Making the new more relevant

April 29, 2008 at 8:13 am · Filed under ABC News, CBS, Information Management, Interview, Messy World, Michael Skoler, News, Politics, Public Insight Journalism, Public Media, Public TV, Social Networking, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution

It’s ironic isn’t it, that at a time when the problems that confront us, such as the end of cheap oil, a war that we cannot get out of, an education system that fails 40% of Americans, a healthcare system that serves only a few, that our news is so awful.

CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.

News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.

How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?

I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.

Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience - how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.

This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.

The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.

What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?

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It’s the metonymy, stupid!

March 5, 2008 at 12:18 pm · Filed under Commercials, David Weinberger, FASTforward08, Marketing, Search, Social Computing, Social Media, Story, TV, Trust, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, advanced search

The other day I was driving with my 16-year-old at a certain speed down the highway. We needed to get her to her new job at the pizza parlor on time, and were making the usual desultory conversation along the way. She had opened her Macbook and started editing photos taken earlier that day. She was also surfing six or seven radio stations looking for songs she liked, and texting three or four friends.

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.

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FASTForward To … Implementation ?

February 19, 2008 at 11:27 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Change, Conflict, Culture, David Weinberger, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0, enterprise software

It seems to me, in the wake of exciting and enlightening presentations by Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, John Hagel and David Weinberger, that a core theme coming out this year’s FASTForward 08 conference is, as Andrew pointed out in his first slide, executives and managers in organizations have finally decided what we call Enterprise 2.0 is coming and will arrive whether they like it or not, and that they might as well get on with addressing the question "how" … "how do we do this, "how" do we make this work for us ?

Of course one of the key complicating factors is that implementation of much of Enterprise 2.0 involves some degree or other of empowerment, which has been a bugbear of organizational life and organizational development for a long time.

As I listened to and watched the presentations, my mind kept circling back to three interesting books I’ve gone though in the past couple of years …. 1) McLuhan For Managers - New Tools for New Thinking, by de Kerckhove and Federman, 2) The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel, and 3) The Future of Work, by Tom Malone.  And I thought of other books I have chewed through in the past as well, as the remainder of this post will show.

Combining the theme of the conference (The User Revolution) the two recent and important white papers recently cited on this blog about user co-creation of value leading to new business logic and new business models, John Hagel’s observations on the impact of the user revolution on organizations, and the presentations from the thought leaders cited above, and the countless articles about the changes observed and coming to top-down direction, control and management, one could be forgiven for suspecting that something big is about to come our way.

There’s always attempts to minimise complexity and the need to deeply understand (we were talking about the above issues at lunch today, and one of our lunchtime companions said "you’ve got to keep it simple, otherwise CEO’s and managers won’t engage").  Right !  

And I mean that .. I think he’s right.  Which is why I expect that many companies will have some interesting failures if they try to do too much too fast.  McAfee did note that there aren’t many horror stories out there, but I think it’s clear that as these tools and services spread, increasingly work will need to be re-designed and the changes to organizational structures and dynamics will accumulate until it’s clear that the networked organization operates very differently, and has different needs for hygiene and development than do today’s existing pyramidic organizations.

As a longtime OD practitioner, and with many friends and acquaintances in this field in several countries on at least three continents, may I say that with respect to hyperlinks and electronicised information systems that people use to communicate and sometimes collaborate .. yes there will be complexity added to the process of effectiveness in organizations, and yes, hyperlinks can and sometimes do subvert hierarchy (a la Weinberger).

Many OD consultants know a fair bit about Semler’s leadership of Semco and the structures and dynamics it has engendered, the earlier Saturn environment, self-directed work teams, socio-technical work systems, Barry Oshry’s work on power in social systems, the relative looseness and fluidity of smaller organization, Participative Work Design (Emery & Trist), Weisbord’s Productive Workplaces: Organizing And Managing For Meaning, Dignity and Community, Zuboff’s seminal study of pulp & paper factory workers  chronicled in her book In The Age of The Smart Machine: the Future Of Work And Power, Elliott Jacque’s stratification methodologies according to time-span of decision-making, and so on.  Another practical look at the emerging possibilities for the democratization of the workplace / organization can be found in Thomas Malone’s recent book The Future Of Work.  Seriously, I could go on … the issues are not new, and there’s a rich history out there to tap into.

The issue(s) of empowerment and how to work effectively as information and values exert a democratising effect have been with us for a long time.  There is a lot to learn about the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives from the thought and work of OD practitioners over the past three or four decades.

