Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.
I recently tweeted an observation of David Weinberger's on how our language has shifted:
Over the past decade, we’ve gone from talking about social circles to social networks. A circle draws a line around us. Networks draw lines among us.
I liked the way he phrased it, and I also note that it is the word social that connects the concepts because we are, at our core, social beings. The observation also begs the question about how those lines get drawn, and this leads me back to an inquiry I've been having for some time. The word social is now attached to so many concepts that it is hard to keep up with the proliferation of terms that are coopting it and putting it in different contexts. (Just as when I was young I had trouble parsing "ice cream social" because I didn't see "social" as a noun.)
Because I am called upon to give talks about, uh, social media and the like, I thought it best to take the time to do a very quick run-down of the terms and my sources for the definitions that I use. This is necessarily an incomplete list (see the word "proliferating" above). Here's my current take, divided into three pieces: technology, practice, analysis. First, social media.
Social media appears to be the term that is showing the most legs in terms of collective use with respect to the web-based digital technologies that shift focus from content to conversation, from publishing to interacting. Penny Hagen, who nicely ties together some of the definitional threads to provide A working definition of social media and why we couldn’t answer the question, captures thinking from Danah Boyd and Clay Shirky that suggests that social media is both about technology and the social habits that are being entrained by our use of it. So the media is not just the message (as per McLuhan) but it is the message and the messengers.
Technology
Social software becomes, therefore, the technology side of the definition of social media, and we use it when we refer specifically to software that enables and supports personal interaction. The personal interaction becomes social to the extent that there are named and identifiable people on each end (or in all the threads) of the transaction. These may be either tools, platforms, or social networking sites/services.
Social tools are the individual programs and products that use, either in concert or individually, for example, blogs and wikis.
Social software platforms consist of suites of social tools that are packaged as solutions aimed at one or more business segments. Jive, for example, is a collaboration platform designed with a social perspective. Ning is perhaps the largest open (free) platform available to groups of any size or inclination who want to form a community or to collaborate. Andrew McAfee
Note that existing software platforms that predate Web 2.0 can be socialized by the addition of social tools, but the design centers for these platforms remains unchanged (SharePoint, even SP10, remains designed around content management.)
Social computing. Dion Hinchcliffe, who is so talented at graphic representations of the relationships among concepts tackled social computing as the overarching and encompassing term for the mishmash of themes and terms. I don't want to contradict him, but merely point out that each of us has to resolve the distinctions for ourselves and that his model is a good starting point for anyone who wants to try to make sense of this (as I am now doing for myself and sharing it with the expectation that it may help others start to make their own sense of things).
Social networking sites are a special case of social platforms. To use Danah Boyd's definition, they are
"web?based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi?public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.
Andrew McAfee has similarly used the term social networking service to refer to these sites, which include Facebook, MySpace, and so on.
Social bookmarking lets people share the URLs of websites that they want to revisit and organize them in a way that is browsable by others.
Social tagging offers the ability to provide descriptors for information artifacts that can be used by others, including bookmarks.
Practice
These technologies are changing the way we work, the ways in which we grow relationships with other human beings, and the ways that we process, filter, and give context to information. These are the practices that are emerging that make us comfortable with, dependent on, and successful using social media. It is in this area that some of the more interesting new terms are sprouting. I say "interesting" because the terms themselves challenge us to think anew about who and how we -- and our enterprises -- are in the world.
Social Business is a term proposed to lead us to rethink how business is done:
An organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web. (Stowe Boyd)
(Stowe also acknowledges the need to disambiguate this use of the term with the use related to nonprofit businesses that address social objectives.)
Social architecture is the intentional use of social media in the design of how people work. For me, the term architecture implies design, as is evident in these definitions from two of my favorite people:
Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals. (Andrew Gent.)
Social architecture is a user experience oriented approach to the design and analysis of social tools. (Stowe Boyd)
Note there is no single architecture, but a sense that we can harness the extraordinary capabilities offered by social computing to change the ways we work and learn.
Speaking of learning, Social learning
[is] the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes while connected to others (peers, mentors, experts) in an electronic surround of digital media, both real-time and asynchronous. (Harold Jarche).
Even as I include that definition, I feel that we must also acknowledge, via Jay Cross, that informal learning occurs by many means (especially face-to-face) that can't be controlled or programmed, but by its nature when the learning comes through exchange with other human beings, it is social learning. I have also blogged social learning at theappgap.
Social team (from Boris Pluskowski): a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the "game they are playing" (i.e. the team's purpose); know in which goal they are trying to score (i.e. have a shared understanding of what a "win" looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim. Boris is extending the concept of team using the concepts from Here Comes Everybody to illustrate the potential to tap the expertise, passion, and abilities of a large number of people to support a shared purpose.
