Every organization has a story. Any group that wants to be an important part of that organization needs to craft a place for itself in that story.

The story an organization tells itself and shares with others helps everyone make sense of who the organization is. For members, the organization’s story helps them articulate their connection to the organization, because it explains how their work contributes to who the organization is and to why it exists.

Crafting a place in the organization’s story can be harder than it seems.  Especially in consumer-facing companies, groups that are not visible to consumers often fall outside of the story. Departments like Accounting, IT, HR, Facilities Management, et. al., are rarely part of the organization’s brand, and they are often distant from the core promise of who the organization is, what it does, and why.

 [When I worked in the manufacturing and sales divisions of a consumer products company, folks in both divisions felt like under-appreciated step-children. If you didn't work in marketing you weren't a full-fledged member of the organization, because only marketing was featured in the organization's story. ]

So how does a part of the organization that might not be seen as central to the organization’s purpose make itself part of the organization’s story?

The Software Engineering group at Etsy has what looks to be an effective way of connecting themselves to their company story. Their example shows how some clever and authentic self-description can knit a traditionally ‘backstage’ group into the main fabric of the organization’s identity.

Etsy’s Company Story

Etsy’s company story revolves around artisans, makers, crafters, and the community these artisans create with each other and with their customers. At Etsy¹:

Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.

A company story about a marketplace for handmade and unique objects doesn’t seem like a story where software engineers could be lead characters.  Conventionally (meaning, outside Silicon Valley and Alley), software engineers work in the background, off to the side, in cost centers that support but don’t create the organization’s identity.

But at Etsy, engineers have cast themselves as craftspeople – as people who make a living making things — just like everyone else in the Etsy community. With their Code as Craft initiative, Etsy’s engineers have designed their group as a central, direct, and explicit contributor to Etsy’s mission and Etsy’s overall success.

The Code as Craft Initiative at Etsy

Back in June of 2010, the Etsy tech group launched a blog “Code as Craft” to focus and share their conversation about how the engineering group sees itself and how it fits with the larger Etsy community.  In the inaugural blog post, Etsy CTO (now CEO) Chad Dickerson explained:

At Etsy, our mission is to enable people to make a living making things. The engineers who make Etsy make our living making something we love: software. We think of our code as craft — hence the name of the blog.

It sounds a bit over-reaching, until you realize that the Esty Engineers’ Code as Craft initiative based in something real.

Genuine, not fake.  The language of “Code as Craft” captures and highlights something that is already true, indigenous and authentic about software engineering. Just as light is both wave and particle, software design is both mechanical and organic.

The “Code as Craft” movement /meme has been around since the dawn of computing. While mathematical rigor, linearity, discipline, and a mechanistic orientation might characterize how outsiders see software engineering, engineers themselves see this and more. They see themselves as artisans exercising skill, judgment, taste and creativity.

The computer technology folks aren’t over-reaching posers for calling themselves craftspeople. Their sense of themselves as crafters and their work as craft is real, rooted in years of professional self-description. The Code as Craft language may be strategic, but it is also a very simple act of engineers’ highlighting the part of their work that they choose to identify with most. In the Etsy environment, engineers are artisans whose work is simultaneously functional and beautiful.

Chosen, Not Imposed.   Etsy’s software engineers chose the language of craft themselves. The language wasn’t imposed on them by someone else in the organization trying to fit them into a tidy little box.

You might think it’s just a nice coincidence that software engineering would have words like ‘art’, ‘craft’, and ‘beauty’ in its toolbox of self-description, and that software engineers would be critical for enabling Etsy’s code- and data-heavy business model. But while there many organizations like Etsy that couldn’t exist without a cadre of software engineers, for these same companies words like ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘beauty’ are irrelevant to the company story.

For Engineers at Etsy, describing themselves as crafters isn’t a coincidence, but a leadership choice.

Craft Connects Coders to Etsy’s Other Crafters

At Etsy, engineers striving for improved run times and multi-layer design compliance can use the same words — craft, crafting, craftsperson — to describe their work as do the artisans making sweet mouse pincushions.

