This is the script of a presentation that I gave in the "Future of Social Media" theatre at Internet World on May 12th. In it I hope to provoke thinking about social business and the systems and culture needed to foster a productive and innovative working environment that enables people to take advantage of new many-to-many communications tools:
Hi
My name’s Chris Dymond and I’m Innovation Director at Technophobia Limited in Sheffield. As Innovation Director, I’m responsible for thinking about things and getting other people to think about things too.
What I was *going* to talk about
When I submitted the application to speak here back in January, I was going to talk mainly about software design and some ideas that came out of building the _connect network for the Technology Strategy Board and some work we did last year for Alfa Romeo.
And I was going to talk a little bit about where I think this might all be going.
What I *am* going to talk about
However, time moves on pretty fast and I think there are some more pressing things to deal with. So I’m going to change the focus of my talk a little bit.
I’m going to move ‘up the stack’ as the techies say – talk about things at a higher level of abstraction.
I’m not going to talk so much about software design, but about how the software we design fits into a wider ‘social ecosystem’ or culture – especially within businesses.
And when I do talk about software design, I hope it’s relevant to you if you’re just evaluating or configuring software rather than designing or commissioning it.
"Social Business"
(image: cc "Crowd" by Wayne Large)
First of all, there are some changes going on with our terminology.
Social Media inside the firewall used to be known as “enterprise 2.0” and social media outside the firewall was generally known either as “social media marketing” or “online collaboration”.
Now however social media within and across enterprise boundaries is increasingly being called simply “social business” by people like IBM and the Dachis Group and others.
The idea is that organisations will increasingly consist of a multitude of overlapping networks, transcending existing layers and boundaries with all communications mediated by social media technologies.
Reed's Law
In February 2001 David Reed wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he presented evidence that “the value of group forming networks increases exponentially with the size of the network“.
Or put another way many-to-many communication is orders of magnitude more efficient than one-to-one or one-to-many communication.
This is now known as Reed’s Law, and the development of more and more kinds of cross boundary collaboration can be seen as its inexorable logic continuing to take effect.
Barriers
But there are severe barriers preventing this from happening – companies ask:
- How do we protect our sensitive data?
- What should people within the organisation be allowed to see?
- How do we know our staff are actually working?
- How do we make sure all our staff speak 'on message'?
- How do we cope with information overload?
- What should we measure to ensure value is being created?
- How can we possibly trust all staff to make the right decisions?
Added to which is the stress of change - people already have a fixed set of mental models and are used to working a particular way.
Opportunity
But imagine the alternative for a minute:
- What if everyone had the right basic set of communications and collaboration skills and had access to specialist skills wherever they might be?
- What if everyone's first thought was not "how do I do this?" but "who can I involve in this?"
- What if people within an organisation were able to easily participate in and engage with a vast range of other people via personal and (global) interest networks as well as institutional ones?
- What if everyone continually shared what they think, know and desire to know with everyone else?
- What if common 'patterns' of work such as launching and running initiatives, or suggesting improvements, or getting compliance approval were made easy across organisational boundaries?
- What if the mechanics and structure of the organisation didn't stand in the way of its people's intrinsic motivation to do great things?
Flourishing
‘Flourishing’ is a term I've coined to describe a work environment in which people, individually and collectively, have the resources and ability to do great things without complex dependencies and approval.
I don't think this is a utopian vision - the best, most dynamic companies will make this happen. And they will attract the most ambitious and capable staff as a result.
This is what we try to create at Technophobia both internally for us, and externally for clients through our software.
But how should we think about creating the right conditions?
Innovation Environments
At Technophobia, we think in terms of Innovation Environments that our staff are immersed in every day, and we define four of them:
Institutional - how is our work structured? What are we allowed to do? What must we seek permission for?
Physical - how good are our offices at helping us share information and work together?
Cultural - how approachable and encouraging are people here? Do we know enough about each other?
Informational - how do we discover, learn and keep track of what’s going on? How do we determine what’s useful?
But this is not enough - there is much behaviour to be regulated, so how should we think about that?
We should borrow from a higher-level social system: The law of the land.
And specifically, I think, from Laurence Lessig – the cyberlawyer, academic, political activist and co-founder of creative commons. He has said and written many things about regulation in the networked world, but his model is very simple and very powerful:
Regulation
Things to be regulated are acted on by four influences:
- Law
- Norms
- Market
- Architecture
The crucial question in any given situation is: "what is the best mix?"
