Authentic Organizations » organizational change

Growing Social: 4 Different Paths to Social Organizations

cv harquail — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:54:55 +0000

Is there a “best way” for organizations to ‘go social’?

More specifically, is there a best way to ‘grow social’, so that the organization incorporates social tools and processes so that change is generative and authentic?

Because I’ve been critical of arguments for Social Business and felt unengaged by arguments from the world of technology, I’ve been wondering what the alternatives are for advocating that organizations become more social. I’ve identified four arguments for moving towards social organizations.. Each of these paths tells us to adopt enterprise social media to become more social. But, each of these paths serves a different set of purposes and a different world view.

4 Paths to Social Organization

We can get to social organization on 4 basic paths:

            1. Technology
            2. Social Business
            3. Collective Values
            4. “Product” Resonance

Two of these paths get a lot of attention, and two of them are under-appreciated. Can you guess which two will lead to the most positive transformation?

1. Technology

The Technology path is the classic model, where the availability of technology leads to the desirability of that technology which leads to implementing that technology. Social media tools exists, we like them, we are able to add them to our enterprise 2.0 systems and so we do. Besides, they’ll make work more efficient, reduce waste, increase speed, etc.

Technology-driven ‘social’ seems most prominent in the Enterprise 2.0 / Knowledge Management / Collaborations systems conversation. And, the Technology path is usually promoted by IT experts.

2. Social Business

The path with the largest cheering section is the “social business” path. Originating in Customer Relations Management (CRM) and Marketing disciples, the social business path starts with parts of the organization deploying social media as a way to link the customer community and the organization’s outward facing / front line employees.

When marketers realized that it would take more than social listening and a few brandividuals to serve customers’ needs, they advocated that the organization transform into a ‘social business’ to support these externally-oriented programs with internal changes. These internal changes seem to be concentrated in areas where other organization functions (outside of marketing) can serve back information or solutions for customers. (Lateral social connections within the organization are still largely an afterthought, if included at all.) The Social Business path is usually promoted by marketing experts.

3. Collective Values

The Collective Values path is often derided as the ‘kumbaya’ approach. This path is pursued, where organizational leaders realize that enterprise social media can support the values of the organization by facilitating new kinds of coordination, communication and collaboration behavior. Values like “community”, openness, full participation, engagement, and the like can be brought alive through the behaviors that enterprise social media supports.

The Collective Values path is promoted by a diverse assortment of business unit leaders, HR professionals, organizational change agents, management scholars, and organizationally-committed employees.

4. “Product” Resonance

The Product Resonance path is so rare that it doesn’t even have a good name. I’ve thought about it as the “Progressive” path and the “Movement” path, but neither of those names captures the intent that drives organizations down this path. So let me try to explain in a few extra words.

Organizations follow the Product Resonance path when they realize that the product, service or issue that they produce suggests a certain set of values, and they also realize that these product values demand to be demonstrated through more ‘social’ organizational practices.

For example, an organization that sells recycling services might see that the community participation their product advocates and depends on can also be expressed through specifically social work & organizational practices, like community forums to discuss the organization’s next quarter targets.

For another example, a community health collective adopts enterprise social media because the very premise of community, health, and collective demand transparency, openness, and inclusiveness — all values that cam be demonstrated in enterprise social media. The employees of these organizations use social media with each other to practice what they preach.

Motives Matter

The path that any organization takes to go social matters, because each path carries with it the potential downsides of the perspective it comes from — the Tech path can seem un-human, the Social Business path too profit-driven, the Collective Values path too woo-woo, and the Resonance path too uptight about appearances.

Only two paths towards social organization
engage the core of who the organization is and what it stands for.

Only Collective Values and Product Resonance paths
engage the organization’s identity as an engine for growth.

Even though the Resonance path and the Collective Values path both are driven by values, there’s a subtle difference between the two. The Collective Values path is driven by self-reflection, a push for authenticity, or other self-expressive motivations. It gets its momentum from the inside.

In contrast, the Resonance path is driven by the organization reflecting on what its external presentations say, and then using any discrepancies or opportunities to drive organizational change. For this path, the trigger for change is external. The Resonance path would be pursued when an organization make connections between external projections — its sustainability goals, its CSR goals, its products, services, political commitments — and the way it organizes itself.

What is Growing Social really about?

Technology is about being more efficient, Social Business is about being more profitable, but Collective Values and Resonance are about creating and aligning meaning. And, both Collective Values and Resonance are all about changing the organization to benefit people first, with concomitant benefits for products, processes and profits. Finally, both paths will lead to deploying social media to create systems of engagement.

This is what I’ve come up with so far — I’d love to hear what you think about these 4 paths, the distinctions between them, and how they might matter.

4 Reasons Why Socializing Your Intranet Makes Organizational Change Easier

cv harquail — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:59:25 +0000

You can make the process of becoming a Social Organization a little easier if you start by socializing your intranet. Why? Because the shared, cohering nature of your intranet makes ‘social’ change efforts more comprehensive, more democratic, less scary, and more reinforcing of collective identity.

In my previous post, I argue that we should develop Social Organizations from the Inside Out, starting first with the organization’s intranet.

Your organization’s intranet is the network of digital systems that reinforce the organization’s structure, processes and culture. Changing these systems to become more social (aka Socializing the Intranet) will help to make the organization’s structure, processes and culture more social.

Socializing your intranet is a great way to introduce significant organizational change, because intranets are broad-based, protected, visible and core to who your organization is.

Plus, these features of your intranet actually make organizational change easier.

Why Socializing Your Intranet Makes Organizational Change Easier

1. Socializing your Intranet demonstrates a company-wide commitment to new social behaviors and systems, making it easier for members to choose to change.

