So the general rule of thumb has been that products and services are used to create value.  Media are used to communicate about it.

This distinction was largely based on the limited nature of traditional media and its limited ability to enable value creation.  This is changing, however, with the rising tide of use of new media like social networks, blogs, online video sharing, etc.  While new media still maintain an ability to facilitate the communication about value, if used properly, they also tend to participate in the creation of value.

To clarify a bit, let’s imagine I am planning to throw a house party.  As the person throwing the party, i decide to purchase a newspaper advertisement as a way to communicate about the value that people can expect to receive by attending. In the advertisement, i decide to communicate this in the form of what marketers might call a  brand promise (“This party will allow you to meet hundreds of other cool people!”).  The classified ad does not, however, do very much to create the value that people expect to gain by attending the party.

Now let’s imagine that, in order to further advertise my party, i also create a  free private social network using Ning.com.  By doing so, i not only communicate about the expected value (“This party will allow you to meet hundreds of other cool people!”)  but i also enable the creation of value by allowing people to meet each other virtually, and start forming social connections before they set foot in the door of my party.

This additional capability suggests the need for a serious shift in how an organization thinks of many of its activities.   People involved in the planning and execution of corporate communications, sales, marketing, public relations, and other activities must now consider the role that these activities play in actual value creation.  Perhaps more importantly (and less obviously), people involved in just about any type of new product development effort should be considering the way that products or services (even cars, food, furniture, etc. etc.) can be tightly integrated with new media as a way of creating even more value.

“No one cares what i had for lunch!”

.

Even more puzzling to me is the fact that the wording of the response is almost verbatim from one audience to the next, across many different business verticals and geographic regions.  Most puzzling of all, however, has been the very emotional tone of the response and the body language which is often of a sort much more intense, dismissive and defensive than i would have expected from these otherwise polite, staid people.

I know from general experience and from Psychology 101 that an overly-emotional response to a benign question is usually prompted by some sort of anger, insecurity or fear.  But what about something as innocuous as Twitter could possibly evoke these sorts of responses from otherwise staid folks?  And which emotion is behind them?

After a little reflection and reading of sociology, i think the source may be fear.  From where? Let’s step back for a moment to think about what might produce fear in a manager.

Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of  fields – which are “social arenas.. defined by the stakes which are at stake.” [1]   Without going into too much detail here, all of us live and work in multiple fields.  The manager generally works in the field of management, and may also live in the field of the middle-class.  It is from these fields that she obtains her capital or, in other words, her social, economic, relational result of her activities within that field.  It is the pursuit of these various forms of capital that motivates her to participate in these fields, and it is from these fields that she gains capital.  In addition, her personal disposition, her beliefs (Bourdieu lumps these into the concept of habitus) are developed as she interacts with these fields.  As a result, she becomes deeply attached to, and at least partially dependent on, these fields for her livelihood, her security, and even for her knowledge of the world.

..so when something seems to attack or break either her beliefs or the foundations of one or more of her fields, she is put into at least a minor crisis which in most of us, induces some sort of fear.  It is this sort of deep fear that i seemed to feel in managers and leaders.  But why would it be in reaction to Twitter??

The one field most in common between the people with whom i have spoken is that of management.  Entry into this field traditionally affords a person with a great deal of social (authority, respect) and economic (higher pay, control of resources) capital – which is one of the major motivating factors behind student enrollment in Business School MBA programs – which increase both the speed and likelihood of entry into the field.  As i have written before, though, the field of management, as it is currently practiced, has been showing some cracks.  It is still practiced (and often taught) based on 100-year-old core principles of centralized decision making, scientific management, disconnected workers and difficulty of communication in a slow business environment.  As a result, the field is straining under the weight of cultural norms of distributed decision making, returns to rule-of-thumb and highly-connected workers who are often better at communicating with each other than are their managers in an increasingly fast business environment.

