Can you help me out with a messy research-related question?

What are the best ways to set boundaries around subsets of an “extended organization”, and then give these subsets names so that they are easy to talk about?

The problem seems on the surface looks like a question of semantics (i.e., what to call it). But it’s more than that, since the terms of expression need to be founded on some kind of principle of composition. I need help with both the semantics and the principle(s).

When we’re talking about a network of coordinated, interdependent economic actors, how do we decide which of these actors should be considered part of the organization and which of these actors should be considered outside the organization?

And, how do we name the groups within different levels of boundaries, in a way that’s easy to comprehend and makes sense conceptually?

And the biggest issue:

How do we refer to “the organization” without automatically dismissing the sense of connection that any particular actor might feel, and without diminishing his/hers/its valid status as “part of” the organization?

(Note, I can’t call it The Organization because (ultimately, though not now) I want speak of it as its real self, by name, and not just talk about it as a theoretical organization.)

Here’s the situation:

“The Organization” in question is the core entity and the largest entity in a community of commerce / commercial network of businesses. All of the businesses are interdependent economic partners.  The core organization cannot exist without the co-commercial organizations. And, although some of these entities have revenue streams and commitments to entities outside the extended organization, most of them depend on the incorporated organization for key elements of their value chain.

The incorporated organization is big-ish (400 employees), and the co-commercial entities are small (1 to 10 employees) concerns. Some are incorporated or LLCs.

What I’m talking about this extended organization, I need to name three things:

• The incorporated organizational entity, which is incorporated and has a CEO, and directly employs individuals (that all get W-2 income from their work in the organization).

• The extension of the organization that includes not just the W-2 employees of the incorporated organization but also includes all of the co-commercial partners whose participation is critical to the incorporated entity.

Because the incorporated organization relies so heavily on these co-commercial partners, it’s hard to think of them as not being part of “the organization”. In fact, lots of these partners describe themselves as being part of “the organization”, and are often seen that way by customers and outsiders. If you asked a customer or a random person on the street who The Organization was, they’d likely include the co-commercial partners and maybe not even know that they were not completely part of the incorporated organization.

• The community of commerce, which includes not only the incorporated organization and its co-commercial partners but also includes the customers that interact with partners.

Do economic or financial dimensions work as complete decision rules?

In my description above, of the different layers/levels/subsets of “the organization”, I’ve defaulted to using legal & financial categories to set the boundaries. For example, the incorporated organization vs the intended one. Another similar strategy is distinguish between entities financially, by using who issues the W-2 to whom as a way to separate the pieces.

The easiest way for me to distinguish the boundary is to consider the legal entities–whether they are incorporated or not, and then to consider who is attached to each Inc. entity, based on their W-2 income.

But these dimensions and boundaries are defined by purely financial criteria – which isn’t enough to really define “the organization” if organizations are more than just economic machines. Categories like sources of revenue, origin of income for individuals, and legal status don’t reflect any particular sense of social agreement, such as the beliefs of participants about who the organization is or isn’t.

I’m willing to use the financial criteria to establish qualitatively different boundaries that include more or less of the network’s participants, but once I do that I still have the problem of …

What do I call the different entities?

I have to start with the core organization’s real name, so that outsiders can sort of know what I’m talking about. My daughter suggested “Pluto” as the nom de recherche for this organization, so Pluto has to be part of it. (Or not, you can convince me otherwise).

I could call the three key groupings Pluto Incorporated, Pluto Extended, and Pluto Community.

The method for distinguishing groupings can’t put any particular group down. In other words, there can’t be a master category (e.g., President) and a few marked categories (e.g., Female President), because adding the modifier to only some of the categories makes them subordinate. SO, I can’t do Pluto, Pluto Extended, and Pluto Community.

And, I need a method to refer to them that feels reasonably seamless, and is not clunky or cumbersome. This is made me think about using subscripts, to call it Pluto -I, Pluto-X, Pluto-C. (note, I can’t format a subscript in wordpress — techfail on my part)

But does this look dumb or distracting in print?

Self-Determination and Psychological Connection

Finally, a perfect solution would be to have a naming system that was related to how the different people (and the entities they are part of) think of themselves in relation to “the organization”. How could the names reflect the group that think of themselves and each other at “the organization” when this includes the core organization and some but not all of its co-commercial partners?

Even though the I, X, and C designations map onto financial distinctions, they don’t tell the reader anything about the sentiments or relationships among the actual people I’m referring to. For example, to talk about Pluto-I when I’m talking about things other than revenue/finances, such as the effort of “the people who think of themselves as ‘the organization’ and who are all working together”.

