How do we get and keep more women in technology-related careers?
How do we increase the number of women creators, makers, designers, and coders?

Why not just add more women to the mix, and go from there? 

When all we do is “add women and stir”, without simultaneously and deliberately changing that system, we aren’t going to succeed. This tactic leaves untouched the cultural and structural parts of the system that continue to sustain gender bias.

“Add Women and Stir”

The “add women and stir” tactic works on the logic that simply adding more women to a particular event, school, company, or profession, will ultimately lead to a higher number of women staying on that career path.

We see this tactic at almost every point of the career “pipeline“. Well-meaning people aim to increase the output of the pipeline by increasing the input to the pipeline.

But the data show, over and over, that “add women and stir” doesn’t change the output of the system.

“Add Women and Stir” at Etsy-Hacker School 

The “add women and stir” tactic is the main element of a joint initiative by Hacker School and Etsy to increase the presence of women in the New York tech community.

Hacker School runs a series of three-month “coders retreats” to accelerate participants’ coding skills.  Hacker School’s summer 2012 session, sponsored and housed at Etsy, aims to create a gender-balanced class of 50% men, 50% women.

The initiative has gotten a lot of positive press, since people inside and outside the tech community are excited to see a concrete commitment to addressing gender bias in the world of software making. This initiative should be praised, since the Hacker School- Etsy goal of a coder class evenly split between male and female coders is a win.

But while the Etsy – Hacker School initiative adds more women to a key professional development process, it doesn’t address the systemic issues that ultimately squeeze women out of tech.

However, with a few significant design tweets and a fuller, more articulated commitment to changing gender bias in the system, the Etsy-Hacker School initiative could dramatically expand its impact.

Here’s how:

Why “Add Women and Stir” is Limited

At face value, there is nothing wrong with  efforts to increase the number of women. We’re simply not going to get an equal number of women and men into any particular career, or even keep the same proportion of women at the end as at the beginning, unless we get more women into professional development opportunities like Hacker School.

But increasing the representation of women in software engineering, or anywhere else, doesn’t really depend on changing the number of women hired, trained, and developed. Getting women to be normal, commonplace, and influential in these careers depends on changing the implicit and explicit gender bias in the events, communities, institutions and professions themselves.

It’s not the number of inputs we need to change. It’s the system.

“But if we get more women into the system, won’t the women change it?”

With the add women and stir tactic, some presume that once women get in the door, these women will be able to fight gender bias and change the system themselves.

To some degree, that’s true. There are always women (like the ones I studied my dissertation) who will take on the extra work — and the extra career risk — of advocating to end gender bias and connected discrimination. These women, and men with a similar commitment, will work to change the system from within.*

“But if we get more women into the system, won’t the system change?”

Unfortunately, individual enlightenment doesn’t automatically transform the system.

And, ‘change from within’ and ‘change from below’ are not enough. We need changes in the system, designed and led by people in charge of the system.

Leaders and Program Designers Can Change the Bias in the System

Leaders, and the people who design the classes, the programs, the businesses, and the professional structures that should be without gender bias are the folks with the greatest leverage to make system change.

It’s a leader’s role and a program designer’s role to eliminate gender bias in the behaviors, processes, and systems under their control that reinforce gender bias. Any initiative to increase the number of women in technology needs leaders and designers who will re-code the system.

How can Etsy & Hacker School Design Their Program to Reduce Gender Bias?

Hacker School and Etsy have already made some program design decisions to address bias. For example,

• Having 50% women and 50% men means that there will be enough women in the class that no one woman will be tokenized as the representative woman. The posse approach for adding minority group members goes beyond the Rule of 3 to ensure that there is a variety of types of “women coders” who can each be more of her individual self.

• Offering a $5,000 housing scholarships to women in the program (the program itself is free to participants) addresses the financial challenge that might keep women from participating. While there’s no reason stated that women (and not men) might need scholarships, scholarships might address the effects of a gender-based wage gap.

2. With participants, Etsy and Hacker School could:

• Ask male and female participants whether they are on board with the anti-gender bias agenda
• Ask participants whether they are willing to contribute to changing gender bias, perhaps by opening themselves up to personal change

3. With their own organizations, Etsy and Hacker School could:

• Ask whether they are open to questioning their own practices, norms and outcomes
• Ask whether they are open to adapting their own culture, to design norms, processes (like meetings) and work structures (like project assignments) that confront, reduce or circumvent gender bias

With the program content, Etsy and Hacker School could:

• Add some explicit learning –analysis, reflection, and skill building – to address negative gender dynamics in the coding community
• Address how gender-bias hurts not only female coders, but also male coders and the coding profession

Perhaps the most important program-design questions are:

• What activities will they design into the three month program to create different and better gender dynamics, to create supportive, nonsexist professional relationships among the men and women, and to build a more inclusive culture?

• Will any of these participants leave having become not only better coders but also better advocates for equality?

If Hacker School delivers the very same program for a group that’s 50% women as they have done in the past for groups that were 95% men, we can expect that the very design of the program will have some (unintentional) gendered issues.