..so why is it Twitter that might evoke fear in managers?  In actuality, it probably doesn’t.  But it may, in  the eyes of a person who feels, on a deep (perhaps even subconscious level) that their field and their beliefs are being attacked by the free flow of information, by ad hoc group action, and by rapid, imperfect communications, that Twitter (and more importantly its widespread use in these ways that break very old paradigms) represents the most extreme and obvious (and easiest to attack) tip of the technological and cultural iceberg that is forcing a rethinking of core, 100-year-old assumptions of the management field, which in turn seems to threaten the manager’s beliefs and their ability to accumulate capital.

Assuming, for the moment, then that fear is behind the reactions i have seen, i think it is a false fear. “Management” as a field (in the Bordieu sense) will always be necessary.  It won’t dissapear so long as there is some need for coordination, mentorship, functional differentiation, etc. within groups of people who are trying to accomplish a collective goal.  But its structure, its underlying beliefs and assumptions, and the practices which produce and reproduce the field will change substantially.  The widespread use of Twitter and other technologies only threatens the portion of the field of management which doesn’t question its 100-year-old assumptions, not the entire field.  So in a post-Enron/WorldComm, de-centralized, highly-connected world that is looking for short, informal, consistent, genuine connections with leaders who are trustworthy, real people, perhaps a manager’s biggest fear should be his own out-of-hand dismissal of the organizational power of a 140-character message sent from his cell phone about a great pastrami sandwich.

I will be looking into this further in the coming months (the question is related, on a deep level, to the research we are currently conducting with organizations for our upcoming book), but i’d like to know what you think.  Am i onto something here, or am i on something?

[1] Jenkins, R. (1992). Key Sociologists: Pierre Bourdieu.

The reason armies, tribes and companies exist is that they are, by and large, a more effective way to deal with the many variables that exist in a complex enemy, challenge or market and to turn the situation into a better one for a group of stakeholders.  In order to run an organization, every member of that organization agrees to allow their behaviors to be restricted in some way for the common good.  The trick for any organization, though, is to balance restriction with freedom.  Restrict employees or managers too much, and an organization can slow down and eventually grind to a halt.  Loosen up the restrictions too much, on the other hand, and the organization can speed up and lose all cohesion.  A large part of finding the right balance is accurately assessing the speed and complexity of the enemy, the challenge or the environment, and matching the organization’s restrictions appropriately.

To illustrate this point in a more entertaining way, i would like to share a personal story.  A few years ago, four friends and i decided to enter a paintball tournament in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.  Due to the fact that none of us had ever played any sort of competitive paintball before we entered ourselves in what we thought was a tournament for people who had never before played in a tournament.  The four of us who had never played (on of our team members, Dennis, had played backyard paintball and therefore at least had a very accurate gun) before went out and bought the cheapest possible equipment we could find, threw on our grubbiest jeans and t-shirts, and showed up on the morning of the tournament, mostly ready to play, under the team name of “The Southern Boys.”  As we sat near the entrance to the field, however, we were met with a horrifying site.  Car after car, truck after truck was shuttling in groups of rather serious-looking men.  Not only were these men serious-looking, but they were also remarkably well armed and well armored.  All of them had very sophisticated looking paintball weapons, most of them had matching uniforms, and many of them even had some sort of intimidating-looking body armor.  Compared to our raggedy t-shirt and jean-clad band of misfits, they looked like the Redcoats to our Minute Men.  Now, in the clear hindsight of history books the anticipation of such pitched battles seems very sexy and smart, but when you are facing the prospect of an entire day of physical pain (paintballs hurt quite a bit, for those of you who have never played) and humiliation, it seems very dismal.  In order to move this story along to the important point, i will skip to the important details.  Soon after our Redcoat opponents began arriving, Dennis figured he ought to check and see if we had entered the wrong tournament.  As it turns out we had.  Instead of a tournament for people who had never played before, it was a tournament for people who had never won a tournament before.  So not only were most of the teams experienced at paintball, but they were also grizzled and angry at having come in second or third in previous tournaments.

We had a quick team meeting before the start of the event in light of the new information, and all agreed to throw ourselves into the event, despite the obvious fact that we were likely to take some serious casualties.

