Traditionally, extreme leverage is something organizations worked hard to avoid. Now, in the social media landscape, “Extreme Leverage 2.0” is something that evey organization should embrace.
Why? Because Extreme Leverage 2.0 allows a few people, in relatively small businesses, to change the world for their stakeholders.
Understanding Extreme Leverage 2.0
In the world of corporate finance, extreme leverage often hampers your organization’s effectiveness. You’re up to your ears in debt, having borrowed to your limit, and organizational life is pressured and often miserable. It’s win or lose for you. To make matters worse, your debt/equity ratio scares the crap out of anyone who might be interested in working with you.
In the 2.0 world, Extreme Leverage is completely different.
With Extreme leverage 2.0, your organization has the ability to influence the experience of hundreds, even millions of stakeholders, even when your organization is small enough that you might all fit in one conference room. The combination of your user/employee ratio and your effort/influence ratio give you tremendous reach and tremendous opportunity to shape people’s social behavior. Together, these two components of Extreme Leverage 2.0 make it possible for a few people, in relatively small companies, to change the world.
User/Employee Ratio
I first thought of the idea of Extreme Leverage 2.0 when I saw this post about internet companies with few employees but millions of users. I was struck by ratio of users (or stakeholders) to employees (or members) at these very well-known and influential social media companies. (Thanks to Royal Pingdom for the numbers.) For example,
Take Mozilla: 400 million downloads / 250 employees
Or Twitter: 175 million users / 300 employees
Or Tumbler: 12 million users / 18 employees
It’s mind-boggling when you think about the ratio between the number of people who use the organization’s product to the number of people who make the product being ‘a million to one’, or ‘two million to one’. In each of these organizations, one person’s contribution to the product can structure the experience of an astronomical number of users.
Effort/Influence Ratio
The effort/influence ratio is the relationship between the amount of effort an employee or member has to put into a decision and the amount of social change that this decision might produce. In companies with Extreme Leverage 2.0, decisions that members make about very basic features of their product have broad and even deep ramifications for the experiences of their huge number of users. The effort/influence ratio is a specific case of the “butterfly effect”, where a small difference in an intitial condition ends up producing big changes in a system.
What’s distinctive about Extreme Leverage 2.0 is that the effort/influence ratio is appreciated and used as a way to deliberately create a shift in users’ relationships with each other, with the organization, with society, or with their selves, that liberates them.
The 2.0 -ness of Extreme Leverage
I’m calling this kind of leverage “2.0” because this leverage is easily available to any organization that uses social media inside and/or across their organization’s boundaries. Certainly, the mechanics and economics of building social media platforms & tools make this industry extremely leveraged by design — it only takes so many people to build and run a platform, and once built, it doesn’t take a huge influx of new employees to scale up to large numbers of users.
Still, organizations in other industries can also take advantage of extreme leverage 2.0, when they choose their social media tools and strategies. As I’ve written before, the ways that interactions are scripted into the software itself can shape the relationships between the organization and the stakeholder. (For example, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a well-extablished approach to build-in social change through software design, that takes advantage of extreme leverage 2.0.)
The 2.0 -ness of this social change influence goes beyond using social media tools to organize and lead people to social change action. It goes beyond using processes and software born from an ethically-motivated, gift-culture oriented ethos, as with Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Instead, the social change influence comes from building social changes into the product itself.
Examples of Extreme Leverage 2.0
Let me give you two specific examples of subtle social change that takes advantage of Extreme Leverage 2.0.
Hashable
Hashable, a networking app that helps users introduce people to each other, has about 14 employees and over 10,000+ users (as of Jan. ’11).
Recently, Hashable made a subtle and significant change to the wording of the automatic message that’s part of a Hashable introduction.
As SXSW Hashable Evangelist Natalia Oberti Noguera explains:
Hashable has made me feel that they genuinely care about my feedback, even integrating a #languagematters suggestion I made regarding their automated copy. Emily (Hickey) et al changed the standard language in an email intro via their website from “Hi Guys” to “Hi there.” A small change with a big impact.