The shared vocabulary literally helps them communicate across differences that in other organizations could be barriers.  Moreover, shared language helps vendors, marketers and engineers see each other and recognize what each group is contributing, because they can use criteria that everyone understands.

Whether rendered in colors, textures or command lines, skill and beauty can be recognized by any craftsperson.

By connecting their discipline and their department to Etsy’s core story about “making things”, the Code as Craft initiative presents engineers as central and  relevant contributors to Etsy’s purpose. As a result, engineers can be recognized, affirmed and appreciated by other members of the Etsy’ community, who share the values and skills as craftspeople, albeit in different media.

Craft Connects Coders to Etsy’s External Role and Image

Engineers’ link to the company story is also useful outside the organization. Because they are crafters, Etsy engineers can represent Etsy and its company story to outsiders, not just other crafters but also the start-up community and the software engineering community.

For years, Etsy’s Community & Education group has been hosting regular after-hours Craft Nights at the Etsy Labs. Artisans come to learn and and share techniques for making products. With the advent of the Code as Craft initiative, Etsy’s engineering community has begun hosting occasional “Code as Craft” nights at Etsy Labs, where members of the tech community can come to learn and share techniques for running websites.  (Even better, the engineering group holds these events in a room lined with bins of sewing machines and fabric scraps, and feels perfectly at home.)

Their position as crafters helps the Etsy Engineers become both like other crafters in the Etsy community, and distinct from other software engineers in the tech start-up community. Etsy’s crafty coders become “optimally distinctive” — the same and special, at once.

Enabling, Engaging and Contributing as Crafters

The Code as Craft initiative is a way of embedding the professional brand within the organization’s brand to the benefit of both — like employee branding from the inside out.

What I like the most about the Code as Craft initiative at Etsy is the way that it invites engineers to contribute — from their uniqueness  — at their highest level. Code as Craft recognizes a specific part of a software engineer’s (potential) professional identity — the skilled craftsperson.  It engages that identity by inviting engineers to speak in the craftsperson’s vernacular, allowing them to communicate more easily within the Etsy crafting community. It puts their work right at the heart of the organization’s purpose — making a living making things — and aligns them with Etsy’s goals.

When we can craft our place in the organization’s story, we can create an authentic connection to who the organization is, what it does, and why that matters. That connection makes our work relevant and imbues our contributions with meaning.

See also:
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Be Your Own Hashtag
The “New” Crisis of Meaning?
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand

Images:
Mouse with felt ears, from July 2011 Craft Lab, by thelongthread.com
I Love Etsy from amazingminiatures.com  

¹ It turns out that identifying Etsy’s current mission statement is harder than you’d think. More on that in a future post.

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.

See also:

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
CSR that Improves the World But Leaves Your Damaging Business Model Intact: Authentic or not?
Is your organization flourishing or withering?

Image:
Resonate Some rights reserved by theloushe, Resonate Some rights reserved by Attrill

Why do so many social business advocates overlook the organizational value of online communities?

Too many people dismiss online communities for not being central to the organizations they serve.  These critics dismiss communities for being merely social, just another way to chat or swap tips. Even when they acknowledge how communities can be critical for getting certain kinds of work done, they claim that communities are not sufficiently “business-like”. Worse, they dismiss community advocates and experts as “enterprise social business bleeding hearts” and “kumbayaros”.

What these under-valuers miss is the way that these communities serve a key ‘business’ purpose for their diverse and wide-ranging participants.

While the online community is not the organization, for many participants, the community is their central experience of the organization.

It’s in their role as participants’ central experience of the organization that communities are under-appreciated, and I think it’s time we look at the unique contribution that communities make to the ‘social organization’.

Communities serve two organizational needs that are fairly well understood.

1. Communities serve participants as a way to find, share and develop understanding of things related to work.

2. Communities serve organizations as ways to focus, coordinate, and engage members in shared activity that contributes to the organization’s main goals.