Theoretically, I could make a fourth group that includes all the people who think of themselves as being part of Pluto.

Maybe Pluto-| could stand for Psychologically Pluto?

Making distinctions of who’s in or out based on members’ psychological self-assessments, by asking them whether or not they consider themselves “in” the organization, makes sense when we’re trying to capture or talk about their psychological (that is, non-economic) motivations. But, since I’m an outside researcher who can’t survey the sense of membership of all the entities in the network, I’d always be referring to this group as a theoretical one with a boundary that hasn’t been firmly established.uld always be a blurry group.

Any thoughts on how to parse these distinctions in a way that’s conceptually clear, emotionally inclusive, and textually simple?

I’d love your suggestions ..

Image: B’okay on Flickr ??? Some rights reserved by HarshPatel;Photographer

What value is all this talk about gamification?

It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products.

More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks.

Gamification and Work

It’s true that, when gamification is done well (as in, with a deep understanding of what motivates people), gamification becomes a set of tools and techniques for sustaining intrinsic motivation.

Unfortunately, it’s more likely that businesses will use gamification techniques to turn work into tightly controlled play. Controlled, fake play diminishes both the worker and the work.

With that concern, I didn’t see much reason for promoting gamification at work, until some research on entitlement caught my attention.

Psychologists O’Brien, Anastasio, and Bushman have been studying the way a sense of entitlement influences how people perceive the value of their time. Entitled people feel like their time is very valuable, and they resent having to waste their time.

Entitlement makes us resent mundane tasks

Take this observation into the world of work, where we have many dull tasks that are absolutely necessary. For everyone, the duller the task the longer that task seems to take, and the more quickly we want to scoot away when it’s over.

Now thing about people with a strong sense of entitlement. For them, this link between dull tasks, time dragging, and time wasting is even worse. For dull tasks that took the same finite amount of time, participants who were primed to feel entitled rated them as taking longer. And, they were more likely to characterize that time as being ‘wasted‘ versus having been a necessary cost of getting the job done.

While the authors don’t make this next link in their study, it’s just a short walk from feeling like you are wasting your time to feeling resentful of the organization or manager who is making you waste it. Workers with a sense of entitlement can easily come to resent an organization that “wastes” their time. That’s understandable if the work is fetching coffee, but not as understandable when it’s routine, dull, but necessary work.

We can’t resent necessary work, we just need to get it done.

If entitlement makes people feel more negatively about mundane but necessary work, we’ve got some problems ahead. If it’s true that new entrants to the workforce, a group otherwise known as Millennials, feel more sense of entitlement than previous generations, we might see resentment growing within organizations, especially among entry-level or routine jobs with lots of necessary but dull work.

Oh, so no wonder people are into gamification…. the whole problem of dull work is getting worse!

Entitlement ramps up the problem of boring work

Organizationally, we used to address this kind of challenge with programs for redesigning work systems to enrich jobs. (Old-school job enrichment is the same thing as well-done gamification, just without the leaderboard stuff.) Individually, we worked on ‘job crafting’ to reshape the job to fit our own personal preferences.

Gamification gives us an additional way to make work less dull.

But, maybe a new tactic is not what we need. Maybe we just need to do the old stuff– better.

As far as making work into games…. Using gamification to ‘gussy up’ routine and necessary tasks might make them more palatable to workers with a heightened sense of entitlement. But, at the same time, the motivational power of many games wears off after time, so any positive effect is hard to sustain. So, while gamification candy-coats necessary work,  the fun flavor quickly wears off.

Worse, efforts to gamify might just serve to distract us from redesigning the work itself, and from creating a more salient, more purpose-oriented context.

There is so much more that we can do to improve how we organize and structure work. We might not be able to make all work less dull, but we can make it more meaningful.

Is gamification itself a waste of time?

It doesn’t need to be.    Gamification could be a way into a discussion about how to make work tasks meaningful.

However, gamification will only be effective if and when it supports a larger conversation about why we’re here, what we aim to do, and how we each can contribute.

Gamification must be designed to create meaning, not ‘flair‘, and to pursue purpose, not leader board points.

Addressing entitlement at its root 

As it happens, gamification that links dull work to contributions and to collective meaning will also address the root issue of entitlement.

Entitlement, at its root, is self-centeredness. The best way to counter any tendency to locate all importance and all meaning in oneself is to connect the self to others, and to a collective purpose that exists…wait for it… outside the self.