Now, with every single introduction made through Hashable, users receive a gender-neutral welcome. That gender-neutral welcome recognizes us all equally.
Diaspora
The second example comes from Diaspora, the open source alternative to facebook. Diaspora has 107 contributors, and thousands of beta users.
One Diaspora contributor, Sarah Mei (a Ruby on Rails software developer), decided to structure the “gender” field of the individual’s profile in a way that was, intentionally, liberatory.
As Sarah Mei describes in her Nov 2011 post, Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora”
The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female.
My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.
One person’s thoughtful consideration of a foundational element of a social network, and her subsequent contribution to software & product design, has now made it possible for millions of future users to describe their gender any way they choose. Take that, binary thinking!
And, of course, there is the change that Facebook made back in February, now allowing people to indicate their relationship status as “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.” Facebook seems like a huge company, but with 400 million users and only 1,200 employees, Facebook certainly has Extreme Leverage 2.0.
Each of these changes is very small, in terms of the work was actually required to change the product. But these changes, to the user, are anything but small. From gender neutral language, to self-description, to relationship recognition, these changes all make it possible for users to present ourselves as we see ourselves, and for users to be in charge of our own identity. They give authority for self-definition to us. It may seem almost negligible, but these changes are powerful.
By creating freedom in the very way we present ourselves, these changes create a foundation for authentic personal meaning, and for authentic interaction.
The Challenge and Opportunity of Extreme Leverage 2.0
What’s neat about this whole idea of extreme leverage is the way that it can be used by inspired, visionary, progressive and persuasive employees, organization members, or stakeholders to make a difference in our social world. Each one of the changes, above, required just one or a small number of organization members to identify and understand that a particular design choice could have an important social impact, and to consider what they wanted that impact to be. These changes just required a few lines of code to create. There’s the opportunity of Extreme Leverage 2.0.
And the challenge? The challenge is for organizations and members to decide to be deliberate and thoughtful about the larger social impact of their product design decisions.
Social media platforms and the code that supports them reflect the political & social values of the developers, the product managers, the entrepreneurs, and even the investors involved in the product. Often these choices are treated as though they are only about ‘what the product does’ or ‘what’s most efficient’. Basic decisions just replicate taken-for-granted assumptions about how things already are. But, stepping back to consider the larger ramifications of product choices invites these same developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and investors to be conscious of what else their product could do.
Why should you care about Extreme Leverage 2.0:
Let me borrow Sarah Mei’s explanation to suggest why Extreme Leverage 2.0 matters. She writes:
I made this change to Diaspora so that I won’t alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up.
I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can’t be contained by a list.
I know a lot of people aren’t there with me yet. So I also made this change to give them one momentary chance to consider other possibilities.
Extreme Leverage 2.0 challenges us and offers us the opportunity, as organizations and as individual workers, to use our extreme influence to do good.
Let’s use the idea of Extreme Leverage 2.0 to remind us that as we create products, we should give ourselves the chance to consider other possibilities. Then, we should build these possibilities into our products, and change the social world.
See also:
“Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context) by Sarah Dopp
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
How Social Media Creates Organizational Meaning
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?
Thanks to Jon Pincus (@jdp23) for introducing me to Diaspora, and for sustaining the conversation about software design and social change.
I am an organizational consultant, change advocate, and organizational identity/reputation scholar with a PhD in leadership & organizations. I research, write about, and consult with organizations on the relationships between organizational identity, actions, and purpose. I teach Technology Management, part-time, at Stevens Institute of Technology.
My current research focuses on how social technologies in the workplace can drive organizational change, generate meaning, and catalyze purpose. See the 
{ 1 comment }
CV – what a thoughtful piece. Much to consider and an upbeat view of how change happens in seemingly small ways that are in reality quite large and profound.
Thanks
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