You can’t deliver to women a program designed for men and hope that both men and women will benefit equally. That’s like designing a menu for pescatarians and just assuming that everyone will find it satisfying.

5. Geek Feminists and Women In Technology Allies are Ready To Help

 I hope that Hacker School and Etsy will reach out to the women in tech/ geek feminist community  – if they haven’t already – so that they can draw in more resources and more program ideas designed specific to address gender bias in the software-making community.

For example,

–  Organizations like the Ada Initiative make themselves available to do workshops about addressing sexism in the codersphere. And,

– The Geek Feminism wiki has entries on how to help allies (e.g., men) learn to fight gender-bias.

Of course, we understand that neither Hacker School nor Etsy sees itself as an organization primarily dedicated to gender equality in software engineering. The mission of Hacker School is to build a stronger community of open source coders by helping coders grow their skills. And, Etsy’s focus with this initiative is to boost the skills of the New York coding community, and maybe get its hands on some of up-and-coming coding talent.

Still, they both see a way that their own organizations can make a difference. As Marc Hedlund of Etsy explains:

Last September, three out of 96 employees in Engineering and Operations at Etsy were women, and none of them were managers. Talking this over with others here, we thought that Etsy — which supports the businesses of hundreds of thousands of female entrepreneurs through our marketplace, which sells a majority of all items to women, and which already has many talented and amazing women working for the company — should be one of the single easiest Internet companies at which to correct this problem.

Beyond Adding Women, Leaders Must Change the Biased System

Adding more women to the pipeline, especially by including women in professional development processes, will move women in the coding world forward by a few steps. But, this tactic alone will not change the organizational or professional realities these women (and anti-bias men) face. Focusing on inputs to increase outputs just isn’t enough.

• We can only improve women’s career opportunities by improving women’s and men’s career development systems.
• We can only reduce gender bias by changing gender-biased systems in our professions and organizations.
• We can only get more women into tech, and keep talented women and men in tech, by changing the systems that create the tech community.

The Etsy Hacker School initiative to add more women is a positive contribution to change and a sign of commitment from both organizations. It would be even better to see them take the suggestions above, as well as the recommendations of the Women in Tech & Geek Feminist community, to make a bigger and longer lasting contribution by changing systems too.

See also:

An Interview With Etsy and Hacker School About the Etsy Hacker School Grants, at GeekMom

Why Do Meritocracies Hurt Women?
Why Women DON’T Rule the Internet
Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation

*Note: With both of these assumptions, the burden of making change happen falls on the women participants themselves. I shouldn’t need to mention that it’s wrong to make the subordinated group shoulder the bulk of the change advocacy.

Image: Faucet from StuartD42 , Faucet from Joe Shlabotnik, Faucet from Benurs – Learning and learning… Well….WELL
from MadeOnMercury

What level of change do you really want from social business?

Do you want a little bit, or a whole lot?

Do you want process improvement? Or,

Do you want organizational transformation?

Social technology means organizational change.

Social Business and social technologies are indeed bringing changes into your organization. That we know.

But what we don’t know is–what kind of change will ‘social’ bring? What are the people in charge of social technology in your organization looking for?

Social technology can drive different levels of organizational change.

The confusing and sometimes contradictory advice about employing social technology within the organization starts to make more sense, once you separate advocates by the level of change that they seek.

Do the advocates you’re listening to want:

• Level I Change: Incremental, local improvement in a current process (e.g., “social” CRM) in the organization?

• Level 2 Change: Incremental and systemic process improvement, from end to end in a particular value change (e.g., building social back from ‘customer facing’ employees to the internal employees and customer-specific systems)? Or,

• Level 3 Change: Systemic, significant transformation throughout the entire organizational ecosystem? Changing how we think about what we do together, as well changing how we act together?

When we disagree with a social technology advocate or when her or his advice doesn’t ring true, knowing which level of change s/he is looking for can help us identify whether the difference is in the end vision or instead in the tactics. Then, we can figure out if that person’s advice seems helpful and wise.

Choose your level of organizational change

So, before you start evaluating some social business advocate’s advice, first ask yourself:

– What kind of organizational change do we seek?
– What kind of organizational change is this person presuming?

Then, go on to the tactics and ask:

– What’s the best way to get to our goal?
– Can this person’s advice help us get there?

I’m sure that asking that first question — What level of change do they seek? — will help me step back from conversations where what I have to offer isn’t relevant. It will also help me step towards conversations where people are looking for the same level of change as me.

Deploy, build, and use social technology designed for your change goals.

The kind of change I’m seeking, change that creates a truly “social” organization, can only come from Level 3 change.  Level 3 Change involves new technologies, new processes, and new relationships. It requires that we think deliberately not only about ‘adopting technology’, but also about the deep, difficult, meaningful work of organizational change.

Despite the fact that social technologies have built into them more democratic assumptions about how people should communicate, the defaults of these systems can’t drive Level 3 Change alone.

What also has to change is how we think about people, about relationships, about each other, about the role of our organization in its larger community, and about the purpose of the organization itself.

