Awaiting Igon Valuation

In Steven Pinker’s eloquent review of Gladwell’s new collection of essays, he coins a new calamity - “the Igon Value Problem,” mocking Gladwell for his misunderstanding/ misspelling of the term “eigenvalue” as igon value. The Problem, as defined by Pinker is,

when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Now, I’m laughing all the way home, believe me, but I’m concerned that our industry is one that is fueled by Igon Valuation. Is it not true that there’s a deep hunger for sweeping generalizations in lay speak? A thirst for buzzy buzz words to capture compelling psychological constructs? Isn’t that essentially what industry analysts are lionized for?

My concern is that this Problem is keeping answers at bay. There are solutions available to some of today’s more complex business problems, but they’re waiting to be "Igon-valued" before catching on. Take the measurement of social technology usage, for example.

Meanwhile, academics are often brought on to firms with fear-- left in the back room, lest they promise to dumb down everything they’re thinking of uttering client-side.

I too have criticized Gladwell for his banal generalizations, for his cursory foray into psychology and statistics, for somehow stealing the credit for entire literatures-- but I'm constantly reminded that Gladwell is hailed as a business guru! His books are on the business best seller lists for months, years. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that business wants things Igon Valued. In a recent embarrassment at Web 2.0. Expo NYC, danah boyd was publicly humiliated for speaking too densely, quickly, and smartly... I used to think it was compelling stories about data that were lacking, but I’ve now decided banal generalizations are more effective. Please tell me I’m wrong.

I think the essence of business problems are waiting to be solved by a combination of social network analysis (SNA), text analysis, and some good, old-fashioned, proper attention to human beings-- not all things that have been here all along, but things that are readily accessible now.

By measuring connections through SNA, we can identify things like:

• who’s connected to whom in an organization, however informal those connections are. 
  
• the roles people play in communication and collaboration - whether they’re information brokers, originators, or hoarders (alas, a potential opportunity to make blatant generalizations!)
  

Through text analysis, we can determine things like:

• the nature of signals exchanged-- when work is really getting done as opposed to socialization!
  
• how honest or emotional colleagues are with one another
  

Through asking the right questions on surveys, we can:

• explore perceptions of trust, motivation, awareness, competition 
  
• help validate the root cause of any given problem
  

Compare today's business intelligence to what Dr. Dena Rifkin wrote recently of how our medical interventions -- our attention to “benchmarks and checkboxes” are failing the patients:

As a profession, we are paying attention to the details of medical errors — to ambiguous chart abbreviations, to vaccination practices and hand-washing and many other important, or at least quantifiable, matters.

This too is true in business-- we’re paying attention to quantifiable units because they’re there, buzzy concepts because we want to keep up with the Jones’.  

Be wary of buzz words. Certainly there are outliers, flukes, and things you can accomplish without methodical, long-winded statistical pattern analysis or reasoning, but for the most part, some depth is necessary. Furthermore, means to the depth already exists -- we’re not waiting for it to be figured out, just waiting for it to be popularized.

Also posted on Dachis Group Collaboratory which you can subscribe to here

Three masquerades of metrics

Below is an excerpt of a post I wrote for our Collaboratory today. Curious to hear readers' thoughts on measurement flaws and opportunities in the social space. Please find the full post here. 

[There are three major opportunities that could help unlock the value of conversations and other social interactions. But first, we have to overcome some very basic human tendencies:

• the ease of counts 
• the shine of the surface 
• the convenience of snapshots. 

We need to abandon some traditional standards and stop forcing social data into shapes and sizes that work for other media measurement. Tomorrow is about patterns, depth, and dynamic metrics.]

Reflections on Reflections on Working in Public

When we launched our Collaboratory, I mentioned that it's part web presence, part social business experiment. For now, the most experimental part is the window on our work-- a live stream of communication acts our team engages in, offering up varying degrees of information from having shared an unnamed file on a particular platform to emailing someone at a certain domain to tweeting specific, visible content. 

There are massive individual differences in comfort with transparency. As my team has spent the past few weeks sussing out the comfort zone with the public now privy to the stream, we've reflected on, discussed, and critiqued our perceptions. We're very curious what it's like on the other side of the window... What do you think about our transparency? Too much? Not really that much? Want more? 