Social Object:
...(in a nutshell) is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.” (Hugh McLeod)
This notion brings us back down to earth in the sense that when we talk about what makes it possible for people to collaborate, we must understand that there is something shared between them, an artifact that prompts discourse or a shared emotion.
Note I tend to equate these social objects with a more scholarly term, boundary objects, most clearly explained by Lilia Efimova in writing about blogs as boundary objects.
Social capital. the stocks of social trust, norms and networks that people can draw upon to solve common problems. This is what we build, or can build, daily, by acknowledging others, through respectful collaboration in shared endeavors and in social media through retweets, comments, and references.
Analysis
One of the things I have come to understand in my work in social network analysis is that being able to make sense of the connections -- the lines among us -- gives us access to questions and insights we might not otherwise have.
Social network. a collection of people who can be identified by a something that they have in common, a kinship, an interest, an organizational tie, a membership. What we see in social media are the networks of common interest implied by membership in a single social networking site (so Facebook represents a "network") but more rationally are any set of people who have a somewhat narrower set of criteria. I participate in many social networks on Facebook, don't you?
Social graph. The representation of the social network. As I like to say, if it's a network, you can draw it (or imagine it drawn), showing individual people and their connections.
Social network analysis comprises a set of methods and tools for collecting information about the graph of a social network and displaying that information visually and quantitatively.
Social analytics. The aggregation and correlation of the data collected from social software that reveals social structures and relations to assess interaction and conversation patterns. (See Mike Gotta for the basics and also for his thinking about how this is an emerging topic for 2010 .)
"Devote two hours a week to this effort. If, out of the 60 hours an average person works, you can’t find two for this, reconsider how you’re running your day.
This is not the only new year's resolution I've seen along this line. As we become more and more connected through social media, the more we are aware of what those connections mean.
My new year's resolution? I'm resolving to share more of my thinking, especially about personal networks. Here's a slide show from this past October I hope you will enjoy.
(I also followed these with one of my latest themes, Personal Net Work.)
These 3KM blogs were picked up on by the folks over at InMagic, who were kind enough to asked me to do a podcast with them. You can listen to it now: "Today's collaboration imperative."
If you do have the time to listen, I would be happy to hear your comments. Perhaps we can get that conversation restarted here.
Catching up -- and trying to get ahead of 2010. Some interest bits from latest reading.
Saba, a company that specializes in enterprise-wide human capital management, has created 8 predictions for how social computing will improve the enterprise value chain. A key thread in the predictions themselves is the importance of supporting the ability of people to learn from and work in informal networks:
"Learning connections will matter more than learning transactions."
"Connecting people to expertise will begin to matter more for organizations than traditional learning management programs."
From Understanding Users of Social Networks (HBS Working Knowledge), research by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski looks at patterns of behavior on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. An interesting read as it differentiates how women and men use the sites. Most interesting (to me) in early results of research is in the use of Twitter: "Women actually say things, guys give references to other things." It must have something to do with relatedness, and women's needs to establish context and relationships, mustn't it?
Andrew McAfee (whose work I've been following for some time, though most of my blogs on social media and Enterprise 2.0 have been done on theAppGap) provides a nice summation of the current state of Enterprise 2.0 in a Financial Times article, Enterprise 2.0 is vital for business. In addition to citing some early results from McKinsey on the benefits of E2.0, he makes the case that what E2.0 does is to bring technological support for the informal organization, as they can support the emergence of structures and new patterns of coordination. This is grist for the ongoing complexity conversation.
There's much more, and I'm behind on my book pile, too, but at least I've got a good start on networks, complexity and relatedness.
One of the most powerful learning experiences in my time at Digital Equipment included immersion in a set of practices for effective communication. What I and my colleagues called "Contextual Management" was derived from philosophies articulated and propagated by Fernando Flores. At the heart of these philosophies are speech acts, a linguistic concept identified by John Searle and refined by Flores into a communication structure for effective management. These same speech acts are at the foundation of Landmark Education.
To me, the concept of speech acts is about being mindful that our language -- what we say and how we say it -- is creating the world we live in, as we live it. If we can identify -- just think -- about how we are being heard and the potential results, we can work more effectively. Speech acts include:
Declarations: statements about the world as it might be, that create a powerful future, and for which there is no evidence. "The US will put a man on the moon and bring him back before the end of the decade," famous words from President John Kennedy, are an example. At the time he spoke this, NASA did not have the technology to accomplish this, but by saying it, Kennedy created the future in which this happened.
Requests, or offers: a request can also create the future, in that it is possible to ask someone to do something that they do not know how to do. But in daily work life, we make requests all the time. We do not often enough, however, make well-formed requests, which are in the form, "will you please do x-action BY time-y?" The specificity of x-action and time-y make it clear that the requestor is asking for something that is important.
