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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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The power of the social world is like gravity or light. It seems mysterious. It is easy to wax mystical about it. But I think that what is emerging via observation - just like all good science - is the math. What is ironic is that this math is well known and has been part of human knowledge for millenia. It just has never been applied to the social world before.

It is of course the Fibonacci sequence - the sequence that nature uses to order all relationships if they are to reach their full potential. You may know of the key number that seems to be the limit of Trust for humans of about 150 - called the Dunbar Number after Robin Dunbar.

Many in the Blogosphere have been working on this. Many have seen the sequence emerge naturally in say Guilds in Gaming. Some like Stowe and Valdis are seeing this in the power use of Twitter.

Here is a summary post I made on my own blog 2 years ago that pulled together the field of knowledge that existed then. It is my hope, I am a Historian, that people with a sharper brain than I can add much more to this in the future. I am more convinced than ever that the true potential of the power of social media to get important things done will be revealed once our understanding of how all of this works improves.

Not just marketing and media - but the ideal groupings for work, for learning for health, for credit, for families and for all of our lives. A world reset to our natural design versus a machine world.

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Dave Snowden posted this recently - I could not get Cognitive Edge to accept my comment so I post them here after his post and then add some comments and list of useful links that add to the topic.

Log(N) = 0.093 + 3.389 log(CR) (1) (r2=0.764, t34=10.35, p<0.001)

Recognise it? Well of course, it’s the best-fit reduced major axis regression equation between neocortex ratio and mean group size for the sample of 36 primate genera taken from Dunbar’s 1992 paper which was popularised, and not unduly trivialised by Malcolm Gladwell into a natural limit on human group size of 150 (or 147.8 to be exact). The idea is a simple one. The human brain has co-evolved with social conditions and as a result there is a natural limit on the number of social relationships we can maintain. Dunbar linked the number to village, nomadic and military size over time. The number is exercising several people on the ever idea-stimulating value networks list serve. The argument there relates to if this is or is not a natural limit on a network or a virtual community.150 is not the only natural number.  There are two others, so I could have titled this post The rule of 5,15 & 150. All of those numbers, plus a need to think more about identity than about individuals, should influence either evolutionary or engineering approaches to community/network design.

What I plan to do is elaborate the numbers and their origins. I then want to look at the way in which the debate around Dunbar’s law is limited by atomistic ontology. This all too common assumption, found in the anglo-saxon world assumes self sufficiency and moral autonomy of the person, and sees communities as assemblies, voluntary or otherwise of individuals. Moving away from social atomism allows to take a different view on communities, their limitations and possibilities, but that will be tomorrow’s blog.

1. Five is linked to the natural limits on the short term memory. This was first put forward by Miller’s 1956 paper and relates to time more than items (it is a common urban myth to see it as items). This means that it will vary a bit by language, different languages can compress more or less data into a defined time limit. If you have ever spoken through simultaneous translation then you will know that it takes 30% longer to say something in Spanish that it does in English. Given that the Welsh generally speak english 30% faster than the norm, this can present problems! Translation aside, the number is useful and it relates to common sense experience (always helpful). Think about how many directions you can remember, or how we organise telephone numbers. Another way to validate this is to think about models, or lists and see how many elements they have. More than five and you need a crib sheet. One of the reasons I restrict models in my own work to five elements is because of this. Less then five and they pass the paper napkin test which means they are sense making models as they can be drawn from memory, which means they can be used operationally without reference back to authority.
2. Fifteen comes from anthropology and relates to natural levels of deep trust. I define deep trust here as the ability to tolerate a degree of betrayal. The number varies a bit based on the average size of the extended family in a society and is probably an habituated pattern of behaviour learnt during key periods of plasticity for the human brain. Now readers might be able to help be here. I got this number from two sources several years ago. The number was actually an upper limit of thirty but I reduced it to fifteen for alliterative purposes as well as accepting the realities of modern civilisation compared with the tribal systems from which the number originated. Unfortunately I have lost the reference and I am trying to re-discover it to reference in the book. All help appreciated! Again this manages a common sense test. Think about the social groups to which you belong and which pass the relaxation test. This test is a simple one, its who do you feel able to relax with, without worrying too much how your are seen. I realise that this does not always apply to families! However other than in pre or post divorce situations the ideas is that it should. The size there is definitely under fifteen, and more typically is a small number of groups of around eight or nine on average.
3. One hundred and fifty is Dunbar’s law and in effect is the number if identities that you can maintain in your head with some degree of acquaints that an individual can maintain. It does not necessarily imply that you trust them, but it does mean that you can know something about them and their basic capabilities. In other words you can manage your expectations of their performance and abilities in different contexts and environments. For the moment lets consider this in terms of individuals (the switch to identity is for tomorrow’s blog). Consider your work groups and the size of your organisation. How many people do you know by name? How many people would you invite to a party? Again you can see the common sense experience coming though in the number. Now the assumption in Dunbar’s working and subsequent writing is that this level of knowledge requires physical proximity. However we now live in virtual as well as physical worlds so the nature of interactions change. The natural limit is probably in place, but its form, and the nature of its creation will have new variants for a new environment

