CollaborativEye

Not another book on the power of social networking. Pleeeaaase. But I went ahead and bought a copy of Groundswell anyways. I would characterize this as an "evidence and endorsement" book for social and collaborative technologies, rather than a visionary or revolutionary book. But that can be a good thing. Li and Bernoff base the book on case studies, practical advice, and even ROI CALCULATIONS. These calculations alone (actually the methodology behind the calculations) make this a highly recommended book. Yes you can determine ROI numbers for social networking applications!

The POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) planning process described in the book is a very usable, and smart approach. Among the various insights that derive from this , I believe two stand out:

1) Solve your customers' problem, not yours.  How many times have you been in a planning session where the situation analysis focused on the challenges and strategic objectives of the company? Of course the customer needs are incorporated LATER into the process. Be honest -- you've probably led a few of these sessions yourself.  Li and Bernoff challenge us to start with the customer -- what would they get out of a community, for example? How can a blog help your customers or prospects? This advice is wise, obvious, and usually ignored. Added benefit: it can also be applied to business decisions far beyond social technologies.

2) Start small, build successes one at a time. This is not about technology. It is about culture change. It is about re-visioning your relationships with customers. It is about getting buy-in from all levels of an organization. These things take time. Li and Bernoff describe several cases where companies built successful social-based strategies over a period of years, usually starting with something that was very focused, and didn't require corporate-wide endorsement. This advice may seem overly simplistic, but it is easy to fall into the "got to hit a home run, NOW" trap, especially if you feel pressure to catch up with everybody else.

Near the end of the book, Li and Bernoff touch on the issue of short-term, reactionary behavior verses long-term strategies. Some (not the authors) may view the hyper-responsive, close-in contact with individuals that social networking enables, as at odds with long term planning. Some believe, erroneously in my opinion, that with social technologies, products and services will just design themselves. Yes there is a place for customer involvement in the design and development process, and yes many companies have isolated this process from the customer. But there is still a need for product road maps, requirements gathering and synthesis, forecasting, and other long-term planning exercises. Truly connecting to the "groundswell" will enable you to react quickly, and to feel your customers' pain and understand their goals and desires -- things that have always been necessary to run a successful, long-term business.

Why aren't there any books on how to ride a bike? (OK -- I found one on Amazon, but work with me...) You can read and learn from books on molecular biology, cost accounting, and computer programming, so why not something as simple as learning to ride a bicycle? The truth is, you don't really KNOW how to ride a bike, until you've been on it, fallen off a few times, and become personally engaged with the bike. Philosopher Michael Polanyi called this "Personal Knowledge" in his ground breaking book of the same title back in 1958. Fast forward 50 years to several McKinsey studies in which three types of knowledge interactions as posited: transformational, transactional, and tacit. Transformational interactions change raw materials into finished goods; transactional interactions involve knowledge which can be codified and explained as a process or set of steps (e.g closing the books for the month, or entering sales data into a CRM system). Tacit interactions, on the other hand, are much more complex, ambiguous, and involve what Polanyi called personal knowledge. Tacit knowledge requires judgement, context, and interaction with others to determine the best solution. For example, how should you respond to an irate customer? What features should be included in the next release of product X? Which logo treatment is best? What investment fund is most appropriate for this customer?

McKinsey research indicates that 70% of all jobs created since 1998 involve tacit knowledge interactions as their primary component. However, only 24% of software spending is aimed at improving tacit knowledge interactions! No wonder we feel that we are getting further behind even though we have more and more technology at our disposal!

The implications of tacit knowledge on business cannot be overstated. Organizations which successfully improve the productivity and effectiveness of their tacit knowledge workers will be able to build competitive advantage which will be difficult for others to copy. There will be no "play book" to copy -- rather the competitive advantage is built into the tacit interactions between employees, customers, partners and the ability to innovate and come to the right solution to a problem more quickly.  How can business leaders improve their organization's tacit knowledge effectiveness?

1) By providing the tools where interactions and collective knowledge are encouraged and preserved.  Technology examples include collaboration platforms such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, knowledge management platforms, etc. The goal is to make collaboration  so simple and pain free that it increases meaningful, shared communication dramatically. And no, email is obviously not the answer.

2) Exploring communication platforms that can capture experience, context, and nuanced judgement more successfully than stand-alone text. For example, listening to a set of successful conversations between a customer service rep and an irate customer may be much more effective than reading a 10 page paper on customer service protocol. Or another example, providing tutorials on the use of a CRM system which show exactly how to perform an operation, complete with screen recordings, and audio narration discussing possible exceptions, alternate approaches, and considerations.   

3) Clear the decks for more tacit knowledge interaction by reducing the burden of transactional interactions. Very little time should be spent learning how to fill out an expense form or learning how to run a monthly report in the ERP system. Companies must provide focused, on-demand learning that provides employees with transactional knowledge when and where they need it.

It is exciting to see concrete examples of radical collaboration in business ventures, particularly new ones that have a chance to make a big splash. GoLife Mobile , a startup venture headquartered in Portland, OR, yesterday announced their collaborative framework for developers of mobile applications (or widgets). Rather than taking on the impossible task of producing all of the applications themselves, they are enlisting a potentially vast pool of developers who are interested in mobile platforms, and who don't mind making a buck or two for their efforts. Developers are encouraged to share widgets, and build upon the work of others. The nifty thing is that whenever your widget gets used (either as the primary application, or a component in an application), the author of the widget gets a piece of the advertising revenue that the GoLife Mobile platform will produce.