Transparency can have a profound effect on behavior. Perhaps not a universal effect. Ironically, the psych study that comes to mind is an old great of Ken Gergen's: Deviance in the Dark (Gergen, Gergen, & Barton, 1973). Gergen was exploring the effect of darkness on behavior. He had students enter a dark room one-by-one, to get to know each other. He provided very few instructions. They chatted, talked more heatedly, and then... eventually the study was called off because it led to some scandalous and unexpectedly affectionate behaviors! Not aggressive ones, as might have been expected. 

I bring this up because of what we know from this and several other studies on deindividuation, or not being able to see or pay attention to individuals as individuals (the opposite of transparency). Deindividuation doesn't necessarily make you aggressive or affectionate, it's a powerful force in making people conform to a perceived norm. This has really interesting implications for transparency in the workplace, especially for leaders and norm-setters. Transparency may not have a single effect - be it competition or collaboration; authenticity or artifice. Read how it's affected my colleagues over the past few weeks and let us know what you think.

 

Dachis Group Social Business Technology Alliances

Another week, another announcement: today, about our Social Business Technology Alliance program. 

With such a wide spectrum of social business needs, it's important to have the flexibility to solve the problem at hand and not shoe-horn an organization into an uncomfortable platform. It should be clear by now that at Dachis Group, we believe technology is part of the overall solution; I typically write about the necessary culture and process-related changes we believe in and practice. Today, we're excited to welcome our technology partners to our ecosystem to help deliver comprehensive solutions.

Our technology and integrator partners include:

• Atlassian Confluence - Wiki-based collaboration
  
• CoTweet - Twitter for business
• IBM Lotus Connections - Enterprise social networking tools
  
• Telligent - Customer and enterprise facing communities
• ThoughtFarmer - Social intranet software
• SocialWare - Social Media risk management
  
• Socialcast - Enterprise microblogging and social networking platform
• Photon Infotech - Open Source Development
  
• Bamboo Networks - Custom application development and rehabilitation
  
• Starpoint Solutions - Application implementation and integration
  

Read the official release on our Collaboratory. 

Social should imply specificity

[This was originally posted on the Dachis Group Collaboratory]  

There’s an inherent problem with the word social. Not “social media” or “social business.” Just social. The problem is, it doesn’t incorporate any sense of specificity to it. People are left to think that all things social are massive connectivity festivals. Really, being social is about connecting with sensible, specific others, typically, for specific reasons.

It’s great to open things up and give people freedom, but specificity-- that is, some focus or structure- is what really unleashes talent. Specificity comes in many forms of social systems. As Tom Malone et al. point out, the “genome” of collective intelligence can be broken down into Who (staffing), What (goal), Why (incentives), and How (process). Each of these "genes" demand specificity.

Take the Netflix Challenge, for one: its success as a crowdsourced effort was attributed to connecting the right people only after some jockeying happened. It was not a result of all participants being connected, helter-skelter. Often throwing too many people into the mix leads to hasty and irrational outcomes due to groupthink or lazy free-loading, as a result of social loafing -- not to mention pluralistic ignorance where we incorrectly assume acceptance of a given norm.

A less oft-cited method of making a social system work has less to do with who is connected and more to do with what you ask of those connections. This is a critical focus as researchers migrate from surveys as our mainstay methodology. Good questions are the currency of social systems that flow between the focused connections discussed above.

The other day I noticed Rypple made an important change in this direction with its “Power of One” initiative. Rypple, as you might know, lets you give and receive feedback online (anonymously), to and from select others. All humans lack an inherent sense of psychometrics, so it’s hard to know precisely what to ask, especially when the stakes are high. That is, you’re asking *specific* trusted others for self-related feedback. The inclination is to ask open-ended questions. Logic being similar to the above: connect everyone // ask people to tell you anything and any number of things. Turns out, lack of specificity leads to confusion, and in most cases non-response. Rypple is alleviating this problem by encouraging users to ask “what’s *one thing* I can do to improve.”

It’s usually one question that makes or breaks a given finding. Gallup’s one question, “Do you have a best friend at work” is the biggest predictor of workplace engagement. Other research shows that one question self-assessments of health are better predictors of mortality than an extensive battery of objective health data. Reicheld told us six years ago that your Net Promoter score is “The One Number you Need to Grow.”

