I was asked recently how I evaluated alternative proposals. The question was asked in the context of social systems designs. And while there are a number of considerations that apply to social systems specifically, that in no way obviates the need for a fundamental understanding of the forces at play in your marketplace.
I won't even try to add value here. I think everyone should spend some time understanding at least this aspect of the work of Harvard's Michael E. Porter.
Recently the Harvard Business Review ran an article by Michael Porter. It included a pointer to a video of Porter describing his five forces that definitely worth watching.
I had to check this out. After all, I've been suggesting that at the highest level what we're doing with the internet is creating a virtual version of the physical world. The differences, I suggest (and one of the spaces for innovation), are all about virtual space and time versus physical space and time and what you might be able to do in one that is impossible in the other.
Yes, and I admit to visiting the Star Trek exhibit in Las Vegas.
Anyway, check this out. It is creative. Warning: if you suffer motion sickness you might want to go slowly. I'm not kidding.
Before the holidays I made the following promise:
However, to put all of this in context, I've decided to share the planning process itself -- how we think about planning social computing initiatives. It's my hope that clarifies how we make investment decisions and gives anyone interested in doing so an opportunity to point out any flawed assumptions that have crept into our thinking, and suggest improvements. I see that happening in several installments, each one building upon the last:
- Defining terms: community/social software/social computing
- Detailing association/relationship types and the development of strategy
- The foundations of online social interaction and the development of tactics
- The role of guiding principles in an ongoing creative development process
- The roadmap
I suspect we'll get to each of these over the next three to four weeks.
The post received quite a few views, but no comments. I've been mulling over the meaning of that. And mulling. And mulling. And still mulling. In the meantime, I've decided to forge ahead.
Defining terms. Terms, ahhh, a favorite subject of mine. You see, according to the Insights Discovery System I'm predominately blue with yellow running a close second. (The Insights Discovery System program is one of those things companies do from time to time for a host of reasons including, but not limited to, team build
ing, personal discovery and exploration of self, interpersonal awareness, and spending money. We all put up with it because we have to, and it's usually amusing, if a bit long winded. Here's an example of the kind of report you get after you take their test the graphic was pulled from that pdf.)
Anyway, us blues often insist that we have some agreement on terms. That requires a special effort and is not always a popular use of meeting time. Red's in particular often lack the patience for that sort of thing.
Defining community should be easy right? And it is, sort of. It's a "how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go" sort of thing. Community, and the phrase social network, each have a lot of layers. The wikipedia definitions continue to be refined. They've been edited a couple dozen times so far this month.
Here's the table on contents for the Wikipedia entry for community:
To be clear, I like the entry. It provides an interdisciplinary view of the subject and makes it clear that there's more depth and breadth than your membership in Facebook might suggest. However, I like to start simple, and simple is tough to tease out of that treatment.
And the plot thickens. It turns out that there's another entry on wikipedia that might meet our needs better. Wikipedia offers a second entry dedicated to virtual community. Here's the table of contents for that entry:
This one is not quite as long, and a lot more fun. Consider this quote: "Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks." Or this, "The agglomeration of all online communities is sometimes called the metaverse." Wow. Here we are, right this very instant, in the midst of socio-technical change and with full membership in the metaverse. I should add that to my LinkIn profile.
Along with that excited commentary, however, are a number of gems:
- "A virtual community is a social network with a common interest, idea, task or goal that interact in a virtual society across time, geographical and organizational boundaries..."
- "Virtual communities depend upon social interaction and exchange between users online."
Gems? Yes, because they're simple. You may have great depth in your understanding, but you must also start with simple definitions -- however superficial -- if you intend to get any conversation started. With that in mind, I would simplify further and say that at root a community is a group of people with a common interest and shared activity. It doesn't matter whether they're grouped online or offline, or what the interest is, as long as it results in related, and relating, activities.
On to "Social Network". In popular parlance, the phrase social network and community appear to be synonymous.
Technically, there is a distinction (and Wikipedia, in their definition of social network clearly warns us not to confuse the two). A social network is the structure underlying the community -- the web of relationship or association. Social network analysis is the process of describing and understanding the relationships between the related entities -- not necessarily human individuals (just as community, more broadly defined, does not require people -- though that is an assumption I've made herein to save space).