Going social on your intranet demonstrates the organization’s commitment to the global concept of changing how everybody interacts with everybody else.

When an organization integrates social media tools into its existing intranet or when it adopts new social intranet technology, the organization invests both financial and attentional resources. Rather than focusing this investment on one department or function, the organization invests across the board. It’s not some ‘skunk works’ or ‘demonstration project’, but a full on collective commitment.

This perceived commitment helps members trust that changing — becoming more social– actually matters to the organization. Thus, organization members will be more likely to put in the effort and take the risks to learn more social systems & behaviors.

2. Socializing your Intranet creates an opportunity for every member to get involved at the same time, making it easier for everyone to learn, share and support each other’s changes.

Intranet-based social innovations create an opportunity for more democratic, more broadly-shared participation in becoming a social organization.

No one department, level or function gets the new tools ‘first’. There is no implicit hierarchy of “who is and who isn’t important to social business”. Instead, social tools are introduced on the common platform, and everyone learns together, from the ground up.

When everyone is involved in the change effort, what any member learns about using the tools is broadly relevant to other members. Members can support each other as they experiment, and build change momentum across the entire organization.

**3. Socializing your Intranet creates a protected space for learning how to be social with each other, making it easier to learn without punishment.**

On a social intranet, members can experiment, experience, practice, explore and learn how to be more social as individual contributors and as members of the organization, in a relatively safe environment.

An intranet is a comparatively protected space for interaction — the firewall that keeps the intranet internal makes it nearly impossible for a member’s participation to damage the organization’s relationships with external stakeholders or to damage the organization’s reputation. Members can learn to be social without putting the organization at risk.

And, since much of the activity on a social intranet is organization-related, and not work-task related, members’ participation on intranet social tools won’t be evaluated as part of their work performance. For example, participating in a conversation about possible changes to the cafeteria menu, or HR procedures, or the organization’s new logo won’t be evaluated as part of that member’s “work”.

Conversation on the social intranet can make an organization feel smaller and more cosy, and in that way more welcoming to members’ participation. A social intranet can provide a secure base for individuals and departments who really need to take risks and extend themselves to become more social.

4. Socializing your Intranet creates a rich display and constant reinforcement of “who” your organization is, making it easier to create ‘new’ social behaviors that are authenticity.

A salient, visible, constant sense of your organization’s identity makes it easier for members to figure out how to use social tools in ways that are appropriate and authentic to that particular organization.

Your organization’s collective identity is created, expressed and reinforced through interaction among members. [This interaction can be direct (IRL), psychological (e.g., in the mind) and tech-social (on social media).]

Members’ online interaction with social tools works to translate and express the organization’s identity into the digital form & space of the intranet. In other words, members figure out how to express their organization’s norms, values and character in their digital communication. Doing this on a shared intranet helps members create their organization’s signature ways of expressing values and purpose, “socially”.

Not only is a clear identity important for sustaining authentic interactions internally, it is also a prerequisite for authentic interactions across the organization’s boundary.

Organization members need to be (relatively) secure with “who the organization is” so that they can behave as a reliable and trustworthy social partner to other stakeholders. When the organization is confident and secure in who it is, it doesn’t give up too much of itself in an effort to accommodate and please external stakeholders. And, it behaves consistently and reliably, generating the confidence and trust of stakeholders.

Inside-Out Change Isn’t Easy

I’m not suggesting that going social from the inside out is easy. It is not.

For most organizations, becoming more social will require challenging deeply-held beliefs about the socio-political arrangements of workers, managers and the organization. This means that becoming more social will require a profound cultural shift by your organization and its members.

But, this organizational change towards a more social organization can be made a little easier.

— When the organization demonstrates a commitment to change,
– When all members take small steps together,
– When members learn to change in a relatively safe environment, and
– When the change activity recreates and reinforces the organization’s sense of self,

the whole organization can move forward from its core.

Take advantage of the ways that your central, collective, prosaic intranet can support your members’ move towards more social online interaction.

Become a more social organization by working from the inside-out.

Social Intranet Design and Organizational Identity: Design for functionality and character
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Re-creating Reputation Through Authentic Interaction: Using Social Media to Connect with Individual Stakeholders

Image Lantern Some rights reserved by HeyNixt

Social Organizations from the Inside Out: Start with Your Intranet

cv harquail — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:13:32 +0000

What’s the best strategy for making your organization more social?

Where do you start to transform your systems, so that you can transform your organization?

Many social media experts suggest that you work from the outside-in.

They encourage organizations to start with one function and one stakeholder group, and ‘get social’ by linking CRM (customer relationship management) systems to the organizational groups involved in customer support.

The smarter way to change is for the organization to get social from the inside-out.

Why? Because comprehensive change requires addressing the core of the organization itself.

The core of your organization’s digital systems is your organization’s intranet.

That’s why we should focus on intranets as we strive to make our organizations more social.

The Intranet as Your Organization’s Digital Core

As traditionally designed, intranets are a combination of portals and repositories, functioning in the background of your day to day activity. Your intranet is where all kinds of ‘managed content’ are located. It’s the place you go for reference materials, bulletins, request forms, employee directories and maybe a white label email system.

If your organization has an intranet you probably use it every day, several times a day, without paying much attention to it. Intranets are “stealth applications”, used regularly but pervasively in the background of your work.

If you work in a smaller organization, you might not have an official intranet. Instead you use an intranet proxy to access the resources of your organization. This proxy might be an external email system (like Outlook or Gmail), a file-sharing & collaboration system (like early Sharepoint) or your organization’s website.