Sure, I’ll take a few cute badges, become the mayor of the conference room, and win a t-shirt by scaling the leader board. But truly, I’d just rather have my work contribute to a greater purpose.

Wouldn’t everyone?

O’Brien, E. H., Anastasio, P. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2011). Time crawls when you’re not having fun: Feeling entitled makes dull tasks drag on. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1287-1296.

See also:

How Job Crafting Can Get You Closer to Authentic Work
How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Images: Gamification of Life Some rights reserved by VFS Digital Design, Gamification at its best All rights reserved by LenKendal

What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”?

From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire.

Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as a new development, that maximizing shareholder value isn’t motivating to most employees. Wow. Where have these people been since, oh, the dawn of the industrial revolution?

Folks have been talking about meaning at work, and looking for meaning at work, long before this recent ‘crisis of meaning’.  

True, we’ve used different terms over time.

• We’ve talked about alienation and estrangement to describe being cut off from meaningful work.

• We’ve talked about commitment and engagement, as attitudes towards organizations that ought to have meaning but usually don’t.

• We’ve talked about “leadership” as the process of creating meaning, even if only through charisma, from the top of the organization’s food chain.

• And, we’ve talked about vision and mission, knowing that meaning was in there, somewhere, among all the BHAGs.

There is nothing ‘new’ about the desire for meaning at work.

Just yesterday, Luis Suarez wrote a great post about meaning, in which he shared a vlog from Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, about “The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce“. Luis unpacks why any of us, knowledge workers especially, might feel a lack of meaning. He clarifies that meaning is an issue for every generation of workers, and that each of us needs to do something about refocusing business so that it meets human, social needs. (Read his whole post, it’s great.)

So my question is not whether we need meaning. The question is:

Why is our desire for meaning positioned this way?

Why do so many (like Dan Pink) position “meaning” as something “new”?

• Are we trying to avoid recognizing that meaning is something we’ve always wanted, but perhaps never felt permitted to ask for in polite business company?

Why do so many (like Roger Martin) position “meaning” as something others desire, but not us? Or that we desire for others, but not for ourselves?

• Are we talking about “Millenials” and “their” needs for meaning so that we can take care of ‘them’ while avoiding taking responsibility for ourselves?

• Are we trying to look ‘objective’ so that we don’t look demanding, or ungrateful? Do we have to make meaning a ‘business problem’ so that we can take meaning seriously?

I recognize that for many, it’s become a “crisis of meaning” because there is so little left to promise workers, in terms of job security, career development, gain-sharing, and ownership rights. Maybe after all these other kinds of ‘motivations’ have been eroded by the twin beasts of corporate profit-taking and work intensification, there is nothing left that we can truly count on to take our minds of the paycheck, and so we turn to meaning.

In good times and bad times, people have always wanted meaningful work. People have always wanted – and still want–to work in organizations that serve a larger purpose, where individual and collective efforts create meaningful products, meaningful services, and meaningful experiences.

Why do we treat this as a surprising truth?

See also:
The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose by Deb Lavoy

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Is your organization flourishing or withering?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Organizations are social — they always have been.

But, organizations have rarely been designed intentionally to help us flourish as social beings while we work together.

Neither our analog systems nor our digital systems have been designed to help us bring more of our social selves to our work together. But, it’s not that hard to design technologies that support our needs to be more humanly social as individuals and as organizations.

Small changes smartly made, and big changes founded on key insights, can get us closer to fully social organizations.

If we want to design technologies and digital work systems that can foster, enable, activate, cohere, and catalyze our social human selves, we need to ask:

• How can this system help users express who they are?

• How can this system help users say what they need to say, and be heard where they need to be heard?

• How can this system help users take on new authority and new responsibility, while finding new situations and new ways to choose, decide, and act?

• How can this system help users find, affirm, share, inspire and collaborate with other people, directly and indirectly?

• How can this system help users clarify and pursue a contribution to others that is both individually and collectively meaningful?

We Can Proactively Design Our Social Selves Into Our ‘Social’ Technologies

Too many technologies have ignored these questions, and so we’ve had to exploit the gaps in these systems to create identity, voice, agency, community and purpose.

We could continue to work around these lamely ‘social’ technologies, trying to be more fully ourselves in spite of these systems. Or, we could transform the tools we use at work to that they help us flourish as social beings.

We can proactively re-imagine our technified work coordination systems, by asking, answering and extending these five questions.

