There is a great deal of news, opinion, and discussion these days about the wave of social business which is generally thought to include a shift toward new ways of doing business largely through the use of social technologies like wikis, social networks, etc.

As people who are thinking about the implications of this shift to social business for our future careers, or as managers or a members of the c-suite who are thinking about the implications of this shift for the future of the organization, it seems to me we need to step back from the river of information and predictions for a moment, and ask ourselves a basic question:

How fundamental are these changes likely to be, really?

After a good deal of research into , and thinking on the matter, i have come to the conclusion that the answer is: quite fundamental.  To make my case, i won’t be relying on poll data, or industry stats, or historical analysis or case studies, but rather a series of simple logical propositions derived from decades of theory and research on organizations. As you follow along, check these against your own experience, and i think you will reach a similar conclusion. Ready? Let’s dive in.

Every institution (regular pattern of human interactions, i.e., open source software production, crowdsourcing, viral spreading, vendor relations management, group buying, etc.) or organization (a particular type of institution, i.e., WalMart, Zappos, IBM, Threadless, etc.) only exists because of a set of formal, informal, spoken, unspoken and textual agreements between people (a.k.a. attributions of function, rules, norms, institutional statements, in which two or more people “agree” that x counts for y in a given context, like “dollar bills count for purchasing power in a market” or “the title CEO counts for power in an organization”). No agreements, no institution or organization. Different agreements, different institution or organization.

Agreements are always constituted by social interactions like conversations, sharing of information, etc. No social interactions, no agreements. Different social interactions, different agreements.

Social interactions are completely reliant on symbolic communication. No symbolic communication, no social interactions. Different symbolic communication, different social interactions.

Symbolic communication is dependent on the medium that is available (broadly defined as something which expands the speed and scale of human events, like language, telephones, computers, etc.) and the way that the medium is used (speaking, writing, broadcast, social networking). No medium and use, no symbolic communication. Different medium and use, different symbolic communication.

At this point you may be asking yourself why you read this far. This all seems pretty obvious, right? Here’s where it gets interesting:

Working back up this logical chain, we can see that the increasing availability of new media forms, and the increasing use of these new media in very different ways, is making it possible to form new types of institutions and organizations. It is also making it more likely that people will form new types over time, largely because these new media and uses of those media are making new forms of symbolic communication possible and likely, which in turn makes new forms of social interactions possible and likely, which in turn makes new forms of agreements possible and likely.

When different types of institutions and organizations begin to be formed, whole ecosystems of institutions and organizations begin to change as these new forms (and the old ones) begin to interact with each other. Groupon interacts with box stores, Anonymous interacts with the FBI, Local Motors interacts with Crowdsourcing and General Motors, student bodies interact with teachers, teachers with school administrations, etc.

When these ecosystems change, some of the old types, and some of the new types of institutions and organizations survive and thrive, and others wane and disintegrate, sometimes from lack of continuity (waning use of the formal titles Ma’am and Sir or the lack of subscriptions for news corporations), and sometimes from formal disintegration (legal bans on the institution of hazing or the legal dissolution of a corporation).

With all of this in mind, now we can revisit our question: How fundamental are these changes, really?

Very. Because logically, the ways that social technologies are profoundly different technically, and differently used, than previous technologies are changing organizations not just by providing a new set of tools, but by fundamentally changing the nature of the agreements that constitute our institutions and organizations. Evidence of these shifting agreements show up in ongoing questions about whether hiding information still counts for power in all contexts, whether a unified company brand counts as more valuable than one co-created with consumers, whether a leader’s willingness to show faults counts as weakness in organizations, if owning source code counts as more valuable than sharing it widely, if paid content editors count as more qualified than groups of volunteers, whether playing World of Warcraft counts as quality social interaction or not, etc. etc.

We can see evidence of these shifting agreements when we look at new, powerful and sustained social business institutions and organizations like Wikipedia, Zappos, SalesForce, Anonymous, etc. which are only possible to form, and likely to be formed, because of the new technologies and their widespread new forms of use. We can also see evidence of this when we look at established, and surprisingly collapsing institutions and organizations like newspapers, encyclopedias, etc. whose agreements within their organizations, and with the public have shifted in an ecosystem of new media and new uses of those media.

Armed with a little deeper, more basic perspective, we can go back to the flood of news and opinions and predictions about the coming wave of social business with a more critical eye as we think about our future careers and our future organizations and institutions.

