Swarming, planning, culture and incentive to participate
I was leaving another comment on CapGemini’s Lee Provoosst’s blog (Capping IT off), and it just became more of a blog post, and I wanted more people to see my stream of consciousness…so here it is.
Swarming (the collective)
Lee’s post is about the invisible hand, self-organising, swarm intelligence, etc…I left a comment about my post on the participation economy, as well as a link to a video clip on the most chaotic, but yet self organised road traffic in Mumbai.
Lee’s comment reply is very insightful:
“The Mumbai traffic participants are selfish in the sense that they do not want THEIR car to be damanged, thus resulting that other cars don’t get damaged either. I sometimes feel that this selfishness lacks with knowledge contribution.”
I really like Lee’s perspective, but it almost sounds like an oxymoron, because if you are selfish you withhold, you don’t share/contribute. You still “do”, but perhaps not visibly in the open. I’ll have to think about this one.
Incentive (culture and adoption)
Lee also says:
“One of the things I’ve learned is that no matter how good the tools are that you provide and no matter how supportive the management is, it still comes down to the individual of contributing and reusing. If there is no incentive for a person to participate in this sharing ecosystems, it all breaks apart. It always comes down to the question “what’s in it for me?”"
The word “incentive” really drives it home.
On the open we know that once we discover (weave a network) and tune into our trusted social filter, the personal and social benefits are enormous.
I ask any web 2.0 person now, would you ever stop participating, collaborating, and connecting to your social graph. For me it’s, no way, as I get to centre the world around me. Why would I ever go back to old ways, I am so much more “aware” now…actually I’d need an “incentive” to go back.
I plan to do a post in the future about participation barriers and incentive models, but for now here’s what I was going to write in Lee’s comments:
Lee,
These 2 posts of mine also build on conversations, and the conditions for knowledge creation and exchange.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/04/17/tap-into-the-social-capital
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/04/22/k-flow
But like you say, this all means well, and people could see the benefit, but they are just too ritualised in email and intellectual captial.
It’s just like when I tell my mum that regular deodorant is bad for you as it contains aluminium. She really understands what I’m saying, but does she do anything about it, no…she still buys the same deodorant.
I can’t force her…she has to learn herself. Often in life we have to have a scare before we wake up to a better way. Basically routines are safe, and change is annoying and unpredictable, hence the resistance.
But constant role models and repetitiveness also help…the more you are in a social environment, the more you adapt to their ways, the more you become like them.
This is how I see it, all we can do is get some teams to use these tools, probably the tech populists (IT rogues) who are already using them anyway.
Their successes will hopefully breed more interest, and this has to be recognised by senior management…to generate a message to others that if you participate you are recognised.
When these people work in new teams they can introduce social ways to work, influencing new people. Hopefully this will have a word of mouth, organic, viral effect.
Maybe it should be part of job descriptions and career reviews…maybe as Thomas Friedman says, a few stock options may persuade people to want to do the best for the organisation as now they have a direct vested interest.
No-one can be told to behave or work with certain tools, they have to want to do it themselves, the more they are influenced and surrounded by people that do, the more chance they will have of catching the social bug.
There has to be a “culture of negotiation”…from Using Wikis on the Intranet: The British Council Case Study:
“It is in this culture of negotiation that people are aware that they don’t know everything; that others know different things; and through dialogue and negotiation, they can together create better things.”
I think the social enterprise is going to be a real slow process, as a lot of it is about undoing old habits, ways of being…that’s huge, just ask your wife 
Maybe we need enterprise celebrities to use social tools, to influence knowledge workers to be just like them. It works on kids…we need a Beckham of the enterprise.
To get right down to the fundamentals, I believe it’s about being a “learning organisation”, to get workers to have as much enthusiasm as your “R & D” department to learn new things and new ways. If “learning” is drummed into the corporate mission just as much as “profits” or “quality” or “client satisfaction”, I think initiatives like social tools will be more accepting…as long as “learning” becomes part of the corporate culture from high up. This paragraph was inspired by a quote by Chris Corrigan (via my Tumblr).
I heard in a IT Conversations podcast today that if people don’t get the gist of social tools, they say, oh, I’ll just send an email.