As we construct systems that intentionally bring out our identity, agency, voice, community and purpose, we will build organizations that are truly, humanly, social.

See also:
Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations
How Social Media Affects the Organization Itself: Post Roundup
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?

image: Blue ship detail from springm / Markus Spring on Flickr

Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us.

Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0′ and work system technologies in our organizations:

– When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose.

– When we design technology systems, we think about control, architecture, scripts, modularity, and proxies. We forget about comfort, warmth, touch, and beauty.

– When we use technology, we automate, codify, record and retrieve. We forget about expressing, feeling, creating, and giving.

Too many work technologies are systems of extraction.

We keep upgrading to technology systems that extract more work from us, while giving back less and less to us.

So who can blame us if we’re not all enthusiastic about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business initiatives? Once the shine wears off the new tools, we’re left wondering — What’s in this for me? What’s in this for you? What’s in this for us?

You’ve heard me say before that the Enterprise 2.0- digital- social- business- system- industry-complex seems to be running on the wrong rails. Too many technology products are designed, positioned, and ‘sold’ to us as ways to streamline and enhance collective tasks so that we improve bottom line business results.

There’s nothing wrong with that goal, except that it’s so narrow, so limiting, and so shareholder-centered. It’s just not about being human.

We need to talk about how digital social media enterprise business systems can help us, the users, be more of who we are individually and together.

We need to figure out how to transform these systems of extraction these digital-social-media-enterprise-business systems into systems of engagement. We need to build technology systems that help us to be more fully social human as we work together.

5 Needs for Full, Social, Human-ness

When we human people work with other human people, there are five human needs that have to be met in order for us to be our full social selves.

These are our needs for:

1. Identity
2. Voice
3. Agency
4. Community
5. Purpose

Currently, in too many organizations, we are controlled, constrained, muted, forbidden, or discouraged from being fully human, because the work systems  make it hard for us to meet these 5 needs.

However, as work systems for enterprise coordination, knowledge management, work process flow, and customer relationship management become more social, they are also creating new opportunities for us to be more human while we work together.

5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

1. Systems of Engagement Enable Identity

We humans want to be who we are. We want to bring our full selves to work and into our interactions with colleagues, while we are are making and doing things. When we are able to be who we are in specific, descriptive, textured, multiple ways, we can be ‘more fully there’ at work.

Systems of engagement let us define who we are, help us be seen for who we are, and help us be known for who we are allow us to contribute our full selves. They help us connect who we are, what we have to offer, and what needs to be done, helping us find and create personal meaning.

2. Systems of Engagement Foster Voice

Voice is our ability to say in our own way what we think needs to be said and to be heard when we say it. Voice is the full expression of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. When we have voice, we are able to offer ideas, share insights, and offer feedback.

Systems of engagement create ways for us to speak, to spread our words, to be heard by others, and to be listened to by others. They allow us to use our voice to collaborate and to contribute.

3. Systems of Engagement Activate Agency

Agency is our ability to act, to get things done, and to cause things to happen. Agency is our ability to make choices and to enact those choices. When we have agency we are makers, doers, creators, innovators. We get stuff done.

Systems of engagement create opportunities for agency because they give us more places in which we can act. Systems of engagement also give us the autonomy, responsibility and accountability that agency requires. We are able to decide, to engage, and to act.

4. Systems of Engagement Cohere Communities

Communities are our connections with other people — not just dyadic connections, but also networked connections. We yearn to be connected with people who know us, who like us, and who need us. When we have  a community, we have a slew of direct and indirect relationships in which we can be supportive, helpful, and influential. We matter to others.

Systems of engagement help us find the people we need and who need us. These systems help us create and sustain connections through which we and others form collectives, collectives that have capability beyond the sum of members’ individual ability.

5. Systems of Engagement Catalyze Purpose

Purpose is our reason for being. Purpose is the cause outside ourselves that focuses our contributions to our community. When we have a purpose we can have commitment, vision, motivation, collaboration, and accomplishment. Our (work) lives have meaning.

Systems of engagement help us channel our attention and our efforts towards our purpose. They link us and our work to important tasks, and link our individual work to the work of others. They accumulate, organize, synthesize, and amplify our individual and collective efforts to help us achieve our purpose.

Identity, Voice, Agency, Community, and Purpose are not focus of social media technologies in organizations, but they should be.

Systems of engagement can certainly help us meet business needs. And they can do so much more. Systems of engagement can help us transform how we work together, by enabling identity, fostering voice, activating agency, cohering communities and catalyzing purpose so that we meet our human needs as much if not more than business needs.

