Backblog—Social Networking

Unfortunately, it's coming to be called the Spring Olympics .. but seriously, there's lots of snow at Whistler.

Also ... the 2101 Winter Olympics will be the first in history to have an independent media centre.  The rise of social media over the last five years means that the accreditation of various people-and-purpose users of social media has been a hotly-debated issue in the months coming up to the opening of the Games.

Vancouver's new inner-city arts and media delopment W2 Community Media Arts Centre opened yesterday.  One of its opening projects is the W2 Culture + Media House offered to social media users from around the world:

a 24/7 25 work-station centre for bloggers and twits and vloggers to get together, hang out, work, use high-speed broadband, co-mingle amongst people from all over the world, etc.

I'm glad to have been able to play a role in the development and evolution of this iinitiative, and these pictures tell a thousand stories.

 

W2 - From the Ground Up:


 
Find more photos like this on W2: Community Media Arts Vancouver BC

Jon Husband
Wirearchy

Ever since hearing of "Social Business Design"  – a term associated with the Dachis Group’s positioning as a blue-chip expertise-and-experience based consulting firm focusing on helping enterprises operate more effectively in an interconnected business environment, I have been struggling to clarify for myself what is meant by the term ’socially calibrated’ as used in the Group’s tag line.

"Social business design helps companies reinvent themselves into dynamic, socially calibrated organizations that gain constant value from their ecosystem of connections"

Please do not get me wrong … when I say I am struggling, I am not seeking to criticize.  I think the firm is on the right track, and I think parsing the syntax and vocabulary we are all bringing to this new party is an important exercise … mission-critical, in fact.

Here’s what I find on the Dachis Group’s web site that addresses ’social calibration’:

Hivemind

A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating. The social business hivemind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals. Physicists refer to this as “synchronous lateral excitation.”

Distributed governance
The social business hivemind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions: a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output. Employees approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.

Measurement and cultivation
Hivemindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions – analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on. The goal is always to gain insight into constituents’ attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and remeasured to move the dial.

The explanations on the site continue, explaining the importance of Dynamic Signals and Metafiltering, and culminate in analyzing the various elements of a connected enterprise-customer-employee ecosystem for meaning and this the co-creation of economic value for all parties to the ecosystem.

I like this.  I think that it’s becoming clear to many that we are into a world of increased and dynamic complexity, and that we need design principles and implementable practices that are based on the constant presence of flows of information and feedback loops within connected eco-systems of purpose and value.

This new environent has been building in scope, reach and intensity for years now.  I think that the Dachis Group has thought this through quite well.  But .. I am still wondering about ’social calibration’.

As I read the site’s explanation of the Dachis Group approach, it brought to mind the "sense-making" approach that is being promoted and taught by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge Network, and other leading-edge thinkers and practitioners (and I have opined previously on the similarities to socio-technical systems theory and leading-edge OD (organizational development) principles and practices).

It was about three weeks ago that I started noodling on this.  Back then I made a few notes to myself regarding what I thought ’social calibration’ might mean.  Here are those notes:

Social Calibration ?

I think it means that you look at the social ‘architecture’ of an enterprise, including its markets, customers and employees and how they interact with the organization’s business processes.

I think it means that (initially) based on observation and some knowledge of current patterns of behaviour in networks of people operating ‘on purpose’, you experiment with and implement

• new work designs
• hyperlinked productivity platforms for exchange and collaboration
• the aggregation and use of collective intelligence using tagging, enterprise search and other collaborative processes.

Before this, however, you set baselines or thresholds of organizational performance and productivity from which to measure forward performance,

And then you work at understanding what works, why it works and in what conditions it works really well or may not work.

From there you clarify where changes need to be made in leadership style, management practices, work design and organizational structure(s), internal and external communications and engagement, and performance measurement and support.

With an initial framework in place for watching and ‘nudging’ the ecosystem, you begin to show and publicize in realistic ways why these ways of working are important for both future organizational success and personal work satisfaction and enrichment.

How’s that for consultant-speak ?

I think that’s what I inferred, off the cuff, from the term ’socially calibrated’.

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Please bear in mind that the above points were just rough notes I made to myself before I went looking at the Group’s web site.

I am left with my struggles with the term ’social calibration’, which I do not doubt the Dachis Group has chosen carefully and wisely.

I think my struggle is with the question of "calibrate against what?", given that there are no real models of success against which to calibrate (which in my opinion is a large part of the ongoing frustration with the difficulty of calculating the ROI of implementing social computing in organizations).

Anyway … I don’t have any real answers to my questions, other than I think that if you compare my notes to the Dachis Group’s more complete explanation (on their web site) there are parallels and the general direction of thinking is aligned.

That said, I am sure we are all going to learn a lot about what works and what does not work in the coming decade.

Jon Husband
Wirearchy

An extract from David Armano’s recent post highlighting his and Jeff Dachis’ presentation at Web2.0 Expo …

The presentation below courtesy of the "embed" code provided in the post.

It’s Time to Clobber Social Media (And Get Down To Business)

We broke down what we think will be the building blocks of a more social business. Adaptations in people, process and technology. We talked about the benefits and value of “open cultures” (think Zappos) and the potential of connecting the ecosystem of an organization so that a new way of collaborating could co-exist with traditional hierarchy. (me .. see "wirearchy")

The audience seemed receptive.  More importantly, they seemed hungry.

Does social media really need “clobbering”? Not really—many businesses are reaping the benefits of communicating and engaging with their customers in new ways enabled via social technologies. We applaud this. And we think it’s only the beginning. Have a look at our presentation and let us know what you think. More importantly—ask yourself this: How ready for social business are you?

There has recently been a spate of aggregation of the higher-profile individuals in the Enterprise 2.0 field, resulting in the launch of groups like (for example) Dachis and Altimeter, and the coming together of Ross Mayfield’s SocialText with Dion Hinchcliffe’s capabilities.

The term “social business design” is increasingly being attached to such initiatives.

I am still trying to figure out what these folks (and others, like me) are trying to sell with “social business design” that is any different than the socio-technical systems design field (a sub-domain of OD, if you will) that found some early enthusiasm in the 60’s, established some credibility in the 70’s and early 80’s and then withered away as the western world got into business reengineering.

Except that we now have the technological infrastructure and a myriad of platforms and applications that can actually help the workers interact more easily and to greater / better effect.  I do understand that.

I’m on record as believing that all this renewed interest in “social business design” will result in a resurgence of the OD (organizational development) field … its principles track very closely with the innovations in management Gary Hamel is suggesting are necessary in his book The Future of Management.

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Socio-technical Systems – from wikipedia:

Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.

In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.

Jon Husband
Wirearchy