Not only will this collaborative development eco-system reduce the time to produce applications, it promises to spur innovation as well. Developers are incentivized to create compelling, reusable widgets in the hopes that other developers will incorporate them into their own applications. I particularly like the way that GoLife Mobile is combining collaboration with good old fashioned capitalism. James Whitley, the CEO of GoLife Mobile, shared with me at their developer briefing that he's a died-in-the-wool, Central Oregon capitalist, while his president of technology Mounir Shita is from "socialist Norway" -- obviously a great mixture that promises to produce some interesting results!

We all know by now that social networking technology, collaboration, and "wikinomics"-thinking works. There are still some naysayers, but their arguments are wearing thin. However, there are limits to collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds and understanding these limits is just as important as understanding the potential. So when does collective intelligence just plain not work?

Interestingly, as far as I know, all the books extolling the virtues of Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, and your-favorite-term-here-2.0, were written by one or two authors rather than hundreds or thousands. These authors created a position, gathered support, did the research, created drafts, and pushed the writing project through. We are Smarter than Me tried to break this pattern and use the concepts that the authors write about in the creation of the book. But they concede that part-way through the project "...we found the actual text of the book, the flow of the topics, and the graphical design had to be produced in the conventional way, rather than relying on the crowd to perform these functions." (pg. xiv) I applaud Barry Liebert and Jon Spector for their candor. Why the breakdown?

Before we answer, the same book provides another example of "collective intelligence gone wild". TheBusinessExperiment.com (TBE) was created to harness collective intelligence for the incubation and creation of businesses. Interaction was good during the idea creation and refinement stage, but when an actual project was chosen to work on, the wheels fell off. Most people lost interest, and getting any real work done was difficult to impossible. A "traditional" leadership was created, with a CEO who quickly drove the project forward. Again, why the breakdown?

I think these examples provide important reminders that collaboration and collective intelligence still require leadership, albeit leadership of a different kind. The role of such leadership?

1) From Jim Collins of Good to Great fame:  Get the right people on the bus (and correspondingly get the wrong people off the bus). TBE founder Rob May noted that inviting people to vote on ideas attracted people who liked to discuss ideas rather than people interested in the actual idea itself. In application, this means that leadership needs to chose a specific direction or plan (hopefully applying collaborative principles in the idea creation, vetting, and refinement process), and then amass the right team to make the initiative a reality. The actual implementation, once passionate people are on board, can again utilize collective intelligence.

2) "2.0" leadership still requires the hard work of translating an idea into a plan. Leadership must create a vision around the plan, sell that vision, and  set goals. That plan must include some type of work-breakdown-structure to give concrete things for people who are "on the bus" to sink their teeth into. The size of tasks is important: too big and the task is too open-ended to realistically develop in a collaborative, distributed manner. On the other hand, the task cannot be too small or progress will grind to a halt.

My goal in this post is not to say that collaboration doesn't work. Far from it. As we evolve in collaboration maturity, we will see failed experiments from which we must learn. Understanding the limitations in a concept is crucial to appropriate and most effective application of that concept. Collaborative leadership understands these limitations and knows how to strike the right balance between top-down decision making and collaborative wisdom. Further, collaborative leadership must be willing to explore where that balance is.

In our previous post, we discussed game theory and highlighted 5 conclusions from Axelrod's work on the Evolution of Cooperation which help promote cooperative environments:

1) Enlarge the shadow of the future - make future interactions more frequent and likely and important

2) Change the payoffs - give incentives to value cooperation more than non-cooperation.

3) Teach people to care about each other

4) Teach reciprocity

5) Improve recognition abilities

We will focus on several of these as ways to foster cooperative and collaborative environments.

Enlarge the Shadow of the Future

Collaboration thrives in environments where current behavior is heavily weighted by future prospects of interaction. Keeping units small (see the"magic" of the number 150 in a previous post) is key to encouraging frequent and repeat interactions between individuals. Social networking software can also aid in bringing people together more frequently because the costs of interaction are reduced, and it is also easier t find the "right people" to maximize the benefit of the interaction.

Change the Payoffs

Can leaders make it more attractive to collaborate than to not? Certainly, and we are not talking about monetary awards for "most wiki entries" or "most prolific blogger." Rather, ingrain collaboration in the culture by sharing stories of effective collaboration, giving public recognition, and promoting known collaborators into positions of leadership. Again, social networking software can aid in sharing the story of the power of collaboration and increase the implicit value of these types of interactions.

Improve Recognition Capabilities

In game theory, cooperation is predicated on the ability of the "players" to recognize each other between "games" (iterations), and see and understand their behavior so that they can react to it appropriately at the next iteration. Transparency and reputation management from social networking systems can aid tremendously in this vein by reducing uncertainty about the past behavior of individuals. And coming full circle, reputation management also serves to enlarge the shadow of the future by increasing the "durability" of interactions, i.e capturing the behaviors in a system that is open for others to see.

The bottom line is that collaborative environments can be created and nurtured through attention to factors such as those outlined above. And such factors as enlarging the shadow of the future, changing the payoffs, and improving recognition capabilities can be enhanced through the judicious application of social networking capabilities.