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Salesforce’s acquisition of Rypple will be the beginning of a new explosion in these peer performance apps (social performance software); it’s not hard to predict that existing enterprise social software suites will either create their own, or acquire small start-ups (now’s a good time for software entrepeneurs to make some potential money). Whether the large enterprise social software suites agree with the effectiveness of these tools or not doesn’t really matter, as they need to keep competitive by not allowing the competition to offer something they don’t have. Hence often something becomes the norm not because it’s a must have purpose-based innovation or fills a pre-existing need; but instead just because everyone’s doing it…or cashing in.

But this post isn’t about this high level view, instead it’s on one particular feature that these peer performance vendors offer; and that’s "recognition/thanks/kudos/recommendation".

For organisations already using social networking tools, I wonder whether it’s going to be effective introducing yet another more specific-based social network. I wonder if instead these functions will be incorporated as new features in existing tools.

But first let’s establish what they are about, lets examine their feature set. Most of them are about changing the performance review process to an ongoing thing, rather than annually…and for it to happen socially online.

The players in the market that I know of are Rypple, Worksimple, Coworkers, Achievers, Saba and now an IBM partner application…get ready for more (eg. Atlassian), especially from Talent Management vendors.

The first time I recall something to this effect was LinkedIn Recommendations Some mildy related tools are Happiily and Niko by Socialcast (which are actually more mood based apps) and Evaluat3.me (this is more a survey about you)

The main feature set of social performance suites are:

• Social Goals (setting objectives, and viewing the status of them on our profile) eg. 20% market growth…what a great way for others to know your progess and achievement
• Coaching
• Feedback
• Performance Summary
• Recognition (Kudos/Thanks/Praise)

View the Rypple features page for an explanation on “social performance”, and how they have created a more meaningful and engaging system that is more than performance appraisal/review, in the way that it’s not so much a review, but coaching goal achievement as it happens (by both leads and peers)…much more transparent, and purposeful.

Recognition (Kudos/Thanks/Praise)

For the focus of this post the feature I’m most interested in is peer/lead recognition (thanks, praise, kudos, recommendations…) For example Rypple Thanks (read and watch the video).

Then there are existing social network vendors have have incorporated thanks/praise/kudos as a feature eg. Yammer and a few others. Note that thanks/praise/kudos is only one feature of Rypple and the like. Yammer is different than Rypple, but they do have a few overlapping features. Read and watch the video on Yammer Praise.

ADDED: Socialcast also have a “thanks” feature.

Recognise how well I use my social network to generate quality productivity

In a past post, Measuring employee’s on the quality of their work and gifting; based on how well they utilise their online network, I focused on the need of an observation technique where we can acknowledge the productivity employees generate from being socially active online within their organisation. Firstly, for the direct reason of acknowledging their good work-and how it came to being-which needs to be recognised, and secondly that feedback, acknowledgement and recognition are positive conditions for people to continue participating and adopt new ways of working (in this case online social tools).

Please read my post as it quotes from some intelligent and experienced people in this industry, and gets to the heart of the matter of where current organisational design clashes with the cultural shift that begins to take place with the addition of working with social tools (ie. like we shape tools, tools shape society). Especially in relation to being measured on your individual contributions; rather than how well you used your network as sources, or even collaborators on your deliverable…and also the time required to participate, build and nuture relationships in order to have a valuable network in the first place.

Just quickly, I should get kudos for knowing the right people to give me advice in order to churn out a quality deliverable. Why? Because this sends a signal to people that connecting to the talent of others is what we are about, we didn’t just hire you for your individual intelligence. One step further is me actually getting people I’ve sourced to contribute to the deliverable; this should have no impact on how I’m measured for individual contributions, in fact I should get more kudos for the same reason above. If we need to hire a team to do a job in the organisation we scout around in an attempt to source the best available internal experts. Well I’m just doing the same thing for my tasks.

I’ll re-quote Oscar Berg which will give you the gist of the post:

A paradox for employees today is that they really need to connect with and collaborate more with more people, and strengthen their personal networks if they are to deliver better results and strengthen our their positions. One problem they are facing when doing this is that most current incentive models do not reward employees helping their colleagues, unless there is a direct and measurable return on their contributions. Another problem is that many organizations fail at making the contributions that employees do outside of their own team visible, and thus if fails to recognize them. These problems put people in a kind of deadlock position. During uncertain times, most people will simply do what becomes visible and recognized by those who evaluate them, their managers. They will most likely also most be asked or commended by their managers to do so, because their managers are in a similar position as they will be judged by their managers on the visible contributions from the team they are managing (and so it goes on, all the way to the top).

Wow, that’s a great piece!

A resume that’s alive

So how do we change this syndrome?

• not recognising the help and work you do beyond your team, or even within your team (if you are not allowed to spend time in your internal social network, and help others in the first place, then you have a bigger problem…which is what the post linked above is all about…in addition to the adoption obstacle of not being acknowledged for knowing who the best people are to source and help to create a more quality deliverable)
• people only doing what’s going to be visible; rather than what’s best for the business

I once tweeted:

Before we visited the Rolodex, now we live in the Rolodex

…this is my reference to Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the like. I think the same can be for social work performance

Before we had a static Resume, now we we live in our Resume

…this is a reference to our profile page and how it lists the work we are doing as it happens, comments, likes, recognition, bio links (all this shows off our expertise, respect, dedication, competency, character, passion, etc…what more do you want raw anecdotes of a person in action…and that are continuously updated).

Moonlighting

For those who don’t know I’m the global lead for collaboration, and part of this is facilitating our online communities. Recently I helped facilitate a new community about career development. My role is more about train the trainer, perpetual guidance; doing my best to enable them and coach them in being acute at their new craft in facilitating…and of course I manage the product in general. Anyway on this occassion I went beyond my call of duty by spending time helping them design their community (I did this as a regional CEO was involved, so it was in my interest). Now this is not my job, I would have no time to do my job if I always provided this service (If I had a team of people then it would be different). But it wasn’t just about the design, it was about actually doing the design. Now my HTML skills are basic, but here I am learning about imagemaps, javascript overlay boxes, and then attempting to code them. I also spent time talking to those in the company that I know have HTML skills, and sometimes got them to do some of the work. Ideally these people could have been internally contracted to do the work, but it turned out my product knowledge was required, and they don’t have that much time to spare. (SIDE NOTE: This is natural human behaviour; you make less time to help someone not in your network, than someone in your network).

Now this took me away from other work; but I thought it was valuable to work on this. From the perspective of my HTML contact; well his role is not a webdesigner, although he does utilise these skills in his role. In this case because I knew he has these skills I asked if he could utilise them on a task that has nothing to do with him, but is entirely based on the respect and history he has for me (and on top of this he was busy with his own stuff)

So here I am going beyond the call of duty within my team task, and here my colleague is performing work for free, on top of his already busy workload.

If we did this work observably online on a social network like Yammer, I’m sure people would of noticed our hard work, dedication and beyond the call of duty attitude…indirectly we become known for our skills and qualities. The double-edged sword is this could become a burden…I say this because this same colleague was helping out another trusted colleague of ours on a task also not within his portfolio…we are starting to call this "moonlighting"…and he’s I must say, a professional "moonlighter". Anyway, it turns out we did this work in email, so no-one really knows we did this unless we told them, or they saw the finished product (which they still won’t know who was behind it). I told my boss about this work, and he was OK with it, and said good work. But there’s a better way that could have more impact or impression on my peers and boss, and also fulfill my natural human need for a job well done (and everything that cascades from that being displayed in my profile page as part of my capabilities and service as you would see on a resume…only I’m not telling you about it, you are seeing it in action). The task owner also continually thanked me in email as we did the job, and then at the end of the job he couldn’t thank me enough…he mentioned that he owes me a beer or 5

We have the first part down ie. we can now work observably online where people can see the work we do as it happens. ie. not only the work, but the quality of our participation and how we are dedicated to the organisation at large. But what if you weren’t looking, these conversations roll into the archives quite quickly.
Now a more formal way for peers and leads to recognise your work is to issue you kudos/thanks/praise, etc…this is not just done as a comment, but it’s an actual feature eg a type of status update. Your profile page would also be the place that shows off your kudos/thanks/praise. Surely this is DIY career development, and gives you drive to keep doing what you’re doing ie participating…which is a bonus for social tool product managers as it helps with adoption.

Now take a breather…as the next part is important.

Beware gamification!

Let’s not start gamifying this and create a leaderboard and badges based on levels for all the kudos/thanks/praise you accumulate, and then have this as the basis for decision-making like resource allocation, expertise or which employees to retain based on their badge level. NOTE: Some vendors use descriptive badges, whereas I’m talking about badges that represent an earned expertise level (which could be based on false praise, and invaluable participation…better known as "gaming the system"). Let’s make sure we don’t let the numbers make decisions for us. Why? Because some people that deserve more kudos than others may not have them as the people they helped out haven’t adopted the online social tools in which to issue kudos/praise/thanks…maybe someone with lots of kudos/praise/thanks is less valuable than the next person; but the numbers don’t tell it that way, and what they also don’t tell is that person is gaming the system with others to accumulate kudos/praise/thanks. Also there is valuable, generous and altruistic work being done offline, on the phone, in email, in IM that will miss out on being recognised, due to not being visible…I have posted an anecdote on this before, here it is again:

Someone mentioned today that they hope our organisation doesn’t measure value based on just online communities. That there is so much community activity done on the phone and in meetings that brings value to the business that may not be known about. The concern is that people that are visible are going to get recognition over others that are more offline workers, who may even contribute more value.