My point is not about measurement error and response bias, it’s about specificity. Being direct in order to make social systems effective. Finding the signal amidst the noise.

We can't go on idly talking about "social" initiatives. We must be focused in order to make social systems effective. This pertains to who is in your ecosystem, how they are connected, why they are connected, and how you measure those connections.

Being social is not necessarily complex. If you apply a lens of specificity, you can systematically simplify the situation.

Lab, Sweet Home(page)

Today we launch our laboratory on social business design: The Collaboratory.

It’s a work in progress, and today is the first step. When you arrive, you’ll notice a window on our world of work: a live stream of our communication-- sharing files, yamming, tweeting, and yes, emailing, since no one is perfect yet.

The Collaboratory moonlights as our web presence, offering more information about our company, curating readings about social business design, and eventually inviting clients to engage with us in social business. Rather than making it a static repository of knowledge, we’re testing out new ways to make it more dynamic and blur the lines of transparency and other notions, previously standards of how business has been done.

My favorite aspect of it is its experimental nature, so please participate and help us turn it into something really interesting. We've also posted our first piece of thought leadership, available for download. I hope this stimulates millions of questions from you, particularly about the interface of social science and business; I encourage you to engage, question, critique, comment. We've been thinking about these concepts for just over a year now and are excited to open our doors and engage with our ecosystem.

Think culture change, not brainwashing...

You might laugh, but as I’ve been thinking about the culture change associated with social business design, I’m reminded of the literature on coercive persuasion, aka brainwashing, in its ugliest form.

Only brainwashing has such negative connotations. Abandon those. The part I’m thinking about, the systematic methodology to get people to change their attitudes to drastically different ones, is not necessarily evil. 

I know it seems strong - or wrong - to compare culture change to brainwashing, but building the new collaborative culture we’re talking about takes a lot of work. Unless, of course you’re just asking people to use social technologies and not genuinely change their ways, their attitudes, their business processes. 

Most people aren’t-- they’re asking how we get hierarchical, silo-d, and competitive cultures to change to more democratic, participative, or hiveminded ones.

Enter “thought reform” methodology from reputable psychologists like Edgar Schein or Robert Jay Lifton, as deduced from extreme situations like American POWs in the Korean war. Of course, it requires slight adaptation to be more relevant to an organizational setting. 

The POW brainwashing tactics were complex, but there are three major phases that  are typically identified. Keep in mind, in the case of the POWs, which I don’t for a second endorse a direct analog to employees of corporate life, it was all about breaking down identity through abuse, starvation, isolation, sleep deprivation, etc.. Rather than breaking down who you are, I’ve adapted the process to be about how you work. I’ve also removed the need for undue conditions (managers take note). 

A loose adaptation: simplified steps to "induce" culture change:



Break it down. 

• While you don’t need to begin by attacking “wrong,” or unsocial ways, question current definitions and ways of working. Get all assumptions and beliefs on the table. In the coercive settings, here's where captors figure out what they're working with and build a foundation for change. Use caution here-- the emphasis is on questioning old ways, not mandating new ones. The anxiety you can provoke here could backfire if you aren't supportive and consistent. 
  

Provide a glimmer of hope. 

• As people, we’re full of biases that limit us to seeing and using things in the usual, traditional ways. Offer alternatives. Start with seemingly innocent pilots-- nothing back-breaking. Talk about the purpose behind the ways of old so you can rebuild strategically and not just address features. One of the more effective tactics used in POW coercion was to put newbies in groups with others who were more advanced, or further down the road in the desired change. They offered a comfortable model of tactical next steps.
  

Rebuild the new, social employee. 

• With a blank slate to work from, here’s where the vision comes in. The key here is introducing a new belief system, not just a new feature set. In coercive version, here’s where "the right way" is introduced, and is radically different from ways of old [Note: here's where it's introduced, not in stage 1, but in the final stage]. The trick here is to provide a completely new framework. Recall how easy it is to fall back on what we know; here, you have to go out of your way to offer up new ways to think about things.
  

Again, drastically oversimplified, but in my mind, remarkably instructive when thinking about genuine change.