To drive Level 3 Change with social technology, we need more than savvy marketers focused on customer engagement and super-competent CTOs who can integrate data streams and enterprise applications. We need change agents. We need open, trustworthy, generative, courageous, purpose-driven people.

Truth is, although technology-driven change intrigues me on its own, I’m not interested in social technology by itself.  I’m interested in social technology as a way to achieve more human organizations.

So, I’m looking for insights and tactics to help use social technology to

“Build the change we want to see in the world”.

See also:

Growing Social: 4 Different Paths to Social Organization
When will “Social Business” Become “Social Change Business”?
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization

If Social Business is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Deb Lavoy

hat tip to @desireeadaway and @socialchgdiva
Image: Blue vintage china tiered tea stand Some rights reserved by highteaforalice

Why doesn’t every piece of cake come with two forks?

There’s no fixed reason why the cake can only come with one fork. But, having only one fork is an obstacle to sharing, even for the most generous of potential dessert-sharers.

Why not bring me a second fork, to make it easy for me to share?

Even better, why not serve every piece of cake with two forks?

Why not make it easy for everyone to make sharing their default behavior?

Design decisions drive our behaviors more than we realize. Design decisions intentionally make some behaviors difficult to do, while making other behaviors easy.  Some behaviors occur by deliberately-designed ‘default’.

And, if we change the defaults, we change our behaviors.

This is true for individuals, and it’s true for organizations.

In organizations, deliberate changes to the defaults in our systems can lead to changes in our collective behaviors.

You know how this works– when your organization requires you to use a photo id to get into your building, people eventually start clipping those id’s on their belts. And soon enough, everyone’s wearing a name-tag. Those name-tags make it easier to refer to a person by name when you strike up a conversation in the elevator.

If we want to help our organizations thrive – to become truly social in ways that engage members in positive interactive behaviors– we need to change our systems of social interaction.

One great place to start is with our digital social networks. Here’s how that might work:

Dash off a list of some of the interpersonal behaviors that would make your organization more social, more positive, if only these behaviors could be increased in number. Think of behaviors like:

• Thanking
• Affirming
• Sharing
• Celebrating
• Listening

Can you imagine ways that you could deliberately design your collective activity streaming, your data requests, your emails, and even your group meeting scheduler so that these activities invited people to thank each other, recognize each other, or share with each other?

This is not such a weird idea. Everyone on Facebook has seen this in action, with birthday greetings.

On Facebook, friends are flooded with online happy wishes on their birthdays. You might even have sent a few birthday wishes yourself. Why does this happen?

That flood of positive behavior doesn’t happen because you care more about that individual than you do about others.

And, that flood of positive behavior certainly doesn’t happen because everyone on Facebook went to some corporate meeting where they were urged to recognize people’s birthdays.

That flood of good wishes happens because Facebook’s systems have a built in reminder on the top right of your page: “Hey, His/Her birthday is tomorrow!”

Similarly, Gmail also has some built- in reminders to be more social. One tool recommends other people who might be added to the address field. Another tool reminds you to upload a document if the body of your email includes the words ‘attach’ or ‘attachment’.

Already, some enterprise-wide social recognition platforms have these positive triggers designed right in, so that they nudge us to change our behaviors towards the positive.

We can design in more positive behaviors, for example by designing  online employee profiles that recommend people to connect with, based on work role, project area, and even personal interests. We can import social platforms like Contactually to invite employees to design into their own email habits some regular invitations to reconnect with email contacts & colleagues.

Added 3/22: Here’s another example, from the new gmail interface Fluent.io => Fluent.io’s  formatting highlights the sender’s visual avatar, to “remind you that there’s an actual human being on the other end of the message, not just some infernal robot trying to waste your time.” A simple design change builds in the [ositive behavior of affirming the person

In each of these examples, positive social behavior isn’t required; it’s merely prompted. But sometimes, all we need is a prompt to share, or a reminder to recognize and celebrate someone’s contribution, to actually take that positive step.

Image how this could work in an organization, if the social tools that everyone uses had positive behavior triggers built right in!

If we change the default behaviors that are built into our social technologies, we can change how people interact across these systems. And, these online changes can even infect our offline behavior, making that more positive too.

Of course, there is a fine line between nudges and requirements. And, there’s a fine line between controlling these nudges ourselves and having the organization’s systems ‘big brother’ us with automatic suggestions.

• But why not start thinking more deliberately about the positive behaviors we want?
• Why not starting thinking more deliberately about the positive behavioral norms that we want to establish?

We’ve already predisposed certain behaviors and reinforced certain norms — less social ones — by designing systems without triggers for sharing, without triggers for remembering, and without triggers for thanking each other.

We’ve got communication systems and work flow systems that give us the equivalent of only one fork. If we want to encourage sharing, we need to design systems that give us that second fork. Or even a third one.

When tools make it easy to share, and defaults make it likely we’ll share, our behavior will become more generous — by design.

That way, we can have our cake, and so can you.

see also:

Images: Bigger than your head Some rights reserved by gregoryperez on Flickr
Two Forks Some rights reserved by mmahaffie

With the growing interest in social business and how social technology can change organizations, we’re starting to hear more and more mainstream business commenters weigh in with their opinions.