Now these three numbers, 5, 15 & 150 have an alliterative quality which helps us remember and use them. They also have some fairly immediate and practical implications for communities and networks. That is what I want to look at in tomorrow’s blog which will come from Hong Kong. I am shortly leaving for the KMAP2006 conference at which I am keynoting for the second year, and I will also run workshop on uses of narrative in knowledge management. Hopefully I will meet up with some old friends and make some new ones, the conference has an interesting mix and looks less academic that last year when it was held in Wellington, New Zealand.

Great to find more discussion about these numbers. My bet is that by thinking only mechanistically we have “forgotten” their power and organize without any socially valid reason. This may surely be why so many organizations are so dysfunctional such as schools with say 1500 kids and no sub units. Why hospitals that merely have shifts of individuals are so unhappy. Why there is so much “stress” in most workplaces when the work itself is mundane.

The military however still keeps to these numbers. They have to - the task before them demands the full expression of what an organized group of people can do - they tend to use 8 as the base (8 men in a tent in the Roman army = a section) Sections “shrink” to 5 very quickly in action. Below 4, they are not very capable.

My bet is that 5-8 seems to work as the core unit of intimacy. Most sports teams fit this range. It enables you to pass the ball to a space knowing that the person will be there. It enables uspoken flow. It must have been the ideal hunting size.

Dave talks also about the limits to memory. You can remember a 7 number phone number but longer numbers, unless broken into sections of 3 and 4, are very hard to recall.

I recall other material suggesting that most “Tribes” in the hunter gatherer world (our cultural base) were about 35. 8 men and 8 women plus 16 youths and younger children. 35 is the platoon in the military which is the core organizing unit to get any serious work done. The Company would be about 200 as an paper ideal but would shrink in action to the 150 number which is the operational ideal.

VC friends of mine tell me that they get very concerned when they see new companies reach these staffing milestones of 8 -15 - 35 - 150. The hardest one being 15 -35 when you have to introduce some formal communication mechanisms. Complexity obviously does grow exponentially along a log scale.

Other work on gene pools suggests that 500 is the optimal number to keep enough variety. Hence tribal meetings for festivals etc that acted as genetic mixers as well.

What if these hard social numbers were brought back into formal prominence? What would happen to organizations? We see this with blogging now. My blogging social world has settled out along this gradient of 8 close intimates - about 16 close - about 35 reasonably close and a maximum world of 150. My test is my bloglines aggregator. I pay attention along the gradient.

I have also found that I can be assured that those that fit inside the 8 really do fit. I have worked with 2 of them before we ever met face to face.

So is this just an interesting topic or might it lead to an OD revolution? I add some good supporting links in the follow on:-

• Here is Ross Mayfield with his perspective of how these numbers work in the world of social media
• Here is a link to Robin Dunbar’s book - Grooming and Gossip that expands on his paper quoted by Dave
• Here is a link to a piece on the maths of genetics - that we need a population of 500 to ensure enough genetic diversity
• Here is John Robb talking about magic numbers and how terrorist cells are best organized
• A link to a brief survey of mine on the work of John Pfeiffer, author of the Emergence of Man (Out of print) on the numbers of conflict - why groups over 150 have to drive friction
• Ton Zijlstra weighs in here
• Here is I think the most comprehensive summary by Christopher Allen. I find his comments on Guild size compelling

Chris makes the point that while guilds have these total group numbers, it is rare to have more than 40 online at any one time. More on guilds by Chris here

He goes deeper and deeper into the friction that we feel inside organizations today because we do not consider the fall out from not understanding how these numbers work. I find this diagram very helpful -

This confirm my VC friends observation that going from a group of 7-8 to 50 plus is exceptionally difficult. Moving beyond 150 is also a chasm -

I’ve already noted the next chasm when you go beyond 80 people, which I think is the point that Dunbar’s Number actually marks for a non-survival oriented group. Even at this lower point, the noise level created by required socialization becomes an issue, and filtering becomes essential. As you approach 150 this begins to be unmanageable. Once a company grows past 200 you are really starting to need middle-management, but often you can’t afford it yet. Only when you get up past that, maybe at 350-500 people, does middle-management start really working, primarily because you’ve once again segmented your original departments, possibly again reducing them to Dunbar-sized groups.