Here is an abbreviated list of sources you might want to read to further explore this topic:

1. Searle, John. (2005). What is an institution?. Journal of Institutional Economics, 1 , pp 1-22.
2. American, The, Political Science, and No Sep. “A Grammar of Institutions Sue E . S . Crawford ; Elinor Ostrom.” Political Science 89, no. 3 (2007): 582-600.
3. Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton University Press.
4. Orlikowski, W.J. and Scott, S.V. (2008). Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization, The Academy of Management Annals 2: 433–474.
5. Scott, W.R. (2008) Institutions and Organizations: Ideas and Interests, 3rd edn (Thousand Oaks: Sage).
6. Zammuto, R.F., Griffith, T.L., Majchrzak, A., Dougherty, D.J., & Faraj, S. (2007). Information technology and the changing fabric of organization. Organization Science, 18(5), 749–762.
7. Organization Design: An Information Processing View. Jay R. Galbraith Interfaces Vol. 4, No. 3 (May, 1974), pp. 28-36
8. Beniger, JR.(1986). The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information society. Harvard University Press.
9. McLuhan, M. (2003). Understanding Media, critical ed. Corte Madera: Gingko Press

I would like to throw a little monkey wrench into these assumptions, and perhaps help us to move past the desire for best practices.

I was watching Charlie Rose tonight, who was interviewing former PGA golfer turned putting coach Dave Stockton.

Right around 17:00 in the interview he said something interesting about golf advice. “..everybody wants to give their best tip…their newest tip that worked for them. I don’t think it should be that complicated.” He went on to say that “..there’s not one way to teach golf..” and “..I think the routine is the key thing. I don’t care if you use a telephone pole. I just want you to have a good routine.”

Now in case you haven’t already jumped ahead of me, here’s the kicker: Putting is one of the least complex parts of one of the least complex sports in the world.* It includes a ball, a hole, a green, some wind, some grass and perhaps even a crowd. It is certainly far less complex than baseball, or football, or basketball, or soccer, which include opponents, team strategies, time clocks, buzzers, referees, coaches, cheerleaders, bands, and a host of other dynamics. It is also far less complex than business, which includes budgets, social dynamics, market forces, team strategies, power relations, etc.

And yet even for this least complex part of a least complex game, this seasoned player and coach is suggesting that there probably are no best practices, and that even if they exist, that they are probably not worth following. Rather, that the most important factor for success is the development of a routine that works for the player’s particular situation.

What does this suggest about the desire for best practices in business, social media, digital marketing, and other more complex things i wonder?

* Notice that i am using the word “simple” here and not “easy.” Hitting a good golf drive or a putt is one of the most difficult of tasks i can think of, but it is not, strictly speaking, complex. The same goes for hitting a baseball, shooting a basketball three-pointer, and hand-setting a volleyball.

We are all tempted to see creativity, integrity and global thinking as skills that will help us to wrangle our organizations and the environment back into a state or normalcy, where we can be comfortable again for a while. But i think we need to look at it differently.

There will not be normalcy the way we have thought of it in the past.

In his book Beyond the Stable State, written in 1971, Donald Schön makes the case that the widespread use of meta-technologies like computers and communication systems (he was writing this well before the widespread public use of the World Wide Web) have not only represented rapid change in and of themselves, but they have become platforms which have facilitated far more rapid innovation and diffusion of every other type of technological and social change as well.

In such a world, says Schön,

What is curious is not that we are forced at intervals to abandon some stable state, but that we manage to maintain belief in it in the first place.

So the task for us now, in this consistently unstable state, is to find equitable, efficient new ways for our organizations to create value for people (customers, partners and employees) and to better a world that is more obviously in a state of consistent change, rather than to bring back an old type of normalcy. I will have more to share about how to do this in the future, but a first step is for us all to acknowledge that, if the stable state was on its way out in 1971, it must surely be gone in 2011.

Thanks to Erik Stolterman, by the way, for reminding me of Schön’s excellent book.

Humans also tend to fall back on kinship-like practices in complex situations, which might explain why in the digital age, there is such an emphasis on word-of-mouth recommendations, norms of reciprocity and the sharing of personal details online. I have experienced many many “serious” business people looking down their noses at this sort of sharing (“Twitter is stupid. It’s all about what people had for lunch.”) especially in the context of business (“Why do my employees care if my daughter plays Soccer?”), thinking that it is just time-wasting and off-task. But folks who see it this way may be missing the point entirely. It may not be just free love or oversharing. It may be creating kinship-like relations that provide the most trustworthy means of living and succeeding (in business too) in an increasingly fast, complex digital world.