While these new and novice commenters won’t drown out the voices of the well-established experts (especially those who have corporate support behind them), the increase in commenters may make it harder for you to find independent voices with unique perspectives. These independent voices are important, because these are the folks who are shaking up the conversation and asking us to think broadly about what social technology could do.

Here are 7 experts whose views on social technology will change how you think about “social” in organizations.  

Each of these experts has something unique and wise to say about social technologies, digitally-mediated work activity, social business, and the movement towards more social organizations. These experts are particularly curious, so they read widely and think deeply. And, they are particularly adept at bringing ideas from a range of disciplines into the conversation about social technology at work.

I rely on these folks to lead me to think more expansively — and so should you.

Pound for pound, post for post, following these experts will help you understand the fundamental challenges of social media in organizations.  They’ll raise sophisticated questions and connections for you to ponder. And, they’ll help you be a better leader and advocate for transformation and change.

7 Frame-Changing Social Business / Social Organization Experts

• Elizabeth Lupfer
• Rachel Happe
• Maddie Grant
• Deb Lavoy
• Anne Marie Mc Ewan
• John Tropea
• Thomas Vander Wal

Elizabeth Lupfer
@socialworkplace
TheSocialWorkplace
Senior Manager, HR Technology & Employee Experience, Verizon

Elizabeth puts social technology into the day-to-day work of the organization. Elizabeth’s blog posts are entertaining, real-world windows on how social media is influencing (even transforming) how people work in organizations, especially how it can transform employees’ experiences with “the organization” ( e.g., HR and employee ‘touchpoints’). (Her posts have helped me understand the nitty gritty of how the social intranet in particular will transform organizations.)

On her blog TheSocialWorkplace, Elizabeth curates posts about social technology from other experts, and her blog is a great place to find good case studies. Her blog and twitter feed are your one-stop-shopping for relevant and provocative writing about all things social.

Elizabeth is more than just a curator, though. She’s a very original thinker. Because Elizabeth designs and implements social systems in her own job at Verizon, she’s able to bs-test pretty much any idea or opinion. She sees both the flaws and the opportunities of social tech in organizations. Her elegant and approachable writing finds connections between other peoples’ ideas, shows how an idea can be well implemented, and projects future concerns and trends.

• A Socially Networked Company Makes for a More Human Workforce (Revisited)
• Why the Super Bowl’s Social Media Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown
• When Employees aren’t Happy, then the Company Isn’t Happy

Rachel Happe
@rhappe TheSocialOrganization (her business blog)
TheCommunityRoundtable (her company, with Jim Storer)

Rachel Happe looks at how “social” will change organizations, with a special focus on the role that communities and community managers will play in creating a more social workplace. Rachel’s perspective on social media flows from a real-world understanding of the dynamics of groups in organizations. She understands how group dynamics can be shaped and nurtured by savvy and attentive managers. Plus, she pays attention to how these dynamics affect organizational-level capabilities.

Rachel writes comprehensive, thoughtful pieces about what social organizations could be — she’s a well-grounded visionary, if you can imagine such a perspective.  This combination, along with Rachel’s ‘former consultant’ skill at creating models and frameworks (like the Community Maturity Model), lets her simplify complex relationships to help us understand them better.

• Radical Transparency: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
• Why Socializing Organizations Matters to Me
• Social Media is not Community

Maddie Grant
@maddiegrant
SocialFish (her business blog)
Social strategist for associations & nonprofits at SocialFish

Maddie focuses on social technologies for associations and nonprofits, and she’s sensitive to the added importance of social media for establishing members’ connections and for sustaining a shared sense of purpose.  Maddie approaches social technology not only as a way to serve an organization’s strategic agenda, but also as a way to serve members. Even when her posts offer practical advice (and they usually do) there’s an understanding of the big picture and the big goals behind the recommended behaviors.

With co-conspirator Jamie Notter, Maddie recently published Humanize: How people-centric organizations succeed in a social world. Humanize is the best book you could possibly find about the multi-level, value-driven changes facing organizations who really want to succeed with social. In Humanize, Maddie and Jamie advocate for wholesale organizational change, with or without social technology, but always with an emphasis on what’s good for members individually and collectively.

• Why communities of practice are the key to the future
• 6 Steps for Getting Started with Social CRM for Membership Orgs

Deb Lavoy
@Deb_Lavoy
ProductFour (her blog)

Deb is the sage of collaborative work/ innovative teams. She’s also Director of Product Marketing for Social Media at OpenText. Deb has an engineer’s understanding of how data parts and human wholes fit together, and an advocate’s appreciation for the possibilities of socialized tools. Deb is quick to see what’s common to both internal, task oriented systems and externally focused customer/ service oriented systems, so she’s able to bridge the disciplinary divide between Enterprise2.0 and Social CRM.

Deb also writes about the cultural, value-centered foundations of social technology. She was one of the earliest voices in the social business community to call attention to central concepts like shared purpose, meaning, and organizational change.  Because she combines the roles of philosopher and pragmatist, Deb’s vision and advice are credible, actionable, and inspiring.