We don’t need “social business” technology to suck less of the humanity out of us.

We need technology-enabled social systems that invite us to engage our full selves in our work together.

We need systems of engagement.

How do we create systems of engagement that bring out our full selves?
See my related post: How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations

See also:

Social Organizations Care About Personal Development by Jamie Notter, SocialFish

How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose
Images from Flickr:
Blue from bartb_pt
Machine à répandre la chimie… from ‘ m x b c h r
Blue Network from ringwell

In a social organization, the design of digital social tools like intranets should reflect the organizational features that define the organization. These design features, no matter how subtle, can ‘auto-communicate’ and make salient the characteristics that matter most, and help organizations stay authentic.

Especially in the digital workplace, our digital tools create an important shared context that ‘defines’ the organization.

When I taught my MBA elective Leadership 2.0: Leading in a Digital Environment, I had a teaching case about an organization establishing its intranet.

The pressing question: What should the physical interface on employees’ computer screens look like?

The design challenge was to make the home page ‘work’ while helping keep the organization’s defining characteristics in the minds of the user/members.

Of course, ten years ago “intranets” were really simple affairs. In this case, we were really discussing the ‘frame’ — the sidebars, top navigation menu, and background image. (Once someone clicked into email, or to the library data base, all that was left was a half-inch frame all around.) There wasn’t much variation in functionality, just in the ways that things were presented visually.

But, even though the available options & decisions were small, these little design choices made a difference.

For example, the out-of-the-box default color scheme was light blue and navy blue. Meanwhile, the organization’s colors were green and white. The default frame had the vendor’s logo, a basic typeface, and generic names for features. In contrast, the organization had its own logo, a defined typeface for its printed visual materials, and its own names for tools and features (e.g., “MixxMail”, not “Outlook”).

Research in organizational identity, organizational symbolism, and office environments has shown that triggering a sense of specific place (e.g., this organization, this community) helps to keep the values of the organization salient while people go about their work. Wouldn’t the same triggering and salience be important as people used their computers as portals/terminals to do any variety of tasks?

With this case in mind, I was intrigued by Toby Ward’s post on Social Intranet Design.

Ward, a noted intranet expert, outlined his 7 Principles of Intranet Design: (summarized from his post)

1. Less is more.
2. An intranet is a business system, and the design should fulfill business needs (no creative whim).
3. Follow a design process that includes thorough input by management & employees
4. Soft corners
5. Soft colors
6. Employees love employee photos, not clip art.
7. White space is good.

Do these design principles help to reinforce organizational identity?

The 6th principle, ‘Use employee photos’ makes a lot of sense, since this is an easy way to break up space in an attractive way while making the intranet look like it belongs to a specific organization.

But the 2nd principle troubled me just a little bit.

‘Business-like’ design or Organization-specific design?

While I do agree that “an intranet is a business system, and the design should fulfill business needs”, I disagree with the idea that designers should dispense with creative whims. (By whims, I’m assuming ‘insights’).

There is always a way to be both ‘business-like” and creative, especially if that creativity is used to express the organization’s identity. Were I the manager overseeing the intranet design, I’d explicitly request that the intranet’s aesthetics (and functionality) reflect the identity (or corporate ‘brand) of the organization itself.

Every intranet– heck, every organizational tool — should reflect, express and reinforce the values of the organization.

Every digital tool should pass the ‘below the header’ test– if the logo or headline is taken off, users should still be able to “know” that this tools belongs to their organization, that it is ‘of’ their organization.

Otherwise, you run the risk of allowing your organization and its tools to become generic, unspecial, unspecific, less meaningful. You’re missing a chance to evoke, demonstrate and reinforce what the organization stands for .

Have you had any bad experiences with organizations trying to get too unique, or too generic, in their intranet aesthetics?

I’d love some examples either way.

See also:

Logos, Browsers, Brand Identity, and What You Value: The symbols we use to represent our tools also represent the communities that use these tools.
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld
Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations

Image: Peter Jakubik’s Oval Libertine Mirror: “The seductive motif on this mirror is prepared to adore you.”

“Social Business” is coming to your organization, whether you’re ready or not.

Social business tools, also known as enterprise social media or systems of engagement, are increasingly being advocated by vendors and consultants as tools that help any organization do its work better.

But, while the influx of social tools could really benefit your organization, the advice about how and why to use social tools could actually prevent your organization from using these tools to their full potential.