Communities also serve a third, under-the-radar need of organizations –

3. Online communities serve members’ individual and collective needs for a coherent sense of “the Organization”, by creating the experience of being part of something larger, consistent, and meaningful.

The double-barreled concept of “central experience” is key here.

Online communities are central because:

• They draw members from across the organization together into a group

• They draw this assortment of different participants to a common set of topics

• The participants’ conversation is anchored in a (relatively) stable and findable place

• The shared place is created and hosted by the organization itself.

The online community aggregates, focuses, and anchors a subset of organization members in a place that belongs to the organization

Online communities create an experience for members because:

• The community isn’t composed of abstract thoughts ‘about’ the organization, but of actual other people who act and respond.

• The community is composed of tangible actions, reactions, expressions and feelings that participants contribute. Instead of thinking about organizational issues in ways that are isolated inside their heads, participants put stuff out into the shared space.

• The community has an emotional tenor. Sensing, experiencing and contributing to the emotions in the community reinforces participants’ experience of the community as real, since their emotional reactions are decidedly real.

• The community is “present” as well as past, or potential, because the community and members’ relationship to the community exists over real time.

Tangible, Material “Organization”

For the participant, the community creates a tangible subset of ‘the organization’ that’s perceived as something different from the both the collection of other organization members that surround the individual while ‘at work’, and the collection of specific individual participants in the online community.

Not a mixture but a compound, not an aggregate but a sum.  The community becomes a ‘thing’ — “the Organization”.

Centrality + Experience => Entitativity => “The ‘Organization’”

Together, the the centrality and the experience of an online community help to create for members a sense of “entitativity”. (Entitativity is the scientific word for “thing-ness”.) Unconsciously and sometimes consciously, participants experience and thus treat the community as though it were “the Organization” .

Creating a sense of “the Organization” is a critical business process. The community does not “become” the organization, but it represents the organization in the experience of the members.

What “the ‘Organization’” means for the Community Manager

When we recognize that the community is experienced as “the Organization”, the stakes are raised for the community manager. The community manager not only has to facilitate and support the community as a community (of people interacting, in helpful ways, across an array of topics), but also s/he has to manage the elements of the community that influence what people conclude about the actual organization based on how they experience the community.

Community managers have to manage “the Organization” by:

1. Intentionally crafting the tangible space.

Community managers must attend to large and small decisions that physically construct the space (e.g., names, colors, user interface, visual appearance, defaults and fields, mode of display, data in the display, etc).

They need to think of themselves as the ‘property managers’ of the organization’s online building, since the community site provides the architecture, the aesthetics and the functionality that creates the experience of “the Organization”.

2. Intentionally curating the space.

Community managers must make firm, consistent, deliberate decisions about what is discussed, what resources and participants are brought in, etc. so that the community acts and behaves in was that resonate with the larger identity and vision of the organization.

3. Facilitating the community in the organization’s style.

Community managers must demonstrate, reinforce and cultivate a spirit and a collective personality that resonates with the identity of the organization, since ultimately participants’ experience of that spirit will influence how they define their organization.

It’s not only that the community managers must help the communities serve the organization’s larger goals; they also need to make sure that the experience of ‘the organization’ supports the larger understanding of who that organization is, what it does, and why it does what it does.

Participants will extrapolate from their central experience of the online community their sense of who “the Organization” is, and apply this to make sense of who the (whole) organization is and also to make sense of how they themselves should act.

Community Managers as Leaders

Because the online community helps to construct the organization an entity, rather than ‘just’ a conversation, Community Managers have to be recognized as more than “facilitators” or “moderators’. Because Community Managers are responsible for participants’ experience of the community, these managers have a critical — and undervalued– role as leaders in their organizations.

As leaders, community managers need to have a clear vision for the ‘central experience’ that their communities provide (a vision that is connected, I hope, to the reality of who the organizaiton is and wants to be) so that they deliberately serve that purpose of shaping what becomes “the Organization” for so many.