A Common Center that Represents “The Organization”

Whether it’s a formal intranet or an intranet proxy, this place where you start your digital work day provides a common organization-focused center for all members. Thus, intranets should be the starting point for any system of organizational engagement.

Even more important, as the digital starting point of your work, the intranet actually represents your organization to you, and to every other member using it.

Intranets are the digital communications systems that cohere and construct organizations.

I know, intranets are old news. Many intranets are boring, underfunded, decoupled from business strategy, and lacking in tech-sex appeal.

Worse, we take intranets for granted, as the “always there”, “always on”, and nearly invisible.

But, because they are the shared backbone of your organization’s digital communication,

Intranets are the digital social scaffolding of the organization’s structure, processes and culture.

If you want to change your customer relationships and your brands to make them social, by all means start with boundary-crossing systems like CRM and work you way inside to support these changes.

But, if you want a more social organization, one that can support engagement among external and internal stakeholders, then you need to address the structure, processes and culture at your organization’s core.

Go social from the inside-out, and start by socializing your intranet.

Images: Tiny Apple and Tiny Apple Core, on Flickr Some rights reserved by me and the sysop

Are Your Social Business Systems Designed for Extraction or Contribution?

cv harquail — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:41:05 +0000

The move of social business systems into work organizations exacerbates a tension that’s built into every idea-intensive workplace.

Idea-intensive workplaces ask employees to contribute not just the work of their bodies, but also the work of their minds and their hearts. These workplaces set up a tension between asking people to give of themselves as employees and to give of themselves as persons.

Social business systems, because they are implemented to increase employees’ intellectual and emotional contributions to social business work, rachet up the demand on employees to give of themselves.

Social business systems are designed to extract from employees rather than to contribute to employees’ larger selves.

Social business work systems are social media platforms and architectures brought inside the work organization. They look like and operate much like the social networks we already know– like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Ning, for example. And, like social networks, they succeed only when individuals invest their selves – their personalities, their emotions, their relational styles, and their personal connections — as they use these networks.

However, compared to social networks, social business systems are designed for a different purpose.

While social networks are built to support and increase our contributions of self into the community, social business systems are built to extract the most from us and from our participation.

Social Systems Support the Experience of Contribution

Socializing and social networks in “real life” (aka outside of work) run on social, personal, personality-driven, personal-interest driven interaction. We interact with people we like and love, around things we care about and find meaningful. We participate in communities because participating gives us a chance to contribute to something meaningful and to people who are important to us, and because participating feels good. We participate because we want to.

Online, social networks and digital communities operate with these same motives. We use these digital tools to support and expand communities we care about, and support and expand our selves as social beings. The dominant verbs in these activities are “giving”, “helping”, and “sharing”. Participating in these social networks adds value to our lives as individuals, families and communities.

Social Business Systems Support the Experience of Extraction

When we’re inside organizations and ‘at work’, the systems we use — intranets, knowledge-management systems, content management systems, enterprise resources systems and other systems of engagement— are designed for a different purpose. These work systems are designed to get us members & employees to do more work— different kinds of work, such as creative work, relational work, and emotional work — but work nonetheless.

Notwithstanding that many of us enjoy our work, have pro-social motivations to do our work well, and may contribute above and beyond expectations because we like to, social business systems assume that we will contribute to them in the same ways that we contribute to our (non-work) social networks. Social business systems depend on the same spirit of giving, helping and sharing that motivate us in our social networks.

Social business systems ask us to use our relationship skills, our friendships, our personal interests, our unique voices, our creativity, our mindshare, and our personality flair, to move work along. This work extracts value from us, like social capital and intellectual capital, that we may or may not be compensated for. This work that may or may not fulfill us as people, and this work that may or may not contribute to our larger life purpose.

Social Business systems extract value from us as employees.

Can they genuinely add value to us as persons?

Despite raising these dystopic concerns, I’m all for the idea that we should use systems of engagement in organizations to do our collective and individual work more effectively.

What I get hung up on is the idea that social business takes our generosity, our personality, and our loving spirit for granted. I’m concerned that our generosity, our personality and our loving spirit will be extracted from us, to become ‘work’ rather than a freely-made generous contribution to life and the world around us.

I’m concerned that our social, personality and caring efforts will be judged in our performance evaluations (for example, through social scoring), that our generosity will become the property of the organization, and that being a good, full, authentic person will become another way for a company to make some money.

This concern may sound awful to some of you. Like, what is she thinking? Is it really so horrible to “engage” using social business systems?

I felt a similar recoil when I was working at the soap plant, introducing high performance work systems. There, the technicians resisted taking “ownership” for scheduling, team assignments, and quality control.

“Even if you pay us more”, they said, “that’s not responsibility that we want. That’s not where we want to put our energy.”

I recall being shocked— isn’t having more responsibility a good thing? And today, isn’t it a good thing to be more fully human, more relational, more social, and more creative at work?

Yes, but also no. There are current examples that show us how social business systems are too focused on extraction.

Look at the dilemmas faced by organization members who’ve taken the lead on using social media to extend the organization to customers. Through their personality and their relationships, brandividuals generate value for the organization. But, they also find it hard if not impossible to take that part of that value with them when they move into other job roles.

This is not just a white collar, professional issue either. Hourly workers who get involved in extra-role customer service though social media get engaged emotionally and want to contribute. But companies don’t want to pay them for this work.

So the challenge is—

Can we recreate social business systems so that they nurture a spirit of contribution? Can we move away from the conventional experience of extraction?

Can can we structure, convene, facilitate, and use our social networks so that people experience participating not simply as a contribution to the organization, but also as a contribution to their colleagues, their own values, and their own selves?