• If Social Business Is the Answer, What is the Question?
• The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose
• Is collaboration enough to connect-the-dots?

Anne Marie Mc Ewan
@SmartCo
The Smart Work Company(blog)

Anne Marie’s unique perspective is grounded in her research as a management academic and her consulting experience in organizational development.  AnneMarie’s in the middle of writing a book and has blogged less often lately, but her posts are always pretty deep, and challenging. Anne Marie is the only person I’ve heard talking about the links between (what we think of as) new dynamics triggered by social technologies and long standing wisdom about technologies of organizational change.

Because Anne Marie is able to reach back to what we learned in these previous change movements, like work redesign, total quality, Six Sigma, and the Human Relations Approach, she refuses to treat old ideas as though they were new. Instead, she fills in the space between old and new by highlighting timeless lessons.

• Factories: The original social business
• Smart Work Basics (intro to her book)
• Social Business is Not Rocket Science

John Tropea
@JohnT
LibraryClips (blog)
Snippets (Tumblr)
John on Google+

John is a terrific curator of ideas that are directly relevant to social business/ social organizations, as well as ideas in related fields like complexity science, network theory, decision-making, and leadership. Following John’s twitter stream and his posts is like having your own curiousity bot scouring the web for bits of insight, and then bringing them home to assemble and interpret.

John will find the odd quote, the revealing example, and the assumption-stomping question to help you expand your perspective. Even better, John usually comments on what he finds, not only by evaluating ideas (which is quite useful in and of itself) but also by showing you where else to look to develop your own opinion.  John’s thinking is so wide ranging he’ll connect dots that aren’t even on the same page.

• Teams in Online Organizations Need Both Online Pages and Online Groups
• The role of knowledge management is to enable shared contexts
• Do you know social business theory?

Thomas Vander Wal
@vanderwal
PersonalInfoCloud (blog)

Thomas is an expert in big data and industry level problems and systems. Thomas is also a philosopher of science who works the gaps  beween epistemology,  ontology and everyday life. Thomas has that rather rare ability to tranlate the structure, dymanics, constraints, and complexities of the acual software engineering challenge into social language that explains how people work. He never confuses human processing with data processing, or vice versa. Thomas’s combination of logic and warmth make complex ideas more welcoming to the novice techie reader, and his posts leave you feeling smarter, kinder and more capable.

• Getting Beyond Simple Social
• Social Scaling and Maturity

A funny thing happened on the way to the end of this post….

I sent each Frame-Changer a copy of my draft so that they could correct any mistakes or add any information.  No one had anything for me to revise. But, each one demurred at the suggestion that s/he was an ‘expert’ — they all see themselves as co-learners. And, they all recommended other experts who they claimed had a unique and valuable perspective to offer.  I hope to write another post that includes their recommendations along with the other valuable Frame-Changers that I didn’t fit into this first post.

In the meantime, take advantage of the opportunities to be challenged and to learn from these Frame Changers. Subscribe to their blogs, follow them on Twitter, and look for them on LinkedIn. And, engage with them on their blogs and on Google+ .

The best way to learn, I think, is to hash out ideas and questions with people who are comfortable challenging ‘accepted wisdom’ and experimenting with new ideas.  These 7 Frame Changers challenge conventional wisdom fabulously well, and they’ll make organizations better by changing the way we see the promise of social technology.

Social Technologies — all those different tools we talk about as ‘social media’ — are creating the opportunity for
a social change trifecta.

Social technologies are making it possible for us to transform how individuals, organizations and economics interact with each other, in ways that can help all three thrive.

Social technologies make rich, complex, widespread, accessible communication possible. That’s exactly the kind of communication we need to really free ourselves of the constraints of previous models of organizing and working together.

We often forget that the constraints we pushing up against now, constraints like disengagement, organizational silos, and competition without cooperation, all result from ‘obstructed’ communication.

When communication is obstructed, people and organizations have unequal access to the knowledge, the allies and the influence they need to make sure they thrive.

Individuals can’t share themselves fully, organizations can’t coordinate effectively, and commercial communities can’t negotiate fairly because we can’t get everyone to the table, get everyone talking, and get everyone listening well enough to act in ways that benefit all.

Social Technologies create the opportunity for change at all three levels of productive participation.

• At the Individual level, social technologies give us tools for self-expression, self-affirmation, voice and agency. They give us places to participate and actual things to do that can make a difference.

• At the Organizational level, social technologies connect us and coordinate us through communication networks and locations. They let us find the information and the colleagues we need, when we need them. They let us share resources so that we work more efficiently, and share ideas so that we work more effectively. They let us collaborate to pursue shared purpose.

• At the Economic level, social technologies help organizations rethink their relationships with their stakeholders. They let organizations align and negotiate with stakeholders across both similarities and differences.

Social technologies make it possible for organizations to connect with other organizations and actors to create communities that surpass the functionality of markets.  These communities of commerce can create new types of economic opportunity for organizations large and small, because they offer different terms for conducting commerce. These communities have the social and technical structures to let us distribute the total value generated by our interdependent work in a way that is more fair.

