Cognitive Edge blog post lays out yet-another-argument for coming to terms (or grips, or whatever) with the probability that it (social computing) will become the main way of carrying out the bulk of non–routine knowledge work.

Oh .. and of course I don’t think that all management concepts and activities should be dropped holus-bolus.  I do, however, think, that managers everywhere should start really trying to understand the new social dynamics and methods of constructing pertinent knowledge that are now available, and making thoughtful and sensible decisions about why and how people get engaged with getting things done on purpose.

I know, I know .. it sounds like heresy to not constantly "tinker" in order to improve processes, efficiency and effectiveness.  After all, we’re all familiar with concepts like continuous improvement, orthodox performance management schemes, Six Sigma, reengineering, etc. 

However, how many of us have often wondered about whether or not people have an orientation towards doing things better, easier, faster, cheaper, if we find ways to honour their desire to do good work, to be respected, to make meaningful contribution, to be heard … 

Maybe (in some or many instances) there’s too much structure, too many goals, overly rigid mindsets and worldviews … not enough questions, not enough debate, too few mistakes (how many discoveries or innovations are preceded by mistakes?), not enough "failing faster to learn faster", not enough acknowledgement of the deep motivations of people to serve others and do more useful and meaningful work, etc. ?

There’s a reason why the word "unleashed" gets used so often in books, articles and conversations about organizational effectiveness .. and I don’t think it means turning a horde of web-bots loose onto the organization’s processes.  It has something to do with people and their motivation and guidance.

Anyone else ever wonder ?

I think that’s what this report from the UK government suggests.  But I will have to go beyond skim-reading it to confirm that guess.

What do you think ?

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MacLeod Review says people potential should be ‘unleashed’

[ Snip ... ]

The MacLeod Review of employee engagement, commissioned by the Department for Business, has said workers need to be properly involved in the future of their firms.

Author David MacLeod said he wanted to see people’s potential “unleashed” and said engagement was a key to innovation and competitiveness. Apparently the report’s authors were told during their research that “trust works two ways” and that not trusting staff had a negative impact. They were also told it was people, not machines, which made the difference to a business.

Responding to the report employment relations Minister Lord Young said: “Workers know better than anyone how the firm they work for can improve, innovate and succeed.”

If this all sounds familiar, that’s no surprise.There’s nothing radical, or even new, about this report.

[ Snip ... ]

Of course people are the key to a company’s success. Of course the best people to ask for a solution to a company’s problems are those within it and on the frontline. And it stands to reason that if you haven’t got everyone in the organisation fully behind what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got less chance of achieving it.

The Government says it accepts the report’s recommendations and now there’ll be an action plan to deliver them.

Now that the message is becoming more mainstream, maybe those who run our organisations will forget their management tools, and constant ‘tinkering’ with the system and finally wake up to the fact that this is the only way to make them fitter for the future.

Let’s hope they don’t just pay it lip-service, and they actually do it.

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During a recent business trip to France, I met with a range of business people interested in and involved with early Web 2.0 initiatives in the corporate arena.  There’s a lot of interest in the area (as there is in North America) and it seems to be growing rapidly.

Publicis (the advertising giant) has a consulting arm specializing in corporate-things-digital, and has been involved in helping some companies roll up their collective sleeves and go beyond using the Web to display information on a corporate web site.  I had the good luck to meet with Martin Menu (Community / Networking Manager at Publicis Consultants) and Stanislas Magniant (his colleague at that time and now with Linkfluence, purveyors of webpulse and visualisations of networked conversations on the web, in Washington, D.C.).

Martin and Stan introduced me to, and helped me understand, an interesting case study involving bringing a large and somewhat monolithic quasi-governmental organization (SNCF, the French national rail transportation company) into the 21st Century in terms of interaction with and listening to customers on the Web.

I also remember reading a Reuters or AP feed to the Globe and Mail a couple of years back in which Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis, clearly stated that he and his colleagues wholeheartedly believed that digital and the Web were the future.  He mentioned in the news piece that Publicis would be giving priority to learning more about Web 2.0 and incorporating a range of the elements into its offerings and practices.