Image: a close-up to nature from eeicenbice
Circle of Life – For Mao Mao from Loves_TaiShan

Note: Whether communities remain ‘standalone’ conversations or morph into coherent online collectivities that span several tools on a social intranet, it’s clear that communities will become more and more critical to “social” in organizations. Eventually, these communities will organize all other forms of online organizational interactivity.

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.

See also:
Making social networking work inside the firewall by @eileenb
The True Nature of a Social Intranet by Oscar Berg on CMSWire
Building a Social Intranet by Toby Ward (@tobyward)
Why your intranet is not strategic by Gerry McGovern

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

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.”

Does it really matter if an organization is “distinctive”?

When an organization’s distinctiveness (identity) is linked with the organization’s purpose (greater social goal), the organization’s unique qualities provide the unique resources needed to achieve that purpose.

Organizational Distinctiveness is more than Positioning

Managers often dismiss the concept of organizational “distinctiveness”, thinking that distinctiveness is only relevant to “positioning” in the marketplace. Valuing distinctiveness in the marketplace isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete.

Distinctiveness is important inside the organization, because distinctiveness is half of what makes collective work meaningful.

Distinctiveness: How does “who we are” really matter?

Collectively, we are who we are. We have enduring, distinctive characteristics that create our collective organizational self-definition. That self-definition can resolve a generic existential crisis about “who we are”, but it doesn’t necessarily give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning.

What can give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning is the organization’s purpose. When the organizations’ distinctive features, talents, skills, positions, history, and members are linked to a collective purpose, the organization’s distinctiveness becomes meaningful.

Defining Organizational Purpose

Every organization was created to achieve some purpose. Some organizations define their purpose in narrow, rather generic ways, seeing their purpose as “making a profit” or “producing a service efficiently”.

But purpose is really something beyond the organization’s generic goals — a purpose is how the organization aims to contribute to the larger world, in a qualitative way.

For example, while all financial institutions want to make money, the purpose of CFCU Community Credit Union is to encourage thrift, savings and the wise use of credit, so that members can establish financial well-being. The purpose of Etsy, beyond making money for itself and for its member vendors, is to help reconnect makers with buyers, so that artisans and users can affirm and share each other’s creativity.

Purpose is how the organization’s collective activity can add qualitative value to members and to society.

The Problem with Purpose: Why “us”?

The problem with purpose, though, is often that there is no well-articulated reason why a particular organization ought to take on that purpose.

Why should CFCU, and not some other organization, help people establish financial well being? Why should Etsy help artists and customers affirm each others’ creativity? Can’t artists enter competitions to get affirmation? Can’t customers buy branded products to affirm their good taste?

Distinctiveness answers the question of “Why us?”

Distinctiveness explains why we, and not some other organization, should pursue this purpose — because “who we are” makes us better qualified than any other organization to pursue this purpose.

Because we are who we are, we as an organization have the talent, the ability, the qualities necessary, to pursue this purpose. We can do it better than others, achieve what others cannot, because of who we are.

Distinctive qualities are innate strengths waiting to be used. So, while any other organization might have the time, the money, and the determination to pursue this purpose, only our organization can contribute the skills, talents, values, and members who can contribute what this purpose really needs.

Why did Etsy set its purpose to support creativity? Because Etsy is an artful, creative company, full of crafters, artisans, artists, creatives, aesthetes. They can create this kind of support because they know (themselves) what is needed by their community.

Purpose makes distinctiveness useful; distinctiveness makes purpose achievable.

Linking our organizational distinctiveness to our organizational purpose helps us broaden, deepen and amplify our contributions to that purpose.

Organizational distinctiveness can lead to competitive advantage for the same reason that distinctiveness can help organizations achieve their larger purpose – the advantage comes from a link between what the organization has to offer (its unique qualities) and what is needed to achieve the purpose.