Social Technologies work because they subvert and circumvent the kinds of power dynamics that organizations depended on when communication was more constrained.

Social Technologies Make Democratic Participation Possible

These technologies can make real the dream of democratic participation by individuals in organizations, of democracy as a guiding process in organizations, and of democratic negation within the economy for a more just distribution of net value.

A bonus opportunity is that social technologies make it possible for changes at any level to stimulate, support and power change at other levels. By design, social technologies integrate individual communication with group communication with stakeholder communication. Shift one level of communication and you nudge them all.

For example, digital collaborative work systems organize colleagues around shared goals and shared purpose while simultaneously making it possible for individuals to contribute to work projects that are personally meaningful. While both collaborative work and individual opportunity for meaningful work have always been potentially linked, social technology tools that routinize collaboration make personal connection the default option, not the occasional benefit.

We need leaders who can see the Trifecta of Possibility

As promising as they are, social technologies create only the possibility of these interacting opportunities for change. Social technologies still require ‘leadership’ from managers and engaged participation by most members before these opportunities can lead to real change.

Before we can really take advantage of social technologies for liberating us as individuals, organizations and economies, we need to recognize that change at one level requires change at all levels.

Social business advocates who talk about how technology can transform organizations also must address:

• How will these same social technologies create opportunity for individuals?

• When social technologies put pressure on an organization’s relationships with other organizations, how can we use this pressure to transform inter-organizational (economic) relationships?

Leaders must think bigger. They can’t just focus on transforming their particular work organization. Leaders must also have a vision of how the individuals who compose the organization will transform, and how the economic communities these organizations participate in should be transformed.

We’ve talked about how making organizations “social” requires leadership as well as technology. But in fact, what social organizations really require is for people — not just managers but all members — to think bigger about the kinds of changes social technologies can support for us.

Social organizations will thrive has members are freed to become more human, and as stakeholder communities are pressed to become more just.

If we choose to be truly visionary, social technology can drive all three forms of change, so that we all thrive.

Must see also:

If Social Business is the Answer, What is the Question? 3 Driving Forces, by Deb Lavoy at CMSWire.com

Factories: The Original Social Businesses by Anne McEwan, Phd The Smart Work Company

When will “Social Business” Become “Social Change Business”?

Image: WinPlaceShow Some rights reserved by Professor of Death

What does it mean for organizations to become more “social”?

Becoming “social” means that more people across the organization can contribute their ideas and have influence. Why? Because social technologies make it possible for more people to have Voice.

What is Voice?

Voice is having a say with the expectation that you will also be heard. Voice is one of  famous options for individuals who are dissatisfied with governments and organizations.¹ Voice is the only option through which people can be constructive and make a difference.

Along with Exit, Loyalty and Neglect, Voice  is also one of four ways to imagine organization members across the spectrum from ‘engaged’ to ‘disengaged’.²

Organization members who are engaged have Voice. They are able to contribute because their ideas can be heard. Organization members without Voice can only be compliant (loyal) or be disengaged (neglectful). Organization members who don’t have effective Voice and have somewhere to go simply leave (exit).

When Members Lack Voice

If you’ve never worked in non-social organization, you may not realize just how common it is not to have Voice. It’s not only common, it’s awful. Not having Voice means you have no way to speak up, no way to be heard and thus no way to have a positive impact outside your immediate purview. Being without voice means that what you want and what you think can easily be ignored.

Organizational structures like bureaucracies, hierarchies, and silos make broad-scale, effective Voice difficult.

The combination of the power dynamics and the lack of interactive communication up, down and across these organizational boundaries means that people have few options for getting their ideas outside their immediate group. They have no way to connect with others who share their interests, concerns, or sense of purpose,  or to connect with others whose skills or roles enable them to transform an idea into an innovation.

Social Technologies Enable Voice

Social technologies within and across organizations are intentionally designed to cross structural barriers and stakeholder boundaries. And, they are designed with the expectation that users/ employees/ members/ constituents will initiate their own participation.

Social technologies are biased towards Voice and away from silencing.

With social media technologies like SocialCRM, Social Intranets, systems of engagement, digital communities, activity streaming, and social collaboration systems, everyone from employees to customers to interested constituents to fans can find a place to speak and a forum in which they might be heard.

For example, instead of waiting for the corporate retreat to train folks on a new initiative, a member with an idea to contribute to this initiative can comment on a blog post, or start a conversation on the organization’s social intranet. Instead of waiting for an annual performance review, an employee can list the skills she’d like to develop on her online profile, so that the HR folks sponsoring training classes can find her and sign her up. Instead of waiting for the company to upgrade their product and finally include the tool you really want, you can connect with them in customer forums to discuss the specific features you need next.

Social technologies don’t insure that your voice is heard, listened to, and responded to. We all know what it’s like to tweet about a customer service issue and never hear back from the twitter account of the organization responsible for the service failure. But, social media makes it more likely that people’s Voices will be heard, because their participation is located somewhere specific, visible to others, easy to find, and stored for later access.