When we start basing decisions on badges we are forgoing badgless, but equally capable people. I don’t want to get into gamification in this post, but what once had immediate purpose and respect (recognition and praise), when quantified or turned into a fetish (accumulated into a total and turned into an entity "the badge"), can lead to competition and gaming the system (doing it simply to gain points, and "it" may be not really valuable stuff we need to pay attention to); it may become more of a tail wagging a dog scenario. The system just becomes a whore, or sold out just like film and music has become (SIDENOTE - luckily web 2.0 allows us to enjoy the honest and more true to artform music/film generated from the long tail)

So the thing here is that as long as there is no prize, people are less likely to game the system. Instead the accumulation of praises and kudos are just another aspect to consider when making decisions about recognition, finding experts, bonuses, promotions; rather than the sole aspect. This is contrary to what some in the Dachis group say (like Larry Irons, I was surprised to hear these words from that crowd):

…wouldn’t the decision to promote one of two equally skilled employees would be just a little simpler if one had five more “badges” than the other?

The new 3rd party IBM Connections app called "kudos" just doesn’t sit well with me (mind you I say this hastily without reading too deep or playing with it). In addition to what has been talked about above, they go one step further and award points for participating (need I mention Dan Pink’s book or psychological research on self-determination.

Kudos Badges works by tracking metrics around what users do within IBM Connections. For example when a user posts a Status Update, they get a Kudos Point. When they create a blog, they might get 5 Kudos Points. When someone recommends a file that someone else created, they get 1 Kudos Point and the receiver of the recommendation gets 3 Kudos Points. There are hundreds of potential actions within IBM Connections and Kudos Metrics enables us to track them and reward users for their behaviour. Kudos Metrics are used to award both Kudos Leaderboard points as well as award Kudos Badges. All of the metrics can be customised and you can even create your own metrics and badges. Kudos Badges comes with a heap of predefined metrics and badges to make it easy to get started. They have been designed to not only reward behaviour but also to encourage users to take further action and educate them on the broader capabilities of IBM Connections. In addition to metrics within IBM Connections, Kudos Badges enables you to create metrics for actions and behaviour in external systems. These external metrics can then be used to award custom badges as well as contribute to a users leaderboard score and rank. For example you may have a sales force system that you want to encourage specific behaviour. Or maybe HR Performance Objectives that you want to reward users for achieving. The options are endless!

It’s all good intended, but I fear it may lead to gaming the system, participation just for the sake of it…it’s old skool km, and not sustainable. Sorry I didn’t want this to be a post about gamification, but obviously gamification starts to bleed or take centre stage in some vendor offerings. What I can see happening is that organisations will get lazy on intrinsic motivations, and just rely on game mechanics.

Speaking of IBM this type of participation-based "pointsification" is one of the factor that did harm to one of their internal social networking sites "beehive" (socialblue)…so indeed we have to becareful of something poisoning the system.

This presentation by Rypple tells me they are very different than this and understand the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and that intrinsic motivation needs to be the lead singer.

See my posts by Sebastian Deterding and Jane McGonigal on gamification is nothing without gamefulness. I also did an extensive post on the difference between gamers and employee engagement.

I may do a follow up post on gamification since this post has led us that way…I could keep going on this post about point systems and knowledge markets for sharing knowledge and collaboration, but I’ll elaborate on how gamification is not the answer for that particular context

Always good to finish with some philosophy by Dave Snowden:

Reward systems, linking social obligations to targets and promotion criteria are the single most stupid thing that anyone can do in KM or any other system reliant on social interaction. People will always share with people in the context of proven need, but to share in anticipation of that need will not happen. All that happens if you create a reward mechanism is that people game the system. Its another excuse (like the culture was wrong) for an ill conceived approach

"When an organization doles out bonuses, raises, awards and promotions based on individual contributions, what’s the carrot for social participation?

I, for example, am mainly measured by my individual efforts: how many customers I work with who go on to buy my software; what leadership roles I fulfill inside and outside the organization; what assets I create for others to reuse. This is all right and good, for how else can an individual be measured"

- Gia Lyons

Will sourcing my network for help, reduce the measure of assets I produce, if so I will produce something of less value on my own, at least I get all the credit and a bag of carrots?

This is a generalisation, we are all wired to socially connect, some more than others, (in fact we don’t survive unless we build horizontal relationships and help each other out…think about who helped you iron out an issue on your recent spreadsheet, or who helped you find a person or locate information last week) but this natural behaviour is impeded by organisational design constraints (ie. time should ideally be spent on our own tasks).

Gia explains what prompted her post. She was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says:

"…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…"

This is not about engagament and what’s in it for me.

And it’s not about incentives to participate; what this is about is recognising people for how well they work based on utilising their network (MIT study found that in one organization the employees with the most extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues).

And something more deeper than ratings, which I covered in my post, The ROI of time spent helping others, and performance reviews

Will how well I use my network to tap into talent to produce that report be recognised, compared to just using my team resources?

Gia explains:

"What’s missing is a measurement of how well I use my network…how do we measure a person’s prowess at making their individual contributions better because they knew who knew what, and had a relationship with them such that they could tap their expertise…whether directly or through their social contributions, at a moment’s notice?"

Now we are talking about being recognised and measured for how well we use our network to deliver our requirements.

Coupled with this is the time spent building your network, and building and maintaining relationships. For more see my post, People who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced POV

Basically you need time to spend using social tools to get to know people so you can use them properly.

Here’s how Gia puts it:

"To network, one must be social, must participate in online communities as well as offline, must spend time getting to know others and letting others know them.

Aha. Being social requires a stiff price: spending our most precious commodity, Time.

So really, we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured."

And her conclusion:

"Fix this, and you will have removed a major obstacle to the inside-the-firewall business adoption of social networking and productivity behavior."

It’s a fact that we utilise our networks in an offline way to get our work done. Now we can also do this online. 

But does this mean we now need a way to measure this just because we can see it? Or have we always wanted to recognise people for how well their network works for them, only we had no way to do it?

Or is the reason a tactic ie. a way to increase adoption ie. the more we recognise contributions, the more people participate?

I think it’s all of these, and also a way to encourage cross-silo awareness and collaboration. 

Look at the reverse of this. We take the time from our tasks to help others on their tasks, as this is reciprocated or perhaps this is the organisational culture. Our bosses understand that even though they pay us and give us time to deliver our tasks, that sometimes they are actually paying us to help out others…as long as it’s not detrimental to our own tasks, or our health.

Given this do we need to be measured, not just as Gia puts forth on how well we source and utilise our network to deliver our work, but also how frequent and valuable our gifts to others are.

I always use the quote by Bertrand Duperrin:

"…businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used…businesses don’t understand free across its departments."

Which is similar to Prems notion of Social collaboration:

"Where people collaborate outside of the contractual obligations? Which means outside of the role structures & job descriptions in the organization? Typical of a matrix organization, no? What do you think? What are your views on ‘social collaboration’ and ‘role power’ in a collaborative enterprise (a bit more complex than a matrix organization)?"

I think this is a variation of Google 20% time or non-commissioned work or cognitive surplus. In that model you are free to spend some time to work on your passion, whereas I’m still talking about regular tasks set by your unit…but what I’m getting at is that your boss is ok for you to spend a certain portion of time in gifting others as the organisation at large will absorb that cost from your business unit.

eg. 10% of your work week can be spent on tasks that are not your own, or perhaps volunteer on.

Doesn’t this happen anyway…yep, but if it’s part of official organisational design I think it’s a step forward to growing into a collaborative enterprise; and certainly a win for "sharing" in KM circles. It’s also a win for employee enagagement, as workers can be fulfiled gravitating to tasks that interest them. 

Related

Lose the person, you lose their network that made them valuable

What gets measured determines what gets done

Collaboration built into structures and compensation

Recognise silo bridge walkers in performance evaluations

I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!

Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque?

Networks, Collaboration, Cooperation and silos

Value is often defined at the divisional level

People who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced POV

Performance review according to embodying core values

Performance reviews are typically based on pre-determined expectations

Value is often defined at the divisional level

Social business - feel the dissonance; a look into the disruption of Taylorism

VIDEO Andrew McAfee: Can you have your hierarchy and network too? 

 

2min50sec - In reference to not just team work, but to enterprise-wide

"My provocation is why would you not bake into everyone’s job description and into their performance review some level of enterprise helpfulness or enterprise collegiality"

 

Oscar Berg nails it: 

 

A paradox for employees today is that they really need to connect with and collaborate more with more people, and strengthen their personal networks if they are to deliver better results and strengthen our their positions. One problem they are facing when doing this is that most current incentive models do not reward employees helping their colleagues, unless there is a direct and measurable return on their contributions. Another problem is that many organizations fail at making the contributions that employees do outside of their own team visible, and thus if fails to recognize them. These problems put people in a kind of deadlock position. During uncertain times, most people will simply do what becomes visible and recognized by those who evaluate them, their managers. They will most likely also most be asked or commended by their managers to do so, because their managers are in a similar position as they will be judged by their managers on the visible contributions from the team they are managing (and so it goes on, all the way to the top). 

Luis Suarez nails it answering a question in a video (22mins) where he says he often works on tasks on other teams but does not get financially compensated, and maybe this is something that HR needs to look at in order to keep up with the way we work now. But he said there are potential intangible benefits ie. if in the future he is looking for some work he will have goodwill with those he has helped out in the past, and you will have demonstrated your competence and character…and they more often than not will help you out. But it may even be that your job security is ok, all you need is some expertise outside the skills of your team…ah yes reciprocity.

 

This post is about my first couple of days experimenting with Google Plus. Some of my review critique may be known or answered on the forums, but there’s already over 1500 posts on some of the forums, so I’ll give it a miss for now.

This isn’t a general review about the product per se, but more about it’s design model; it’s not just another social network.

Then I get deeper into their execution of the design model. I pose that the "Circles" functionality (which the whole product hinges on) seems simple at the surface level, but when you look into it, it’s more complicated than you think. I feel people will use it thinking one thing is happening, when indeed it’s not precisely the case. Unfortunately you need to read the manual to understand just what’s going on.

Google Plus is very impressive…it’s a shot at being a Facebook/Twitter hybrid and more…I pointed to a mashable post in Jul 2007 (4 years ago) to hints of Google social networking, then it was called Socialstream. See the reviews so far on: Google, Techcrunch, Read/Write Web, Mashable (pros and cons), as well as a roundup, and the history.