Possible options

A straightforward way of dealing with the extractive bias of internal social networks might be to build in rewards. I don’t mean superficial things like cute badges and game points, but meaningful rewards like recognition, celebration, and related personal development opportunities. Building in some genuine goodies might balance out the extractive bias of these social work systems.

[ Note, this is the basic assumption of ‘for purpose’ businesses— that our participation in the purpose creates the contribution experience to balance out the extraction experience.]

Another strategy would be to change the basic terms of employee contribution itself, perhaps through changes in the ownership structure of the organization. Systems might feel less extractive if the (economic and other forms of) value they created was shared across contributors in a way that felt commensurate with our increased and diversified contributions.

Which adoption strategy will we choose?

Whenever we adopt a new technology, we have two strategic options. We can choose to fit the technology into the organization to make things more efficient, or we can choose to change the organization using the technology as a catalyst.

I’ve already noted that the corporatized conversation around “Social Business” seems oblivious to concerns about how these digitally-facilitated higher expectations change the psychological contract between persons, organizations, and work. And, I’m very encouraged by the emerging community of thought leaders who are examining our assumptions about ‘social business’ and the broader concept of ‘social work organizations’.

There is an opportunity here to change the world of work and make it better, by using social networks and systems of engagement across organizations.

Right now, though, it seems like nature and motives of social networks will be squeezed to fit into organizations that are themselves designed for extraction.

I would rather see adoption follow a different dynamic. I’d rather help us use the expansively human nature of social networks to push the boundaries of how we think about working together, and to change organizations themselves.

How can we shift the conversation about Social Busineess, so that we use social media and networks to help change our organizations for the better?

Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations

cv harquail — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:56:55 +0000

“Systems of engagement.”

Isn’t that an evocative term?

The minute I read it, I knew that the term “systems of engagement” captured something important–but what? I searched the web, I even consulted Quora, but I found no definition of “systems of engagement” that incorporates all that the term evokes for me. So at the end of this post, I’ll propose a definition.

But first let me tell you why the concept of “systems of engagement” is useful.

The term “systems of engagement” evokes complexity, dynamism, a sense of purpose, and a set of values about stakeholder interaction.

As a term:

“Systems of engagement” includes any kind of tool or medium that focuses on engaging any stakeholder–internal or external.

“Systems of engagement” encompasses all forms of “social media”, but they aren’t limited to the activity of the organization connecting outward to external stakeholders.

“Systems of engagement” highlights the complex, recursive, dynamic nature of the tools and the processes that they support. Explicitly, the term takes us away from any notion of broadcasting.

“Systems of engagement” focuses on the goal, the reason for being, behind these tools & processes: Engagement. These tools are built and used explicitly to facilitate people getting involved in the interpersonal, communicative and creative elements of the work that they do.

“Systems of engagement” invokes a perspective on technology that captures how we need to think differently about technology, when we want to use this technology in a social organization.

“Systems of engagement” is a term that will –I hope– be used to describe all manner of interactive, digital, communication oriented systems, used by organizations, to support engagement among stakeholders.

Where did the term “Systems of Engagement” come from?

Geoffrey Moore coined the term “systems of engagement” (though I cannot find a citation) and contrasted them to “systems of record”. Moore offers a simple definition of systems of engagement, calling them

“social business systems designed to dramatically improve the productivity of middle tier knowledge workers. … (they) enhance the ability of knowledge workers to quickly cooperate with each other in order to improve operating flexibility and customer engagement.”

That definition is a good start, but it really doesn’t embrace all that the term implies, and all that the actual systems mean to an organization.

The term popped into my awareness with the Jan 2011 AIIM report “Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT”. It has been discussed somewhat by process management specialist Jacob Ukelson and by CRM/eCommerce specialist Richard Hughes, both of whom bring an IT/Content management perspective to it. Michel Bauwens has created a Wikipedia page for the term. And, JP Rangaswami has elaborated on the concept of Systems of Engagement, especially drawing in some history of the evolution of these sorts of social systems.

But no one, as yet, has directly addressed the organizational, cultural, and leadership issues related to systems of engagement. (Richard Veryard, I’m with you in this concern.)

Consider just this one direction:

When we think about systems of engagement, we are triggered to think about engagement as a concept, and as a process, as it has been understood and facilitated by organization development and change agents since before the dawn of the human relations movement.

We are triggered to remember, for example, that engagement requires a commitment to four organizational principles:

widening the circle of involvement
connecting people to each other, to ideas, and to emotions
creating communities of action
embracing democracy

When we think about these underlying principles of engagement, and consider how they need to be built into digital tools to support stakeholder interaction, we explicitly create the bridge from a tech focus (like Enterprise 2.0) to a social focus on individual and organizational flourishing (e.g., social organization, wirearchy).

Let’s Co-Opt the Term “Systems of Engagement”

I want to co-opt this term, popularize it, and promote it in conversations about social media, social business, and social organizations.

“Systems of engagement” reminds us that we need to step beyond customer relationship management– we need to include more than just customers, and to focus on processes in addition to “management”. Even when we talk about constituent relationship management, we’re still talking about a view where the organization controls the medium and controls the engagement for its own purposes–not necessarily for maximizing the value that’s exchanged between and among stakeholders.

When we think of systems of engagement, not just ‘social media inside organizations’, we invite ourselves to think differently, more expansively, and more creatively about what we need to do to support the engagement of all organizational stakeholders.

The term suggests, maybe even reminds us, that these tools are attached to values, norms, and a worldview about users, managers, leaders, and those whom these systems will serve.

As a term, “systems of engagement” solves a problem for us.