For both organizations and individuals, when “who you are” is linked to “what you’re trying to contribute to this world”, your work is meaningful. Work is meaningful because it draws on something you uniquely have to offer, and contributes to something that uniquely needs what you have to offer.

–  By itself, your organization’s defining features are interesting but not necessarily relevant.

— By itself, your organization’s purpose may be noble but not necessarily achievable.

Linked together, your organization’s distinctiveness and purpose serve each other, making your work and your organization more meaningful

See also:

Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Can an organization be too different?: The Strategic Value of Optimal Distinctiveness
B Corporation Identity: An Opportunity for Organizational Authenticity

Images from Naccarato on Flickr

Action Branding is the concept that brands are the sum of their actions.

– Extending this concept to personal brands and organizational brands, action branding helps individuals and organizations demonstrate, and thus authenticate, the character, values and purpose they claim to have.

– Social media creates opportunities for individuals and organizations to track, organize and display their ‘activity streams’ so that others can construe the person or organization’s identity from their actual behaviors.

Too much of what constitutes a “brand” is fake.

Most of a product’s brand is a fiction. It’s a social construction. You learned that in Marketing 101.

Brands are claims built on top of a product’s material features and attributes. Brands are claims that marketers want us to believe; when we believe these claims we make the claims and the brands they compose more or less “real”.

Still, in a consumerist culture, we’re generally aware and okay with the idea that our product brands are created largely to sell products, and not so much to reflect the inherent qualities of the product itself.

Personal Brands and Organizational Brands

When we apply the concept of “brand” to individuals and to organizations, we can run into trouble. When we replace concepts like “reputation” and “image” with “brand”, we highlight the question of whether the claims that compose these brands are authentic or not.

We know that people and organizations are “real”, but we are left to wonder whether their brands — their claims about “who they are” — actually represent what defines them. This question of how ‘real’ these brands are gets raised over and over on social media.

Social media provides individuals and organizations with a huge array of places and formats for telling us who they are. On Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and more, we use profile pictures, self-descriptions, “likes” and dislikes, and other forms of self-presentation to claim and declare who we are.

How do we know whether these declared personal brands and organizational brands are real?

To figure out whether claims and declarations are real, we try to authenticate and substantiate these claims.

Authenticating is the process of establishing the origin or ownership of a quality to confirm that this quality exists. We want to know where that quality comes from, as a way to make sure that it is inherent in the person or organization, rather than just pasted on it.

Substantiating is the process of finding the substance, the material support, behind a claim about identity. We want proof that this quality exists.

We prove who we are by what we do.

When we want to authenticate or substantiate an individual or organization’s identity claims, we look at their actions. And, when individuals and organizations want to make their claims real, they turn to behavior to show us.

Just think of the words that social psychologists use to describe how we create and substantiate our individual identities: We express. We demonstrate. We perform. We enact.

In short, we behave like the people we say we are.

Social Media => Activity Streams

Social media creates new opportunities for us to demonstrate, track, aggregate, and display these actions, through our online “activity streams”.

A person’s activity stream, technically, is the confluence of many different sequences of activity-related data that a person publishes on an assortment of different work, social and personal platforms. When/if aggregated, either formally by a service or informally by someone simply paying attention to that individual, that activity stream tells us what you’re doing, often with whom, and often why, giving us a sense who you are based on what you do.

Activity Streams => Action Branding

Using activity streams made visible on social media, individuals and organizations can engage in “action branding.” They can create a more substantiated, authentic ‘brand’ by building a sense of who they are that is crafted as much by actions as by declarations and claims.

The actions people see on our activity streams, as captured by different media platforms, provide information for substantiating and authenticating identity claims.

• On platforms like Twitter, individuals can share what they’re thinking, offer their reactions, recommend resources, and engage in conversations with others in ways that demonstrate what they are paying attention to and even what they’re doing.

• On platforms like Hashable, individuals can track and then display who they’re meeting with, what they’re doing, and why, using activity hashtags (e.g., #meeting) as well as project hashtags (e.g., #morevoices).