Before taking the field for the first game (as i recall, it was actually against a group of ex-military guys), we laid down three very simple strategies for ourselves:

1. Run! – when the referee blew the whistle to start the game, two of our fastest guys would run helter-skelter down either side of the field and plant themselves behind some sort of cover in order to flank the other team and make it harder for them to hide behind small barriers

2. Snipe! – Dennis, who had the most accurate gun at long-range, would stay toward the back of the field as a sort of sniper/observer, barking out commands to the others and trying to put pressure on the other team

3. Talk! – everyone was to talk constantly.  Since we hadn’t had time to come up with some sort of silent sign system, we figured it was better to be loud and informed than silent and unaware, even though our communication would surely give our positions away to the opponents.

To make a very long and entertaining story short, we won our first game, despite the fact that Dennis tripped, fell and broke his gun in the initial seconds, starting us off at a 5 to 4 disadvantage.  This was surprising to us, especially given the additional fact that the other team clearly had memorized hand signals (they didn’t speak in an effort to conceal their positions), and team tactics that they were trying to use against us.  We assumed that the win was a fluke, of course.  But we were wrong.  We won our next match, and the next and the next.  And we won by a perfect score each time.  Amazingly, we won the entire  8-hour tournament without losing a single game.  So what is interesting about this from an organizational standpoint?

Let’s start with the second most interesting thing first.  How did we beat all those teams?  Balance.  Quite by accident, we had struck just the right balance between restricting our actions and letting ourselves run wild.  The other teams were not so fortunate.  Many of them had so restricted their movements through tactics, hand signs, etc. that they couldn’t react to our rapid movements.  Many others had no restrictions at all, and were too poorly coordinated to react to even our very simple flanking tactic.

Now for the first most interesting part of the story, which occurred at the lunch break, where all of the teams were milling around in a huge tent and socializing.  During the break, we overheard many other teams talking about their first round of games.  Much to our surprise, many of them were talking about us – the Southern Boys right in front of us, never suspecting us to be the subject of their legends:

“I keep hearing about some team called the Southern Boys.  They’re beating the pants off of everyone.  Have you ever heard of them before?  Do you even know what they look like?” said one tough-looking guy to another – both standing right in front of me.  ”No, but i’m sure not looking forward to playing them” was the reply.

You see, just like the British Red Coats who had been victorious worlwide for many years and the business veterans whose skills have served them so well in the markets for the last few decades, these experienced paintball players had developed a comfortable blindness to any team or method which didn’t use the traditional tools, uniforms and restrictive tactics which had  worked for them in the past.  As a result, all it took was for one team to stumble, through dumb luck (though we’d like to think that there was a little bit of skill involved), on a more nimble, albeit riskier and less serious-looking set of tactics and the old guard ended up playing their next tournament in the “never won a tournament” division.

For a slightly more theoretical look at the dynamics in these sorts of things, check out:

• The Law of Requisite Variety
• Assymmetric Warfare

As you can probably guess from the range of themes and styles the requirements for the assignment are very few.  What you might not guess is that these students had to write an accompanying essay on how their creative choices were designed to impact the viewer’s experience, as well as the likelihood that the video would spread virally.  After watching hundreds of these student videos and reading the accompanying essays over the last two years, one thing is becoming clear: the next generation of communicators, business practitioners, parents, citizens, etc. are developing a new fluency not only with the tools of new media, but also in the cultural understanding of how these media shape our lives and our culture.

Note: for those of you who watched these videos  and find yourself thinking “this isn’t serious communication,” go back and watch these again for the deeper themes like the parody of our overblown infomercial culture, comparisons of cooking to communist military parades, a rap video about the healthcare debate, satire of frat life and a commercial for a divorce agency called “Lord of the Rings.”  Then fast forward 5 years, and imagine the themes that these (now) 19-year-old students will be producing when they have been exposed to customers, office politics, social movements, etc. and have been given a budget to hire staff, buy better equipment, and build production infrastructures.

On a recent flight to Europe, i spent some time re-programming my mental model, envisioning the air surrounding the wings, blowing over, under and around them, and the flight was far more enjoyable.  This more accurate mental model provided a great deal more integrity between my thoughts and the actual dangers of flying (having worked with a bunch of aircraft engineers for a year, i now have a pretty decent mental model of the actual dangers), and as a result, i was able to feel and act in a way more appropriate to the situation.