In chapter 4 of his excellent book The Control Revolution, James Beniger suggests that the persistence of “traditional” family kinship and honor-based business relationships well into the 19th century was more than just a resistance to change, but was rather a means of controlling [1] trans-oceanic commerce in the absence of effective telecommunications and international legal sanctions. In other words, if a person was running a trans-oceanic shipping company in the 1600′s, they were faced with a hugely uncertain situation, where they needed someone they could trust completely to sell their goods on the other side of the ocean. That person was usually kin; a family member. When these kinship networks were not available, though, merchants still conducted their business relations in kinship-like ways which look strange from the perspective of 20th-century “professional” perspective:

Even when the actual kinship did not exist, people tried to evoke these sorts of feelings. As Lane (1944, p. 99) notes of Andrea Barbarigo [a real merchant of Venice who lived from 1418-1449], ‘There were in his business letters more protestations of personal affection than can be taken seriously…Conventional references to a loving concern for the agent’s future honor and profit..’ [2]

So before you assume that the next employee Twitter message about how “You should visit that sandwich shop on the corner next lunch time.” is just a waste of time, you may want to consider that it might be part of a series of kinship-like, trust-building activities that will help sustain your organization in increasingly fast, complex times.

[1] I am using the word “control” to refer to any form of influence, from slight to total control, as is suggested in James Beniger’s book [2]
[2]  Beniger, J. The Control Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1986

A C-Level person in the 1970′s who had never watched television, or a manager in the 1940′s who had not used a telephone, or a business leader in the 1990′s who had never purchased a product online would have a difficult time understanding how these technologies affected their business externally, or how they could be used to benefit their organizations. They would also be in danger of either ignoring the technologies altogether (“We don’t need telephones. Business is about face-to-face relationships!”) or they might be easily lured by a clever sales person into wasting money and time on less-than-useful efforts (like the people who spent huge amounts of money on expensive websites in the late 90′s when a simple web presence might have sufficed).

The same is true today. Great managers are digitally fluent (in case you are wondering, here is what i mean by “digital fluency”) enough to make smart, informed strategic, policy, cultural, staffing, IT or budgeting decisions in light of the changes occurring in the digital age. They aren’t easily misled by eager sales people, they understand the need for digitally fluent employees, and they are comfortable critically questioning any sort of hype either for or against the use of digital media in their organization. Importantly, their digital fluency, while bolstered by books on the topic, or advice from consultants or sales people, is best developed through active participation in digital culture and practices both inside and outside of the organization.

Most of your employees live in digital culture [1] outside of your organization that tends to lean toward the development and use of open source software, the use of massive collaboration, the viral spread of videos, the love of practical jokes, the rapid coordination of protest, the use of digitally-scheduled meet-ups, the crowdsourcing of media ratings, the fracturing of messaging, the formation of social networks, the proliferation of micro-messages and many other things that are probably different from the culture inside of your organization.

Your employees’ participation in this culture affects how they see themselves, your organization and their world, just like their participation in the so-called television culture, the telephone culture, the radio culture and the book culture. (these co-existed, of course, but you get the point)

Great managers understand the culture (and the world) of their employees. To do that, they must become fluent in that culture through active participation. Great managers today will only stay great if they find ways to actively participate in digital culture.

[1] We could split hairs about what that word means, but for now let’s assume that i’m referring to the set of values and practices that we can see occurring frequently.

Reason 2: Decision Making

If i want to become fluent enough in German to live and work in Germany, i first have to get over my xenophobic fear of German culture, or my feeling that their way of speaking, their way of living, is lesser than mine.

I will probably figure out later that there are some parts of the German language and culture which are to be feared (like the alpenhat in the picture above), or loved (like the real German preztels and weissbier) more than my own, but going in with that prejudice before i understand it will keep me from becoming fully fluent.

The same goes for my relationship with my students at Indiana University. If i want to become fluent enough in “student language” to live among and connect with them, i first have to get over my xenophobic fear of their ways of interacting, or the feeling that i am somehow better or smarter or wiser than they are.

To become digitally fluent enough to thrive in today’s world, i have to first overcome my xenophobic fear of people who live lives of always-on mobility, who share massive amounts of personal information, who use Internet slang, who love and share silly-seeming photos and videos, etc. (the list goes on). I also have to overcome the feeling that my preferred alternatives to these things, like face-to-face conversations, reasoned long-form discussions, non-slang language, etc. are automatically better.

Once my xenophobia is lessened or removed, i can then start my journey to digital fluency. Along the way i will adopt some of the new tools and practices (i have begun using Twitter quite regularly over the last several years to connect with other researchers, family and friends, and i have come to appreciate the art in many silly-seeming YouTube videos) and reject others (after trying out the game World of Warcraft for a bit, i did not find it enjoyable or useful, and i rarely break out a digital device in meetings or in social settings), but i can do this from a place of knowledge and reason, rather than from a place of fear and prejudice.