SNCF’s web site is the largest e-commerce site in France.  The following graph gives you a sense of it’s presence on line and the amount of conversational activity it stimulates.

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In the last several years it has gone about updating  it’s web site to reflect a growing range of content and opportunities for customers to communicate / interact with the company.  Publicis is the digital branding / communications consulting agency that has helped it design and build these sites. 

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2006 SNCF Site

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2007 SNCF Site

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The changes year over year reflect the increasing opportunities and demand for interaction, and in 2008 SNCF decided to test, in a pilot project, the much-ballyhooed listening to and speaking with customers with a new site, a section of which (at the URL http://debats.sncf.com) carries the tag line “Talk To Us” (or “Speak With Us”).

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2008 SNCF Site

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The growing awareness of the need for and utility of hosting conversations with customers led SNCF to realize that it “is a company that people talk about a lot on the Web without it being able to answer the criticisms“.   They decided they wanted to explore “how can we create the conditions for dialogue with Web users?”

SNCF, with the help of Publicis, decided to take advantage of the launch of the newest version of the site to create an interactive space to stimulate and engage in conversation with (current and potential) customers who use the web site.

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2008 “Talk With Us”

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Creating this interactive and participative space involved the following steps:

• SNCF recruited voluntary spokespeople within their staff
• Web users ask the spokespeople their questions about the SNCF
• They are able to vote and comment on other people’s questions
• Every day, the “spokespeople” answer the questions elected by the Web users

Thus SNCF and the customer participants on the Web site co-create the content of this space.  From what I learned in talking with Stan and Martin, an important additional effect has been the feedback from customers working its way back into some of SNCF’s core business processes.  Are you surprised ?  I’m not. 

The short-term results of the pilot project seem to speak for themselves:

• 76,486 visits in a couple of months

• An average of 2,000 visits a day
• 
331,606 pages seen

• Average time spent on the platform is 2.30 minutes

• A community of 1,560 users

• 1,210 questions and 233 answers

Via debats.sncf.com customers asked questions mainly about services and pricing, and provided a wide range of feedback, while SNCF through its staff asked questions in order to solicit customers’ advice and better understand what kinds of new features and services customers were wanting or looking for.

It also became the de facto source for current information, such as:

Jan. 24 strikes announced

• Users worried about the impact on their daily journey
• Seeking for information on Google

Opinion & Debate is users’ first choice

• Opinion & Debate at the 1st rank of Google query
• Daily updated content
• Free referencing campaign

A key source of official information from and about SNCF

• Web users go to the platform
• Find answers

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All in all, the pilot project was deemed successful enough to make it a permanent feature of the SNCF web site.

 Now SNCF can legitimately state that it is a company that has experienced, appreciated and will continue to learn from being in dynamic interaction with its current and potential customers … thanks to the Web.

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I’d like tp build on my FASTForward blogging colleague Bill Ives’ informative post titled "Deloitte Declares We Are in a Media Democracy", Deloitte of course being the major global consulting firm Deloitte Touche.

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Deloitte Declares We Are in a “Media Democracy”
Bill Ives

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"

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"In 2009, hierarchies will grow, democracy will ebb–"might is right" and pragmatic choices win."

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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 was interviewed a bit more than a year ago by WorldBlu (Annual World’s Most Democratic Workplaces) founder Traci Fenton about the impact of social computing on organisational democracy.  If we believe that "knowledge is power" and that the days of a few people at the top of organisations taking all the decisions and telling everyone else how to do things are numbered (John Cambers of Cisco clearly believes that’s the case, and is not sacrificing organisational effectiveness with that belief), then it’s clear that eventually shifts in traditional organisational power will be more frequent, more observable, and carry more implications for major changes in the ways people are led and managed.  Gary Hamel clearly believes this is the case, as he outlines in his most recent book The Future of Management.

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.

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It would be interesting to learn what you think.

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