Influence Without Social Technologies

It used to be that, if you wanted to have Voice in an organization and you didn’t have your own platform (i.e., you were not powerful yourself),  you had to align yourself with someone who was powerful. You had to rely on — really, depend upon — some other person to speak for you. This process for getting your voice represented by someone else only worked occasionally, because that person had his or her own interests to represent, and could easily distort your message (intentionally or not) for their own needs.

With social media, participants get to speak for themselves, in their own words, advancing their own reputations, creating their own relationships throughout the organization’s network.

And, with social technologies, participants get to speak in ways that matter. Voice is not only critical to innovation, collaboration, service, crowdsourcing, and knowledge sharing, but voice is also critical to a sense of contribution, a sense of personal significance, and to the creation of personal meaning.

Voice is not freedom, but …

In organizational networks, the Voice enabled by social technology is not the same as “freedom”. Just because social technologies give us a platform for speaking doesn’t mean we should say what we want, to whom we want, when we want, and in the style we want.

Voice operates within the constraints of context and common courtesy. Words that are irrelevant (e.g., thread hijacking), words that exist only to be mean (e.g., trolling) and words that are tone deaf (e.g., all promotion and no response) are not Voice — they are noise.

Social media doesn’t create Voice, it makes Voice possible. When Voice is possible, influence, contribution and meaning are also possible. With Voice, stakeholders can stay engaged with each other and with the organization in ways that make a positive difference.

See also:
4 Reasons Why Socializing Your Intranet Makes Organizational Change Easier
Are Your Social Business Systems Designed for Extraction or Contribution?
Growing Social: 4 Different Paths to Social Organizations
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization

Could E2.0 really mean Enlightenment 2.0? by Deb Lavoy
White Paper: Social Intranets and Employee Engagement: An HR Solution for Meaningful Morale Building by ThoughtFarmer

 Re-creating Reputation Through Authentic Interaction: Using Social Media to Connect with Individual Stakeholders (book chapter, by me)

References:
¹ Hirschman, Albert O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
² Farrell, D. (1983). Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect as Responses toJob Dissatisfaction: A Multidimensional Scaling Study. Academy of Management Journal, 26(4), 596-607.
Rusbult, C. E., Farrell, D., Rogers, G., & Mainous III, A. G. (1988). Impact of Exchange Variables on Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect: An integrative model of responses to declining job satisfaction.Academy Of Management Journal, 31(3), 599-627.

Images: Puffing Up Some rights reserved by Property#1, Chirping Carol Some rights reserved by bogenfreund, on Flickr

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

Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”.

It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community –  in one network.

We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than maximizing profits. And, while we treasure communities where we create collective meaning and build relationships, we often shy away from using these relationships to help each other make a living. We ask too much of the market format, and expect too little from the community format.

It’s become easier to see how these two different models, the market focused on economic transactions and the community focused on meaning & social interchange, diverge in both form and feeling.

Ebusiness and social technologies have made it easier for us to buy and sell based on prices alone. At the same time, they’ve made it easier for us to build strong and rich networks of interpersonal and collective relationships that sustain us socially.

In online markets, the ease of finding a lower price or quicker delivery has led us to dis-intermediate the buyer-seller social relationships we relied on before. We’ve learned to sacrifice the comfort, the security, the qualitative connection, and any interpersonal meaning we found in these commercial exchanges in favor of reduced search costs, lower prices, and increased economic efficiency.

Online communities, facilitated by social technologies, have created more meaning for us, as we’ve been able to find and interact with people who are like us (or unlike us in desirable ways), who have similar interests, values, and goals, who can recognize and affirm who we are, and with whom we can pursue a shared social purpose.

Although we often draw on online communities for social support, learning, and collaboration, we have sometimes shied away from using them to sell or buy or earn money. We worry about burdening our relationships with something as crass as pricing or payments, since we fear that these will change the nature of our interactions and deprive the community of its innocence – or its nobility.

These concerns and these hesitations are appropriate, since markets aren’t supposed to be about creating meaning, and communities aren’t supposed to be about extracting excess rents. Markets and Communities are different models for working together.

But what about our vision of markets where relationships matter and communities where we can make a living while we explicitly pursue values beyond profits?

Enter the Community of Commerce.

As I’ve been researching online eMarketplaces like eBay and Etsy, I’ve identified that while the dominant model is a marketplace that’s all about efficiency and economic exchange, an emerging model is a marketplace that combines the exchange of goods and services with the exchange of social meaning. This combination of economic and social exchange is intentional, motivational, and wickedly effective.

Instead of seeing this model as some sort of ‘not-free’, values- constrained market, let’s give it its own category. Let’s call this model a Community of Commerce.

Defining a Community of Commerce

A community of commerce is a network of organizations and individuals that buy, sell, and exchange goods and services within a collectively-defined community culture, a culture that is based on articulated, shared, more-than-economic values.

Back in 2000, Stacy Bressler & Charles Grantham published a book “Communities of Commerce: Building Internet business communities to accelerate growth, minimize risk, and increase customer loyalty.” Their thesis was that businesses should learn how to transcend geography so that they could identify and connect with strategically relevant business partners. Bressler & Grantham’s motivating contrast was between off-line and online business relationships; they used the terms “communities of commerce” and “online business communities” interchangeably.