A Good Flight Crew Promotes Good Mental Models

It occurred to me this weekend (while waiting for a flight) just how important more experienced people are in affecting other people’s mental models.  On an airplane, for example, every time a flight attendant gets up and calmly walks around during turbulence, they are not only taking care of business, but they are reinforcing a mental model of safe air travel.  And they should.  It is safe.  But they have developed their own mental model through thousands, even millions of miles of flying, training, and talking with other people in the business of flying.  This fact is doubly true for the pilots – the people most responsible for the overall direction of the plane.  If anyone should have a good mental model of turbulence, it is the people who intimately know how the plane works, and how it tends to interact with the environment.  The more they act in ways that display a correct underlying mental model, the more likely i am to adopt their accurate mental model.

Today’s Business Turbulence

Almost every business right now is in a situation not that different from an airplane.  The turbulence has ratcheted up.  Formerly stalwart institutions like banks, newspapers and automobile manufacturers are crumbling left and right.  The speed of market change has become dizzying.  Old revenue models have faltered, and odd new ones like open source, freemium, etc. seem to be on the rise.  Management and employees are overloaded with more information and change than ever before, and this overload is making it even more difficult to find the time to figure out the cause of the overload.   A large part of this turbulence is caused by the rise of new media* and social media**.  Anyone can create content now, so there is a lot of it out there, and businesses no longer control it.  In fact, rather than being disseminators of content, businesses are now buffeted by it on all sides, and the people within these businesses are trying desperately to figure out how to deal with it.

In order to do this, though, they need better mental models.  Models which will help us to know if the turbulence of this new media environment is threatening to knock the business out of the sky or if it is just a few crosswinds.  I believe it is clear that the new media-fueled changes we are seeing worldwide are partly danger (the very air is being sucked out from under some businesses) and part opportunity (some businesses have ridden the winds to new heights).  The trick is to have a good mental model to help figure out which is which.  Otherwise, businesses will begin fearing things they shouldn’t (i.e., “..but if we use social media, we might lose control of our brand!” [they have already lost total control of it] or “Social media might undermine our management’s authority” [good managers will gain authority through social media]) and ignoring things they should fear (i.e., “Our people don’t know how to use social media” or “If we don’t start adopting social media for collaboration, it will be hard to attract employees who have become accustomed to using it to boost their productivity”).

A Good Manager Promotes Good Mental Models

In a business (as on an airplane), the people with the biggest responsibility to figure mental models out early are the ones with the most experience in business–the ones who know best the current capabilities of the business and how it has dealt with turbulence in the past.  But these people need to really understand the nature of the new media turbulence first.  If you are part of the management level (middle, senior and C-Level!) within an organization, you need to start understanding the new media turbulence now, so that you can ensure that your organization’s response to it is based on a correct mental model of that turbulence, and your organization’s response to it.  Then, you need to find ways to promote the development of that mental model throughout the organization.  If not, things could get ugly:

* New Media – Digital media (as opposed to analog or physical media)

** Social Media – Media created, disseminated and consumed through highly social processes.  Examples include blogs, wikis, microblogs (Twitter, etc), online video (YouTube, etc), social networks (Facebook, etc).  Social media is a type of new media.

It is usually at this point that the headache sets in.  So let’s explore this a little more in-depth.  (spoiler: there is a cure!)

Skyrocketing Amounts of Information

On the one hand, the amount of information bombarding organizations each day has skyrocketed.  For example, the number of Americans using services like Twitter has risen from 11% to 19% in one year (Pew Internet), and in 2009 a reported 46% of social network users posted something good about a brand or company online, while another 23% posted something bad (eMarketer).  Traditionally, when an organization is bombarded with information, they do what they have done since the early 1900’s – create a series of standardized procedures to filter the information through algorithms and reports, make decisions based on those reports in an orderly fashion and efficiently create a consistent response.

Skyrocketing Ambiguity of Information

The challenge to the procedural approach is that the information hitting via social media is disordered and poorly-structured.  In fact, it is becoming more and more so over time, since it is increasingly produced by everyday people who are forming their own rules for the creation of that content.  And they are forming these rules in informal, highly-social groups.  As a result, the information becomes increasingly ambiguous, and therefore difficult to understand and even more difficult to respond to in any sort of procedure-like fashion.