But (imo … an important caveat, to be sure) not very much has changed over the past 30 years.  I believe I could make an argument that hierarchy has actually in many instances increased its grip over the past five years.  In saying that, I am consciously remembering David W’s various statements about how hyperlinks and digitally-connected environments can cut the slack out of interactions between people.  With a ruthless focus on efficiency and the use of information technology to pour electronic concrete over many large-scale business processes, we can observe today that when it comes to purposeful interaction between employees and other employees, and employees and customers, and employees and management, there’s not much slack or room to experiment in may organizational systems today … and perhaps little tolerance for the messiness of experimenting with social computing.

Andrew McAfee did say, at the end of his presentation, that implementation would be hard, and that increasingly IT and social computing would create differences in performance between companies.

I think he’s right .. and I also expect that the practice of organizational development will rise from relative obscurity.  But .. and it’s an important but … not too many current OD practitioners have a lot of experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools and services.

The good news is that I think there’s a reasonable chance that there’s a new breed of line managers coming along who get this stuff, and will plunge into it relatively enthusiastically.

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Sited … CounterIntuitive

February 8, 2008 at 10:16 pm · Filed under Adoption, Blogging, Culture, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Trust, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0

Via Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter, I learned that George Colony, Forrester’s CEO, has recently started a blog (… as Rob Paterson has been pointing out, Twitter is a great place to pick what’s of interest to you out of a flow of murmurs, pointers and other snippets from a bunch of smart people)

I think Forrester has been pretty steady and early in their understanding that blogging is here to stay and will have large impacts upon marketing, PR and the evolution of knowledge work inside the enterprise.  Forrester’s Charlene Li was early to the party and produced some good research about the blogging and social software phenomena in a business context …

• Blogging:  Big Deal or Bubble?  (November 2004)
• Corporate Blogging Policies (Public Wiki)
• The ROI of Blogging - The "Why" and "How" of External Blogging Accountability (January 2007)

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… and more recently Forrester had the good sense to hire Jeremiah (Owyang), a smart and well-informed fellow.

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It will be interesting to watch and read Colony’s blogging, and over time see if he, like many other people, comes to believe that it is useful to think, question and listen in public and "out loud".

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Tags: Forrester, CEO blogging, Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang

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Radio as TV? - The Bryant Park team show the way

February 7, 2008 at 7:23 am · Filed under Bryant Park Project, Social Media, Social Objects, Trust, Trusted Space, Video

Not only can I get Bryant Park streamed or podcasted to me in Canada. Not only can I banter back and forth with the team and other listeners on Twitter - NOW I can see them eating what looks like a dead python and coughing their lungs out on video.

The point?

Makes the connection more human - this is not the Radio of my youth when the BBC announcers would wear a dinner jacket on air to get the right sound. Here is Alvar Lidell announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor - gives you a sense of the “sound” of the time.

BPP is evolving a deep human connection with their audience - all local stations can and should do this.

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Another Sighting … User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value

February 1, 2008 at 2:52 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Cloud Computing, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Sustainable Development, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, mashups, open source

Hot on the heels of the recent post about "The Rise In Collective Intelligence - Decentralizing Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture" comes the release of a second report or white paper with a remarkably similar title … "User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value".

There must be something in the water or the air, one would think.

This announcement comes from the P2P Foundation, spearheaded by Michel Bauwens.

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User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value

This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.

It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.

The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).

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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era.  The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.

At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago.  I promise I’ll stop soon

"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"

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Tags: Collective Intelligenece, Co-creation of value, new paradigms, peer-to-peer, business models, wirearchy

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Grooming and Social Software

January 12, 2008 at 9:00 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Grooming, Relationships, Robin Dunbar, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Trust, Twitter

Why is facetime and going to the “office” so important? Intellectually we know that most of what happens at the office is a huge waste of time - all those meetings - all that posturing! Why can’t we mainly work remotely?

Maybe it’s because we are in truth Primates and that what the office really presents is lots of opportunity for that central primate social lubricant - Grooming.

A recent study on grooming shows its economics: (CTV)

SINGAPORE — Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity.

“In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all,” Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.

“It’s a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something that can be exchanged for sexual services,” Gumert said.

Gumert’s findings, reported in New Scientist last week, resulted from a 20-month observation of about 50 long-tailed macaques in a reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.

And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.

“And when the female supply is higher, the male spends less time on grooming … The mating actually becomes cheaper depending on the market,” Gumert said.