I’m not going to talk about all the other components like Sparks, Hangout’s, etc…instead in this post I’ll focus on Circles (ie. the stream-if you haven’t seen it-it’s the Facebook Newsfeed type thing)

But first let’s quickly cover the question people will ask you…

How is it different to Facebook and Twitter?

As an online relationship model; Facebook is symmetric, Twitter is asymmetric, and Google Plus is asymmetric

Twitter

• Follow (asymmetric) - enables you to follow people (those people don’t have to follow you back in order for you to see their content in your stream…you are basically their fan)

• Public - your posts are shared in the public

Facebook

• Friend (symmetric) - you cannot read and send each other updates unless you both follow each other (this is called "friend")

• Private - you posts are not shared in the public, instead they are shared with all your friends only (this is called a "walled garden")
• Selective Reading & Sharing - you can also read and share with just a selection of people (this is called "Lists"…this isn’t a primary design feature and isn’t used that much as far as sharing goes)

Google Plus

• Follow (asymmetric) - enables you to follow people, just like Twitter, where those people don’t have to follow you back

• Public and/or Private - your posts can be shared in the Public, or just shared with All Circles or a selection of Circles
• Selective Reading - you can also read posts in a stream from just a selection of people you follow (this is called "Circles")
• Selective Sharing - you can also share posts with just a selection of people (this is called "Circles")…BUT unlike Facebook, unless "those people you follow in your circle" follow you back, they won’t see your post in their stream, instead they will see it in an alternative stream called "Incoming".

Posting to Circles

I post about my trip to Melbourne and limit this to my Family circle (this circle has 6 people in it)

Because I’m so used to Facebook I have assumed that all those 6 people will see my post.

Wrong? Only the 4 people that have followed me back will see that post in their "Stream".

The other 2 people will only see that post if they look at their "Incoming" stream.

The 101 - when you choose a Circle only the people that follow you back will see your post

Posting to Public

It simply means that all people that follow me will see my post in their stream

Just say Judy follows me, but I don’t follow her (therefore I don’t have her in a circle)

And just say I post to a Circle, and not Public.

This means Judy will not see my post at all.

Posting to Individuals (Mentions)

This has nothing to do with Circles.

But just like Circles and Public; Individuals are a selection you can make in choosing an audience to post to.

The way you can post to Individuals is pre-fixing their name with an "@" or a "+"

The difference in limiting to who sees your post using this selection is that it will also send that person a notification that you have "mentioned" them. Which kind of makes it very similar to the Twitter @mention feature. In Google Plus there is a stream called Notifications where you can view all these pushed mention posts.

NOTE: Notifications isn’t just for mentions, it also displays comments on your posts, and comments on posts that you have commented on, and a few more things. The good thing is you can limit the Notification stream by these selections.

Here’s a use case combining Circles and individuals:

I’m posting something to my family circle (which contains 6 people), but since 2 of those people don’t follow me back I will mention those people as individuals

The result is the 4 people in my circle that follow me back will see my post in the stream; and the 2 people that don’t follow me back will get a notification to take a look at my post in the "Incoming" stream

Another use case is that I post something in my friend circle (16 friends follow me back and 4 don’t). I want to make sure that 2 of those friends who follow me back will see this post in their stream and read it. But there is a potential that it will stream by them without then noticing it, so in this case, even though they are in my circle and follow me back, I will still mention them as individuals, this way they get pushed a notification. As for the 4 friends in my circle that don’t follow me back; I’ll leave it up to them to see my post in their incoming stream

Ross Mayfield has a visual illustrating Stream, Incoming, and Mentions, ans another on Public, Extended, and Limited

 

 

 

BTW - If you see a post in your stream that has the label "Limited" this means you are in that person’s Circle/s. So who else can see that post? ie.who potentially is in this conversation. If you click the "Limited" label you can’t see that person’s Circles, but you can see a selection of people (which is good enough for your purpose). If there’s 65 people that post was shared with, you will see a photo list naming 20 people, and a word saying +45 more…read up on it here.

My gripe with Google Plus Circles is a design problem with "Selective Sharing" in relation to how we cognitively think.

I think Circles work well for reading (as it’s what we are used to with Facebook Lists), but when it comes to sharing they are not what you think.

Yes you are still sharing with all people in that Circle, but for some of those people your content will not appear in their main stream ie. for the people that don’t follow you back it will appear in their incoming stream (where they probably won’t see it for a long time as it’s not really an important stream that gets their attention)

Compare this to Facebook lists; you may read content from all people in a list, and you can share content to all those same people in that list…the content appears in their main Newsfeed.

To me that’s how my brain immediately thinks what would happen.

But as explained above this doesn’t happen with Google Plus as it’s design is not the symmetric model, yet the execution of parts of its sharing design makes you think it is.

You have to think of it like this; a Circle is not an Email List or a Facebook list…all the people in your circle will not see your post in their stream (only the people that follow you back see it)

If 8 out of 10 people in your Circle follow you back then these 8 people are the "email list/facebook list type feel", whereas those other 2 don’t miss out.

NOTE: But it is unlike an email list by design anyway, as it’s not a push model and you don’t get pinged…unless you use the @mention feature.

It may not be a problem for some as they may be ignorant of what they are actually doing, they will just assume that all people in a circle will see your post in their stream…similar to a Facebook List.

They perhaps will be aware of their ignorance later on when they ask someone if they read their post, and that person replies that they have never read any of their posts.

I told you Google Plus is complicated when you look deeper. I think it’s a problem as it’s not in tune with how we cognitively think things work, especially when our brain already has an established pattern (ie. here’s a list of people, I will send this content to that list, and all those people will see it)

But perhaps that’s what you get when you try to be Twitter and Facebook at the same time; which is a good idea, this way I’d only need to use one product.

Recommendation for posting to Circles

I think there should be a better name for the "Incoming" stream. When I first read that label it didn’t mean anything to me….it’s "posts from people that follow you that you don’t follow"..but this label ain’t gonna work either.

I would like to see an icon on Profile photos that informs you if people follow you back or not. And somehow design this into the context of posting ie. at time of posting, when I choose a Circle, I want something to say" did you know that these 2 people in your Circle do not follow you back so they will only see this post in their Incoming stream."

Or perhaps we need two types of Circles ie. Reading circles and Sharing circles. The Sharing circle only has people that follow you back. But you don’t create sharing circles, they are just the portion of people from your Reading circle who follow you back.

In my profile page there’s two sections "People I have in Circles" (people I follow), and "People that have me in their Circles" (people that follow me), but what is lacking is a section called "People that I follow that don’t follow me back"…not sure if I need a section called "People that follow me that I don’t follow back" as I can just see this in the Incoming stream (but at the same time it would be good if their profiles were listed in the sidebar of my Incoming stream). Same goes with having these sections in my homepage; actually the homepage even lacks the section "People that have me in their Circles"

Recommendation for posting to Public

When I choose Public, I would think that Circles would be greyed out so I cannot select them ie. if I’m posting something as Public there is no need to limit it to a circle as well, as the limiting is having no effect since it’s public anyway. By greying out selections the user feels they are doing the right thing.
UPDATE: ‘your circles’ may deposit posts in their incoming stream if they are not following you, while public does not

Same goes with "All Circles". If I’m posting to "All Circles", any other circle selection should be greyed out; as what’s the point of choosing a circle when I’m already posting to it via All Circles.
UPDATE: "All Circles" does not allow you to also share with a non-G+ user via email, this option is only available via a single circle, so this may be the reason why you can post to both "All Circles" and a single circle at the same time. In that case why not just make the emailing non-G+ people feature available when posting to "All Circles".

And to be complete, if I’m already posting to "Public"; why would I choose "All Circles", for the same reason above.
UPDATE: ‘your circles’ may deposit posts in their incoming stream if they are not following you, while public does not

NOTE: "All Circles" is different than "Public". If you post to "All circles", people that follow you that you don’t follow back won’t see it. And when it’s "Public" it’s indexed by the web.

What it comes down to…

If you post using "Public" then this is no different to Twitter (it’s the same follow model, and your posts are available to see for all who follow you, and those who browse your profile on the web)

If you post using "Circles" or "All Circles" then your posts are not available for all your followers to see, they are only available for a selection of your followers
CAUTION - in your "Circles" you will probably have people that don’t follow you back, so don’t get tricked that your post is displaying in their main stream (it’s not, it’s in their incoming stream)

The broadcast / sharing design model

Twitter

• Broadcast medium - I post and people who follow me will see that post in their stream. In addition my content is public for the world to see (unless you go the private option).

Facebook

• Broadcast medium - I post and my friends will see that post in their stream. The difference here is that you can only see my posts if I follow you back…in fact you can’t use the product unless we follow each other, called "friends", as part of the design model. And your content is not public to the world.

• Sharing medium - additionally there is an option to divide your stream (Newsfeed) into lists (these are I suppose sub-streams). An example is to make a family list in order to read just posts published by your family. You can also limit who sees the posts you share by posting to a list, rather than sharing it with your whole stream; but this is designed in the background, it’s not quick and easy so people tend not to use this feature.

Facebook is primarily a broadcast medium, and secondary as a sharing medium

Google Plus

• Broadcast medium - Like Twitter it’s a follow rather than a friend (following each other) model. You can decide to post "Public" which makes it no different than Twitter when used this way.

• Sharing medium - Like Facebook I can group people into Circles (lists), in fact I can’t use the product if I don’t do this. This way I can read sub-streams, just like Facebook, but the difference is, it’s a background feature in Facebook, whereas it’s part of the primary design in Google Plus. When you share a post in Google Plus the design forces you to think, "should I post to Public (all people that follow me…and also displays on my profile for all on the web to see), and All Circles or a selection of Circles (people that follow you that you don’t follow back won’t see it)

Google Plus is a selective sharing medium, I’d say more than a broadcast medium…or perhaps equally.

Again, it’s complicated isn’t it. Whilst writing this post I had to re-read the same thing so many times as it just doesn’t stick in my head. Whereas I know exactly how Twitter or Facebook work.

