January 2004 Archives

I bumped into the transcript of a speech given by Clay Shirky last year called "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy". Don't ask me how, I honestly don't remember how I got there.

This is a great text on social software, defined by clay as "software that supports group interaction", which really opened my eyes on some key issues regarding group dynamics in general and online communities in particular.

The core thesis is that, in any social group setting whether online or offline, the danger of explosion comes from within the group itself, and not from the outside. Quoting W.R. Bion, a psychologist of the middle of the 20th century, Clay details three patterns which I personally have seen unveiling several times:

The first is sex talk (...) And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members. You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad. (....) So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way." Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion. Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.

Hence, it becomes necessary to have a group structure, i.e. a set of norms, rules and rituals in order to protect the group from itself. This is especially true if we are talking about large, long-living and heterogeneous groups:

Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

Clay derives very interesting conclusions from this. He emphasizes for example that you cannot separate technical and social issues when designing social software.

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.

Group dynamics are so complex, changing and social in nature that online tools to support collaboration must be of the "small pieces loosely joined together" kind.

A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration. It's lightweight, it's loosely coupled, it's easy to extend, it's easy to break down. And it's not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we're taking all of these tools and we're extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.

The typical "one-fits-all" collaborative applications with a web interface such as those that large companies buy for their employees are thus likely to be ill-adapted to the needs of the group. There is too much design in them, and not enough emergence. All social interactions take place within the boundaries of the technical design, made by some remote project team who decided that "this is the way people should be collaborating". Managers like that, but groups don't. How many people really like Lotus Notes? What groups need, and communities of practice in particular, is

three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.

The biggest mistake social software developers can do is actually to get carried away by their own design and build a flashy tower of Babel which, at best, was designed to fit the needs of a given group in a given context, and too often is designed for a hypothetical group whose behavior is mechanically predictable, and whose constitution is pre-coded and parametered by management (the guys who actually buy the software). I made that mistake myself in 2000, when I was designing knexsis

On Missboulette, this quote from Steinbeck in "East of Eden":

"Our species is the only creatice species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."

Creation is the act of a person. Innovation is the act of a group. That's why personal weblogs come first, then collaborative spaces.

George's report "Blogging the Market" is a very interesting read, even though I sometimes think its going a bit to far in its manifesto-like tone. I agree with the fundamentals, but I think the actual change in corporate governance and marketing practices resulting from the widespread use of weblogs will happen gradually over time. The conclusion wording of "be assimilated or annihilated" may turn some readers off. I don't think the networked/knowledge economy is actually "Killing Mrs Hierarchy", but only keeping her in the limits of her domain of competence: Attracting talent and investment and allocating them on the right projects. Networks and Communities will be in charge of cultivating a shared body of knowledge, making sense out of it, and proposing actions.

George's question about "blogging for profit" is an interesting one. I found the examples of Macromedia and Gizmodo particularly representative of blogging associated with for profit organizations. The former expects increased product revenues from establishing more trusted relations between the company and its technical clients, the latter from expected referrals and advertising. Another example combining a little bit of both is Dave Leggett's blog on Just-Auto an online for fee information source for business and research professionals of the automotive industry. The blog makes the web site much more lively and brings a human touch to it. It's no longer just a storefront window, but you can actually peek through the window, see what people are doing in there, and get a feeling of their trustworthiness.

But there are other ways, I think, to "blog for profit", especially when the blog is no longer personal but collective. If the content published reflects interesting conversations taking place among the community members, then you might be willing to pay for membership to participate more actively in community events or download full reports (motivation for learning can be powerful enough to pay for a good experience) , or to pay for sponsorship if you have good reasons to help this community grow. That's what Etienne Wenger is trying to do with the blog of CPSquare, "the community of practice on communities of practice".

Last thursday was a milestone for our CoP-1 community. For the first time, our monthly meeting meeting was not organized around one KM project of one of the members, but around a common presentation of three of them.

Topic was "Metrics of KM projects". Patrick Boisserpe, director for documentation at IFP started with a presentation on why and what we measure in KM projects. René Peltier, head of the KM department at Airbus elaborated on the methods used to determine the relevant metrics, and I concluded with a list of typical metrics used in the four families (activity, output, value, business outcome).

The final ppt presentation (in French) bears the logos of our three companies, which looks good. The content is not bad either. Feel free to ask for it.

Following Seb's recommendation, I read "We Media" over the week-end (download report there)
Though this report is by and large about the media industry and written for journalists, there are a few things that all business people should be looking at.

What I found particularly interesting is how journalists use weblogs to

"invite their audience into the process by which they produce the news (...) Many journalists who are weblogging are doing just that -exposing the raw material of their story-in-progress, posting complete text of interviews after the story is published, and inviting comments, fact checking and feedback that contribute to follow-up stories"

Interactive journalism uses audiences as an extension of the editorial staff to develop a broader base of voices and opinions. It pushes media companies into relinquishing control of the story, that they no longer own. I like this idea about relinquishing control, which I think is always key to understanding the knowledge economy. Rusty Foster, founder of Kuro5hin.org:

"The story itself is not the final product, it's just the starting point, because ultimately the goal of every story is to start a discussion, to start a lot of other people saying what they think about it"

I experienced something like this when I wrote an article for "Les Echos", a French business newspaper, and was asked to make it shorter. So I did. The short article was published last september, and whenever readers contacted me about it (I had two or three), I had them read the full article on my weblog, where people could comment on it.

"We Media" makes the case that "audiences are shaping the future of news and information". I see many implications of this for Marketing and Communication staff of big companies like mine, where this would translate into "customers are shaping the future of corporate communication". This quote from Malcolm Gladwell is worth meditating:

"The future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk"

Yes, indeed. Aggregation of social capital will become more and more the key to business success. It's back to the Cluetrain Manifesto again !!!!