Curing the Headache

Assess your current Information Environment
Are you swimming in ambiguous, increasingly socially-generated information?

Assess Your Approach
Are you constantly trying to create policies and procedures for things that are best dealt with in another way?

Explore approaches that are better at dealing with lots of ambiguous, highly-social information.
I have written before about the increasing importance of rules of thumb, and the importance of social media fluencyfor every employee, including the organization’s leaders.  Other folks like Roger Martin have written about the importance of “design thinking” in business, which is a powerful way to accommodate and even to leverage ambiguity.  It also might be worth reading my blog post on the different ways of making decisions in complex/ambiguous situations.

Contact us
The process for adapting your approach to social media does not need to be a painful one, if you have some help from the folks at SociaLens.

Note: this concept is loosely based on “Information Richness Theory”.  For more on it, check out the following:

Daft RL, Lengel RH. Information Richness: A New Approach to Managerial Behavior and Organizational Design. Research in Organizational Behavior. 1984;6:191-233.

Organizations have been experiencing this same rule-of-thumb/scientific tension for at least the last 100 years.  In the late 1800’s, Frederick Taylor formulated his “Principles of Scientific Management” which, for the first time, attempted to use scientific principles to improve the then-current philosophy of management which was based on workers relying on self-generated “rules-of-thumb.”

“..the underlying philosophy of all of the old systems of management in common use makes it imperative that each workman shall be left with the final responsibility for doing his job practically as he thinks best, with comparatively little help and advice from the management.  And it will also show that because of this isolation of workmen, it is in most cases impossible for the men working under these systems to do their work in accordance with the rules and laws of a science or art, even where one exists. “ (Frederick Taylor: Principles of Scientific Management, 1911)

Taylor essentially argued that, in the large-scale corporations of the time, it was better to shift the burden of managing away from workmen using rules-of-thumb to managers using scientific principles.  This, in his thinking, would allow the workers to focus on working, and allow the managers to optimize the worker’s work by standardizing the best rules-of-thumb into repeatable processes that they would then document, test and improve.  Most organizations are still doing this today in some form or another.  According to Taylor, the need for his principles were designed to overcome three big weaknesses in the workforce of the industrial revolution:

1. Many of the workers were under-educated and were often isolated from one another by race, language and lack of literacy (read his work, and you will understand what i mean)
2. (related to weakness 1) Workers had no way of self-vetting the best rules of thumb across the entire workforce
3. (related to weakness 2) Rules of thumb for the same task could vary widely and cause friction when combined

So here is today’s tension for organizations: Most of the three reasons for Taylor’s principles either have changed or are changing.

1. The general workforce today is, on average, better educated than Taylor’s workforce as he portrays them in his writings
2. The general workforce today is beginning to develop the tools (Web 2.0) and literacy (ability to use Web 2.0) necessary to self-vet their rules-of-thumb without the help of managers
3. As these rules-of-thumb are shared and vetted, the potential exists for disparate groups to come together and to work very efficiently, having adopted similar rules-of-thumb completely outside of a management layer (The OpenSource movement, the DIY [do-it-yourself] movement, etc. are early examples of this)

The new challenge, then, for organizations (as is the challenge for me as i walk the academic/practical tightrope) is to figure out when “scientific management” is still useful.  Clearly it is in certain circumstances, but new developments are starting to call into question Taylor’s long-held ideas, and the best organizations are recalibrating their balance between rules-of-thumb and scientific management.

Yesterday we saw a perfect example of this.  Within minutes of the news story breaking, every major network was covering it, but more intriguing, the internet network lit up, kicking its creative electronic coordination and creation machine into high gear.  Within hours, people were reworking the Fresh Prince lyrics to fit the story via Facebook, commenting on whether or not the incident was a hoax, mashing up the story with previous internet meme Kanye West, and even creating a “Go Falcon, Go!” t-shirt about the event for sale on Zazzle.  At the same time, the internet network began self-policing, suggesting, in its own unique way, that the event was a hoax.