That’s because so much of what you’ll hear about why and how to incorporate social business tools into your organization, while well-intentioned, is fundamentally misguided.

7 Ways that Social Business Advice is Misguided

1. It’s Technology-driven

Misguided social business advice is driven by the availability of bright shiny new enterprise social media technology.

Wise social business advice is purpose-driven. It aims to tap into the pent-up desire of organizations, members, and stakeholders for deeper, richer and more authentic communication, communication that helps them achieve their collective purpose.

2. It’s Customer-centric

Misguided social business advice is driven by a focus on customers and customers’ needs. Employees and organizations either excluded, treated as afterthoughts, or seen as means to an end.

Wise social business advice is people-centric. It puts the organization and its members first, understanding that the organization and the people within it are the engines of authentic change and the source of true value.

3. It’s Reactionary

Misguided social business advice is reactionary. It takes the “Oh crap, here it comes, might as well figure out how to fit it in” approach.

Wise social business advice is visionary. It is energized by a vision of what the organization and its stakeholder system could be like, if authentic communication was fostered and supported.

4. It Extolls Efficiency

Misguided social business advice urges us to automate and digitize whatever we can that might make work more efficient.

It puts new digital architecture on top of old digital architecture. It tries to separate content from process, as though process were content-agnostic.

Wise social business advice has a generative orientation. It has a creative flavor.

Wise social business advice starts with the questions like: “What more can we contribute together, to each other?
What tools can we use to foster and support these contributions”?

Wise social media advice helps organizations flourish, by focusing on how to support the personal, interpersonal and collective systems that create value.

5. Adoption is driven by Vendors

Misguided social business advice is driven by vendors who want to sell more tools, more systems, more consulting, and more stuff. It preys on organizations’ fears that they must have the latest stuff in order to be competitive.

Wise social business advice takes the perspective of makers, right inside your organization. It begins by recognizing what we already have that’s working, what we already have that we value, what we already have that we can tweak. It helps us figure out what we really ‘need’ to support our collective purpose.

6. It’s Obsessed with Numbers

Misguided social business advice is obsessed with numbers. It is driven by the logic of ROI. It takes an investment-return, input-output approach to (over-)emphasize just a small part of what social media systems can do for us. Misguided social business advice tells us to count, to compete and to keep score.

Wise social business advice is driven by the logic of quality, by the search for real value. It invites us to make qualitative adjustments, to recognize the role of aesthetics, to appreciate emotion, to help experience working relationships as sources of delight, insight, joy, and fun.

Wise social business advice helps us use these tools to be more human, more “community“.

7. It’s All ‘Business’

Misguided social business advice intends to help you run a business, make stuff, deliver a service.

Wise social business advice intends to nurture and sustain a flourishing organizational eco-system. It seeks to to help you build capacity in your organization, your members, and your stakeholders individually and as a system.

Well-intentioned and Misguided

There are many folks with great enthusiasm about social tools and great intentions about helping organizations.  Lots of their advice is useful, but very little of it is comprehensive, truly visionary, or deeply inspiring. It’s too much about ‘business as usual’. It’s not enough about ‘organizations as they could be’.

It’s not wise to focus on Social Business. Instead, focus on Social Organizations to really make a difference.

Misguided social business advice has got a lot of things bass-ackward. It treats the organization as a fresh site for selling new technologies, and organizational change strategies only matter because they’ll help us implement technology more efficiently.

Wise social business advice, in contrast, understands that social technology, systems, and tools matter only because they have the potential for enabling our collective purpose.

I’ve been composing a list of sources for wise social media advice, so if you have any links, blogs, or tweeters to recommend, please let me know. I’ll post the list in a few weeks.

See also:

Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Social Organizations and IT Leadership: Resources

Note: The posts hyperlinked above are absolutely not intended as examples of misguided advice. They’re there for context, definitions, further ideas for you, etc.

Images: Graffiti showing frown on…from Horia Varlan
rhythm and blues from iboy_daniel
blue green glass abstract from Brent 2.0

There’s a great photo in the New York Times (May 19, 2011) of a whitepaper chart created to manage the Delta-Northwest Merger’s Long and Complex Path.

The chart is full of of post-its, probably more than 200 of them. Each post-it reflects a point where the systems and processes of the organizations need to be integrated, and the assorted colors represent the type of operational system where the integration task is to be solved.

Notwithstanding the low tech-ness of their process, this post-it chart is an amazing view of what it takes to put together two very different, very distinctive companies.