So let’s break this down

Twitter - Public, Follow model (asymmetrical), Broadcast medium
Facebook - Private, Friend model (symmetrical), Primarily a broadcast medium, secondary a sharing medium
Google Plus - Public and Private, Follow model (asymmetrical), Primarily a sharing medium, secondary a public medium

Ross Mayfield has some visuals on some of my explanation above, see them below

 

 

Selective sharing vs. ambient awareness

The primary design of Google Plus is based on grouping people you follow into Circles (lists). If you don’t do this then your stream will be empty. So this tells us the whole premise or differentiator of Google Plus is that it’s designed around selective sharing. It’s not that you can’t do this on Facebook; the difference is it’s a just another feature, whereas in Google Plus the whole design is based around this feature.

You can read posts limited to a Circle (one of your lists), or read posts from all Circles (called Stream)

Same goes for sharing; compared to Facebook, sharing to selective lists (ie Circles) in Google Plus is very upfront ie. the design is structured this way that it triggers you to think when you share a post (Public-is this post for all my followers, Circle-or just a selection of my followers, Mentions-or just a few individuals, or a combination of all).

I congratulate them on this; they have a vision for people to share selectively, people don’t have to be told, instead the design makes them do it.

Why is selective sharing good?

How’s your Facebook Newsfeed going for you…lots and lots of crap you don’t care about hey. Why is this? Because people don’t share selectively, not because they don’t want to, but the design does not lend to that sort of behaviour. Look at the style and how many steps it takes.

Firstly you can post as usual without selecting a list ie. it lacks a prompt or feature that’s in your face at the time of posting to remind you to share selectively if it’s appropriate

Instead there is a lock icon that I’m guessing most people have not even noticed.

If you do click the lock icon, then you click customise, then specific people, then type in a list or person (there’s no browsing here, instead you have to starting typing and the auto-suggest will do the rest. This is over 5 clicks to share your post with a list instead of all your friends, and the labels and design don’t make it that clear or obvious. There’s a video illustrating this on the older interface.

With the frequency we post on Facebook, and the cumbersome steps and non-intuitive design, why would we ever selectively share…we might if the design nudged us to, but it doesn’t.

Now this is all OK as this may be purposefully designed this way as Facebook is big on ambient awareness. But they have to be careful as noise can be another word for ambient awareness.

Now let’s look at Google Plus. If you follow someone you will only see their posts if they share it in one of their circles that you are in. We are so use to the receiver doing the filtering, well now the sender is choosing whether you should see one of the posts or not.

Now the sender is doing you a favour to help you manage the speed of your stream, but this design choice is at the expense of exhaustive serendipity…one good thing about noise is there’s serendipity in it, but then too much noise kills you…so like all things in life we need a balance. And I think Google Plus is a good step in that direction.

 

Algorithm

As I said many times in this post; not all people in a circle will see your post, it’s only those that follow you back (ie. have you in one of their circles)

So it feels misleading to me…I’ll send this post to the people in this circle (but at the time of posting I’m not sure who in this circle are following me back) which means not all people in the circle will really be seeing my post in their stream

Natural human behaviour to me is that all people in a circle will see my post…but it’s not true is it?

Even though I know it’s not true, the design keeps tricking me or I keep lapsing. I keep thinking in email or Facebook terms ie. I’ll send this post to this bunch of people, or all my friends in this list will see this post…but in Circles it ain’t true…so at the time of posting the design isn’t clear in telling me who I’m actually potentially having a conversation with.

Now this sort of thing is a worry if your post is about coordinating a task. As not all people you think are seeing the post. That may be OK as Google Plus isn’t designed to do that sort of thing yet, but if you are an experienced observer of web 2.0 unstructured platforms you know people use the tools in many ways the vendor didn’t intend or foresee…this is the whole enigmatic thing about web 2.0.

Alan Lepofsky hits this one perfectly:

"Whether I create a group of analysts or college friends, when I post something to that group I expect them to be able to see it. I don’t care if they are following me back or not. Without those assurances, my use of a tool like Google+ will be limited to "stuff I want to share" but not "work I need to get done." That is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just choosing the right tool for the right job, which is nothing new. (phone vs. email vs. chat vs _____ )"

But let’s just probe Facebook a little deeper. I said all people in your Facebook list will see your post in their stream (as we all follow each other), so it kind of has that email list feel.

But do you really see every post in your Facebook News feed, nope. Instead you only see posts from friends you interact with a lot. ie. based on your past behaviour; basically Facebook is constantly tuning your newsfeed.

This is also a worry if your post is about coordinating a task. Why? cause not everyone in your list may get your post. You best use the private message feature, or a Facebook Group.

NOTE: Facebook lists and Google circles are not collaboration group spaces. Think of it like this; Friendfeed has lists (just like the concept of Facebook lists and Google Plus Circles), but it also has Rooms for groups to collaborate…I guess similar to a Facebook group. I’m sure in the future Google Plus will release this feature (perhaps even revamp its Google Groups product), but right now one thing at a time.

Rachel Happe has something to say about knowing what we are and not seeing and how it affects our decision making:

"One of the issues that I find, generally speaking, with social media monitoring tools is that it is very difficult to understand the scope of what you are looking at and therefore challenging to make good decisions with the information. Talking about this issue recently caused me to have a striking aha moment about what has bothered me about Google for so long: the algorithms are considered ’secret sauce’ and very tightly controlled. This is highly problematic for decision-making because whether it is search engines or social media monitoring solutions we absolutely need to understand what we are looking at (and what we are not seeing) and how that information has been prioritized for us. Without that context, our decision-making is biased toward to proclivities of the tools we use and that is extremely risky.

We don’t even like eating chocolates without knowing what is inside… how are we to make good decisions if we don’t know how we got to the information we have?"

See more on this thinking here.
 

Google Plus puts segmentation at the core of the user experience

And another thing is that in Facebook you don’t even have to create lists, whereas in Google Plus you are forced to create Circles, otherwise you can’t use the product.

Jonathen Allen puts this so nicely:

"…there is something fundamentally wrong about the design of Facebook. It’s almost the opposite of real life. In "real life" we don’t live our lives as if we are a single monolithic public identity that does not differentiate our behavior between groups of friends. In fact, on a daily basis we are constantly adapting our behavior to different ’social circles’.

One of the first, most obvious aspects of Google+ is that it puts segmentation at the core of the user experience. As soon as you get into Google+ you are prompted to put your friends into ’circles’ that they suggest, or create your own. It is no different to Facebook friend lists, except that much of the functionality of Google+ does not surface until you have done that basic activity. Once you have, you can browse through different streams being shared within the social circles you have defined.

Out of the box, Google+ seems to have got this right - the entire project is geared towards limited and selective sharing.

Google+ relies on users manually creating these classifications and if they don’t (simply because people will not do things they are forced to do), they can’t generate any value from the sharing platform. Put another way, if users do not define circles, there is nothing to do on Google+ — absolutely nothing"

Ossian’s pithy comment was integral to the analysis of my post:

"Facebook isn’t about sharing. It’s a broadcast medium."

Jonathen replies:

"Yep exactly - whether you like it or not, the incentive to ’share’ on Facebook is to broadcast stuff to all your connections. If you dont like sharing, you join anyway to maintain an ambient presence among your friends - because the critical mass is there."

Jonathen goes on to point out that this still isn’t the panacea:

"However, this is where Google+ gets into hot water. There is a lot that can start to go wrong at this point. To get it right, Google+ relies on users being able to fully articulate their social circles, which people actually cannot do. We’re simply not wired to be fully cognizant of what social circles we actually move in or who they are made up of. Beyond friends and family, every other social group we belong to is induced by a common purpose.

"Social groupings are induced by a common purpose or goal - and therefore, for Google+circles to work, it’s got to push the collaborative aspect of the tool, and not just try to control who’s sharing with who, just for the sake of sharing

…the social circles thing is straight out of academics, but in rushing to copy Facebook functionality, all we get is another way to share photos and links - when really Google+ strength lies in task orientated live sharing.

Controlled privacy is not enough of an incentive to use the site unless you actually need to control the flow of information. Managing the flow is one thing - but it’s just more management for it’s own sake. Ultimately Twitter and Facebook have made us much better at managing our online identities.

Google has to ultimately bite the bullet and auto-suggest circles and perfect that - then the product can really take off - but if we all have to manage the contacts for it, we’ll lose interest - unless we identify our own reasons to create niche collaborative spaces. But if it relies too much on the user, i think most people will use everything and just want two circles - one that’s public and one that is private."

The interest graph

Robert Scoble alludes to selective sharing perhaps helping with filtering, but is still looking for quality based on the interest graph, as opposed to the social graph. ie. if I follow 10 people and put them in a Circle called KM, it doesn’t mean they will post about KM…I might see posts about their vacation, etc…So Roberts alluding to a super intelligent filter, that I’m not sure can exist (or at least at the expense of leaving good stuff out). But that’s life isn’t it. All people have a forte or a passion, and they will speak about that alot, but they also speak about other stuff in their life. 

UPDATE - JP Rangaswami hits the nail on the head here, and suggests the publishers have various versions of their profile, and then subscribers can subscribe to the version they like…here’s what he said:

 

"I guess I’m warped. What I really want is to break myself up, classify myself, into a series of circles: cloud, food, music, books, cricket, politics, hippieness, freedom, whatever. Then others who put me into their circles can choose to put bits of me or all of me. Publisher circles are like hashtags and channels. Subscriber circles are filters and balancers. That combination creates the best signal-to-noise ratios" 

So basically what he is saying is that he is a blog, and he has categories, and you can subscribe to a category, rather than all of JP

 

In addition to this how about being able to follow a person’s comments…kind of like following someone’s disqus profile.  

Re-sharing and editing

You can’t re-edit a post to change or add a Circle/s, or make it Public, etc…as the post might have comments that were not intended to be made public.