• On other platforms like IfWeRanTheWorld and MyImpact.org , individuals can direct, organize and display project-related micro-actions where they are actively contributing support for cause they care about. Both of these sites are intentionally designed to allow individuals and organizations to display their actions to others with a composite personal profile as an as an activity stream.

Action Branding Defined & Demonstrated

Action branding as a business tool is the brainchild of Cindy Gallop, CEO & Founder of IfWeRanTheWorld. Cindy drew on her insights about what’s missing from traditional approaches to branding to build a social media platform that aggregates individual and organizational actions that advance values-driven projects,   IfWeRanTheWorld creates a place where individuals and brands (and the organizations that own the brands) can demonstrate the attributes and values that they claim to have, by organizing, recording and displaying the actions that they take to make these claims real.

As Gallop describes action branding:

“It’s not about saying but doing. It’s not about telling but being. It’s communication by demonstration.”

This business insight is supported not only by basic social science about identity and image creation, but also by our common experience of presentation and authentication.

• An organization’s “brand” or identity or image is anchored in the human attributes of organization members, in the organization’s collective values & goals, and in that organization’s routines and practices.
• An individual’s “brand” or reputation or image is anchored in his or her human attributes, values & goals, ways of being, and actions.

For individuals and organizations, the authenticity challenge is to demonstrate that your claims about who you are are borne out by the actions that you take.

Action branding holds us to a higher level of accountability, and brings along with it a firmer sense of authenticity.

See also:
Activity Streams: Moving Beyond Event Aggregation by Mike Gotta
Datum iPhone App turns your daily routines into visual report cards FastCompany

Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand
When the Organization Wears its Brand

MyImpact.org IfWeRanTheWorld

Images: Tracks from Doug McG. Fingerprints (page 12-13) -…from atibens Prints from qmnonic

The 2011 TED conference begins Tuesday in Long Beach CA. Of the 55 folks who will present “Ideas worth Spreading”, 15 of these speakers will be women.

That’s a whopping 27%… no improvement over previous years, and nowhere near gender parity.

To celebrate the 15 Women who will take the TED stage, and to encourage TED to #ChangeTheRatio so that a full half of TED presenters are women, I’m spending this week with the team at SheShouldTalkAtTED, advocating for #morevoices and gender parity on the TED stage.

Join us on Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, and in conversation, and in action.

What you can do:

• SHE Should Talk At TED: 5 Ways to Get Started

• Separate Still Isn’t Equal: Sexism among TED Conferences (at The Huffington Post)

• TEDWomen: Brilliant or Belittling?
  by Michelle Tripp at BrandForward

• Followup on the TEDWomen Conversation

• IS TEDWomen Sexist? Use the “Group Replacement Test” and tell us what you think

• Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation

• The Goal is Gender Parity — at TED and Beyond

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

• 15 Trailblazers Take The Stage (A Feminist’s Guide To TED 2011
  by Susan Mccaulay at Amazing Women Rock

• Building on TED & the TEDWomen Conference:
  How can _we_ make conferences more inclusive spaces?

• TEDWomen: Proving That Gender Does Not Determine Great Ideas
  By Linda Tarr-Whelen, at The Huffington Post

Every organization needs to establish optimal distinctiveness – a competitive position within your field, where you are similar enough to other organizations to be seen as legitimate, but different enough that you’re seen as having something unique to offer.  But, optimal distinctiveness is more than being in a competitive place in your field.

Optimal distinctiveness means having a competitive position of similarity and difference that is anchored in the organization’s identity.

While optimal distinctiveness depends on knowing of your competition, it also depends on knowing your organization and what’s built in to who you are. When an organization can link its competitive positioning in the marketplace to the very features that define the organization for its members, its claims to distinctiveness are authentic.