Promises: promises are commitments to do perform specific actions by specific times. Obviously, a goal of a request is to acceptance (a promise) to respond to the request, in its specificity, by the designated time. (One may also respond to a request by negotiating the deliverable, the time that is is requested for, and so on; or may decline it, respectfully.)
From these, and other speech act building blocks, a number of communication patterns unfold. I'd like to take some of these up in future posts, but my inspiration for starting this thread is a terrific article about Fernando Flores that has just come out in strategy+business, "Fernando Flores Wants to Make You an Offer."
In the article, Lawrence Fisher provides a biography of Flores, whose life represents a journey from a Chilean prison to work at Stanford with Terry Winograd, developing a successful consulting business, and ultimately a return to Chile as a statesman. The book he co-authored with Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition, describes how software programs could be used to enable more productive relationships in the workplace -- using the speech acts as a basis for communication.
It's a rich article (you will learn more about speech acts) that comes at a time that Flores is shifting into a new phase of his life and work, returning to business consulting to bring his perspective into how we work in networks. His concern is that:
“How do you educate people for the future world, in which an important part of activity is going to be networks?” he asks. “In my opinion, we human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.”
I'm excited about the possibilities in net work thinking opened up by the questions Flores is raising. The social web is opening up entirely new ways of communicating -- both means and modes -- and my head is already spinning at the thought of integrating these past and new ideas into my work.
Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.
It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.
I don't need to have this conversation with my Mom. She has had a rough bout with cancer that is, at present, at bay. Last year, she hand wrote a note to each of her five children expressing her wishes about her end of life. It was hard to read, but it's good to have it explicit. We will of course honor all of her wishes but one: we will hold a memorial service to remember her.
The Engage with Grace "one-slide" format for questions is below. Cherish your family.
Yesterday I received an email announcement from Tom Davenport via the BabsonKnowledge email list (no current web site to be found, sorry. Tom was announcing the publication of his newest HBR article, Best Practice:vMaking Better Decisions. While I am not the audience for this piece (I have not, for a long time, been called upon to participate in strategic decision-making), Tom's email included a table from the article:
Since I had just blogged on the human emotional response, I was very interested in how Davenport saw neuroscience as a decision-making approach. His list of approaches includes:
1. Small group processes ("making effective decisions with just a few people") 2. Analytics ("using data and quantitative analysis to support decision making;" analytics is Tom's current area of research) 3. Automation ("using decision rules and algorithms to automate decision processes") 4. Neuroscience ("decision makers know when to use the emotional brain") 5. Behavioral economics ("incorporating research on economic behavior and thinking into decisions") 6. Wisdom of crowds ("using surveys or markets to allow decisions or inputs by large groups")
I can see #1, #2, #3, and #6 as approaches that incorporate methods and hence processes for making decisions, but I interpret neuroscience and behavioral economics as filters rather than methods. I am probably splitting hairs, but if someone said, we are going to use the neuroscience method to make this decision, I'd wait for instructions.
Using the wonderful phrase from Claire's comment on that previous post, "...understanding this aspect of neuroscience helps us understand "the limbic brain as being the gateway through which we need to move to get to the neocortex [which makes it] so important to focus our leadership development work there." Being able to know which part of our brain we are using in the decision process can only help us improve that decision.
Nice to see so much of this thinking converging and starting to mainstream.
I'm engaged with a local group of colleagues on a series of conversations about the marvelous complexity, flexibility, and mysteries of the brain. Our first conversation was with Deb Gilburg. Deb and her family associates at Gilburg Leadership Institute have done a lot of good thinking about how to talk to executives about how the structure of their brains can color their responses to events and affect their decision-making. Executives also need to be aware that this human system is always at play in the workforce as something to be dealt with.
The Gilburgs use the diagram on the right (and the red and green lines) to provide a language for talking about the brain. (My humble apologies in advance to Deb if I've misstated any of this. It is a simplification, but I might still have some of it wrong.)
Neocortex: this is what we normally think of as our operative “brain,” and it contains the machinery for hearing, seeing, thinking, creativity, remembering, decision-making, and so on. We didn’t talk about this much, especially as we talked about how the machinations of the other three components control how much of our neocortex is available to us.
Our limbic brain (green) is shared with other mammals. It is where empathy resides, and our ability to do bond with and be influenced by others. Feelings are what bonds us. This is how we connect with others who share our values; the extent to which we share values dictates the extent to which we can “move into” the neocortex to work together.If you haven’t seen Rebecca Saxe’s TED talk about how we read each other’s minds, you should! She uses MRI to identify what happens in our brains when we consider the motives, passions and beliefs. It’s in this part of our brain that we try to make sense of what is going on in other people’s brains.
The amygdala (yellow) is our emotional memory store. This is where our preverbal memories reside (which are sometimes surfaced during psychoanalysis). The amygdala is responsible for our split-second responses to emotionally-charged situations – those times where we don’t think about what we are going to do; we just up and do it. Often, situations our amygdala perceives as threatening can lead us to the “red line” continuum of responses, from flight to fight.