When I re-share someone elses post that was made to a "Limited" audience (ie. Circles, not Public) it cautions me of this via the overlay box, but there is no way it can control which of my followers will see the post (ie. which Circles I post to), but it does make the "Public" selection not available

But what about re-sharing to Facebook or Twitter…will it allow breaches of privacy
 

Wall-to-Wall, Private Messages, and Extended Circles

UPDATE: See my follow-up post Google Plus : Closed group email collaboration done online

At time of posting when you use "@mention" without using any other selections like "Circles" or "Public", I take it this is a wall-to-wall conversation.

From what I’m guessing this is different to Faceook as only the two people in the conversation can see the post; which means it’s kind of like private messaging

But then you’d want a feature where you can collect these types of conversations eg. where’s that individual to individual conversation I had with Gerry last month

In Facebook when you have a wall-to-wall conversation you don’t initiate it from your profile, instead you visit that person’s profile to make your post.

Then the way it works is that only your mutual friends will be able to see your posts (but I think you can change this in the settings to make it more open).

NOTE: In Facebook if you @mention someone from your own profile, that person will get a notification, but all your friends (not just mutual friends) will see it.

Lotus connections wall-to-wall posts are open by default ie. followers of both people can see the post, not just the mutual followers. And I think the reason why is kind of what Google Plus is trying to do with Extended Circles:

"…let’s say Nediva is in one of your circles, and Jadon is in one of Nediva’s circles. You don’t know Jadon and he’s not in any of your circles. If Nediva chooses to have Jadon visible on her profile among the people in her circles, and you choose to share with your extended circles, your content could appear in both Nediva and Jadon’s streams."

…but surely this would appear in Jadon’s incoming stream as he is not following me (just like people in my circle that don’t follow me back will see my post in their incoming stream)

Here’s a use case from Ron at IBM. He thought George might help him with an answer to his problem, but instead of @mentioning him from his profile, he instead posted on George’s wall.

What this meant was all the people that follow George will see the post. So in effect it allows you to tap into someone elses network to problem solve. Since IBM is it’s own world I’m guessing you don’t even have to follow that person, or that person follow you, to be able to post on their wall.

Context is important here - the Lotus Connection wall-to-wall posting design is perfect for people wanting answers and solving problems in the enterprise, but it would not work on the open web as this would be open to spamming…in the enterprise you’d just get fired for effing with people.

NOTE: If I post in "Extended Circles" does that not imply I’m posting in "all my circles and more" in one selection. If so, then all other circle selections should be greyed out, this way I feel I’m using the software the right way.
UPDATE: extended circles may deposit posts it in the incoming stream of people in ‘your extended circles’, while public does not
 

Pushing in a Circle (can Circles act like email lists after all)

Like I said earlier in this post; some people in your circle aren’t necessarily going to see your post as they may not follow you back…they will only see it in their incoming stream ie. it’s not a Facebook list where all people in your list will see the post in their stream. This was the whole reason for my post as I don’t think users of Google Plus will realise this. Anyway the way around this is; if you want to properly ping someone so they get a notification, you add them as an individual to the post as well by doing an @mention.

But I noticed another feature…when posting if you hover over a circle label, an overlay box pops up where you can check it to notify people in the circle (there is a limit to 25 people). Does this feel a bit spammy; this is indeed like pushing to an email list. Something like this can’t happen on Twitter, as you would have to manually type in 25 @mentions which no-one could be bothered, and the other thing is the 140 character limit nulls this anyway. And in Twitter is the conversation would be very messy as it lacks threaded comments.
 

Email

Some people in my Circles have a mail icon which means they are getting content via Gmail rather than visiting Google Plus…I think this is because they have not yet created an account to Google Plus

But surely I’m not pushing them content am I. I hope my posts are not emailing them. I’m not notifying others that are in my circle (the posts are just appearing in their stream or incoming stream), so why should it happen to those accessing via Gmail only.
 

Other

I know it’s early days yet, but here’s some more review…

Hoping collaboration rooms come soon (maybe some left overs from Google Wave)

Comments don’t have hyperlinks

Comments are not threaded in a tree

I can’t +1 from the Notification pop-up, but I can in the notification stream

Need to expand /collapse comments as some posts have too many comments (try +comment toggle)

Comments need to also appear as posts in their own right…remember Jaiku…but I think Google Plus is doing the Friendfeed thing where posts with new comments jump to the top of the pile UPDATE: perhaps comments as their own post is a bad idea

+1’s tab is only for stuff I +1 outside of Google Plus (I want a bucket that collects the +1’s I make inside Google Plus)

Lacks a favourites

How does Google Buzz and Google Latitude come into this…will they be merged?

Awesome feature is that you can view how someone else sees your profile or how anyone on the web will see it (this helps you understand how all the features work ie. who sees what when I do this). You can even edit how they see your profile…now that’s granular.

The Share button and notifications are available via the Google menu in Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, etc…but not Google Web search…This is a subtle killer feature. This is very powerful. Potentially people that have Gmail can share something on Google Plus with one-click…this has the potential to grow a hug user base quickly

Posts have a mute button (opt out of a thread)

It would be good to re-share a comment as a post

UPDATE

It would be good to mute a circle (this way you can read the main stream without having posts from a particular circle bother you…sometimes in Facebook I’d like to read my main stream without having posts from pages bother me, but I can’t mute it just for an hour)

It would be good if it could collapse posts that point to the same link, this way I wouldn’t have to see a post about the same thing again and again…basically a personal memetracker kind of like Google News

UPDATE Social network groupings offline and online 

UPDATE The mystery of Public and Incoming at Google Circles: An Explainer (unless I’m getting it wrong) 

"I thought I understood Google Circles until I tried explaining it to someone. So, let me see if I have this straight.And if I do, then I have a suggestion for Google Plus: Instead of saying that we post to “Public,” tell us we’re posting “To Followers.” And instead of letting us look at our “Incoming” stream, tell us we’re looking at “From Followers.”

Now, it turns out that my coworker Carol hates my guts and hates hearing from me, so she hasn’t put me in any of her circles. Does she see my posts to my Coworkers circle anyway? If not, then either (a) I have the illusory sense that I’m posting to her when I post to my Coworkers circle, or (b) Carol is seeing my posts even though she does not want me in any of her circles." 

Last post I reflected on why I share and a couple of the items on the list refer to a type of altruistic nature

Help Others This is unconditional for me…but it does depend on time availability I co-facilitate the vendor CoP we use at work…I spend some of my time helping others…I do this for free…I’ve experienced many things with the product so for me helping people on the forums is the right thing to do…the by-product of this behaviour is you become known as a subject matter expert whether you like it or not

Messenger Noise comes across my radar…the glass half-full is that what was once noise is a new topic I now like to read… a little noise is good…but it also means that when I come across posts about iPad I send them to my friend Gerry…I unconditionally send people links cause I know it’s what they like…I guess this is gifting

This sort of thing happens all the time…

For example the other day I saw a YouTube interview with Stowe Boyd at the Defrag Conference. Stowe talked about "Social Cognition" which is something he is currently researching, I happened to read a blog post later that morning on this topic and tweeted it to Stowe. Why not, it felt the normal thing to do.

Stowe and I don’t know each other, but I respect his thinking as a thought leader. He provides so much insight for me that the respectful thing to do is send a link his way if something comes across my radar. But it wasn’t even about respect, it’s the simple fact that I came across something that I know is helpful for someone else, so I shared it. Not all people practice this, but technology like Twitter emerges new behaviours where this type of interaction and gifting is normal…it brings out this random act of kindness, so much so that the only thing random about it might be the person, but the act becomes the norm.

Organisations talk a lot about needing to collaborate more, but I think networking sharing is overlooked.

The example above is illustrative of this. Another example is someone asking you for help. This is a bit more deep than the example above as it’s more time intensive. The example above is simply sending a link, a quick gesture…whereas someone asking for help takes more time, and there are also trust and reciprocation factors.

Both these examples have always happened offline…we tell people about stuff we know they like or that helps them…we also do this in email…when it comes to online networks we even do this with people we don’t even know that well…the medium is the message…twitter’s design creates the conditions for us to behave this way…you aren’t told, it’s something you innately do…the phone or email would seem too awkward or weird for this type of communication, but on Twitter it’s the norm.

And the second example of asking for help is what makes organisations tick…this is how real work gets done. I take my time to help others, and they do the same for me. My current place of work is really good at this as our culture is to help whoever comes our way…so sometimes it’s not based on reciprocation or trust, it’s just about being helpful. Of course time is a factor, but the intention is intact. In the online world we mimic this behaviour and it’s amplified.

Service economy

Bertrand Duperrin calls this a "service" economy. Yes collaboration is a good place to be, but this often refers to working together; an equal, if not more transformative goal is a connected organisation where people are servicing each others needs, a truly people-centric organisation that doesn’t necessarily revolve around a joint activity. As I mentioned we already behave this way offline…it’s the informal organisation.

Because service is a person-to-person commitment rather than a goal-to-people one, it engages employees more, make the whole organization more responsive and make them less reluctant about caring about issues that are not directly theirs. Collaboration is something one do with someone else to achieve something. Service is quite different. Service is not something one does WITH another but something one does FOR another. The final purpose is, of course, to achieve something, but the immediate purpose is to help someone. And that changes everything. Fostering stronger relationships within the organization has few impact on collaboration because collaboration often commits people to a goal and not to other people. In a collaboration context, people don’t feel they help one another but rather that they’re on the same boat rowing to reach an island they don’t care about. In a service context, one is directly committed to help the other solve his problem and, then, relationships are more easily leveraged.

NOTE: This is subject to organisational design aspects such as the burden of being an expert, time spare to help others, recognised/appraised in helping others in their tasks, and how resourceful you are at sourcing people and information for your task.

The more you have a history of interaction with people, the more you are happy to help or share with them in the future. Most people would keep on driving if they saw a car broken down on the side of the road, but they are more likely to stop and help if that’s the person they spoke to at the bus stop the other day where they talked about their children. Once you have history and rapport, and made a connection and identified on a personal level, you will more likely help and look out for each other.