The term creates room for our imagination, for us to create additional systems that support and facilitate stakeholder engagement. It also triggers us to think about the organizational context that will support, and use these systems.

Old Wall, New Coat of Paint?

Craig Rhinehart, an enterprise content specialist, believes that “systems of engagement” is really just a clever label for systems we have been using all along, a “proven idea with a fresh coat of paint”.

He’s right, I think, in recognizing that tools such as email and instant messaging were used to facilitate engagement long before “social media” etc. were created. It is a proven idea that engagement needs tech system support.

But we haven’t yet fully explored and explained how systems of engagement are attached to values, norms, and a worldview about users, managers, leaders, and those whom these systems will serve. There is still a lot we can do to understand how a class of systems, engagement systems, can be fit in next to old(er) paradigms of digital technology, and older paradigms of leadership and organizations.

So here’s what I propose:

If the term “systems of engagement” feels useful to you, let’s hear how. Let’s just co-opt the term, and work together to define it. Where do you want to start?

[ Note: I use social organization instead of social business to include nonprofits and other organizational forms as well as businesses.] More links to follow but I’m out of time for now…

images: Complex Beauty – Liatris …from 1Sock The Complex Plane from Garrett Crawford Williamsville Water Mill Complex from johncpiercy

Recognizing Women On The Far Side of Complexity

cv harquail — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:57:35 +0000

I’m getting a bit weary of talking about “women” and having some people assume that I’m only talking about “women”.

Recognize that when I use the term “women”, I am consciously talking about “women” on the far side of complexity.

The Far Side of Complexity

The “far side of complexity” is one of my favorite concepts. Contrasting “simplicity” with “simplicity on the far side of complexity” helps us recognize how we often use the same word to label two very different understandings of a category, variable, element, or system. And, it helps us recognize how easy it is to assume – wrongly – that someone is being simplistic and not complex in her thinking.

I find this problem of assuming the wrong side of complexity coming up again and again as I participate in online and face-to-face conversations about applying feminism to the business and social world.

Who do you assume “women” are?

Sometimes, when I use the word “women” on this blog, on other blogs, and in conversation, some people assume that I’m referring only to “women” who are white, able bodied, cisgendered, US-based, and upper-middle class. They assume that I am ignoring the racioethnic, class, orientation, ability, and other dimensions of human difference that also compose a sexist system.

Worse, when someone assumes that I’m using the term “women” simplistically, they also assume that I am coming from a blind, unacknowledged, place of unearned social privilege. They assume I am only in the feminist conversation to help myself and women just like me. Then, they pounce on me for being inauthentically feminist, and tell me to stop talking. At which point I want to say, WTF?

Was that feminist?

This dynamic is not just happening to me; I see it happening to other conversants too. But here let me just talk about my own experience. And, let me note that this doesn’t happen often– but when it does happen, it can be profoundly painful.

Presumptions and Assumptions

I expect that this assumption is made because I “present” as (or “look like”) a white, cis-gendered, upper middle class, able bodied woman. A woman with this kind of social & economic profile is just the type of woman who’d supposedly make the categorical mistake of taking her own experience as a woman to be representative of all women’s experience. (Indeed, this type of woman is the kind of woman who historically did make that mistake.)

But, if we assume that a woman, any woman or a woman of a certain type, is automatically sexist in a certain way simply because of the categories she seems to inhabit, that’s actually a form of (anti-feminist) stereotyping. And, it engenders a dynamic that stops feminist conversation and social change in its tracks.

“Gotcha” Feminism

Anti-feminist stereotyping of other women, and the presumption of their lack of feminist enlightenment, inspires a dynamic in feminist conversations that I think of as “gotcha feminism”.

Gotcha feminism is a conversational posture that’s focused on catching someone being wrong and then turning the conversation to focus on her wrongness and her lack of adequate feminist consciousness. It’s a conversational posture that is rarely instructive but always punitive. It is a dynamic that prevents connection, thwarts alliance building, and stops our collective progress.

Gotcha feminism is a ‘holier than thou’ dynamic that aims to tell some women that they are not good enough to participate in the feminist conversation.

“Not feminist enough”

The idea that someone is not feminist enough suggests two other assumptions that inhibit social change. The first assumption is that there are defined levels of feminism -- that there is some progression where you are a better person and more valuable to the conversation if you are somehow further along on your journey.

While there may be different “stages” of feminist consciousness, there is no single path through them that is more valid than other paths.

The second assumption is that everyone is starting from the same place. Each person starts from her or his own place in the world (or standpoint), and branches out from there. Some people will begin their journeys from concerns that aren’t explicitly about gender dynamics and sex-based distinctions. They may frame their social justice understanding in terms of racial injustice, ableism, colonialism, social class, or hetero-”normativity”, just to name a few.

However, it doesn’t matter where you begin, or where you are. It matters that you’ve begun and that you are still on the journey.

If we believe that a feminist perspective is something we learn, we must expect that different people will be at different places in their own authentic journeys.

Commitment, not category, is what matters.

I also notice that the people making this assumption, that a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, upper-middle class woman only thinks of “women” as including people like herself, are more often than not relatively new to their own feminist journey, and are also more likely than not younger than me. No offense intended to my younger, super-aware and firmly committed colleagues — it’s just a correlation, not a cause.

Personally, where the age thing matters is not where you are coming from but instead where you think I’m coming from. Don’t you think that after 40 plus years of identifying as a feminist, I might have learned a thing or two about feminism in general and my own privilege in particular? Or about who “women” are, in all our complexity?

At the very least, if I’m going to be stereotyped by what I look like or how I present, the visible indication of my age should trigger a different assumption about where I might be on my journey of social consciousness.