The reptilian brain is where our survival mechanisms exist. Threats activate this portion of our brain – and the amygdala can alter the circulation of blood flow for a split second away from the neocortex (so no time-consuming analysis can be performed) to either the upper or lower torso, depending on the determined response. The loss of blood flow to the neocortex can also happen to a lesser degree during a time of sustained stress, thus leading to more subtle but pervasive “redline” behaviors. So it is perhaps easy to see why we act unreasonably when we are stressed. For executives, this kind of stress can trigger survival-based behaviors (power plays, knowledge hording, peer distrust, etc.) that would be less likely were they not at this stress level.
“If we don’t have a green-line way to process stress & fear, we’ll drop to the red line.”
The value of understanding the brain in this way is that it provides a way to overwrite the blueprint. For an executive, this can mean acknowledging when employees are stressed (on the red line), and creating opportunities for them to bond over shared values (the green line) so that they can move into creative and strategic action.“Having conversations about what we care about and why can reset our brain and help us make better sense of what is going on, and think more strategically and creatively about solutions.”
A wonderful example of this concept is how Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Hospital, addressed a serious budget problem. The hospital was in a position in which it would need to lay off many of the lower-waged employees. Levy was reluctant to do that, as he understood how these people contributed to the hospital as well as the importance of the jobs to their lives and families. At an employee meeting, Levy spoke directly to the staff about his concern, saying, “… if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to…give up more of their salary and benefits.” He received a resounding standing ovation, and over the next several days, suggestions for how the hospital could save money. Many of those ideas involved job sharing, reducing hours, and the like. (Full quote, and full story from the Boston Globe: “A head with a Heart.”)
In the language of the brain's colors above, what Levy did with his employees was move them from the red line to the green line by connecting them to a core set of shared values about the hospital workers and engaging them to participate in coming up with a solution, because he had none. Getting to the green line freed the hospital staff from more primal, red-line reactions to the budget reality and enhanced their capacity to exercise their neocortex— to think and solve problems creatively, and move the work of the hospital forward.
I like the way that Deb related the green line (“bonding continuum”) to the style of a network. Every network has a purpose, and it is in sharing the purpose of the network that bonds people toward action. A great lesson for network builders and weavers.
"Imaginary friends" is the term Nancy White has used to describe the hundreds of people she has developed relationships with in our shared virtual spaces. They are presumably not imaginary once we've met them as we have seen the flesh and blood. But we still cannot "imagine" the depth of people we barely know. This morning I learned of great and unimagined talents of two of my no-longer-quite-imaginary friends:
I'm not surprised that these talented colleagues have additional talents, just that I didn't happen to know what these were. Of course we don't have time in the (usually) scant hours we see people face-to-face.
And of course, that's just what I learned in 15 minutes this morning reading blogs. What if I actually started looking?
Via Beth Kanter, I am reading today an essay on network leadership by Bill Traynor, executive director of Lawrence Community Works. I had the pleasure of meeting Bill last fall at a regional nonprofit event, and was literally blown away by his success building a network of stakeholders and small groups in Lawrence, MA focusing on community development and civic engagement.
I have used the word "intentional" with respect to Net Work to express the importance of being aware of the network and using this awareness to work with and for the network. Traynor describes the "Intentional Habitant" as follows:
In connected environments, leaders know that networks are always teetering on the edge of balance, requiring many small adjustments to achieve a measure of dynamic stasis. I have found that a network leader has to be in constant motion, paying attention to the habits and the small stimuli needed to incessantly reconstitute balance and motion. One must learn to feel the current of change, look for and recognize resonance, and deploy oneself not as prod, but as a pivot for the many moments of change that are called for every day.
He also describes how work gets done in the network, telling the story of how member of his network would go about creating a club for 10-year-old girls:
Staff is asked to challenge that member organization to pull together others who might agree and provide the space and time for the club to happen. If a group assembles, staff is asked to challenge the group to put on an event and to bring some girls together to do something fun and helpful. If the event takes place, staff might work with the group on a short series. In other words, we resource the specific demand rather than jump to program development before an idea has proven its value to other members.
The result is an iterative process that goes through several cycles in a span of months. Months that, in traditional management, would have been spent planning, resourcing, designing, raising money -- and learning nothing.
Critical to understanding how to manage in networks is the word above, space. Providing space and time is not just providing physical space, but also "accessibility, flexibility, and options." Maintaining this environment is rooted in three disciplines:
Keep moving the outer edge of the network, continuing to expand the network so as to continue to reduce the cost per member.