Now take a minute to think about how new these concepts must have seemed to people in 1954. Now take another minute to think about how much the widespread practice of using telephones in this way participated in changing

• How sales and marketing are done
• How customers connect with companies
• How customers connect with each other
• How geographically spread out organizations would become
• The speed at which information spread across those organizations and beyond

Now take one last minute to think about how the widespread practice of using internet-connected digital technologies in the many ways that people are today are starting to change these things too, and how different many of them might be in 1,5,10, 50 years.

What do you think is on the way?

Digital media has begun to give people an (almost) infinite choice of what they can do and when they can do it. In a world of (almost) infinite choice, the ability to focus everyone on shared strategic goals becomes more important than ever.

Perhaps an analogy will make this connection more clear. Imagine you are a teacher leading a small group of Bloomington, Indiana high school students on a 5-day museum tour around their town. The choice of museums, according to the city’s visitor page, is far from infinite. In fact, there are fourteen. The systems and technologies that the students will have to learn in order to visit those museums is small as well. They will probably either drive, walk or take the local bus. They will be able to easily find them on a map, and could probably just ask friends for most of the locations. It will not be difficult for you and your students focus on, and to achieve a positive outcome.

Now imagine you are leading the same group of Bloomington students on a 5-day museum tour around New York City.

The choices are overwhelming. According to this web site, there are at least 70 museums from which to choose.  To add to this, the systems and technologies that the students will have to learn in order to visit those museums may be overwhelming. They may have to learn to navigate the subway system, learn how to negotiate a cab fare, how to find the museums, how to cross busy streets, how to catch and take a bus, etc. etc.

To have a successful 3-day trip in New York–the city of (almost) infinite choice–your ability to focus everyone on shared goals–becomes more important than ever.

This is analogous to the situation organizations find themselves in today. Every person in a company now has an (almost) infinite choice of things that they can do from their computer, their iPad, their phone, and even from their car. They can pose an idea to their friends or to the world, they can raise money for a project, they can instantly shoot and upload video to a public website from a phone, they can surf the web for competitive information, they can send an encouraging message to their colleagues, they can meet up with people to share knowledge, they can blast an email to the entire company, or just to their spouse.. the choices are (almost) infinite. To add to this, the number of different technologies that they can use to do these things is (almost) infinite as well.

Because of this, one big key to an organization’s success in the digital age is the effectiveness of its strategy execution process. And by this we don’t mean putting together a 40-page strategy document and filing it away for a year. Rather, we mean the discipline of making sure that every person in the company is constantly aware of the organization’s 5 or 10 top strategic goals, that they are able to understand how their daily decisions support those goals, that the company is measuring and communicating everyone’s progress on those goals, and that the organization is adapting its strategic goals often enough to keep up with the pace of change.

When an organization’s strategy execution is lacking, the blessing of (almost) infinite choice in the digital age can quickly turn into the curse of chaos, like a bunch of small-town students who try to visit all 70 museums in New York in 5 days. When an organization’s strategy execution is solid, it enables its people to make smarter choices, ignore the potential distractions, and use digital media to help accomplish the organization’s biggest goals.

 

* Photo sources:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amyguth/3450521193/ and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29624656@N08/3735314426/

How can we make sure that some of these ideas turn into effective action?

SociaLens has recently started using a series of questions to help organizations reflect on the things that either inhibit or enable their ability to turn their ideas into effective action. While we tend to focus specifically on helping clients with the strategic and digital challenges that face them, the general gist of these questions can also apply to the Bloomington community. It is important to know that these questions are built on the assumption that in order to get things done, every organization and every community (every person, really) goes through some version of the following general process when trying to turn their ideas into effective action:

Using this as a starting point, we then ask organizations the following set of questions. Any boxes in the diagram below that an organization finds difficult to mark “most” or “often enough” represents an area that may be a sticking point for turning ideas into a reality (to apply this to Bloomington, we would change the wording in the questions a bit of course to include things beyond just digital).

(here is a pdf version of this) *

TEDx has given us a huge boost in the “prepare” part of this process by providing a large group of folks with a better shared knowledge of where our world is today, and some ideas for how it might be able to improve in the areas of environmental, psychological and sexual health, mutual understanding and cooperation, educational initiatives, and many others. It has also made that shared knowledge more vivid (easy to remember) for us. Our next step as a community is to put together a simple strategy or strategies (and by this i mean a shared goal or two) that are vivid (easy to remember) and relevant (are easy for a person to turn into everyday actions), and to move around this cycle in ways that allow us all to answer “yes” to each of these questions.

* This set of questions does not get at everything that a city or organization needs in order to thrive, of course (there are also questions of financial and natural resources, values and beliefs, governance, etc.), but we are finding that it helps to reveal a lot of the common barriers that keep people, organizations or communities from turning their ideas into effective action.