More importantly, though, is that we take each person’s entry into the conversation as an indication of their interest in – and maybe their commitment to – learning more about making our work, home and world more just.

Instead of getting ready to pounce, we should be ready to support.
Instead of being primed to criticize, we should be prepared to learn.

We should encourage everyone who genuinely wants to participate, not act like self-appointed arbiters of who’s good enough to play.

The Feminist Conversation is Changing

At one point in our US feminist history, the idea that “women” should refer to more than one subset of “women” was an ‘aha’ for a large & influential group of active self-identified feminists. These days, though, if you’ve spent any time in the feminist conversation, one of the first things you learn is that “women” is not just some small group of women who are all alike (and all like you or not like you). You get this lesson in Women Studies 101, by week two if not sooner.

I wonder if too many feminist conversants are mired in the past, taking our analysis of the wrongs of “first and second wave” feminism and re-inscribing these dynamics on a different current world. Even before the term “intersectionality” was coined in the late 1980s, the feminist conversation was moving to embrace the complexity of “women” — how women are different and what “women” share.

Now, we should enter our conversations with each other understanding that ‘women’ is a broad, meta-category — a category on a farther side of complexity.

This is not to say that everyone ‘gets it’ and uses the term “women” intentionally to refer to all “women”. And, it is not to say that we no longer need to learn how our own experience is neither universal nor exclusive. But it is to say–

Let’s put the Gotcha Feminism aside. Let’s start from a different place.

Extend a generous interpretation. Wait until some other (feminist) actually demonstrates racism, classism, parochialism, or some other form of blind or claimed privilege before you impute it to her.

There’s simplicity. And there’s simplicity of the far side of complexity.

Let’s stop assuming that “women” is used in a simplistic way. Let’s start giving each other credit for understanding the complexity of the work we are doing together.

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Use Extreme Leverage 2.0 to Change The Social World

cv harquail — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:53:54 +0000

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.

Thanks to Jon Pincus (@jdp23) for introducing me to Diaspora, and for sustaining the conversation about software design and social change.

Images:
Lever from Leo Reynolds Levers from Remi Longva

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?

cv harquail — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:15:16 +0000

This post is featured on Social Media Today.

How has the activity of organizational change been changed, with the advent of social media?

Back when I was an internal OD/Org Change manager in the Soap Plant, we spread ideas about change the old-fashioned ways: meetings, photocopied paper mail, and face-to-face conversations.

With the rise of enterprise social networks, and all of those messaging, micro-blogging, meet-up-ing, and connecting tools, the world of an internal organizational change agent must also have changed– but how?

Has Social Media Movement Building moved inside organizations?

At last week’s Social Media Week events, there were several sessions about using social media to foment change ‘outside’– among citizens, voters, consumers, and audiences.

Social media — the latest, greatest tool set for social movement building –is being used outside organizations:

To aggregate individuals who share an interesting change,
To cohere these individuals into a community, and
To mobilize this community into off-line as well as online efforts to change a social situation.

No one at Social Media Week really talked about using these very media platforms and techniques inside organizations. This led me to wonder:

Inside our organizations, are individuals intentionally using social media to develop organizational change movements?

We already know that the adoption of social media within organizations, through the implementation of “enterprise social software”, can (and should) transform relationships among individuals and organizations. Once conventional organizations, these actively networked collectives have become “social organizations”.

As far as I’ve seen, most of the conversation about the dynamics of social media within social organizations have to do with dynamics around getting work done (project management, knowledge transfer, innovation) and personal career development (expanding your network, finding sponsors, developing a personal brand). These activities reflect the basic needs of organizations and the self-oriented concerns of individuals who want to succeed in organizations.

But what of organizational social change agents?

You know, those individual people in our organizations who have a vision about how things could be better? These individuals may or may not be in leadership positions; they may or may not have managerial authority or access to significant organizational resources. But what they do have -now- is access to internal, cross-organizational communication networks.

Are individuals using these communications networks to aggregate the attention of individual members around a moment, an event, or particular program?

Are they using social media to build these aggregates of individuals into a core community of employees/members who are moving towards a shared vision of a better organization?

Are they using social media to move organization members to act differently at work, to push for change and initiate it themselves?

The kinds of organizational changes I’m thinking of are not things like re-instituting Friday coffee hour. I’m thinking about organizational change initiatives like developing a worklife flexibility policy, promoting LGBTQ inclusion initiatives, or influencing the organization to adopt a cradle-to-grave sustainability program.

I can imagine a few individuals using the internal social network:

to identify possible allies,
to recruit new members,
to share information about successes, failures and opportunities for influence,
to send messages–public messages–to key decision-makers,
to gather financial, behavioral data on the change topic.

Enterprise social media tools could also be used to build off-line community–for example, creating ways for people to meet each other and work together in person. Social media can help a change initiative movement “scale” to include a critical mass of members within an organization. And, it can allow individuals at many different locations in an organization to group together and put pressure on the organization from many different angles.

All of this change agency can be facilitated by social media within the organization, without or before even turning to the organization’s external stakeholders to engage them in helping to influence the organization.

There are obvious power-related obstacles to using social media within an organization to mobilize organizational change.

The primary one is, of course, that the organization itself owns the networks. If powerful members of the organization wanted to prevent individual members or employee groups from using the organization’s networks to foment revolution, all they would need to do is change the rules about how the network can be accessed by members, or revoke the user privileges of certain members.

Another obstacle to using social media for organizational change is that the very visibility, transparency and trackability of internal social media tools makes it difficult for internal change agents to keep their enthusiasm and participation “under the radar”.

Still, why not use the master’s tools to transform the organization?