One Post-It = Two Different Cultural Expressions

Each post-it note reflects not only an integration task, but a point where the cultures and identities of these two companies are made concrete. Each post-it shows a place where the culture of one organization is different from the culture of the other. To resolve each of these integration tasks, the merger team has to decide which behavior, which system and which characteristic with be chosen for the ‘new’ merged culture, and which behaviors, systems and characteristics will be rejected.

While one spokesperson notes that these amount of work to resolve these details is ‘boring’, I see it as rather fascinating. That’s because opportunities for the merger team to create a distinctive, merged organizational culture exist at each of these points. The merger team needs to chose one concrete expression over the other.

What matters is not only which behavior is chosen, but also why it is chosen, and what that behavior is supposed to express.

Take this very subtle distinction, from Jad Mouawad’s detailed article:

Delta always thought of itself as the gracious host. Hence its flight attendants poured the requested drinks.

Northwest was the practical carrier; its attendants just handed over the can.

Distinctiveness => “Signature Moves”

When I talk with organizations about how they demonstrate what makes them distinctive, I often mention the concept of a ‘signature move’.

A signature move is a behavior that demonstrates — through its particular style– a quality that is important to how the organization defines itself.

The beverage delivery gesture is a perfect example– the same task, “delivering a beverage” is performed differently. And at each organization, that slightly different performance communicates something deeper and more meaningful about who the organization really understands itself to be.

These differences in ‘who the organizations are’ reflect how the carriers hoped (at one time) to differentiate themselves from each other and create a competitive advantage in the eyes of potential customers.

In the ideal airline industry …

Ideally, some customers would prefer the gracious culture of Delta, while others would prefer the practical culture of Northwest, all because the concepts of “gracious” and “practical” were concretely expressed in authentic behaviors by the organization and its representatives.

These signature moves, demonstrated throughout the organization, construct the distinctive identity that should differentiate the firm from competitors.

In a world where airtravel customers felt that they had positive reasons to choose one airline over another, the cumulative distinctions created by these different behaviors could have created a competitive advantage for one airline over the other.

In the actual airline industry…

However, in customers’ practical experience of these airlines, the subtle differences in style and culture were overwhelmed by the profound and disappointing similarity of bad service at both airlines. Neither the graciousness of Delta nor the practicality of Northwest made enough of a difference to set either organization apart as distinctive.

Which, of course, points to the weakness of depending on distinctiveness alone to make your organization competitive or attractive.  Distinctiveness only matters if you can deliver a decent product or service. The details matter, certainly, but only once the core business is competent.

See also:
Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness

Is Authenticity the key to being “Meaningfully Different”?

Snippet of image by Seth W. Feaster/The New York TImes, in its full glory at The New York Times.

“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:

1. widening the circle of involvement
2. connecting people to each other, to ideas, and to emotions
3. creating communities of action
4. 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

If you were building an organization from the ground up, how would you “build authenticity in” from the very start?

I had the chance to ask this question of Cindy Gallop, an entrepreneur and marketing/advertising/branding guru, who is the CEO of a start-up called IfWeRanTheWorld. IfWeRanTheWorld and Cindy have both been recommended to me by several readers who are active in the cause marketing, technology, women who tech, and geek feminism conversations.   IfWeRanTheWorld offers a real-time example of 3 important trends: feminist design principles, designing for authenticity, and designing to create a better world.

When I wrote about a feminist approach to social network software, and mentioned IfWeRanTheWorld as one live site that is perceived to be built on feminist design principles, Cindy tweeted me and offered to talk about her venture and the software design in more detail.

Our conversation was rich and wide ranging, with enough provocative ideas and wise advice to fuel many blog posts. In this post, I want to focus on one small piece, the kind of business organization Cindy and her colleagues have created to organize how they work together.

Innovating From the Very Start

I asked Cindy what it was about IfWeRanTheWorld (IWRTW) that people should notice, that would demonstrate her group’s design philosophy as applied to the business itself and the business operation and structure. She started with the most basic, and most profound, business design principle:

I wanted to innovate in every aspect of how we operated as a business, not just the actual platform itself.

To create the organization that would build this business, make it profitable, and make a difference in the world, Cindy and her team focused on four principles for working together.

1. Design the organization around the kinds of lives the individual members want to live.

Consider the relationship between your members’ work lives and the rest of their lives, and start with a balanced equation.