You may know someone who has the powerpoint skill set to help you with a tip, but you don’t ask as you don’t know them ie. you don’t feel comfortable asking someone for help who you don’t know. You happen to mention it to your friend and they say "yeah I know her…we spoke in the elevator…she rides 20km into work everyday…I’ll introduce you"

If you create conditions for people to build rapport, have dialogue, then this positively affects performance and collaboration. In other words rather than trying to get people to share and collaborate, focus on making a fertile soil for relationships to grow. A natural one is the smokers hang out, another is the coffee room, the work gym, lunch time sports activities, weekend work activities. The more we purposely design for this both online and offline, the more collaboration and sharing will happen by itself, and this cascades into improved performance.

I’m not talking about an agenda based activity like team building, rather I’m talking about creating conditions for people to build social relationships and get to know each other, because when you do this you form a deeper connection of care and respect. When this happens people are more prone to look out for each other and work better together as they now have a history and may have identified with each other at some level.

This is what friendships are about, but I’m not saying for everyone to be friends, but to generate some of these qualities. Relationship may be a strong word, but when we at least share experiences we build a bond akin to a relationship. The theme of this post is knowing each other as "people" not just co-workers…when we are connected on a personal level we have more care, empathy and respect, and become more engaged and perform better.

Gil Yehuda shares his insights on conditions for informal social relationship building:

Smokers developed an informal employee social network. They spent nearly an hour a day chatting with other smokers in other groups about all sorts of shared interests. Eric was pretty junior, but he hung out with some of the more senior managers too - those who smoked, that is. Eric knew about people and initiatives that we never heard of. He was our eyes and ears, and was invaluable to the team. …a colleague of mine in the health-care industry found that the most important element to preventing a particular type of accidental death in a hospital setting is tied directly to how effectively the floor-staff has gelled. The better they are as a team, the higher the likelihood that someone will notice and correct a common procedural mistake that one of their co-nurses made. The hospitals who commissioned this study are now trying to figure out how to get their floor staff to feel like a team. Who would have thought that a weekly pizza lunch and a bulletin board with family pictures could save lives?

In Gil’s example not only is it about a "service" workplace of sharing and asking, but it’s also about awareness…knowing who knows what. And the hospital example is priceless, the more chance for social interaction and rapport building, the more people look out for each other like the organisation is one big team or family.

Social relationships are the building blocks for organisational health

Larry Irons also posts about the importance of social relationships..he points to a quote about poor team performance:

Michael Schell, CEO for RW3, noted in Chief Learning Officer magazine that, of the teams studied, “Half of these teams never meet in person…They don’t get time to create any kind of rapport, which is very important when you’re working across cultures.”

Larry mentions that it’s not enough to talk about the importance of collaboration and performance…even if management are onto the positive impact of building social relationships, it’s still not enough having manager led meetings and training, instead we need to design for social encounters in a more natural and informal way, a way that doesn’t have an agenda.

Members of distributed teams perform more effectively when they understand one another as people as well as employees.

Larry’s other post hones in on the benefit of people who identity with one another, and how they are more sensitive to other perspectives and situations other than their own, and proactively do things for each other, which as it turns out is a positive trait for well performing teams (more about this further down):

Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people. People who identify with one another are more likely to share information proactively, without waiting for others to ask for it, because they understand how their own work relates to that of other people and see the flow of work from multiple points of view, spanning silos. Too many social computing experts view collaboration from within a command and control prism, assuming people collaborate because coordination and communication are part of their job description. Effective collaboration really requires proactively sharing information with those it affects, not simply reacting to information requests. It means anticipating the future impact of actions you take on the responsibilities of other employees or business partners, or the needs of customers. People really don’t do this well unless they see other employees, and customers, as people too. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons that social networks increase in importance as collaboration decreases as a face to face activity.

Now we are getting even deeper, not only does building social relationships lead to better collaboration, altruistic sharing, expertise finding…but it makes for better cooperation. Being more aware via new online social tools helps immensely with ambient awareness; but the social caring dimension relates to whether you will take action with what you have become aware of. The more we care about each other the more we will watch out for each other…this type of care and networking is what bridges silos, and ultimately organisational effectiveness.

In other words (from an MIT lab report):

…social support in the form of cohesion (how much time do the people you talk to spend with each other) was strongly positively associated with productivity.”

Larry points to another example at the Bank of America

Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers’ e-mailed instructions.” One simple intervention is to give workers more opportunities to socialize in groups. Currently we are implementing a strategy at a call center for a national bank chain where we are changing the break structure of the employees. Previously each employee on a team of around 20 people had a separate 15 minute break in order to reduce the need to shift call loads to other teams, although in practice this issue is not terribly important. This makes it very difficult for cohesive relationships to develop, since groups of friends will by design have limited opportunities for shared interactions. To create more of these opportunities we changed the break structure of two of the four teams that we had studied previously so that all of the employees on a team are given a break at the exact same time. The patterns of social interaction changed dramatically after the intervention, and Bank of America reported productivity gains worth about $15 million a year.

Lastly Larry informs us of how Zappos value the importance of social experience by designing random questions about people in the workplace:

…we’ve begun tracking employee relationships. When employees log in to their computers, we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person - the options include “say hi in the halls,” “hang out outside of work,” and “we’re going to be longtime friends.” We’re starting to keep track of the number and strength of cross-departmental relationships - and we’re planning a class on the topic. My hope is that we can have more employees who plan to be close friends. The key fact behind the Zappos example is that using social networking as part of business design is a way of cultivating shared experience among employees rather than a mere means to an end, or goal, alone.

This post has been about the importance of social experience and relationships in business performance and the ways we can design conditions for social interactions ie how do we capitalise on the idea of the water cooler. Natural ones are the coffee room, smokers section, self organised lunch sports activities, and others are more designed like communal break times, and random online network questions.

But what seems important is that rather than just formal team building exercises we simply need more opportunities for people to get to know each other in places and times where there is no agenda…harnessing those natural and informal social settings. This is when we get to know each other, we talk about our families, etc. and identify with each other, and look out for each other…this is what makes a team and workplace effective.

Coming full circle on this post Larry provides a good conclusion:

……shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and community…comfort with one another is needed to develop a shared experience where trust increases the likelihood that needed information is shared, or that the need itself is anticipated.

Phatic communication

Just when you (and I) thought this post was finished…a correlation sparked with the notion of phatic conversation:

…data that pass between friends on Facebook and Twitter…as when someone tells me they’re doing their nails, or I tell them I’m entertaining my cat. Who on earth cares? What kind of communication is this? Can it be that we are using the internet to issue trivial facts about ourselves? Facts? The "fact" that I am entertaining the cat is so staggeringly unimportant it fails to interest even the cat. But there is another, anthropological, point of view. Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.

The author talks about phatic communication as a reminder that they exist:

This is not nothing. Facebook sustains social knowledge and networks that begin in conferences and then fade almost immediately until a couple of months later we have a hard time attaching a face to that business card still banging around in our briefcase. A "newsflash" about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out.

Danah Boyd also chimes in:

Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It’s about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It’s about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what’s happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it’s embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What’s so wrong about that?

Tweeting about what you cooked for dinner may seem useless from an outside snapshot. But how often does this start some chatter, and before you know it you are talking about research topics. Offline we small talk all the time, it’s what we do, we chat in the coffee room about the weekend or what our cat did and all of a sudden we are talking about our work budget.

Why don’t we jump into talking about the budget? It’s just the way we are…we first cultivate a comfortable space…we don’t like being ordered like a command on a computer…it doesn’t feel good, instead we co-create a little scaffolding before we dive in. Have you not experienced a scenario when two people see each other for the first time in the day and one of them straight off the bat asks a work related question, which conjures a sarcastic response like, "…and good morning to you to, yes I did have a good weekend…"

When a client comes to your work you don’t just start digging into work, you talk about their travel over, and hope that rolls into other small talk that builds a good connection and some rhythm…the small talk helps the quality of the agenda.

But the small talk is not intentional or a secret agenda, it’s just how we naturally are…we do it to build rapport…it’s "social grooming".

Kevin Jones talks about small talk leading to serendipity:

Welcome to microblogging at your business. It is the conversation starter that leads to greater things. If you only jump into the heavy topics you miss the serendipitous interactions that pay big dividends. Encourage the small talk - For by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.

Looks like this post is gonna go on for a little longer…

Touch, conversation and happiness

In the end social interaction (not necessarily related to an end goal like collaborating on a task, but in general) is simply a human need…the Romanian orphans are indicative of that…without attachment and touch they wither away.

Rob Paterson has more:

At the heart of all primate development and social health is the act of grooming or touch. Harlow’s experiments on monkeys show that given the choice between food or touch, baby primates will choose touch. Babies that have not been touched develop poorly

Stowe Boyd posted on some research on "touch" and how it may relate to better performance in basketball teams:

“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.” Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent. …good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams

Patrick Lambe has also posted about the importance of touch in maintaining relationships of trust and relates it to KM:

Coelho opened his keynote by saying “we only do business with people we like” and this is why any serious agreement needs eye contact - that interesting precursor and reinforcer of touch…“This human contact, regardless of whether you sell 100 million copies, where you don’t have eye contact, so it becomes an abstraction, this [human contact] is basic, and this is the blessing of the internet.” So I’m convinced that touch - and regular touch - is an essential element in growing and expressing trust and assurance. In the multi-initiative field of KM, where we are messing with the way people have organized their work and their information and knowledge flows, with their relationships and sharing patterns, in this field trust and assurance - it seems to me - are critical. So why don’t we talk about touch, when we talk about change management and KM communications? And why do organisations insist on believing they can completely remove face to face meetings - basic human contact - from their virtual teams and communities of practice once they have put collaboration infrastructure in place?

Back to Rob Paterson’s post; he reviews an article about how screen based baby learning video’s like "Baby Einstein" are not a replacement for real social interaction, in fact relying on them may delay language development:

"Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don’t get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis.