Continuously listen to the network and follow the demand for services by continually experimenting in response to the needs of the network
Shrink or contract routine and recurring activities to their simplest and most efficient forms
The critical mindshift for the leader of a network is to learn that one cannot possibly do anything alone. "In fact," he says, "in this process there is no 'alone.'" This is another point that I emphasize in my NetWorkShops on personal networks. Your network is there because you need it, you will always need it, and you must discipline yourself to remember when you in the middle of great problems, opportunities, stresses, and challenges, that you must, must, must, remember your network of support.
I've not blogged much at all lately, because I've not yet discovered how to combine blogging and work without revealing too much about my clients. And of course I tweet (panklam). What I have blogged, I've done over at TheAppGap. Here are two of my recent posts from there:
The Connection <--> Collaboration Continuum, about the pattern I'm seeing in how social platforms (which I would define as any web-based site that provides some set of collaboration and social media tools)
@panklam What is openwork? How does it differ from Net Work?
So, an alert follower picked up that I was thinking about a new way to think about work that is different from net work. I wrote Net Work in 2007, I consciously left out technology, except to provide a bit of a placeholder in an appendix. I knew that the landscape in social tools was changing rapidly and that my book would be out of date within months if I tried to talk about specific technologies. (I'm still quite happy with that decision.)
For my work, I consciously separate the words net and work to underscore that networks take work, intentional design and maintenance. This is true of our organizational networks as much as it is about our personal networks.
Now I found myself uniting the words open and work to provide a metaphor to convey that the networks we live in (because we live in networks all the time) provide the scaffolding for openwork, which is constructed so as to show openings - for meaning, for connections, for knowledge transfer - through its substance.
I was recently invited to participate in a published "panel" on the topic of heterarchies for the People and Strategy Journal, a quarterly publication of the Human Resource Planning Society. The lead article "An Argument for Heterarchy: creating more effective organizational structures" was written by Karen Stephenson, who has a gift for describing network concepts, in this case, the emergence of what she describes as a new network form, the heterarchy.
She describes heterachy as an "organizational form somewhere between a hierarchy and a network that provides horizontal links permitting different elements of an organization to cooperate, while they individual optimize different success criteria."
Now, I have used the term heterarchy myself in a more specific way (referring to closely knit social networks), but have no objection to the introduction of this topic in a prestigious HR community. It's important to get the word out: we are everywhere seeing the importance of understanding connections within and among corporations, institutions, and groups, profit and nonprofit alike.
I was one of eight experts invited to respond to Karen's article. It's exciting to be published among such respected thinkers as Ed Schein, Charles Handy (I've been a fan since I first read The Age of Unreason in the early 90s), and Art Kleiner, as well as colleagues Ross Dawson and Tracy Cox of Raytheon. Ross blogged about this article himself, including his own response to the article, and posted a copy of the PDF.
Karen is at her best when talking about the importance of relationships, particularly when it can be too easy for companies to declare a strategic "alliance" and forget about the myriad connections that need to be made at all levels in an organization. My response focused on the ways that heterarchies may emerge and form (top-down, bottom-up, or shaped) and then asks the question,"okay, what happens next?" If we see a heterarchy emerging, what is the real work that needs to be done? As Karen puts it: "Connection by technology without trust is merely traffic." Overall, the article and its responses make for great conversation.
I am particularly happy to see how Maya positioned the need for learning officers to leverage networks. And the best way to leverage networks is to understand their structures and the people who play key roles in them. Dr. Stephenson identifies three types of key people: "Hubs," "Gatekeepers," and "Pulsetakers." Knowing who these people are in any given network offers the opportunity of moving knowledge more efficiently through the organization.
Here are Maya's four steps for CLOs to get started on their net work:
Understand what your organization gains from a network. Great diffusion of information? Access to the influential people? Help people across the organization connect?
Identify the set of venues -- networking space, blogs, communities -- that are currently in use or that can be used strategically to nurture networks
Use the key people you've identified to help seed the network
Stand back and let the network do its work
Nice job, Maya, of getting the word out to another vital senior audience.
Today I am adding my voice to those who are rallying via blogs to protest the possible shutdown of the Boston Globe by its parent, the NY Times Co. If we were marching in front the NYT offices, carrying banners and placards, my would read: "Lead the revolution, don't turn your back on it."
Clay Shirky has written and spoken eloquently about the reasons for the demise of newspapers and suggests that perhaps "they had it coming" for not seeing the internet coming. But he also says, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." And an environment -- a social architecture -- in which journalists can learn their craft from masters. Newspapers provide such an environment, and the Globe's rich history of journalism awards speaks for the generations of apprentices who have become masters.
We are in the middle of a revolution, and the economics of running a newspaper in a time when people can get their news from the internet are stark. The old business model is not affordable, but that doesn't mean we should shut down the business -- we need creative thinking of the kind that wins journalism awards to design a new model that gets the news to the online masses as well as provides investigative reporting, reflection, and context.