• Chris also asks in this age of social networking software “Is there an effective limit to the size of your personal network. He adds a comment by a VC friend of his -

Venture Capitalist Jeff Nolan relates similar concerns:

“It strikes me that the social networking theory holds that the more volume you have, the bigger your network will become by introducing degrees of separation roughly along the lines of Metcalfe’s Law. I disagree, human networks do not grow in value by multiplying, but rather by reduction. For me, it’s the quality of relationships that enhances my professional and personal life, not the sheer numbers.”

If you know of other good links please let me know.

Commandos were not only surprised to find the devices in the terrorists’ rucksacks, but that they used the internet to look beyond local Indian media for information, watching the global reaction in real-time as well.

It’s somewhat striking that the terrorists’ use of BlackBerrys “caught the anti-terrorist forces by surprise.” While perhaps another step forward in the sophistication of their organization, in that it it makes communication more instant than ever, it’s long been reported that terrorist networks use the internet and cellphones for communication. Why wouldn’t they use the same tools that millions around the world use? They don’t all live in caves, you know. (Gizmodo)

Of course the people who don’t use social media much or well are the security forces!!!!!!!

Use of social media

• The Machinery of Hope : Rolling Stone - A substantial article analyzing the volunteer organization in the Obama campaign and the role of social media tools
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet key to Obama victories - A fairly substantial report on the Obama campaign’s effective use of the Internet during the primary season
• Inside Obama’s Surging Net-Roots Campaign - Analysis and commentary of the Obama campaign’s use of the internet as an organizing and fund-raising tool
• Members vs. Customers: How the Obama and Clinton Online Campaigns Differ - Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter - An analysis of the differing approaches to enlisting supporters by the Obama and Clinton campaigns during primary season. Turns an eye toward the differing uses of supporting technology and how those differences reflected differing assumptions and goals about the role of supporters
• The Media Equation - How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power - NYTimes.com - An excellent overview piece of reporting on how the Obama campaign made effective use of social media tools and thinking.

Effective use of engaged volunteers

• Obama Opens the GOTV Firehose | The Next Right - Analysis of the organizing principles and strategies behind the Obama campaign’s ground organization
• Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort - A fairly detailed analysis of the organizing principles behind how the Obama campaign built its volunteer organization
• Zack Exley: The New Organizers, Part 1: What’s really behind Obama’s ground game - A case study of the principles and approach behind the ground level volunteer organization in the Obama campaign. Some good insights into how to take full advantage of a motivated volunteer force with the right organizing principles and the right supporting technology

Lessons for organizational design and strategy

• Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators - Umair Haque - Umair Haque is one of the most insightful analysts and interpreters of how new technologies are influencing and shaping organizational design choices. Here he turns his eye on the lessons available in the success of the Obama campaign.
• Barack Obama’s Edge-Based Organization - John Sviokla - An early analysis of some of the broader lessons for organizations and organizational design that can be drawn from the Obama campaign

These are questions put forth in an interview I had several years ago with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. As Allan so aptly put it, knowledge management has always been a confounding issue for organizations seeking to better digitize, if you will, their collective knowledge. All too often, huge pieces of that collective learning have walked out the door to other organizations or to retirement.

Now, of course, we see social networking as a way to organically capture an assemble that collective knowledge, both within and outside the enterprise walls. But how is the more informal, almost free-for-all social networking approach meshing with more formal efforts to capture and leverage knowledge?

Xerox researcher Venkatesh G. Rao, said that the emerging tension between social media and knowledge management is a “generational war,” with younger participants opting for Web 2.0-ish approaches, versus the command-and-control nature of knowledge management systems.

However, in a post responding to Venkatesh’s observation, Tony Baer called the idea of generational war, at least here, as “hogwash.” As Tony observes, Web 2.0 isn’t wasted on the young: “Twittering, Facebook et al tend to hit more of a younger demographic, but use of Web 2.0 tools is definitely not restricted to people under 30.”

In fact, social media is being embraced with a lot of gusto by end users of all generations. “There have been many of us around for years who have always contributed “folk” knowledge, but until recently lacked the tools to share it.”

There are distinct differences between conventional knowledge management approaches as we’ve known them and social media, however. Tony points to parallels with the software development world. “Conventional knowledge management is more of a waterfall process [one department hands off work to another], whereas social media tends to be more agile [working collaboratively, real-time].”  In other words, conventional knowledge management systems have been top-down mega-projects, versus the more grassroots, democratic nature of social media.

As Tony puts it. the rise of social networking introduces a new dimension to the art and science of knowledge management:

“The question is whether you do so in a carefully organized top down fashion or instead encourage a culture of more informal or organic knowledge sharing. There’s no single silver bullet that works, but what’s always disturbed us have been those top-down enterprise knowledge management projects that to us appeared as little more than make work for highly paid enterprise consultants…. Along came Web 2.0 and social media which provided new technologies for the grassroots to simply not wait for some project manager to start a harvesting session which is then converted into retrievable assets from some application requiring significant custom coding. Instead, the notion of Wikis, blogs, microblogs, chats, forums and so on is to use the right tool for the purpose as the purpose arises. Some call it fun. We’ve thought of the new social media as the next generation Knowledge Management.”