Conversation like touch has said to have a similar effect in boosting performance as we are sensitive to other people’s perspectives…the theory of mind (which is something Larry Irons pointed out earlier in this post):

They found that engaging in brief (10 minute) conversations in which participants were simply instructed to get to know another person resulted in boosts to their subsequent performance on an array of common cognitive tasks. But when participants engaged in conversations that had a competitive edge, their performance on cognitive tasks showed no improvement. “We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others’ minds and take their perspectives on things,” Ybarra said. “And we also find that when we structure even competitive interactions to have an element of taking the other person’s perspective, or trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, there is a boost in executive functioning as a result.”

This also cascades into happiness. The more we connect and share meaning and experience the happier we are…perhaps happiness is a by-product:

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that when two people enter into a deep discussion, they create shared meaning of the world, strengthening their connections and bonds and interdependence, making them happy. “It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject. But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people. “By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”

When we are connected and happy we are more engaged in what we do:

There is plenty of research out there supporting the value of having close friends at work. Higher satisfaction, stronger engagement. Intuitively it makes sense: if you like the people you work with everyday, you’ll be happier and more involved. If friendships can drive engagement, then visualizing a companies social network should tell you a thing or two about the health of an organization.

Happiness in networks breeds more happiness…

Groups, Proximity and Grooming

Rob Paterson has blogged about this area of cognition and behaviour especially in relation to infant development:

At our deepest level, we are primates. We are intensely social. We feel best in groups. We love to be touched. In fact, when given the choice primate babies will take touch over food. One of the huge breakthroughs for humans is that by developing speech we learned to groom at a distance and hence could expand the size of the social group The ideal human groupings are seen in all military organizations. •8 the core group •15 the ideal team •30-50 the normal tribe or platoon size •150 - the maximum that can self organize These are called Magic Numbers and they are the social scaling that is hardwired into humans If you ignore these natural laws for human organization, then you have to impose a structure. Hence the modern bureaucratic workplace and hence helplessness and dysfunction

This reminds me of the cultural engineers post on the social organism outgrowing the social network, and how proximity reduces group altruism ie. a manager is so distant and out of touch with the frontline they are unaware how a change will have bad affect on a group of people. This lack of grooming is what is failing organisations as people are not connected or sensitive to others due to distance and the number of people they can pay attention to.

In the post linked above Rob concurs with this:

Primate individual and group health depends on the giving and the receipt of “Attention”. Much of this attention has to be physical. Especially for the young. This is a very “expensive” activity as it means that neither the groomer or the groomed could do anything else while grooming. Our breakthrough that has driven our own explosive development as a species has to have found a more efficient way of grooming. Instead of using our hands, we used our vocalization ability. Noises became language. Humans could work at some distance from each other and pay attention by how and what they said to each other.

Further to grooming at a distance using language; organisations can now connect with online social networks…hopefully this is a start to fill in the grooming gap, and supplement the hierarchy dysfunction. If we are not grooming to the extent small groups do, the alternative is that we can at least be ambiently aware, which is a more fitting approach when you are connected to more people than you can pay attention to.

Oxytocin, Cortisol and wired to share the load

Robert then posts about the brain science of neglecting relationships in relation to the Cortisol hormone:

…if you have a workplace where you neglect the needs for real relationship you will get an unhealthy and acting out workforce The connection between neglect and abuse and a primate’s ability to thrive or cope is the hormone called Cortisol. Neglect and abuse, drive the production of Cortisol. High Cortisol levels are at the foundation of the behavioral and health problems of the modern age. What drives them is that we have dropped the ball on the reality that for humans, legitimate relationships are the holy grail for a good life and a healthy society.

Back to Stowe Boyd’s post on touch he points to off-setting Cortisol with Oxytocin production via touch:

If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol. In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”

The Stowe relates this back to the organisation in that humans build relationships as a coping mechanism to share the load in solving problems:

Touching leads to trust, which leads to a sense of shared commitment. We have evolved these social bonding tools because it leads to better group performance: we operate better collectively when trust and shared commitment exists. “We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”

Fast Company have an article on trust and digital oxytocin:

…nations with a high level of trust (Norway, Sweden, the United States) have higher income levels and more stable governments than those that don’t. Their citizenry possess higher levels of “social capital,” which depends on positive interactions between people, on a level of trust created by low crime, better education, and greater economic development. He concluded that trust was the variable that showed whether a society was working well, and when it did, the economy would take off on its own. “One day, a company might be better off asking not what its margins are, but what its trust factor is,” says Brian Singh, founder of Zinc Research, a social media and marketing research firm in Calgary, Alberta. Singh has begun framing the formation of connections via social networking as a form of “digital oxytocin.” The idea is that if businesses wish to thrive in our interconnected world, where consumers’ opinions spread at the speed of light, they must act as a trusted friend: create quality products, market them honestly, emphasize customer care.

This post has been about how creating conditions for sharing social experience where people can understand and learn about each other as regular people, improves the happiness of workers, and trust and engagement lead to better performance. The big question is does this cross over into the online world where we also connect and have relationships…here trust and engagement is also linked to better performance for the individual and organsiation. The Fast Company article goes on to point out that the brain may not sense the difference between offline or online connection in parts of the experience:

…the release of oxytocin I experienced while tweeting reduced my stress hormones. If that’s the case, says Zak, social networking might reduce cardiovascular risks, like heart attack and stroke, associated with lack of social support. But there’s even more to our findings. “Your brain interpreted tweeting as if you were directly interacting with people you cared about or had empathy for,” Zak says. “E-connection is processed in the brain like an in-person connection.” …our findings are potentially “huge” - despite the fact that they depend entirely on an unscientific control group of exactly one. If I’m representative (a big if, as we both readily acknowledge), then social networking may increase a person’s oxytocin levels, thereby heightening feelings of trust, empathy, and generosity. Why does this matter to businesses? Well, consider that Facebook has more than 400 million users. And consider that a healthy number of those folks are basically addicted to social media. A recent study asked 200 University of Maryland students to give up media for a day, including laptops, MP3 players, smartphones, and TVs. Many of the students suffered withdrawal symptoms, as if they had gone cold turkey giving up drugs. The most painful part, they said, was “losing their personal connections. In their world, going without media meant going without their friends and family.”

The Limbic brain

Getting deeper into brain science Rob reviews a book on love which examines the main operating systems of the brain which explains how the mammalian section of the brain is what helps us get through life as relationships are core to our existence, and that we pay too much attention to the rational brain:

Why are we collectively so unhappy? Unhappy at home and at work? Have we put our rational brain too high on the pedestal? If we understand our Mammalian or Limbic Brain better might we have a better time? Why are relationships so important to us?…How important is having the right relationships to our happiness and to our health? Their thesis is that we have 3 brains. The reptilian brain which controls the core life functions like the heart beating and our breathing. The limbic brain which is a mammalian construct not found in lower animals which controls our emotional life. Its main job is to keep us connected to those who matter the most too us which is essential for mammals. And then the neo cortex which humans have the most of which deals with things like speech and reason. Today we give no credence to the limbic brain. We have put the rational or neo cortex brain up on a pedestal. We value IQ, our education system is rationally based. But really we get things done and we get through life as mammals on how well we connect or not with others. Our EQ is as important as our IQ. Maybe more so. Their insight is to look at the power of the mammalian brain to inform us about what is going on, to govern our health and to enable us to work effectively with others. So what is this limbic mammal brain all about anyway? The big idea is that the limbic brain is our relationship brain designed to enable mammals which have live birth and which need the tribe to protect the mother to form the attachments that are essential for the success of these large investments in the other - the other baby, the mate and the tribe. Reptiles do need need relationships because on the whole they do not raise helpless young. Most but not all reptiles abandon their offspring and most do not have mates or packs/tribes. Having no need of relationships, they are more than cold blooded they are cold emotionally. It seems that the limbic brain needs to be in active relationship with others to be happy. Mammals are "open" systems. We cannot exist without referencing with others…The boss who imposes his will is not dancing. The result failure to grow and learn, stress, depression and illness. I wonder if we have been entirely captured by the Rational Brain as represented by the corporate world of relationships which are not be definition interactive but power driven down? Our corporate world is a machine world with machine relationships. No amount of wellness or flex programming will change this unless the core work is to change the machine relationships to human/mammalian/tribal relationships.

Putting this another way is to say that we are not existential cowboys; instead social connection is part of the human operating system:

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others…violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not just a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear. Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.

I was interviewed by Cathrin Gill on the Enterprise 2.0 Open blog as part of their E2.0 Expert Profiles.

The Enterprise2Open blog was initiated for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT.

It’s not easy summarizing over 5 years of my thought blogging and reading…this was something I needed to do. I have learnt about many things by reading bloggers, commenting and blogging myself…nothing better than DIY interactive education…I thank Cathrin for giving me motivation to do that…

Here’s the main bits below. I hope it’s OK that I’m re-posting…I don’t want to lose this summary

What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

• A new operating system based on different ideals, designs and structures
• For people to be engaged at work, rather than be seen as assets
• A focus on engagement rather than sharing…through design and facilitation you have better conditions to achieve your goal… sharing and heightened awareness will happen by default
• A somewhat role-based network organisational structure where people connect and are aware, have diverse input, acknowledge and action emergent outcomes, find suitable tasks and people…basically to exploit the collective knowledge to make better decisions and have an innovative edge
• A focus on complexity theory based on experimenting, manipulating for favourable conditions, monitoring and feeding back, rather than an addiction to plans and outcomes, targets and rewards. Being more transparent, adaptive, agile, and resilient