Here's an observation that makes the distinction: it is possible to be a member of someone's social network and not know it. It commonly occurs. My RSS reader represents one of my most prized and certainly most professionally valuable social networks. It's not, however, a community. Personally, I experience the sensation of dissonance at the idea that I could be an unwitting member of some community. Community membership connotes (at least) knowledge of that fact, though I've been known to ignore that distinction myself. Therefore, a community is a type of social network (web of relationship) where the members are cognizant of membership.
Consider this question: will community form around the OfficeLive Workspace product itself? I suspect that a community of experts in the technology will form. I hope it does. In fact I'll be continuously evolving the community site to support that goal. However, they will very likely represent only a tiny percentage of the overall population of workspace users. Any other communities? Again, I surely hope so and will be designing and redesigning services to support that end. But I don't think all, or even most of those communities will center on the product itself. Heresy, I'm sure, but the more likely outcome is that communities will form around the activities the technology supports, rather than the technology itself.
Will social networks form around the technology? The answer is yes if I have anything to say about it. You see, support is one of the reasons for the existence of http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com. And social networks may be a more important concept than community when we're considering support scenarios specifically, or information worker scenarios generally. I've written about that before, and likely will again -- just not right now.
So, with community and social network defined, are we ready to go determine strategy? Not yet, but at least we can begin talking sensibly about the subject. The next job is to define the nature of the relationships or associations that are most likely to best support the activities in question.
You have to do it. You have to separate yourself from what you're passionate about. Especially if you're passionate about it. The consequences for remaining plugged in and active are significant. Well, they may be significant, it's hard to say given that we can't do A/B testing with our lives.
Why this is true deals with one of my favorite subjects: confirmation bias. Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes the phenomenon well in the The Black Swan. I've referred to this book several times. To quote Taleb, "the more information you consume, the less you know". And that happens because we tend to consume/recall/share/promote the things we already hold to be true. More input, more confirmation, less knowledge.
So how do you avoid it? Perhaps you can't, but I had to give it a try. So, for the last several weeks I've been experimenting with break taking.
The first thing I did was unplug from my professional online social network. That was hard. I kept thinking -- and was occasionally correct -- that I was missing important late-breaking industry news. It really was like trying to break an addiction. I wanted to open my RSS reader in much the same way I wanted a cigarette back in the days when I was addicted to those. And literally, after about two weeks, the cravings started to subside. No kidding.
Next I put together an eclectic reading list -- not a giant leap for me. I started down that path, but noticed right away that my mind was constantly drawing parallels between the development of online social systems and whatever it was I was reading. I can't say it was a total failure. Some of the things I learned from Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (and continue to learn, I'm not done with it yet), may turn out to be useful. (Peer groupings, for instance, may have significant limitations, and don't actually match professional real world nets. They are a better fit for personal social nets -- fascinating.) In any event, I would highly recommend the book.
At best that got me maybe a third of the way there.
What helped the most turned out to be a couple of things I didn't plan in advance. Perhaps that's why they worked as well as they did.
The first was partying. Not the intoxicant part. The part about listening to all the other people -- all the other non-Microsoft, non-SN, just hanging-out around the holidays, people. It took an act of will. I was always tempted to talk work, and was often being led into those discussions. But on those occasions when I prevailed upon myself to just listen, the dramas defining other people's lives became clear and the drama of my own became less compelling. I was reminded of a book I'd read years ago called the The Drama of Everyday Life.
The second was almost an accident. I had the few days after New Years off. The kids were back in school. There was snow in the mountains. So I went snow shoeing. My wife didn't have the days off, so I went alone. I won't go any further with this, other than to point out that hours and hours alone in the Cascades, in the silence of the snow fall, is something I need to do more often.
However, I do have to go back to work, and I suspect confirmation bias won't be denied for long. Truth: I'm not confident I really got away from it at all. Nevertheless, the new perspectives I was exposed to while actively avoiding my standard inputs have changed my own. I glanced at my professional social net today. Some of the people there, people whose insights I've followed for months, seemed a bit too extreme from where I stand today. I seem to have moderated somewhat.
On the other hand, I looked at the site I'm responsible for and saw compromises I've already made. There, I feel more determined.
It may be that confirmation bias is just another way of saying that we give everything in our experience a role in our personal drama, in our personal story. We press it into service, and the fit is not always, perhaps not often, a good one. In the heat of the moment, of the moments, that's often hard to keep in mind. In the very least, time away can be a reminder.