I want to expand the definition of “communities of commerce” to focus on how the tensions, tradeoffs and opportunities of a commercial network that puts community first will differ in economically and socially important ways. Trying to stack a network for exchanging meaning on top of a network of economic exchange won’t work – it’s not like we can simply add “meaningplace” to “marketplace” and call it a coherent business model.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post my efforts to define what’s distinctive about a community of commerce, to explain how it’s related to other progressive business models, and to begin to unfold the tensions and opportunities that arise when buying & selling are inseparable from and integral to the mutual exchange of meaning.

I’d love your thoughts about the concept and especially your suggestions for defining it.

See also:

Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless
Purpose is the Killer App: Why Organizations Need Social Business Tools
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization
Insights about Authenticity from the Open Community Book Tour

Image: Indian Garden Flowers Some rights reserved by EssjayNZ

While it’s true that I’m an unabashed advocate for social technologies as tools for transforming organizations, there are lots of reasons why we’d want social technologies in our workplaces and ‘together places’. Social technologies help increase engagement and make organizational democracy easier — just to name the top two reasons.

But the biggest reason to like social technologies? They can help us keep the big picture in mind, even as we pursue our own local goals and tasks.

My personal favorite bit of social technology is the social intranet– a socially enabled organizational commons, where people can find the resources they need to get their work done. I like social intranets because they help build community and connection from the organization’s core, allowing everyone (not just a few early adopting departments) to get a taste of active connecting to the community.

From a social psychological perspective, there’s a lot about a social intranet that facilitates collective behavior. The social commons that is the intranet helps us keep our eyes on the community’s purpose, helps us see progress being made, helps us see our contribution to the whole, and give us a useful and relevant place to add our voice.

Social technologies do this ‘instrumentally’, in that they have features designed to accomplish these goals, and they do this psychologically, by triggering cognitive and emotional responses that in turn nudge collectively-oriented behavior.

Psychological Mechanisms Triggered by Social Intranets

We attribute a large part of the shift to collectively-oriented behavior to a prominent social psychological mechanism — social identity.

When individuals are made aware of the larger organization– say, by seeing the larger entity represented on their social intranet screen in the form of logos, icons, and visuals — their identity as a member of that larger entity becomes more salient, leads them to think first of themselves as a member, leads them to think that their interests and the organization’s interests are the same, and leads them to act in the organization’s interest. Voila, triggering social identity triggers collectively-oriented behavior.

An odd bit of research suggests another subtle but valuable way that a social intranet can lead to collectively-oriented behavior by shifting individuals to be biased towards “global processing” instead of “local processing”.

[Global processing bias is usually a good thing in groups. It's assumed to reflect a more open mind, and to be somewhat more conducive to creativity. ]

This new research suggests that individuals can be nudged to think more of the whole than of the details, if they are exposed to an ‘urban’ environment. An urban environment is more populated, more full, more active, and more energized.

So here’s the conceptual leap:

If the social technologies we use in the workplace function as our ‘environment’, an “urban” technological environment could trigger individuals to think more holistically. It could trigger us to focus on the big picture, and to think first of the global issues over specific details.

I know, this is a superbly nerdy post. But don’t you think the concept is intriguing?

The cognitive mechanism for triggering a global bias is shorter than the mechanisms of social identity. And, it bypasses the self-concept (always so complex), and just works on shifting cognitive perspective. Shorter doesn’t mean better, but sometimes more automatic processes are so subtle we miss them.

It’s intriguing to think of the myriad of ways that our technology influences our most ‘automatic’ psychological processes. If we are looking to ‘sell’ the value of social technologies in the workplace, or even better to tweak them until they bias us towards ‘good’ and not just ‘different’, we need to keep wondering how they are working to shift the ways we think.

Notes:
Hat tip to the Research Digest of the British Psychological Association: Do urban environments trigger a mindset that’s focused on the bigger picture?

In my first contribution to Social Business News, I’m reminding organizations that want to align their social media messages to focus their efforts on leadership.

I find it pretty frustrating that so many social media advocates recommend “governance” or “policy” or “control” when an organization finds there are too many voices, not enough voices, or the “wrong” voices aiming to represent the organization online.

My post on Social Business News, “Too Many Wrong Messages On Social Media? Try Leadership, Not Control” outlines my argument and recommendations in full. Here’s the takeaway:

If employees are making “mistakes” on social media, that’s not the fault of the organization’s governance, but the fault of the organization’s leadership.

If your employees use social media to talk too much or not enough or not about the right things, that’s a leadership opportunity for you. Don’t concentrate on policing the perimeter with control tools and governance initiatives. Instead, lead from the core of your organization and help members learn to express the organization’s brand and demonstrate the organization’s values as they represent the organization.

 

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Social Business News is a website dedicated to covering enterprise social media, collaboration, governance, technology, and change management. It’s updated every day with original content from a broad range of social media, social business and social organization experts.

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