I love this cartoon from Celemi corp. in Sweden.
I often have this sort of feeling in my company when I am asked to justify knowledge management or e-learning projects by cost savings.

On ManyWorlds I downloaded Perfect Information and Perverse Incentives: Costs and Consequences of Transformation and Transparency from Michael Schrage
It is a truly brilliant paper, which argues, based on documented evidence both in the military and in finance that "the benefit of information superiority may be vastly overestimated".

The key idea is that in a world of information overflow, where more and more analysis is needed to interpret information, the natural tendency to distribute the burden of information analysis on many people often generates different interpretations, thus more disagreements and more decision-making problems. "Dramatically more information means dramatically more power and influence of analysts (...) it gives more ammunition to the disputants"

Even worse, more information and more transparency on what is really happening puts a new stressful burden on the management. "The more transparent investments are, the more accountable investors are. The more transparent the enterprise becomes, the more accountable management becomes. Verification increasingly substitutes for trust (...) Just as in finance, the rise of transparency creates perverse incentives for military decision-makers to take refuge in deliberate ambiguity, outright concealment and 'cover your ass' risk-averse behaviors. Individual accountability gets blurred into institutional accountability."
The conclusion in the form of a paradox: "The more choices you have, the more your values matter".

Indeed, if information analysts share a same set of values, it is likely that their interpretation of a same set of informations will be at least compatible and reinforcing one another if they are not similar. There was this dot-com era idea that "Information Wants To Be Free", and this debate over "if so, who's going to pay for it?". Michael's paper reinforces my personal conviction that "information wants to be free within communities", which by the way also answers the question about who's going to pay for it (communities!).

It makes me think of a paper by Alex Bennett former Chief Knowledge Officer (I think) of the Department of the (US) Navy, where she wrote, back in 2001:

"Closed system [industrial age] management thinking contains a world of walls, barriers and dividers, including functional stovepipes. While organizational structures are important, if they are constructed in a restrictively closed manner where individuals are not exposed to a larger view they provide limited perspective which can inadvertently lead to dead-end solutions. Like the caged bird, closed system organizations are at increased risk of not being able to adapt to changing conditions.

Today, there is a radical shift from closed to open system thinking taking place in a broad range of disciplines, which is increasing an organization's ability to remain adaptable in face of the changing environment. A key to understanding adaptability rests in understanding the two main differences between closed and open systems; flow across boundaries and flexible infrastructure. Flow across boundaries (in the context of the Knowledge Age) portrays the actual interconnectedness and transference of data, information, knowledge, patterns, models and ways of informing and learning. Infrastructure (in the context of the Knowledge Age) means not only the tangible physical organizational support structures, but also intangibles such as operating rules, regulations, culture and philosophical constructs. A balance between these two factors needs made, else breakdown will ensue."

Why Can't We Get Anything Done?:

"Companies often confuse talking with doing. They think that talking about doing something is the same thing as doing it! That planning is the same as doing. That giving presentations is the same as doing. That making reports is the same as doing. Or even that making a decision to do something is the same as doing it. All of those errors occur with alarming regularity in companies today.

Mistaking talk for action is worse than just a simple error: Talk can actually drive out action. Studies about the way that meetings actually work demonstrate that negative people are perceived as being smarter than positive people -- that is, being critical is interpreted as a sign of intelligence. You see this attitude in business all the time: The fastest way for me to seem smart is to cut you down. So you come up with an idea, and I come up with a thousand different reasons why that idea won't work. Now everyone sees you as dumb and me as smart -- and we've created an environment where no one wants to come up with ideas."

This gives an indication of why this country is paralyzed. Too many smart people from Polytechnique, ENA and Corps des Mines who know they are smart (they have been told so) and who make a living judging the actions of other less smart people. But there's worse: Not so smart people in France often try to boost their ego by imitating smart people.
That's what we call French wit: A lot of interesting conversations and little action. The Establishment of smart people.

On April 18. 2003, at 4:00 PM, our little daughter Rose, aged 2, fell into a pond and drowned. This sudden death left us heartbroken, and it changed my life.

I think I now understand a little more what human suffering is. I also know that when your heart breaks, Love and Hope can also flow out of it. I learned the virtue of humility. When you finally recognize that you are not the center of the world, your stress level lowers and your life can take a completely new meaning.

"- It's not what you know
- It's knowing when you know that you don't know.
- It's knowing who knows what. It's intuition, insight, and years of making mistakes.
- It's knowing when to approach a key customer and let him know you're listening.
- It's knowing whether he likes golf or fishing or building houses for the poor.
- It's knowing how to get the best price for a flight, a car, or a mortgage on the Internet.
- It's the knowledge of the hands-knowing how to keep that old lathe running smoothly.
- It's the ability to know what's wrong with something just by the smell, whether it's a gourmet dish or a car engine.
- It's knowing how to work as a team.
- It's knowing how to really listen.
- It's knowing when not to say anything. To let others learn for themselves.
- It's knowing that you don't need to know it all to have all the answers.
- It's knowing that the next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
- It's knowing that you can make mistakes and admit it.
- It's knowing that innovation comes from making more mistakes faster than your competition and learning from them.
- As an individual, it's knowing why you work for a living. Is it to pay the rent? Or do you have the luxury of looking for meaning?
- As an organization, it's knowing why your firm exists and what, if anything, you owe to society."
(Brian Hackett - Sept 2001)

I am fortunate enough to have the luxury of looking for meaning, and it makes me a happy man.

I wish you all the same for 2004. Happy New Year!