As McLuhan would have predicted in 1964- the cycle of events, news reporting, social commentary, historical analysis and production of commemorative memorabilia – which in the past might have taken weeks or perhaps even months, was compressed yesterday into a span of 24 hours.  We are still in the early stages of understanding the massive implications of this speed for individuals, organizations and societies, but they are not going to be small, nor are they going to be easy to figure out.

To get the final product, here’s what i did:

1. Used a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet to draw out a rough sketch of the concepts in Macromedia Flash (because i am used to the Flash drawing tools)
2. Printed the sketch on a piece of paper for reference
3. Fired up Screen Toaster to do the screen capture, and set the “geek settings” to replay the recording at 2x speed
4. Recorded a screencast while drawing the sketch in Flash (without audio)
5. Used the Screen Toaster tool to add voice over to the video (using a Sony ECM-MS907 microphone)
6. Tried to upload to YouTube directly through Screen Toaster, but had some sort of technical problem, so just saved a version on Screen Toaster, and a local .mov file, which i then uploaded to the SociaLens YouTube account.
7. Embedded the YouTube video in this blog post
8. Wrote this blog post

Considerations for next time:

1. Check audio levels more carefully (i used the Screen Toaster defaults, which didn’t record at a high enough level)
2. Imagine my audience a little more vividly (it’s sort of strange presenting these things without real people in front of me)
3. Speak more succinctly (this is something i need to work on in every context)
4. Take the time to sketch objects a little more carefully (i am still not completely used to the Wacom tablet)
5. Experiment with object-drawing capabilities of Flash?

All told, the process took about 1 hour, though i think with practice, i can probably get it down to about 20-30 minutes, as well as improve the quality as i get more used to drawing with a tablet, the recording/uploading process, and get used to thinking within the context of this process.  For this first try, i chose a topic that is probably just as easily tackled through a text blog post, but hopefully future versions will deal with more visual-dependent ones.  I’d love to hear your comments on this.  Did the visuals help at all?  Is it better than a blog post for these sorts of concepts?  I’d also love to see some of my colleagues in industry and the academy experimenting with this.

“..writing three songs about United Airlines and my experience in the whole matter. I would then make videos for these songs and share them on YouTube, inviting viewers to vote on their favourite United song. My goal: to get one million hits in one year.”

Dave followed through – and achieved his goal – somewhere in the first few days that the first of the three videos was online.

Within just a few weeks, the video had received 4m views on YouTube alone, as well as 19k comments from people who were not all that friendly toward United Airlines.  Why does this make the case that new media fluency needs to be developed outside of the marketing department?  Because United’s new media-fueled problem was brewing for nine months before anyone within the marketing department ever heard about it.  Now, the ball is in the marketing department’s court to try and salvage the brand.  It is also in the court of the branding and leadership folks, who need to figure out why the airline’s stock dropped 10% within four days of the the first video going live.

There are two important aspects of this issue: the ethical and the functional (they are not really separate, of course, but for the sake of this post let’s treat them that way) The ideal ethical response would have been for United to take care of Dave’s claim regardless of his ability to use new media against them.  They don’t appear to have done so in this case, so i will leave that alone for now, and move to the functional aspect of this: How would new media fluency outside of United’s marketing department have helped?

Anyone who has spent time on YouTube and who has ever watched Internet sensations “go viral” (spread far and wide) knows that music videos are some of the most likely to spread quickly throughout the Internet.  This is especially true on YouTube, a platform whose list of top-viewed videos of all-time consistently includes both amateur and professional music-related videos.  So a new media-fluent United customer service department might have therefore seen it as a legitimate threat to their brand when a professional musician tells them directly that he is taking his case against United to YouTube.

At the very least, one of the employees who dealt with Dave would have discretely escalated the issue to a few people within the customer relations department.  “Could this guy be for real? What if his video does go viral?”  At best, a truly new media fluent staff may have actually seen an opportunity which could have been brought to the marketing department.  “Could we pay for this guy’s guitar and ask him to write a positive song about our honesty?  Maybe we should be engaging all of the musicians who regularly fly on our airline and who might produce songs for YouTube?”