Establishing Optimal Distinctiveness: Positioning plus Anchoring

Establishing optimal distinctiveness requires your organization to work in two directions. You must:

1. Position your organization in the marketplace
by comparing your organization to other organizations to see where you stand out, and then matching this to customer needs

2. Anchor your organizations position in your organization’s identity,
by recognizing and understanding unique characteristics that are indigenous to the organization itself, and linking these to claims of distinctiveness

Positioning: Your Place vs. Your Competition

Most people assume that you can find optimal distinctiveness simply through the process of positioning. Positioning is a marketing activity where you orchestrate perceptions of what your organization has to offer so that you occupy a valued place in the customer’s mind relative to competitive offerings. A product, service or organization can be positioned on the basis of an attribute or benefit, a user niche, class, price, quality, purpose, etc.

Positioning traditionally focuses on finding an attractive place in a competitive field. We consider what other organizations offer and what customers & clients want, and use this external information to find a definition or image for our organization that is attractive, competitive, and unique. We aim to be the one and only organization able to offer what we offer.

Positioning is not enough for optimal distinctiveness, though, because an organization needs to be able to substantiate its claims to be unique. The organization has to be able to explain where its uniqueness comes from and demonstrate that this uniqueness has a sustainable source in the organization’s core character. It has to anchor its claims in real features of the organization.

Anchoring: Grounding Optimal Distinctiveness in Organizational Identity

“Who you are” as an organization is your organizational identity. Organizational identity is the set of core, enduring and distinct attributes that define an organization for its members. The ‘core’ and ‘enduring’ elements refer to the idea that these attributes are foundational to the organization and more important than other attributes. The ‘distinctive’ element refers to the idea that this set of attributes defines one and only one organization.

To anchor any claims to be distinctive, an organization has to look deeper into itself to answer the question:

“What is indigenous to this organization that explains what we do, what we value, and what our goals are?”

These indigenous features could appear in the organization’s past, in its history, the founders’ personalities, mythical stories, and narratives. These features can appear in the present as organizational practices, routines, and capabilities, and as the organization’s perception of its best collective self. And, these features can appear in the future, in the form of the organization’s vision or aspirational ideal self.

When an organization is able to anchor its claims to be one way or another in actual features of its organizational identity, it demonstrates to its stakeholders that these claims are authentic—they have an actual source in the organization. They aren’t made up, or invented just so that the organization looks good. They are real. Anchoring claims of distinctiveness to the organization’s identity also demonstrates that this distinctiveness is sustainable. The organization controls the source of this distinctiveness and can continue to produce the same distinctiveness over and over.

Navel-gazing vs. Anchoring

Many managers think that crafting their organization’s market position is all they need to do to set their organization apart from others, to be distinctive, and to be competitive. Managers feel reasonably comfortable spending time on positioning, since everyone knows that marketing is important.

However, many managers think that focusing internally, on the organization’s indigenous characteristics, is not worth their time. It’s too touchy-feely, too much ‘navel gazing’, too much reflection.

What these managers fail to understand is that positioning an organization without anchoring that position in the organization’s actual identity ends up creating a façade—and an untrustworthy one at that.

A distinctive, competitive position in the marketplace is only “optimal” if it is authentic. To establish optimal distinctiveness, the organization’s market position must must be anchored in the organization’s core, enduring and distinctive identity.

By anchoring your organization’s position in the the marketplace in your organization’s identity, you establish an optimal distinctiveness that allows your organization to adapt to its different competitive contexts while upholding, confirming and sustaining who it is and what really makes it powerful.

See also: Can an organization be too different?: The Strategic Value of Optimal Distinctiveness

Images from Flickr: Dandelion collage from robynejay Dandelion from Anja Jonsson

Here’s a mini-exam for you.

College ranking systems are:

A. A great way to sell magazines and get your publication’s name in the news
B. A scam that preys on the social and economic insecurities of educational organizations
C. A somewhat-helpful guide to prospective students
D. A process that is entirely gamed by the organizations that are being ranked
E. A problematic way to assess the meaningful distinctiveness of any institution
F. All of the above

If you chose F, go to the straight to the next question.