A friend once told me about a science fiction book he'd read. Post apocalypse, in a world bereft of information and telecommunications technologies, knowledge was passed only from person to person. One day, a character perhaps like our modern Wall-E digs through an ancient garbage dump and discovers a new technology that will bring this distopic society back to light: a pencil.
My Ada Lovelace day tribute is to the inspiring Anita Borg, who was committed to bringing women into the field of computer science and whose work continues at...
In 1987, I was part of a small group of women in the software engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation who were convened to work with Jean Baker Miller and colleagues at Wellesley College's Center for Research on Women. Sometime during that fall, one of our group returned from a computer systems conference on the West Coast talking about how all the women at the conference (perhaps a little more than a dozen) had all had lunch together one day. Among those women was Anita Borg, who founded (from there or around that time) the systers list. Mailings from the list animated my days at Digital, as the postings ranged from the technical questions, to career support requests, conference room sharing and ride information, and into the deeply personal.
It was not a happy time for women in engineering. I had fared somewhat better, though I was not a software engineer per se and had been given many opportunities. As a "senior consulting engineer," the first women from the documentation/information architecture field to be granted that title, I sat on the review board that approved candidates for promotion to senior positions in engineering. Anita was one of the few women engineers in these coveted positions.
She talked about the need to bring women into engineering every chance she got. But people weren't always listening. I talked to her at an awards ceremony at which she was due to speak, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before Digital crumbled. She had prepared remarks directly focused at a number of senior managers in Digital who were present. However, one of them had earlier apologized that he would not be able to stay to hear her speak, because, Anita reported blood pressure rising, he had to "walk his dog."
That is as as good a sign of those times as any. Thanks to Anita and her vision, the world has changed, but I think we are still not as far as we could be. And what could be? Jean Baker Miller, herself an inspiration to many women for pointing out at a time when it was not politic to say so, that "women are different from men." She firmly believed that if women were designing the computers and applications that were becoming such an integral part of our lives, that the world would be very, very different.
Pretend, for a moment, that it is February 17th and I was blogging as I was supposed to. I would have written a blog post about a great new collaborative brainchild of Nancy White and Tony Karrer that I feel privileged to have been invited to. It's call the Communities and Networks Connection, and you will see my badge posted proudly here.
February 17th was the launch date, and I missed it while deeply immersed in a windowless office at a client's site, where my primary task is to bring the concepts and (more importantly) the practices of networks and communities to bear. So I really need to pay more attention.
The Communities and Networks Connection has a number of really terrific aspects. It aggregates the blogs of many of the thought leaders in community and network thinking, featuring many people I've come to know and work with. So, it's kind of like one-stop shopping. On one site, I can check on the most recent blogs of people I already subscribe to including Jessica Lipnack (Endless Knots), Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic), Shawn Callahan (Anecdote), Valdis Krebs (TNT - The Network Thinker), Jenny Ambrozek (21st Century Organization), John Tropea (Library Clips), Mike Gotta (Collaborative Thinking) as well as Nancy and Tony linked above but I also can see what bloggers I've been missing and start to pay attention.
On the site, you can see the aggregated posts for the day, or click on any of the featured members. If you click on Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness from there, you'll see that it has also has mined my posts for keyword concepts, tools, and information types. These keywords are all rolled up on the site's main page.
Thank you, Nancy and Tony, for rolling out such a service -- to all those who want to see the latest thinking on communities and networks in one place, nicely organized, and bound to be an exciting stop on the morning's reading lists.
I assume it's no secret that some of the time I should be blogging these days is spent on Twitter. I hope soon to shake this out so that I can translate more of the trends I see on Twitter into meaningful blog posts (that don't belong on theappgap.
But I had too much fun looking at my Twittersheep (hats off to Stowe Boyd) that I thought I should share it.
This word cloud comes from the biographies of the people who follow me on Twitter. I'm happy to see "social" and "knowledge" writ so large, but where is "network" ? And why so many consultants?
At a meeting in December, a friend recently handed out The Eureka Hunt, from the New Yorker magazine's issue of July 28, 2008. The annals of science have now extended to an understanding of how insight occurs. It turns out that the brain activity associated with insights comes from the right hemisphere which, as that hemisphere has long been associated with creativity, makes sense. But there's a very interesting network insight as well: "Cells in the right hemisphere are collecting information from a larger area of cortical space. They are less precise but better connected." (Emphasis mine.) Simply, the cells have longer branches and access to a larger network of associations.
It gets more intriguing when we consider that when we are trying to solve a problem, we start with a focus that is controlled by the brain's prefrontal cortex, which wants to focus, get away from distractions, and look closely at the problem. Fortunately, this cortext is not just the largest part of the brain, it is also connected to all the other parts. The hub, if you will, of a network of networks. In order for the right hemisphere to be allowed to do its thing -- to work its way through its branches and network of associations -- the prefrontal cortex has to relax and give up control to the right hemisphere. Then, and perhaps only then, are we available for insight.