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

• As Euan Semple says these new social platforms can finally legitimise informal networks. Closing the gap between the c-level and the frontline (”we” rather than “us” and “them”), a more transparent, two-way communication, feedback and bypassing the levels of hierarchy. Preventing blockage of information and re-interpretations, welcoming and capitalising on feedback.
• This is a new approach and leveling, and can be amplified by the use of social tools. Two things come to my mind: Improve awareness and the seminal lack of communication syndrome, and co-create change so it’s relevant to the frontline.
• It also means working socially productive in silos and bridging silos using visible and open group tools, and connecting silos via enterprise-wide networks.
• E 2.0 provides workers with tools to communicate and share their exceptions to processes…let’s face it procedures are not clairvoyant, every context brings up unique aspects to current processes.
• E 2.0 leads to social productivity and activities like crowdsourcing are now achievable by connecting and conversing in public by default, rather than private by default (like the current email way). This is a move from PC (Personal computing) to SC (Social computing).
  But I’m not too sure how decision making being done in a social way will pan out; if we really want to talk about democracy that is…maybe a committee. It just depends on who owns the firm really.
• And since these interactions happen in the open, everyone learns for free on a daily basis, a pull system where workers pick up signals with their radar.
  Referencing Jim McGee: New social tools reprise the concept of observable work that we lost with the coming of the digital era. We now have the potential to tap into the “know-how” and “know-why”, rather than just the “know-what” we get in deliverables and documents. We are interested in the conversations and brainwork. When reading a deliverable we wonder why things are they way they are, what were the many micro-decisions and now we can go back to those fragments if we worked using social tools - this is the real corporate memory. The beauty of it is these fragments can be assembled together (re-mixed) for different contexts. Then the output of that work can be traced back to the artifacts (the workings out) and re-hashed, and so on. The whole idea is not re-use but re-mix…malleable objects that live in a flux…basically fragments as springboards to continuous knowledge creation.
  Ahhh, just read Oscar Berg’s post on social tools being our coping mechanism

6.) What are the main challenges, threats and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Control…simple as that!
Bottom-up is not enough, we need a new organisational design, a top-down shift in ideals. At the moment we have worker 2.0 and group 2.0, but we need management 2.0 to make enterprise 2.0 happen.

My top 10

1. We share with people we trust, and share when we are engaged, rather than incentives and rewards, and now we have new social tools that appeal to intrinsic motivations
2. Some managers may feel dis-intermediated, especially those who rely on their status in controlling information flow, whereas managers who slant to the more leadership side of things welcome it. People worked a long time for their authority, and now comes along a way (eg blogs) to be influential by reputation
3. Transparency, two-way communication, and co-creation are key to engaged workers
4. We currently get rewarded for individual action, not collaboration or group output…or how much we help others on tasks we are not on…or how well we source the right people to help you on your task.
5. Different units compete for resources
6. Politics and power
7. This one can be slowly overcome, and that’s changing routines and habits from email to new tools (as long as the new tool is designed for ease of use)
8. A culture that is OK with sharing and learning from failure
9. Psychological safety (it’s OK to be wrong or to speak up)
10. In the past we only shared finished products in the open, and all the working out and know-why happens in closed email. There is now a change to “work-in-progress / status updates” happening in the open. With this we get more awareness, diverse feedback, reputation building, relationship building, learning… We can look back at a record of how things came to be…peripheral information, the conversations behind decisions. A report doesn’t compare as a raw record vs emails, phone, meetings…but all these things are behind closed doors.

Learnings since the interview

Here’s some snippets about the "real enterprise 2.0"…

Real enterprise 2.0 is about “service” "Because service is a person-to-person commitment rather than a goal-to-people one, it engages employees more, make the whole organization more responsive and make them less reluctant about caring about issues that are not directly theirs. Collaboration is something one do with someone else to achieve something. Service is quite different. Service is not something one do with another but something one do for another. The final purpose is, of course, to achieve something, but the immediate purpose is to help someone. And that changes everything. Fostering stronger relationships within the organization has few impact on collaboration because collaboration often commits people to a goal and not to other people. In a collaboration context, people don’t feel they help one another but rather that they’re on the same boat rowing to reach an island they don’t care about. In a service context, one is directly commited to help the other solve his problem and, then, relationships are more easily leveraged." - Bertrand Duperrin

Social Media goals are derived goals "I repeat. Your company does not need a social media strategy. What your company does need to do however, is to incorporate social media into almost every other strategy or plan that it has. This means that social media needs to be a part of your marketing strategy, public relations strategy, HR strategy, customer service strategy and maybe even your finance strategy. Maybe you do need someone to coordinate your company wide social media efforts, but that is not the same creating a social media strategy." - Asia Digital Map.com

Is this an aspect of capitalism 2.0? "Management in the 20th Century was about achieving a finite goal: delivering goods and services, to make money. Management in the 21st Century is about the infinite goal of delighting customers; the firm makes money, yes, but as a consequence of the delight that it creates for customers, not as the goal." - Steve Denning

Now this is the real enterprise 2.0 "The finite goal of delivering goods and services, in order to make money, was utterly boring and dispiriting…Because that goal dispirits those doing the work and often frustrates those for whom the work is done, it is inherently unsustainable. The infinite goal of delighting customers is inherently inspiring: helping other people is the essence of moral thinking. It is inherently uplifting for those doing the work, and invigorating to those for whom the work is done. Hence the goal is inherently sustainable. The new goal of delighting customers is a radical shift in the difficulty of what a firm is undertaking. The goal of a firm is no longer simple and linear and finite. Now the goal of the firm is difficult and complex and infinite. Now continuous innovation becomes a requirement, rather than a distraction and a de-stabilizer. Now we are in a world of continuous experimentation, to find out what works and what doesn’t, in terms of adding new value for clients. Now mistakes, instead of being elements that can be eliminated, are an essential element of the learning process. Now mistakes become crucial and welcome elements of the learning process. Instead of mistakes being punished, now mistakes are welcomed as essential opportunities for learning. Now everyone in the firm is focused on what can be done to add additional value to customers and clients. The firm is no longer an end in itself. The firm is now “other directed”: it is focused on meeting the needs of the clients and stakeholders whom it is purporting to serve." - Steve Denning

Real enterprise 2.0 is about letting go of “control” "Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control." - Tim Leberecht

Influence is replacing authority "If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control…businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them….levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty" - Tim Leberecht

The need for both process and people-centric systems “A customer account manager receives a phone call from a client asking why an issue with their service has not been resolved and when it will be. The account manager can query a workflow-supported issue management system and learn that the issue has been assigned to a specific employee and that it has been assigned an “in-progress” status. However, that system does not tell the account manager what she really needs to know! She must turn to a communication system to ask the other employee what is the hold up and the current estimate of time to issue resolution. She emails, IM’s, phones, or maybe even tweets the employee to whom the issue has been assigned to get an answer she can give the customer. The employee to whom the issue was assigned most likely cannot use the issue management system to actually resolve the problem either. He uses a collaboration system to find documented information and individuals possessing knowledge that can help him deal with the issue. Once the problem is solved, the employee submits the solution to the issue management system, which feeds it to a someone who can make the necessary changes for the customer and inform the customer account manager that the issue is resolved. Case closed”. ad hoc communication and collaboration systems were the tools that drove actual results Without the cludgy, structured issue management system, the customer account manager would not have known to whom the issue had been assigned and, thus, been unable to contact a specific individual to get better information about its status - Larry Hawes

The mutation of capitalism "Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet. When a majority of people want things that remain priced at a premium under the old institutional regime—a condition I call the “premium puzzle”—the ground becomes extremely fertile for wholly new classes of competitors that can fulfill the new demands at an affordable price. A premium puzzle existed in the auto industry before Henry Ford and the Model T and in the music industry before Steve Jobs and the iPod. The consumption shift in Ford’s time was from the elite to the masses; today, we are moving from an era of mass consumption to one focused on the individual. The leading edge of consumption is now moving from products and services to tools and relationships enabled by interactive technologies. Innovations improve the framework in which enterprises produce and deliver goods and services. Mutations create new frameworks; they are not simply new technologies, though they do leverage technologies to do new things. Historically, mutations have superseded innovations when fundamental shifts in what people want require a new approach to enterprise: new purposes, new methods, new outcomes. The Model T embodied a mutation we now call mass production. It solved the premium puzzle of its time, reducing the price of an automobile by 60 percent or more, and thrived in the emerging environment of mass consumption. That potential for wealth creation remained invisible to those who clung to the 19th-century framework of small-factory, proprietary capitalism. In the same way that mass production moved the locus of industry from small shops to huge factories, today’s mutations have the potential to shift us away from business models based on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, and central control" - Shoshana Zuboff

The first wave of “distributed capitalism "The true source of value, which had been invisible to the music industry, resided in Apple’s ability to reinvent the consumption experience from the viewpoint of the individual, at a fraction of the old cost The iPod—and its successors, the iPhone and the iPad—are part of the first wave of what I call “distributed capitalism,” Winning mutations—those that create value by offering consumers individualized goods and services at a radically reduced cost—express a convergence of technological capabilities and the values associated with individual self-determination. Inversion The old logic of wealth creation worked from the perspective of the organization and its requirements—for efficiency, cost reductions, revenues, growth, earnings per share (EPS), and returns on investment (ROI)—and pointed inward. The new logic starts with the individual end user. Instead of “What do we have and how can we sell it to you?” good business practices start by asking “Who are you?” “What do you need?” and “How can we help?” This inverted thinking makes it possible to identify the assets that represent real value for each individual. Cash flow and profitability are derived from those assets. Reconfiguration Once individuals have the assets they want, they must be able to reconfigure those assets according to their own values, interests, convenience, and pleasure. A teenager, for instance, may use her iPod Touch and an application called Pandora to assemble an entire personalized “radio station” while at the same time learning Mandarin Chinese at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoon through an online classroom based thousands of miles from her home. Support The emerging logic of distributed capitalism rewards enterprises that realign their practices with the interests of the end consumer and punishes enterprises that try to impose their own internal requirements or, worse yet, maximize their own benefit at the expense of the individual end user" - Shoshana Zuboff

Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise (NGCE) "Collaboration encourages clusters of experts with diverse skills to make decisions quickly. The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise allows experts at any level to propose, create and execute without hierarchical or geographical constraints. Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions. Decisions are communicated real-time through social media applications…Individuals are able to apply themselves to the work based on their skills and availability, regardless of their geographic location…Funding is directed based on milestones. Direct accountability is embedded into the social network. Finally, organizational functions become less relevant and ‘Re-orgs’ become obsolete. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, envision and execute ― rather than the authority to command and control." - Padmasree Warrior