It seems so likely that this activity is possible, I’d like to know if anyone actually done it. Anybody have some stories?

Some ideas about where this might be underway? Please share…

Advocating for Inclusion: A roundup of ideas from post-TEDx636 roundtable

cv harquail — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:19:52 +0000

“Building on TED and the TEDWomen Conference: How Can We Make Conferences More Inclusive?”

We made a big start towards answering this question at our roundtable conversation after the TEDx636 NYC/ TEDWomen simulcast event. Our panel, organized by Natalia Oberti Noguera and sponsored by NYWSE, included Brittany McCandless (moderator), Adaora Udoji, Liza Sabater, Ritu Yadav, and me.

This post offers my personal, subjective summary of the conversation and the actions steps that were recommended. As my fellow participants, organizers, and allies share their perceptions of the event and ‘next steps’, I’ll share these ideas and resources too.

Although our panel was diverse in terms of age, expertise, professional domain, culture, and racioethnicity, we shared the same over-arching goal: inclusivity and diversity not only at conferences, but also in the larger ‘world of ideas’.

Liza Sabater led off by describing a history of her efforts with others to get more women onto panels at tech events. Liza noted that very early on, people created a wiki where women in tech with interesting things to say were recommended as speakers and panelists. Adaora Udoji described a similar effort that she’s been involved in to create a directory of women and men of color for corporate board membership. Activists in the tech community and beyond continue to point conference organizers to these lists of available speakers, and generate new and up-to-date resources. Most recent is Sara Holoubek’s initiative, the Field Guild to Female Founders, Influencers and Deal Makers.

The sheer number of directories like these, and the sizes of the database of nominees they contain, puts the lie to the claim that “there aren’t ‘enough’ women”. If conference planners were to use these resources, they could find many qualified speakers from diverse groups. And, using these resources, conference planners could help to alleviate the tokenizing experience that both Liza and Adaora mentioned, where the same one or two women, or people of color, are being asked to represent over and over again.

Despite having an abundance of women available to speak, conferences still lack gender parity. So, there is still work to do to get these women into panels and onto speaker lineups so they can bring their big ideas into the conversation.

Four Strategies

We came up with four different, complementary strategies:

Advocate for Gender Parity at TED and TEDx
Advocate for Gender Parity at every conference, with a more general campaign
Create alternative conference spaces built on inclusion and diversity as a foundational principle
Create ad hoc, smaller scale opportunities for women (and men) to share their ideas publicly

1. Gender Parity at TED and TEDx

Taking ideas and comments from my own blog posts and from insights by Michelle Tripp, we’ve started a few microactions directed at influencing TED itself. Some tactics are loosely organized in the SHE Should Talk At TED campaign, (#SHEtalksTED), initiated by Debra Condren, Gloria Feldt and me, and anchored on Facebook. We are working on a button that can be shared to nominated women as potential speakers for TEDs and TEDxs. And, we will soon send a formal invitation to TED organizers to invite them to a conversation about inclusion.

There is also the Dubai-based campaign sponsored by Susan Macaulay at Amazing Women Rock. Susan has been advocating for more women speakers at TED events for the past two years.

She has also posted more than 200 TED and TEDx talks by amazing TED women (http://www.amazingwomenrock.com/ted-talks/awr-ted-talks-list.html) on her site. She updates the list regularly, and tweets several TED women talk links daily on Twitter from @AmazingWomen (http://twitter.com/AmazingWomen).

2. Advocate for Gender Partity at Every Conference, with a more general campaign

Natalia Oberti Noguera has started a broad campaign for inclusion: #MoreVoices. #Morevoices includes a Tumblr, a hashtagging campaign, and an action on IfWeRanTheWorld: “add #morevoices to conferences”.

Rachel Sklar’s #ChangeTheRatio effort, begun last year, is one we should continue to embrace. #ChangeTheRatio includes a Tumblr and a speaker series, as well as a @ChangeTheRatio Twitter account and hashtaging. Rachel’s efforts are targeted more at tech events, but the awareness of a need to #ChangeTheRatio of men and women, to achieve #GenderParity, is something that helps not only the tech community but also the larger public community involved in discussing ideas.

Sara Holoubek’s initiative, the Field Guild to Female Founders, Influencers and Deal Makers, has a web page where people can nominate interesting women and keep track of the growth of the Field Guide.

3. Create alternative conference spaces built on inclusion and diversity as a foundational principle

If you were designing, from the ground up, a scalable conference about ideas that embraced inclusion of women and men, and people of different cultures, races, abilities, and orientations, it would probably not look like TED.

Sure, it might have strong branding, a great reputation, a significant online distribution, and weighty influence in the tech, entertainment, and design world conversations, but it might not be organized around a ‘singular, great, individual giving a speech’.

An inclusive conference might include team presentations, interactive conversations, tummeling, unconferencing, and a whole range of learning and discussion strategies that are implicitly less hierarchical than having everyone watch the ‘sage on the stage’. It would not depend on the transmittal model of learning (where wisdom flows from the speaker to the passive, receptive audience) and involve more co-learning, facilitated discussions.

Conference spaces themselves would be designed to facilitate interaction, many modalities of learning, opportunities for reflection, and even opportunities for practicing new skills. Liza Sabater continues to look for funding for a conference along a more inclusive model, focused on tech. There are surely others with a similar interest– and you should follow Liza on Twitter @blogdiva.

TED is a terrific event but it is not the only way great ideas can be shared, be spread, and become influential. There are other models, and new conferences can and should be created along these additional models.