I've used the phrase "planned serendipity" to refer to the intentional practice of using Dopplr (though I use Twitter much more now) to let people know my travels and to see the travels of others just in case we engineer an encounter that might or might not happen otherwise. Seeking insight means we have to let go of the seeking, stop thinking so hard and just let the network do its work, just as in our lives we sometimes need to look beyond our frontal cortex of close friends, colleagues, and relationships to remember that we have a myraid of looser connections and weak ties that we may allow to come to light.
Colleagues Jenny Ambrozek and Victoria Axelrod from the 21st Century Organization have teamed with the World Research Group to design a conference here in Boston, March 24-26: The Business of Community Networking. (You may also want to download the brochure.) This conference is focused on businesses that want to engage customers in interacting, networking, and exchanging knowledge using social media.
The speaker lineup illustrates a commitment to offer best practices -- real nitty-gritty how-to information. I'll be on a couple of panels and also delivering a talk on the process of community networking, with a focus on how the network lens (oops, no pun intended) can alter the perspective of community designers. I'm particularly happy to see Mark Bonchek (who also assisted in the conference design) on the agenda. Mark has been applying network (and net work) principles to his evolving businesses, currently incorporated as Soundbridge.
Early bird pricing is available until January 16th. You can save an additional $300 on the rate by entering the promotional code KKH735 when you register.
I've been on the theme of relationships and relationships for close to 20 years, much of it stemming from work with Jean Baker-Miller, who was an inspiration to me in the late 1980s when I participated in a Stone Center project. Jean's ground-breaking work in understanding the psychology of women opened the way for many changes in the workplace as well as in the discipline of psychological counseling. As more research shows how men and women are different in many physiological ways, it becomes clearer and clearer how revolutionary her ideas were.
Fundamental to Jean's theory is that women grow in relationship; we become transformed and empowered by through shared experiences and authentic conversation. Such transformation is not unique to women, but most often experienced by women.Growth-fostering relationships empower all people in them.
The five good characteristics of growth-fostering relationships:
A sense of zest or well-being that comes from connecting with another person or other persons.
The ability and motivation to take action in the relationships as well as in other situations.
Increased knowledge of oneself and the other person(s).
An increased sense of worth.
A desire for more connections beyond the particular one.
This work has always been founded on face-to-face personal, intimate, relationships, which we tend to think are more in the province of the feminine side. I wonder if our social media-based networking via technology has made it easier for men to develop relationships that they might not have done otherwise?
The more I immerse myself in the flow -- increase my addiction to the Internet, some would have it -- the harder it is to focus and collect my thoughts in a blog. I've always tried to use my posts to synthesize ideas that come from different places, so it's sometimes a long time before things gel into a coherent concept. Lilia Efimova's blog this morning brought my process into focus.
Her PhD thesis is on the blogger community and blogging. She has continued to blog throughout her research and now in her dissertation-writing phase. Here's how she divides the process of writing into phases:
Awareness and articulation -- starting to get ideas on the radar
Sense-making -- when the connections among the ideas and a possible meaning become clear
Turning the ideas into specific product -- the dissertation chapter
Here is her perceptive map of the process: Here are the bits I am collecting (somewhere between the two left-side states):
Understanding what collection of Web 2.0 tools to use in different contexts (this will go on the AppGap)
Information overload in the flow (more on the topic introducing this post, also AppGap)
Uptake of net work in the nonprofit world (here)
Understanding the transition between an emergent, self-organizing state and the close-knit structure required for a team to produce
Actually, the last item will need a graphic that looks very much like the one above.
A re-posting on the Value Networks blog of a list of research centers in social network analysis reminded me to take a look at what's happening at the University of Kentucky's International Research Center on Social Networks in Business which nabbed Steve Borgatti away from Boston a year and a half ago. I noticed a few "managerial essays" that I hadn't seen before that Steve has written and that are now posted.
Steve's essay on Facilitating Knowledge Flows provides definitions of centralization, density, core/periphery, and also a term new to me, multiplexity (the the extent to which one kind of tie between two people is accompanied by another kind of tie between the same two people).
We had an extraordinary theater experience last night at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. Let Me Down Easy is an Anna Deavere Smith "play in evolution" that begs the audience to inquiry about the nature of grace. If you are not familiar with Deavere Smith's work, you can find her on Ted. Her solo performances are based on interviews with people she seeks out in order to learn how the world occurs to them. As she talks with them and records the conversations, she acquires these people as characters who then inhabit her play as she inhabits them. Barefoot, so as better to "walk in their words," she expresses their thoughts and emotions as she speaks their words verbatim.