Katie Couric’s interview with Governor Palin was the Rubicon moment that showed most of us that the Governor was not up to the job. How did most of us watch it - on the web.

Paradoxically it has been SNL and Jon Stewart that have made a major impact on the election. They have deepened the insights of the conventional news sources. Most of us have watched Tina Fey and Jon - on the web.

The system has noticed.

Until maybe 2 months ago, all conventional news outlets have seen the web as a useful add on. Now, it is clear that the web is THE place to put up the key content. The air merely markets the web - the web is the primary source, where people virally spread your content and so where the conversation begins.

It’s also where the producer can track with precision who watches. As the recession deepens, what advertising there will be will demand this precision. Only the web can deliver this.

Expect a major re-alignment.

Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War - An interesting and thought provoking post on some major philosophical differences between the world of knowledge management and social media. While I think the effort to link these differences to generational differences (Boomers vs. Millenials) is a bit of a stretch, the contrasts in philosophy and approach themselves are quite telling.

• Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: The Reactions - This is a follow up to an earlier discussion of the differences between knowledge management and social media in the enterprise. It collects various responses and reactions and goes on to react to the reactions. Definitely well worth reading.

I’m (still) all for Web 2.0 and listening to the voices of the great unwashed, but there are key aspects of using this approach that leave me skeptical or cold.  He and his colleagues get to pick which items they want to use add emphasis or colour an issue.

Nevertheless, I applaud CNN for actually paying attention to what is happening on the Web.

Mashable has more.

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Are we there yet? Can Kathy in finance now build a front-end analytical application that will call up data from several different departments to help her prepare a new quarterly budget report? Or does she still need to go to IT to make sure it’s “done right”?  Industry watchers have been pondering the efficacy and possibilities of user-built applications over the last few years, and generally have concluded that most business users aren’t quite ready and willing to spend a lot of time in application development. Plus, enterprises need to keep tabs on who’s doing what with data and applications.

But, lately, Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms — especially mashups — have been clearly exhibiting the levels of accessibility and simplicity that may make user-built apps more of a reality. There’s certainly a great deal of collaborative interfaces and Websites being built by non-techy folks — are they ready to take on more sophticated apps?

Ovum analyst Tony Baer recently took a look at the mashup phenomenon that is gaining steam across the Enterprise 2.0 landscape, and sees some progress, but agrees that we’re not quite there yet in terms of end-users building more sophisticated apps: As he puts it:

“…the very notion of “writing programs” is not exactly the kind of thing that you would expect your grandmother to do, not to mention business stakeholders who do not fall under the category of ‘power users.’ To date, that goal has only been realized with the common office productivity tools that are equipped on just about every desktop which provide bare bones features for extending a spreadsheet or word processed document with a macro, and to varying extents, hobbyist programs like kinder simpler photo editors that are thrown in gratis with Windows or Mac platforms. But for the most part these are automation, not programming tools.”

Tony warns that particularly at the enterprise level, IT still needs to stay involved in end-user projects, pointing out that “no matter how visual mashup tools are, you still need developers or power users at some point of the lifecycle, whether it be to vet objects or sources than can be safely mashed up without violating some corporate policy, or to deal with some complexities of JavaScript under the hood.”

However, there is progress, as exhibited by the Mozilla Foundation’s “Ubiquity” project. Ubiquity is supposed to bring mashup app development to users of all stripes, in what Tony describes as an “attempt to transform the browser into a natural language mashup tool accessible to non-programmers.”

Tony illustrates the types of mashups a Ubiquity-enable browser would enable:

“Ubiquity, is supposed to enable anybody – not just JavaScript developers – to casually mash things up when you perform tasks like send emails. Let’s say you want to throw a party and invite a bunch of friends to a restaurant. Instead of signing up with a site like Evite, simply name the restaurant, hit an option key, type in ‘Map,’ and voila, a Google Map with the location of the restaurant populates your email. Want some reviews or a display of the menu. Press the option key again and enter a command like ‘Yelp’ and type in natural language that you want some reviews or display a menu. Of course, you can do similar things today by embedding links, but this makes the process a lot more direct.”

Tony adds that the concept could also find its way into other leading portal sites such as Facebook and Yahoo News “to embellish messaging, Wikis, micro-blogging, or other uses limited only by the imagination.” However, he adds, since corporate data and software are involved, enterprises will still need to maintain boundaries over such activities, so IT staffers may still need to play a supporting role for the foreseeable future.

With Gustav a day away from landfall many of the most experienced people in the field are coalescing on a Ning site that will aggregate as much information as possible in one place. Wiki, Twets, RSS feeds from Blogs, Video - everything.

Here is the address of the site