December 2013 – Page 2 – Harold Jarche

The value of Twitter

2013-12-06 by Harold Jarche

“From @SteveMartinToGo interview: “Writing is now so essential to our lives online. Sometimes it’s the only thing people see of us.” So true.” – @thinkitcreative

What an anonymous British sheep farmer can teach us about the power of Twitter: “though it took me a while to realize it, I had the tools to connect to thousands of people around the world” – via @mathewi

“Twitter gives you an amplifier for your voice… It cuts out the middleman (I don’t need you to interpret and translate my life and my work for other people – sorry journalists but I’m a shepherd not an idiot). It lets you find your niche (and that niche can be massive). It lets you sell things … and it lets you connect with weirdly interesting other people.”

The real value of Twitter in 1 image, by @ValaAfshar @tom_peters @sandymaxey

Rich people don’t actually create the jobs – via @eprenen

But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of the company’s customers’ ability and willingness to pay for the company’s products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that “rich entrepreneurs and investors” create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

@Kasparov63: “21st century democracy needs to adapt to 21st-century technology. The gap between information to public & government response has grown too big.”

Some fundamental changes

2014-10-292013-12-03 by Harold Jarche

But neither the flat organization nor empowered employees have been fully realized. The reason is that most of us have been working over the years to solve problems by creating new and improved companies, rather than by equipping individuals with their own empowering tools. What we still need are tools that make individuals both independent of companies and better able to engage with companies (or with organizations of any kind). Social tools alone won’t do it — especially ones that are still corporate silos. (And, forgive me, even Quora is an example of that.) – Doc Searls: Answering “Why has the empowered employee predicted in the Cluetrain Manifesto not emerged?” in Quora

You cannot read the rest of Doc’s answer unless you log into Quora, which is a pretty good example that most social media companies are just as control-oriented as any industrial organization was. If you have not read The Cluetrain, you should at least peruse some of its 95 theses. The initial thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto is that markets are conversations, but I think that theses 10 through 12 describe the big potential change in relationships brought on by the Internet.

#10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

#11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

#12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

As Doc mentions, the big challenge is equipping individuals with their own empowering tools. These tools are hardware, software, and most importantly, skills and attitudes. Taking control of our learning is a challenge for individuals used to working inside hierarchies that demand conformity and compliance. Note that without compliance training there would be almost no e-learning industry. The deck is still stacked against networked individuals.

So if you read the Cluetrain back in 1999, or have since quoted it, then it’s time to think about how to implement it. I have written about hierarchies and connected organizations for the past few weeks here. I have no doubt that major systemic change is necessary to deal with the wicked problems that face society today. Critical components that need to change are how we work and how we learn in organizations. That change has to start with people. Individuals need to build their own interdependent learning networks.

This is not a leadership or a management responsibility. This is a people issue. Each one of us should start seeking knowledge, building upon it, and sharing it, all in public. In this way we can develop an aggressively intelligent and engaged citizenry.

For the first time in history we have the means to learn together without any institutional or organizational intermediaries. We don’t need schools, or even corporate MOOC’s. It is not easy, but it is possible to create a global group of co-learners around almost any problem or subject. What’s holding us back? I think we are holding ourselves back.

If participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally, then it’s time to make some fundamental changes. Here is an example of re-thinking market relationships. Doc Searls is working with the Vendor Relationship Management project, which is “based on the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy. To be free —”

Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.
Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.
Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

Similar changes can be made in education and employment.

Free learners are more valuable than captive ones.
Free employees are more valuable than captive ones.

Thanks to Jon Husband for inspiring this little manifesto.

Ask what value you can add

2020-03-172013-12-02 by Harold Jarche

Remember when someone older than you first got an email account? They probably sent you at least one joke, and it was likely to a long list of recipients. Actually, they probably sent a lot of jokes. There is a similar phenomenon with social media. While it may not be jokes, we are inundated with over-sharing of the same stuff.

First of all, there is a difference between sharing and making something public. Posting a social bookmark to a service like Diigo does not create additional noise for your networked peers in a social network. This is making your work public. But posting your latest collection of webpages in an activity stream is sharing. Doing it poorly adds more noise than signal.

For example, I recently passed on a tagged collection of social bookmarks as a result of a conversation in an online community of practice. I shared this tag when the occasion arose. I did not post every time I created a new bookmark. In my PKM framework of Seek > Sense > Share, this is called discernment, or knowing when, and with whom to share.

As good social learners, sharing is not as important as knowing when to share. This does not preclude us from collecting lots of information (Seek), but it should make us consider appropriate ways to share. We should be ready to share when the time is right.

The most important and difficult part of PKM is sense-making. Little should be shared if there has been no value added. The value I added when sharing my bookmarks was not so much in terms of adding my own insights, which were negligible, but there was value in the timing. The context for sharing was optimal.

Hierarchies are obsolete

2023-11-142013-12-01 by Harold Jarche

Your hierarchy is the smallest & least valuable part of your network — Simon Terry

Hierarchies may technically be networks, but they are merely simple branching ones. They work well when information flows mostly in one direction: down. Hierarchies are good for command and control. They are handy to get things done in small groups. But hierarchies are rather useless to create, innovate, or change.

Image: Richard Dennison

We have known for quite a while that hierarchies are ineffective when things get complex. Matrix Management was an attempt to address the weakness of organizational silos resulting from simple, branching hierarchies. I remember in 1992 working on a capital project that required 17 signatures in order to proceed to the next step. By the time all the issues were addressed by a high ranking officer in the hierarchy, the situation had changed and we had achieved nothing, other than producing a lot of paper. During my 12 months on the project, no progress was made at all. In fact, the project later died. This was matrix management at defence headquarters.

Any hierarchy, even one wrapped in matrices, becomes an immovable beast as soon as it is created. The only way to get real change in a hierarchical organization is to create a new hierarchy. This is why reorganizations are so popular — and so ineffective. Most organizations still deal with complexity through reorganization. Just think of the last time a new CEO came in to ‘fix’ a large corporation.

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organising, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. —Charlton Ogburn: Merrill’s Marauders (Harper’s Magazine – 1957)

Reorganization has to be part of an organization, not something done to it. This is why everyone, from an individual contributor to the CEO, has to understand networks. Networks enable organizations to deal with complexity by empowering people to connect with whom they need to, without permission. Enterprise social network platforms epitomize this, usually letting anyone connect to another colleague, and where the default permission to get access to information is public.

Networks are in a state of perpetual Beta. Unlike hierarchies, they can continuously change shape, size, and composition, without the need for a formal reorganization. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well. Of course this means letting go of control. Hierarchies were essentially a solution to a communications problem. They are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and hard to share, and when connections with others were difficult to make. That time is over.

So here’s the situation — markets, competitors, customers, suppliers, are already highly connected. The Internet has done this. It is why a connected enterprise needs to be organized more like the Internet, and less like a tightly controlled machine.

@MarietjeD66 [Member of European Parliament (D66/ALDE Group)] RT @carlbildt [Foreign Minister of Sweden since 2006] Tried to sort out 21st century statecraft at #bf7 [Brussels Forum]. Hierarchies losing and networks gaining in a world of hyperconnectivity. [2012]