Everyone from Forbes to Business Week to US News & World Reports to The Economist to the Princeton Review has been ranking colleges, and graduate programs. Every year when these rankings come out we hear all about all the ways in which they are flawed.

When we step back and look at the whole picture, it makes me wonder whether the distinctions that these ranking make as they compare schools are very meaningful. Are these just a way to show various differences among schools? Or, are these authentic distinctions along meaningful criteria?

Do these rankings tell us anything meaningful about the organizations that are ranked?

Rankings vs. Meaningful Differences

These ranking systems tend to emphasize the financial assets of the institution, the academic potential of the student body, the school’s popularity among 17 and 18 year olds, and the perceived prestige and/or elitism of the institution. Every year they seem to add more and different measures, as though the sheer amount of data in the survey can make the distinctions among schools more meaningful.

Increasing the number of different measures makes the rankings more useful to some potential students (and their parents), to the degree that the rankings incorporate components that are important to the student. Some students do want to compare the the number of varsity sports teams from one school to another.

But in terms of telling us what those colleges are like, what defines them, what makes them significant, these long rows of numbers don’t tell us much at all.

As Jo Ellen Parker, President of Sweet Briar College, explains:

Rankings lists can produce strange conjunctions. On the Forbes.com list this year #87 is Sweet Briar, and #88 is Johns Hopkins University. While I have no doubt that Forbes’ methodology genuinely produced these results, it strikes me that these two excellent institutions are so different in nature and situation that their appearance side by side is almost startling. (emphasis mine)

Comparing Johns Hopkins and Sweet Briar overall is rather like comparing, well, a laptop and an autoclave. Both might be highly rated, but they’re far from interchangeable.

As Parker points out, these schools are ranked close together and rated as being pretty similar, when in fact they are not really alike at all.

Metrics about inputs (e.g., % applicants from USA) and metrics about component parts (e.g., university endowments) don’t necessarily convey information about an organization’s important qualities.  The schools’ average SAT scores and number of varsity sports teams does not help us understand either school’s core identity, what defines that school and its community, and what values that school holds dear.

Meaningful Differences: Identity and Core Values

In contrast to mainstream ranking strategies (e.g., those employed by Forbes, Business Week, US News & World Reports, etc.) and in contrast to the ethos behind these rankings is the approach taken by Washington Monthly. Washington Monthly focuses not on the prestige or elitism of the institution, but on how well these schools serve the public interest.

Washington Monthly ranks schools … “based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories:

• Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students),

• Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and

• Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country).”

Why measure these outcomes?

By measuring these outcomes, Washington Monthly is sharing data about how committed these schools are to the values that underlie these outcomes. That, in turn, tells us something about the qualities of the school itself.

For example, knowing that Bryn Mawr College ranks 7th this year in the percentage of undergraduates who go on to get PhDs tells us more about the intellectual caliber of the experience at this college than its 49% acceptance rate (USNWR).

But even more important, Washington Monthly rankings measure what kinds of transformations these institutions are able to create for the students who join them and graduate from them.

Organizational Identity and Transformations

You can get terrific insights about an organization by looking at what happens with/to the people who join it.  Washington Monthly’s rankings tell us something about the organization’s positive approach to diversity, its orientation towards learning, and its orientation towards contributing to the world. These rankings give us a sense of what values inform the community, and what values will be emphasized by the members.

Of course, not every school values diversity, learning, and contributing to the world, not every school makes these values part of their core identity, and not every high school senior wants their college experience to emphasize these values.  But Washington Monthly’s survey offers meaningful information to these schools and students– by showing them (and others) which schools choose not to emphasize these values.

It’s always difficult to compare lots organizations simultaneously on criteria as idiosyncratic as their identities.  Each institution’s identity is unique, and so you’re always comparing apples to oranges and to strawberries. Still, there are some comparisons that are meaningful– comparisons based transformations (outputs) that reflect values, and metrics that demonstrate values.