It's the weaving. In Let Me Down Easy, she mixes the views of theologians (including a Buddhist monk and an Iranian imam) about the concept of grace (which is a uniquely Christian concept) with the actual experience of grace as it visits or people's lives. Reverends James Cone ("Grace is Power") and Peter Gomes (businessmen are disinclined to practice the golden rule until after are successful) provide glimpses into different worldviews and experiences, one following the other at the beginning and both reappearing throughout.
But the play is as much about "Disgrace" as it is about grace. Her explorations of the genocide in Rwanda and its impact on survivors provides one powerful theme. A second theme is in her critique of the U.S. healthcare system which, in the words of Phil Pizzo, is very close to reaching equivalence with healthcare systems in 3rd world countries.
Practical experiences include a doctor who waited five days for FEMA to evacuate the Charity Hospital in New Orleans during Katrina and its aftermath, amid the black patients and nurses who knew that no one would come for them. In a touching conclusion, an orphanage director in Johannesburg talks about how she sits with children dying of aids.
You can hear Anna Deavere Smith doing some of her characters (including the wonderful Ann Richards, former Texas Governor, talking about her Chi) with Christopher Lydon here. (Many thanks to Craig DeLarge for picking up on my tweets and then searching out the two clips linked above and sending them to me. Also thanks to Jessica Lipnack, who inspired me to start going to the A.R.T. in the first place.)
You know you've been touched by a powerful idea or theory when it keeps coming back to mind, and begging you to apply its perspective to other ideas you encounter or read about. I've been touched by the Strauss and Howe theory of generations.
Deb Gilburg, of the Gilburg Leadership Institute introduced the idea (first described in the 1991 book Generations) to a recent meeting of our local idea network Gennova. The theory has it that there is a cycle of generational patterns that repeats every four generations (approximately 22 to 26 years). Strauss and Howe have characterized the four patterns and have mapped these patterns to 350 years of American history. Each pattern both shapes and is shaped by the historical context of its time, but the underlying characteristics of each pattern remain the same.
We are now accustomed to thinking about our three primary current generations, Boomers (the first generation to actually identify and name itself), GenX, and GenY. There are, of course, still many members of the pre-boomer "GI" generation that took us through WWII and its immediate antecedent, the generation that Strauss and Howe call the "Silents." The archetypes that typify these generations are the Hero, Artist, Visionary and Nomad. A "turning" occurs after each cycle of four generations. The 2007 HBR article, The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve, though a bit scarily prescient in that it lists both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as exemplars of Generation X. There's also a lot of free stuff on the web site linked above.
This intriguing theory shows up, of course, in my current work to understand how to implement social tools in the enterprise given the distinct differences between the Boomers who fill the top management ranks, the GenXers coming up to management, and the GenYers who we look at as group-oriented, network-and-tool-savvy, and eager to be assigned important work. The tool part is an instance of history (in this case, the march of technology) influencing the generation. But, the group-oriented nature of GenY as this generation gets down to work, in the same way that the previous "Hero" generation, the GIs, got to work to organize and defend the world against tyrannical and mad dictators.
Previous Hero generations came of age during wartime (Revolutionary, Civil, and WWI) and we are of course at war on many fronts. But the challenge that unites a Hero generation does not need to be war. It could, for instance, be a planetary threat -- like global warming -- that will need people to set aside politics to accomplish bold endeavor.
This notion of the generational styles shows up for me in many ways recently. In a blog over on theAppGap, for instance, I reflected on current criticism of why managers do not think deeply. I wonder if there is a generational aspect to this. Reading about Daniel Goleman in a recent strategy+business article, (perhaps a blog on this anon) I wonder if the organizational development movement is an aspect of self-introspective generational pattern coming of age.
And, in looking at notes provided to me by KMWorld speaker Peter Andrews of IBM, I see the the pattern anew as he distinguishes the current state and future state of workers, saying of the future state "Workers identify with peers" and "Work centers around the endeavor." Take this out of Andrew's organizational context, it's not hard to see these terms being applied to the GI generation.
Last, this past weekend walking my visiting cousins around the Revolutionary battlegrounds and the homes of Transcendalist writers (who, like us Boomers were of the "Prophet" archetype) I thought again about generations seized by ideas. Later, around the kitchen table with my cousins I thought of our own GI-generation mothers and of our grandmother, Alma, who raised ten children and who's laugh I can still hear. Alma, like many Americans (the work is decidedly US-specific) doesn't quite fit her generation -- the Lost Generation -- as she was born to Danish farmers in Wisconsin and married an immigrant Dane who shod horses.
Generations is a long and fascinating read and I suspect that when I finish I might start all over again. Having some fresh perspective will do odd things to you. As long as you keep your perspective about it.
in 2007, I consciously left out technology, except to provide a bit of a placeholder in an appendix. I knew that the landscape in social tools was changing rapidly and that my book would be out of date within months if I tried to talk about specific technologies. (I'm still quite happy with that decision.)