The solutions *are* the culture
So we need to design solutions that overcome the barriers, and maximise the value of the environments.
But the real challenge is to do BOTH THINGS AT ONCE, by using the right mixture of regulatory tools at our disposal.
It is wrong to think of this as a balance or trade off, where you enforce one thing, but compensate by making concessions to improve 'culture' - it is possible to make it a NON-ZERO SUM GAME! I.e. one in which doing one thing also improves the other and vice versa.
Further, because this affects everyone’s ability to do anything, I believe organisations should have their *most* creative people involved in figuring this out.
Donuts
As a quick example of this kind of thinking is a practice we have called ‘donutting’, which is a response to a particular data-security barrier.
We need to keep our network secure, and we often have people from outside the company in our offices, and so we have a policy that says every staff member must lock their computer whenever they leave their desk. Even if it’s just for a couple of minutes.
Now I’d imagine a policy like that is a nightmare to enforce if you try to use the law only to regulate it.
Luckily, we don’t have to as we can use the market to create behavioural norms to do the same job.
We have an additional rule that states: if you see anyone’s computer unattended and unlocked, you have permission to open their email and send an email to everyone with the subject line “Donuts for All”.
So it’s now a competition – everyone is incentivised to do the policing. We keep track of who’s been donutted and get them to pay up – it’s a matter of principle. People of course don’t just put ‘donuts for all’ in the subject line they use their creativity. They also find plenty of edge cases which represent potential security holes, such as meeting room computers left logged in, or a new smartphone left unattended and without a codelock.
We’ve even had a remote donutting where we have a couple who both work for the company, and the wife donutted the husband on his work laptop in their livingroom!
It’s a lot of fun. And people tend not to leave their computer unlocked. And when they do we get cake.
So a security policy is a significant piece of our culture.
Architecture
So we used law, market and norms to get people to behave in a certain way, and we improved our cultural environment in the process.
But what about the fourth regulatory influence: architecture?
It’s not that architecture was missing, just that the existing architecture – email – allowed the practice to occur with no friction.
But what happens when it scales? Let’s say the company has 1000 employees not 70 – you can’t spam 1000 people every time someone leaves their computer unlocked. And you can’t buy donuts for 1000 people when you get caught. You could limit the practice to individual work groups, but then there would probably not be much donutting between workgroups as people wouldn’t know the appropriate email address to use and it wouldn’t ‘feel’ right. So our cultural innovation environment would actually suffer.
So we’d have to change the architecture. We’d have to have a universal donuts@ email address and a software process that’s tied into the corporate directory and knows which immediate group to notify, but could also post the occurrence to the company’s internal activity stream for all to see without spamming everyone’s email. We might then even place wireless screens in a few strategic locations to show the stream of people being donutted across the entire organisation!
Of course in order to allow this to happen, the company needs a good directory service and an activity stream. Both of which are pieces of social business infrastructure.
And this is the thing: Lawrence Lessig said Code is Law, and he’s right. This is what he means:
Architecture is the crucial component – it doesn’t matter what you want to do or how you want to do it, the architecture determines what you can and can’t do. It is the crucial constraint on your potential.
And in a world where social business dominates, the architecture is software.
Social systems must be flexible
Throughout human history, social systems that have been designed without much flexibility in their architecture haven’t worked so well.
Think of Soviet Communism or the difference between Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro.
We need to design flexible, adaptable structures that flow from, and speak deeply to, our evolutionary journey as social animals; and that are intrinsically humanising, not alienating.
This is a tall ask for software. So far its architectures have frequently been alienating. Complicated. Impenetrable. Emotionless. Unreliable.
But I think we are now beginning to see this change. FINALLY!
Computing power and development frameworks have reached the level of complexity where we can delight users with interfaces and interactions.
And network structures are starting to be created that mirror the way we want to socialise with each other.
We need to continue this work.
And so...
Here's what I've been trying to get at in this rambling talk:
It seems likely that companies that manage to harness many-to-many communications across boundaries will innovate better and perform better over time.
The barriers that exist currently are best overcome by using a mix of influences that create culture in the process.
The tools of social business can help solve the barriers to social business.
We are still only at the very beginning of modelling social interactions in software and there is much left to do.
Structures made from simple, flexible, independent, highly configurable components will probably be best in the long run.
The more flexible and comprehensive our architectures, the more scope we have to create environments that humanise instead of alienate.
So choose wisely. And don’t give up your ability to create.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you.