The IWRTW team has made several critical decisions about the design of their business venture together so that they can live the lives they want. When Gallop put a premium on hiring ‘the absolute best’, she also explicitly agreed to find ways that they could work together without asking everyone to choose between moving to NYC or to passing up the opportunity to join IWRTW. They manage offset time zones and physical distances with all of the tools you might imagine, and they spend money to fly everyone in for important sessions when they need to work together in the same physical space.

This arrangement allows each member to work on IWRTW as a start-up while maintaining the personal lives (and the professional connections) that support them in continuing to be their own “absolute best”.

2. Allow, expect and create “the organization” to reflect the authentic voices of the individual members.

Cindy described how, although “IWRTW is built on my own (Cindy’s) DNA”, IWRTW as an organization is intended to be experienced by the members and others as a composite of the authentic voices of all the the members.

IWRTW is as much a creation of Cindy, her values, and her self-expressions as it is the co-creation of the authentic voices of the other members.

For example, the occasional off-color tweet or party-boy blog post is absolutely fine when it is a genuine reflection of the member who posted it. There’s little concern that these communications will drive away customers or users– in fact, this kind of authentic communication helps them attract the kinds of users, companies and brands they want to work with, since people who don’t feel comfortable with the identity IWRTW expresses will select themselves out.

This is an attitude about the voice of the organization that I describe as “We are all of us being each of us.”

3. Create the kind of organization you want to work in, not something that will make you unhappy, stressed, or depleted.

Inside the organization, find the roles, titles and activities that create the link between who your members are and what they are doing/creating in the organization. Draw on members’ unique (business-relevant) skills and personalities, and support these skills and personalities.

A few very basic organizing decisions demonstrate this principle. First, consider the titles that various members of IWRTW hold. Some examples: Joe Unruh is the Love Agent, Corey Innis is a Code Supervillian,  and Rachel Heaton and Julia West are Code Whisperers.

Second, consider the world-changing projects that are unfolding on the beta of their social platform. (I’ll give details about the business itself in another post).

As part of demonstrating and developing their product, the members of IWRTW are pursuing their own world-changing goals using their company’s tool. They are putting their software to the test of their own action commitments. They are making sure that their product really can support world-changing initiatives. (See Joe Unruh’s profile for an example.)

4. Design the venture to have a business model that you want, that supports the kind of organization and the kinds of relationships you want.

This is a bit more complex to tease out, but the idea here is that IWRTW is creating a business — a product and a way of interacting with clients and users — that is literally being the change that they want to see in business itself.

Cindy explained how something as straightforward as their pricing model demonstrated their values.

Our product is designed to be affordable to the kinds of businesses we want to support. Running an ad agency (Cindy’s previous business), we had complicated compensations agreements that were different with each different client. At IWRTW, our pricing policy is transparent and simple. It makes it easy for us to do business, and to do business fairly.

Is this model of a tech start-up “competitive”?

As Cindy and I talked about the model of the authentic organization that they are creating in the start-up of IWRTW, I noted the many ways that their organization and their business model are ‘different’ from what we expect to see at the typical tech start-up (e.g., folks sleeping under their desks, a 24 hour work day, founders desperate to look serious and to impress investors.)

I had to ask Cindy whether she was ever concerned that their venture might not seem dedicated or competitive enough to potential funders or to potential clients.

Cindy replied:

That’s fabulous, actually, not to look like other start-ups, because you make your client base very self-selecting.

When you define yourselves very clearly in terms of what you stand for, that makes everything in your business life so much easier. You attract to your business the people you want to work with, and the people you want to work for. You engage the ways you want to, and with whom you want to. It ends up being a fabulous business discriminator.

… If you only ever behave, act and communicate in ways that are true to you and the venture, the more ways you can demonstrate who you are with everything you do. You never have to worry about how you come across to people, because you never act in ways that you would feel ashamed of. This is liberating, in every piece of the business.

You can see this liberation, and the alignment between their purpose, their identity and their everyday actions, just in this self-description of IfWeRanTheWorld:

IfWeRanTheWorld is a real-world experiment in tapping good intentions and turning them into tangible, do-able microactions that anyone and everyone can help you to do. All of us can achieve more than one of us, and everything starts with a microaction.

Being authentic as an organization starts with deliberate choices — some big, some small, and some micro. From the very start-up, designing your organization to demonstrate the power of your product, and to demonstrate the power of your business purpose, builds a foundation for ongoing authenticity with clients, with each other, and together.

See also:
Yes, We Plan: How Altruism and Advertising Could Change the World, in Wired, by Elliot Van Buskirk
Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary
If Women Had Designed Facebook
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand

Image from TED Blog