Organizations are autonomous when they have final say over their own future. People are autonomous when they have final say over their lives. I might be autonomous at home but not at work, by the way, just as I’m free to decide who I vote for in an election or what movie to watch this weekend but not to decide whether to merge my organization with another one. That latter type of decision is checked by an organizational reporting structure, so I’m not acting autonomously when I make it. Similarly, a division of a corporation isn’t autonomous because final say on important matters sits outside, in the parent corporation.

What does this have to do with networks? Hang on, we’re getting there – but first a word about relationships that are voluntary. As an employee, the connection I have with my organization is not voluntary – it’s part of an institutional hierarchy just like the corporate division that reports to its parent. These relationships are power relationships – institutional power relationships, to be specific. They’re not voluntary, and they’re usually backed up by the force of law through things like employment contracts and corporate bylaws.

Networks are an alternative organizational structure to hierarchies; not necessarily better, just different. You join them voluntarily and they connect you, not to a reporting structure, but to peers. Networks connect peers in ways that help them safely and voluntarily shed a little bit of their autonomy - just enough to be able to get work done together.

To illustrate, let’s talk about a partnership, a simple form of network that connects just two entities. True partnerships are between equals. When two people decide to marry or move in together, the resulting partnership is voluntary and between equals. When two firms decide the advantages of ongoing collaboration outweigh the costs of coordination, the resulting partnership is voluntary and between peers.

In true partnerships, the relationship between partners is definitely not a reporting relationship where one controls the other. It’s much more complicated and nuanced than that – just ask anyone whose been married or in a significant relationship for any real length of time. The same is true for partnerships between two independent companies.

It’s also important to note that if a third party were to force the collaboration, the connection between ‘partners’ wouldn’t be voluntary and they wouldn’t really be acting autonomously. In networks, there is no external controlling force. It’s not only the individual members of the network that are autonomous; the network itself is also autonomous.

Why is autonomy so important to networks? Because, as we’ll see in future posts, they run on a different set of principles than organizational hierarchies. Networks collapse when we use the wrong operating manual to run them. Networks aren’t the answer to everything. Many situations really are best solved by organizational hierarchy. Lots of good stuff has been written about working with hierarchies. You’ll find it in the “management and leadership” section of your favorite bookstore. In comparison, less has been written about networks, so that’s the focus here.

Understanding that organizations voluntarily give up a little bit of their autonomy in order to work together is a critical first step in understanding how networks function. How that happens and what that means is were things get a little more interesting…

In 2004, I wrote a piece called “Movement as Network” which captured the imagination of a number of people in the social change community. Over the intervening years, I’ve wanted to follow up on many of the ideas that grew out of that work and my experiences at Groundwire. That is what I will be doing here at the Alchemy of Change blog.

What can you expect to find in this blog? Well, networks play a big role in how I see the world and I think a lot about organizations and how they engage people in their work. Democracy, innovation and sustainability are also key themes that you’ll find woven into much of what I write.

I’ll be trying to write in a modular format with lots of links to related posts so that after a few months there will be a nice little kernel of interconnected ideas for others to use in their work with organizations and networks.  Beyond that, I don’t know exactly where this will go.

Turning to writing has been a big step for me. This morning, while at a gathering for my son’s school a man asked me what I do for a living. After a few moments hesitation, I told him “I write. I am a writer.”

So, I guess I better get to it.

“People give authority to people that they genuinely like.”

The more troubling part of the article, however, is what tends to happen to these same people when put in positions of power. In short, they lose empathy and their ability to make complex decisions – two of the key attributes that put them in power in the first place.

For those of you who’ve been in positions of authority before, you may recognize some of what this article outlines from your own personal experience.

Loss of empathy? Yeah, you might have experienced it as having to make a ‘tough call’ that really hurt someone who worked for you. It’s about watching out for the bottom line, or putting the mission above people – and sometimes it’s totally necessary. But often as boss it’s easy to put the task ahead of the relationship in an effort to eke out short-term goals. You often find the worst flavor of this behavior accompanied by some equivalent of  “nothing personal; it’s just business.”