4. Create ad hoc, smaller scale, frequent, local opportunities for women to share their ‘Big Ideas’

One argument that is offered to explain the under-representation of women at TED and other conferences is the belief that women are scared or otherwise ill-equipped to speak in large events like these. I grant that there may be some truth to these claims of reticence, despite the presence of truly outstanding women presenters like the women who graced the TEDx636 stage last week.

Certainly, the kind of ‘sage on the stage’ presentational style expected at TED is something that is learned. And, other modes of public idea facilitation are also learned– one may be born with the inclination, but the skills themselves can be taught, learned, and developed.

To develop their presentation skills, women could participate in ongoing public events like IGNITEnyc, FRED Talks, CreativeMornings (events and videos sponsored by Emily Cohen), NerdNite, and more. (Send me links and I’ll add them here).

This strategy also helps directly with the main goal, getting women’s ideas into the larger conversation. At these ad hoc events, we can present ideas to each other, talk about them together, and then share them more broadly with our own networks.

There is an abundance of terrific women, with great ideas worth sharing. And, there is an abundance of tactics and strategies for working towards the overarching goal: gender parity, diversity, and inclusion in all conferences and in influential conversations about ideas.

Whether you gravitate towards a TED-specific effort, a broader inclusion effort, a ‘we can build it’ effort, or joining ongoing programs to add you own and others’ voices, there is a way for you to join in.

Hit those links, above, and get on Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. Let’s hear you — add to the #morevoices for #genderparity in the world of Big Ideas.

See Also:
Speak Up, Speak Out, Take The Stage: The World Needs More TED Women at AmazingWomenRock.com

Images:
Red horizon from Photofinish 2009
Untitled from Dré Batista Please respect …

Is your organization flourishing or withering?

cv harquail — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:52:12 +0000

Organizations are organic things — they are born, they die, they suffer and they thrive. But very few organizations flourish.

Organizations that flourish are rare creatures.

We find them where business goals are tied to larger purpose, where larger purpose is linked to community needs, and where individuals’ authentic selves are nourished by and engaged in the collective enterprise.

The opposite of a flourishing organization is a withering organization.

Many organizations that we assume are doing well are, in fact, withering.

A majority of organizations are just getting by. They hit their profit or service targets, they hire and retire members, they serve customers, and they do this all adequately. But, in the service of short term goals and/or selfish missions, these organizations are sapping themselves and their stakeholders dry.

These organizations are a net energy drain on their stakeholders. They take rather than contribute to the net value of the systems they are part of.

These organizations are withering.

We fight organizational withering, but we don’t promote organizational flourishing.

Organization leaders, advocates and members spend a lot of energy trying to prevent withering. We try to make organizations ‘better’ by addressing specific dimensions of improvement. We advocate and work towards everything from employee engagement to diversity to sustainability to enterprise 2.0.

The problems addressed by each one of these initiatives are root causes of organizational withering. Fixing, improving, changing and even transforming the organization on any one of these dimensions does make an organization genuinely better.

But ‘better’ isn’t the same as flourishing.

These single-issue change initiatives, and those of us who advocate for them, work as though “better” is our goal, and not as though organizational flourishing is our goal. I’m not sure whether this is because flourishing is just something we don’t let ourselves consider, or whether it’s because we’re so focused and so invested in the one particular issue that calls to us and feels like “our” work.

What Flourishing Requires

To be sure, getting an organization to flourish requires that we work on each of these important change dimensions:

Flourishing requires engagement.
Flourishing requires sustainability.
Flourishing requires leadership.
Flourishing requires diversity.
Flourishing requires employees with full, balanced lives.
Flourishing requires connections to causes that matter.
Flourishing requires products and services that meet real community needs.

Flourishing requires coordination and connection.

Most of all, flourishing requires coordinated, other-aware participation, from all of us who are advocates and agents of organizational change.

The success of the initiatives we each care about depends on us recognizing how that one dimension is connected to and depends on all these other initiatives. And, organizational flourishing requires that we deal with each of these initiatives in their relationships with other initiatives.

Each of us who advocates some dimension of organizational change needs to recognize, acknowledge, support and link to the organizational change efforts on other dimensions. We need to be aware of other initiatives, and coordinate our change efforts to include the initiatives important to others.

Flourishing requires a multi-pronged, networked change strategy.

To get to flourishing, we don’t have to abandon our commitment to a particular change initiative– we simply need to adjust how we approach our own initiative.

Oh, and think bigger too.

I realize that this is what some might call a tall order — too complicated, too complex, too ambitious. You’re right, it is complicated, complex and ambitious.

But I don’t really see a sensible alternative. I don’t want to rearrange deckchairs on a sinking ship, or tie up the weakening branches of a withering vine.

More specifically,

I don’t want to contribute my energy to improving the environmental sustainability of an organization that is exploiting its workforce.
I don’t want to improve the work-life strategy of any corporation that is taking advantage of the American financial system.
I don’t want to improve the social learning at an organization that makes fun of LGBTx consumers.
I don’t want to develop leaders in organizations that are fundamentally selfish.

Do you?

I didn’t think so.

What I do want to do, and what I want you to do with me, is to focus on flourishing.

**Our goal should be helping organizations to flourish.**

Our strategy should embrace every progressive organizational initiative and work to leverage the connections between them.

Our tactics should center on the initiatives that are dearest to us and where we can make a unique contribution, but always moving to connect with other advocates and ally our initiatives with theirs.

Are we together on this?

Images from Flicker:

Vine on blue from tanakawho
Funny from tanakawho

HT to Akhila Kolisetti (@akhilak, blog: Justice For All) for recommending Paul Rogat Loeb’s book “Soul of a Citizen: Living with conviction in challenging times.” page 283.