August 2008 Archives

I've been stewing on this one for a week now: I'll start an example. When Netflix had trouble with its shipping centers, what could it do? What did it do?

Many businesses knee-jerk and feel obligated to hide problems from customers (or more importantly, shareholders) rather than shake their confidence. Not with Netflix.  The truth was out there, and they were ready to apply a 15% credit to accounts at a loss to the company of $3 million.  So what happened to Netflix shares when this information got out?  Did they drop?  Nope.

Imagine if they tried to conceal the information.  In the information age, with unofficial blogs like Hacking Netflix, what would speculation have done to share prices?  Maybe it would have taken a dive similar to the Apple shares when investors speculated over Steve Jobs' health.

So this brings me to my thought for the week.  The Internet is a free place (at least until Net Neutrality is utterly obliterated, anyway).  As long as it is free, you may be able to control the information on your site, but you will have very little success getting a grip on what everyone else on the Internet is doing.  Just ask Steve Jobs (the fake one, not the one mentioned above). Just ask WikiLeaks. Just ask the Internet Archive, the EFF, and the FBI.

Our systems of information control (intranet knowledge bases, secret Excel files and Word files on a shared drive, or the manual that the one staff assistant who has worked in the department for twenty years keeps at his/her desk, etc.) may have worked 15, 10, or even 5 years ago.  Things could be locked down and controlled. Whispers and rumors of alternate information only went as far as cubes and copy machines.

In the bad old days, if your knowledge base did not meet user needs, they might not use it. Today in the Web 2.0 world, if it does not meet their needs, they will make something else.  (Psst. If you haven't already, now's the time to read my previous post on Death by Committee; Contraception by Silo.)

Do you see the dramatic irony here?  In the attempt to lock down and control information to keep it pure and accurate, we create a situation where users go elsewhere, make duplicates that are no longer under control and can longer be updated, accurate, or blessed by the central authority.

Wouldn't a Wikipedia model make much more sense?  You could allow your community to contribute to the knowledge base, but re-purpose your gatekeepers as reviewers of the contributions.  Instead of having to keep up with the authoring and updating  and becoming bottlenecks of all the documentation, they can delegate to the community and become reviewers of this work.

As a testament to our walled-off departmental-units, we fortify our documentation in all its monolithic grandeur to stand rock-solid and unchanged by rival city-states (or departments).  In the meantime, we could be could be using Wikis and other collaborative tools to transcend the walls erected by physical location, department, and job title to get some work done.  The metaphor, of course, is much better when Victor Hugo used it for another game-changing technology for one of my favorite chapters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame:

...everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus's letters of stone...

In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once...

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? ... But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art...

The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole, or places his stone.

The Learning Design Summer Camp Welcome from Allan Gyorke had me thinking, as I'm sure it did a lot of people.  To many people who had not yet considered the use of Twitter, they may have written the tool off as a silly waste of time.  But then, they realized they had been missing out.  That was not what I was thinking about.

What I began thinking about is something I've been interested in for a long time.  How do you get people engaged, so engaged that you can get large groups to embrace change and spread a new idea or a new tool into mass adoption?

For those of you interested in some great resources on the topic (I promised Allan I'd give up my sources for my crazy ideas):

• Dave Balter's The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II (available at Amazon, or as a free PDF here)
  
• Polly LaBarre & Bill Taylor's Maverick's at Work (I know, I mention this one a lot)
• Various posts from Bob Sutton related to creating infectious engagement
• A study on flock mentality
  

Social Experiment #1

You might consider me a social engineer of sorts.  In high school as a practical joke, my friend and I decided to make up a fictitious holiday, Adopt-a-Leaf Day, where we tried to get high school students (appearance-conscious as they are) to wear fall leaves on their clothing.

In the morning, most people shunned the leaves and thought them silly; but as they day went on and we got a few people to wear them, people began asking for leaves.  People wore them without even knowing why.  One student assumed it was environmental.  Some teachers asked if these were "gang-related".  (I should mention my high school had about 2000 students, so they feared any mass uprising.) By the end of the day, we couldn't walk down the hall without seeing a number of students wearing leaves.  Those few who knew where is started even wanted us to continue the "holiday" the following year and into college.