Other experts not involved in the study welcomed Gumert’s research, saying it was a major effort in systematically studying the interaction of organisms in ways in which an exchange of commodities or services can be observed — a theory known as biological markets.

This is where I see tools such as Twitter playing such an important role in facilitating us leaving the office and working more from home. Twitter supports Grooming. I think that that is what Twitter is all about. Without this Grooming, we can’t increase the distance and hence cannot escape the office.

This then raises another aha for me. We have been here before.

Robin Dunbar (Dunbar Numbers etc) has a theory (Grooming & Gossip & the Evolution of Language) about the evolution of language that enables us to see tools like Twitter in a new light.

In short it is this. Grooming is central to social cohesion in all primates - that includes us. Traditional Grooming is socially very expensive. You and I have to stop everything else and focus on each other. We have to be very close physically. Dunbar’s theory is that we started to use vocalizations to groom each other instead of touch. This enabled us to extend the distance and also freed up our hands to do other things such as get food.

Earlier theories are based on the idea that language began as a response to complex hunting. But we all know that men don’t talk when hunting and wolves and lions who engage in complex hunting, don’t vocalize then either.

Intuitively Dunbar makes sense to me. So then Twitter might be a way of dramatically reducing the social costs of our essential need to Groom which now has to take place within the physical presence of our colleagues and our bosses.

Just as language broke the cost of touch, so Twittering can break the cost of going to the office.

Maybe, this simple little tool might be the most important breakthrough in how humans work and unleash the huge costs that we have embedded in having to go to the office to meet our primary social need as primates - Grooming!

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The New NPR Music Site - A Model for Social Media

November 6, 2007 at 8:18 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, NPR, NPR Music, New Realities, Public Media, Social Media, Trust, Trusted Space

NPR launched its new Music site yesterday. I spent much of yesterday walking around and playing in it - yes it’s a complex world not a “site”.

I am really impressed as I hope that you will be too. It really does allow for an informed “discovery” for instance when I listened to a new recording of Elgar’s cello concerto, it took me to the incomparable Jacqueline Du Pre, to articles on Elgar and to many other pieces. All can easily be played and put onto my own playback list with an exceptional Flash Player - no more WMF!!!!!

Most musical tastes are met. As are many different “views” - Not only can you listen to recordings but also concerts and view video. Not only can you establish a personal playlist but you can buy music too. You can also tap into the streams of up to 12 stations - many of whom have a global reputation in the field

Not only can you hear music but you can hear informed discussion about music.

For me the site offers the current ideal in a social media site

• It’s a complex world but with intuitive navigation that not only allows you to find what you are looking for but also to discover things that you were not! So you tend to spend hours there. As the site builds - so will its complexity and your ability to hang about there for long times
• It’s a personal world - you can shape it to meet your own needs both in terms of taste and time and control
• It’s interactive with many open and informative blogs
• It can grow as more stations join and has the potential to become the major music site in the world - it demonstrates the mutual value of cooperation that exceeds the early coop venture in podcasting - for here each new addition adds to the over complexity and hence life of the system.

So how did this come about? That is itself a story.

I think that the key was a decision by a few brave NPR folks over 2 years ago that they did not know what to do.  I am finding the the most inviting and most successful beginning to find the new way is to accept ignorance.

Not only did they accept that they did not know, but that intuitively understood that maybe most did not know either BUT that if they genuinely asked the stations, an answer might emerge.

They also knew that they had to get some help to enable them to do this - they needed a few (They got 3) people who were not selling a solution either but who could help build the conditions of trust to have a huuuuge conversation so that the “Wisdom of Crowd” could be heard.
In later posts, I would like to talk a bit about what happened. For look at the results:

• The NPR Music site is truly a child of the process
• It is truly cooperative
• It hits a bullseye for design and outcome
• It is the new standard for a social media site and very importantly supporting organization

For me the key to any organization seeking to do the same is to build the requisite trust with some of the parties.
I have found that building trust is dependent on building a shared context, a shared language and a shared understanding of that is going on. This includes getting the elephants out into the open. Just talking does not do this - we found that people had to do things with each other to create this trust.

Then some key ideas emerge - they literally float up. They do not belong to anyone - that is their power. But they are seen as being true by many. By being owned by all, there is no owner barrier to the idea and this seems a precondition to joint action.
Then it takes more hard work still than anyone could imagine - I had hoped that the music site would have been ready a year ago. I was naive. Even with the best preconditions, moving to the new reality is exceptionally hard to do.

The product is all about technology. But the process to getting there is not. More later

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