But before the introduction of email, you couldn’t do that, because your international phone bill would be huge, so you were kind of stuck with having to use email.
And once people got the hang of it, they loved it.
It’s different now, if people are reluctant to adopt social software they know they have email to fall back on.
This is a real learning organisational, culture, and change management issue…bring the cognitive scientists in, not the knowledge consultants.
I mentioned this in my Enterprise 2.0 fad Tumblr post.
Planning (deploy and sustain)
Suw Charman talks about the issue being with “social”, not the “software”, and failure, determination and change:
“Failure, real or perceived, is inextricably entwined with status and, frequently, if a project looks like it’s about to go bottom up, instead of figuring out how to save it, people figure out how to distance themselves enough to save face. In a business culture where rewards and punishments are focused on the individual, the teamwork and collaboration required to make a social software project a success can become too much of a risk. But if you’ve got the right skills and personality, you can turn that around.
To be successful at social software implementations in business you need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and relate to computers, tools, and each other. You need to understand how to introduce tools in a way that is non-threatening and which emphasises utility and benefits. You need to understand the political climate within your business, and know how to route around anyone who’s threatening to be obstructive.
Secondly, you need to be really pigheaded. If one team doesn’t take to a wiki, try working with another. If one blog fails, try to figure out why and then start another. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try again. After all, it’s only failure if you give up.”
I also like her comment:
“Strategy and planning is essential, but it’s not the only thing you need. The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, after all, gang aft a-gley. But just because a project goes a-gley, doesn’t necessarily mean that the tool is flawed. Perhaps there’s a flaw in the plan? Perhaps the plan was fine but the execution lacked? The problem is, it’s easy to succumb failure and dismiss the tool out of hand, rather than examine the reasons for failure, and then try again with a better plan.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “We installed blogs/wiki/social bookmarking in our company, and it was useless!” and, when I’ve dug a little, discovered that their plan was “Let’s throw shit at the wall and see what sticks!” Organic is for vegetables, not software implementation and rollout.”
For more on planning, use and sustain, see Planning & Sustaining Wiki-based Collaboration Projects, and How To Develop a Business-Aligned Social Media & Social Networking Strategy.
Conclusion
People want to have to change, so all we can do is create an influential environment (role models, success stories, recognition), where it grows on them, or perhaps they may decide to adopt because it eventually becomes the social norm.
I think adoption is going to be super hard, we want to show them a more socially productive way that also benefits business innovation…but will they really care when they can already do their work.
At present without the new breed of social software, business goes on as usual, but without phones and email it doesn’t.
In the future could we imagine business not being without social software. I already mentioned above in my personal life I could not live in just a phone and email world. Social software has to become the new norm, which we get addicted to, and then can’t do without.
The game is how to get them addicted, and overcome them being invested in their old ways.
NOTE: Since drafting this post, I have made another post on how the extent of knowledge sharing is tied to how you get paid.
More on swarming
Just before I published this post I see Lee has just made a follow up post.
Here’s more on the road traffic in Mumbai and how it relates to Swarm Intelligence, but firstly Swarm Intelligence:
“Swarm intelligence (SI) is artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. … SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of complex global behavior. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling.”
Lee says:
“To extend the list of “natural examples”, I would like to add “Mumbai drivers” as well:
“The agents follow very simple rules”: Mumbai drivers honk in all situations to warn others
“no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave”: very true, haven’t seen any speed camera or police controls
And the best one: “local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of complex global behavior”: As John pointed out in his link that he supplied in the comments, it is the selfishness of the individual that drives a knowledge base, or applied to Mumbai traffic: “The Mumbai traffic participants are selfish in the sense that they do not want THEIR car to be damaged, thus resulting that other cars don’t get damaged either.” This all leads to a situation where there are not that many accidents as you’d expect. The selfish drive for self preservation, benefits the whole system.”
Read the rest of Lee’s post and the comments on Organised groups vs Self-organising groups.
ENDING THOUGHT
The selfishness of the individual could drive a knowledge base, but how do we get them to be selfish “out-loud” (visible and connected in the open).
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