Subsequent Experiments

Since those days, I've been a part of a number of social experiments. These include both serious work-related endeavors, like getting people to adopt wikis and planning traveling mini-conferences, and more trickster antics, like Twitter alter egos and secret societies of impropriety.

At first glance, you may think my trickster stunts have nothing to do with my work-related activities, but activities like calling me "Doctor Nikki" as I present basic IT topics and turning the Web Conference into a fashion show straddle the line between educational and entertainment.  They are a means to engage and convert large numbers of people in introductory-level topics with silly, somewhat gimmicky extended metaphors.

Conclusion

In Mavericks at Work, engagement begins with an engaging cause, a mission.  If I can't motivate myself, and a core group of champions (5% of my target audience, according to the flock article, if you buy it), how will I build the momentum needed to engage others?  Turn Web Authoring into a fashion show? People will buy in to it. Get some friends to ratify "Articles of Impropriety" as a work-unrelated gag? Yeah, we'll do that.

Now we come to the snowball effect of engagement.  First, you have the snowball effect in terms of ideas.  Yesterday, Allan talked about the Twitter enthusiasts who had created avatars, stickers, and contributed to ideas for LDSC.  When you add some fun, you also have the added bonus of breaking down barriers of entry to technology and language.  Side projects allow you to meet new people socially first, then feel comfortable asking questions and collaborating on ideas later.

The second snowball effect of engagement is the number of people. I saw this with LDSC yesterday.  People who had created Twitter accounts and abandoned them returned.  People who had not considered Twitter created accounts for the first time.  My Twitter was flooded with new participants.  As champions adopt and show enthusiasm, people who were neutral start adopting. Eventually, the people against your cause become the minority.  They have the choice of missing out and being conspicuous or joining the group as the snowball becomes an avalanche making its way toward them...

Those who know me as a multitasker, know I am reading four books right now:

• Dave Balter's Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II;
• Evan Rosen's Culture of Collaboration;
• David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous; and
  
• Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre's Mavericks at Work.

It is the last of these that keeps drawing me back, and the one that I'd really like to talk about, even though everyone else will be talking about the third one on the list for our Brainstorming Bookclub.

Mavericks & the Use of Strategic Vocabulary

In Mavericks at Work's "What You Think Shapes How You Talk—Creating a Strategic Vocabulary", LaBarre and Taylor talk about how language itself can help create an innovative culture.  One example they cite is how Cranium does has it's own unique language, right down to official titles.  There is no C.F.O; Cranium has a "Professor Profit" instead.

Because of my former life as an English teacher, and my current time in IT, I am absolutely fascinated with how language shapes behavior.  You may have even read a blog post about it from time to time here.  We IT folk may withhold communication as a defense mechanism or use over-technical language to establish our status.  I find similar behavior, intentional or unintentional throughout academia.

True, some level of familiarity with or reference to the terminology or theory is necessary, but at times, heavy dependence on such Jargon Monoxide, can have adverse affects on certain audiences.  Additionally, if our language is a reflection of our thoughts and all we do is parrot the language of others, are we really innovating?

Where's Waldo? How to Care for Your Maverick

I came to University Libraries because I sensed from its behavior that it might foster a culture of mavericks.  And I am lucky to be in my department—I-Tech—with it's strategic vocabulary, a maverick within a maverick.  But what if your organization is not a maverick like Cranium (or I-Tech)?  What if your group is cautious, but always asking what you can do to catch up with the cool kids and innovators?  What if?

If you are not a maverick culture, you probably have only one or two mavericks that stand out like Where's Waldo in his stripey shirt among the shirt-sleeved types in your group.  You are probably hoping sooner or later your mavericks, or Waldos, will get the hint and figure or that they, and your organization would be better off if they found a workplace where they fit in better.

Sure, they might be happier at a place like Cranium (or I-Tech), and we might be happy to have them.  But, you're wrong about your organization being better off.  You'd be contributing to your on innovation brain-drain.  Look, you've already got plenty of shirt-sleeved people who've given you what you already do and know, and as the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, then you always get what you've always got."

If you want real change, look to your mavericks, your Waldos, your renegades.  If they don't fit in the place you put them, make a special place or swat team or project team for them.  If you don't, somewhere more innovative will be happy to take them off your hands...