Loss of decision clarity? For some bosses, there’s an enormous pressure to have all the answers. Over time and with added authority, we find ourselves valuing being decisive over making the right decision. Often, we end up getting our ego attached to our decisions in the process. On the plus side, we simplify and streamline our decision making processes to deal with the increased flow of decisions. The best bosses do this with a graceful mix of intuition and decentralized decision making authority. In short, they learn how to trust their people. Hiring great people is critical to success here.

The article talks about where unchecked power can lead. Lord Acton beat the authors to the punch in 1887 when he noted that:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Not sure I agree. I’ve met some really good leaders in my life.

What I do agree with, however, is the punchline of this article. Transparency is the key to curbing the corruption that often comes with power.  Transparency is one of the fundamental forces for good in society and something worth injecting in all our institutions.

His definition of platforms:

• something that is a foundation, an enabling environment, upon which others can build things, make things
• something that exists for a specific purpose (or set of purposes), and which invests in capabilities related to those purposes
• something that then makes it easy for people to use those capabilities
• something that does all this in a commercial model that facilitates the creation and development of new products, new services, new markets, new marketplaces
• something that can coexist with other platforms and ecosystems

And a bit more about platform API’s:

Anything that aspires to be a platform needs to engender this trust. So when you look at “platform APIs” don’t be surprised at what they do at their core. They’re usually about a very small number of things:

• user directories, adding and removing people, grouping and classification
• identity, authentication and permissioning
• service and data inventorying, cataloguing and access
• publishing of things digital
• distribution of things digital

This is a great piece and much of it centers on the notion of trust – users trusting the platform and platforms trusting other platforms. That’s critical for the kinds of service interoperability that is required for an open cloud computing to succeed.

I tapped notes furiously on my iPhone both nights. It’s hard to pick out one thing to focus on from all of what Alex said. But I will.

Apathy is the enemy of engagement. Alex made the case that one of the ways institutions retain power is by boring others into apathy. We’ve all seen examples of this – usually in triplicate.

While making his point, Alex made reference to the following from Richard White:

In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for a skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

From Richard White’s The Organic Machine

I love this quote. You can almost see the little Pepé Le Pew clouds of boredom, wafting out of rows of agency and corporate windows.

Keeping danger away is a strong motivator for established institutions. We’ve come to accept the barriers of boredom that big, bureaucratic companies and government agencies erect to protect themselves. We accept it as normal. But it doesn’t have to be. We can do better and this was a running theme through much of Alex’s second night.

I think a lot about how organizations engage people in their work and something is definitely changing. Smart companies are spending lots of money on relationship marketing and customer relationship management solutions. They’re trying to figure out how to build stronger, more engaged relationships with their customers. Governments are trying to figure out what it might look like to build stronger connections with citizens through “Government 2.0″ solutions.

Many of us get hung up thinking about engagement as a technology problem. Technology is an important enabler of engagement, to be sure, but the biggest challenge is actually much deeper. It’s coming to grips with the danger that we ourselves may be trying to keep away. I’m speaking here of the danger of losing control. For the social change organizations I work with, it’s the danger of giving constituents more power over the direction of their organizations; the danger of fully opening our organizations to the power of fully engaged volunteers.

I’m not talking here about online donations, online petition signing or online methods for contacting elected officials. There’s nothing wrong with those things, of course. But come on. There’s got to be more. We need to be thinking about more creative, more interesting ways of engaging our fellow citizens in formulating our shared future. We cannot afford to bore these people. They are the source of any power we have. The interesting contradiction here is that to fully tap that power we must first be willing to give it away.

Losing control is scary. There’s no getting around that. But until we’re willing to do it, we too are the stinkers.

]]> http://alchemyofchange.net/2009/11/16/the-stink-of-boredom/feed/ 0 gideonro http://alchemyofchange.net/2009/11/07/defining-social-crm-networking-business-processes/ http://alchemyofchange.net/2009/11/07/defining-social-crm-networking-business-processes/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:35:28 +0000 Gideon Rosenblatt http://alchemyofchange.net/?p=100 ]]> Paul Greenberg has an interesting post in which he puts a stake in the ground in defining Social CRM (sCRM). There’s a lot to take in from that post, but here’s his relatively compact definition:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

And here’s the super short, Twitter-friendly snippet:

“The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”

These are good working definitions but I want to hone in on something else from Paul’s post. It’s the notion of the “personal value chain.” Here are some points on this from his post:

That means that we need to recognize that there is an extended enterprise value chain which consists of the company, its suppliers, vendors and agencies that the enterprise has to deal with. There is a separate “personal value chain” which is the total greater than the sum of its parts of what an individual customer needs to achieve whatever their personal agenda is.

For the company to succeed, since they cannot control the personal value chain of the customer, nor should they want to, they can only provide what the customer needs to satisfy that part of the customer’s personal agenda that is associated with their enterprise. That means products, services, tools and experiences that allow the customer that satisfying interaction.

The intersection of the extended enterprise value chain and the customer’s use of part of his personal value chain to satisfy that personal agenda creates the possibility for a collaborative value chain that engages the customer in the activities of the business sufficiently to provide each (the company and the customer) with what they need from the other to derive individual and mutually beneficial value.

Now, this is what I find most interesting about the whole idea of Social CRM. What we’re talking about here is exposing business processes. That is the essence of any good CRM consulting work. How do you expose the business processes for building relationships with customers? In traditional CRM consulting, the focus is on exposing those business process to employees. The goal is to expose those processes in ways that help employees add value to customers.

Social CRM is about exposing those business processes not just to employees, but also to the customers themselves. I’m not just talking about self service processes here though I would argue that is an important step on the way to sCRM. What marks the shift to sCRM, in my opinion, is when customers begin using the tools to extend the organization’s business processes in ways that interact with others.

That’s what I find interesting about Paul’s notion of the “personal value chain” and the way he’s talking about it intersecting with the organization’s value chain. CRM’s early adopters out-competed rivals by using the tool to better manage relationship management processes internally. Tomorrow’s sCRM early adopters will out perform their rivals by melding collaborative processes with their customers in ways that dissolve the edges of the org chart. Those organizations that excel in exposing business processes to their customers are the ones who will tap the energy and value of their customer base – and that is a power that dwarfs all others.

Everything we are talking about here boils down to generating value to customers. In traditional CRM that value came from providing better service through better understanding. In sCRM that value comes from providing better ways for customers to serve their personal networks in ways that take advantage of the organization’s core services. In a recent post, I outlined another, more specific way in which organizations share value with customers through the notion of “transitive novelty.” The value of sCRM shares an important similarity. For the key to success in both cases, lies in how effectively the organization is able to flow value into the hands of its customers in ways that enable that customer to extend that value in turn to their customers.

That’s what I feel tonight after our new http://groundwire.org website went live today – pretty much without a hitch. This site is the culmination of a lot of work over the last 12 months, creating the new name and the new branding that surrounds it.

Groundwire is the new name for ONE/Northwest. The new brand represents our hopes and dreams for the movement for a sustainable society – that it be more “connected” to people. This is the key to shifting society on the scale that we need at this time in our history.

You are connected.

One thing I thought was particularly interesting in Michael’s piece is this paragraph:

Notice how May Boeve refers to herself as a coordinator — not an organizer — when I ask her about her work (video). Sounds minor, but the reality is that no dozen people could have directly organized more than 5,200 simultaneous events on every continent using traditional organizing methods. In most campaigns, community organizers cover relatively small territories, working closely with volunteers to train and empower them to take on the campaign’s work. In this campaign, the “organizers” were the volunteers, not the staff.