Prototyping Social Capital

Group Metabolism

"REWARD success, reward failure, punish inaction," is a favorite mantra of Bob Sutton, Stanford engineering professor who also teaches at the business school (Bob is one of those great examples of cross-discipline richness). During his talk at AlwaysOn a few weeks back, he highlighted the thought through some of his collaboration with Andrew Hargadon on geniuses:

Geniuses do not succeed at any higher rate. They simply do more stuff. It's raw productivity: they get it out faster, they fail faster.

That is, the central engine of development (some call it success) is iteration.

The immediate implication for organizations is to design incentives and practice a culture that encourage trying new ideas, projects and tiny new activities with high frequency. Such a portfolio theory has long been in use for pharmas and VC's to distribute risk.

But what's iteration mean when as the manager you're aiming to improve execution in your group? Projects iterate, but do relationships?

Innovation in relationships stems from social interaction. A group metabolizes experiences at a different scope and rate than an individual. The best groups (which can be a small as two people) outpace the best individuals.

Socializing is the creative generator behind iteration.

First, doing more stuff alone does not guarantee succeeding at a higher rate. Development is driven also in part by how people respond to each cycle: attending to how it went, focusing on what's surprising about the results, looking at what didn't occur as much as what did. Sutton knows this well, as do design practitioners at places like the Cooper-Hewitt, IDEO and Creative Good.

Yet, an individual responding to an experience (ie thinking in their mind) is a very different activity than floating those thoughts into a conversation with others, where others build on them. Working openly is a more generative process.

Fred Newman observes:

There is some kind of development that takes place in the process of ensemble, collective performance, not just of someone else's play, but performance of our own discourse with each other (emphasis his). Our very human interaction...is fundamentally a creative process.

An ensemble can metabolize an experience typically much more thoroughly and objectively than can an individual. (Individuals are most often their own harshest critics). It's no secret that if you want to give better pitches, do more. Yet also socialize how each one went with a trusted set of folks.

The second step of socializing is often easily glossed over. People want to "keep moving" (I want to keep moving), even though it's perhaps the most critical step to yielding value from a given iteration.

The most oft-heard argument against the "how'd it go" conversation is that it's a waste of time, and that at the extreme, the entire day is spent talking about "how'd it go", in effect crowding out getting work done. The critique has merit. Anything at the extreme is a waste of time and will prevent other work from getting done. The trick is to have little conversations often that do a little bit of metabolizing -- generate a little bit of learning from the experience.

Turns out, if the conversation is done with the same people, intentionally, a little bit each day, the relationship among that group grows (making the group more effective). So the next time you chair the Compensation Committee, pitch an investor, or lead the family dinner conversation, talk to your group about it. In time, you may find yourself a Genius.

Addendum: As my group points out, most people already find themselves to be a Genius. Ah, so true.

NPR meets RSS

Very glad to see this happening:

NPR now talks to your newsreader.

Until advertising seeps into newsreaders and/or posts, traditional ad-supported media models will encounter a lot of difficulty incorporating RSS into their readers' experience, that is unless or until Ross' cost per influence model is more fully developed. Bottom-up, listener-supported models can get going today.

Wanted: Women's Voices

There's a group of single women on a singular mission causing quite a stir in San Francisco. And New York. And DC. She19 is working to breathe life into the 19th Amendment. The 19th of course is women's right to vote.

A recent study conducted by Women's Voices, Women Vote, found 22 million unmarried women who were eligible to vote did not cast ballots in the 2000 election. This is the largest group of non voters in the US democratic process, suggesting as a united voting block, they could determine election outcomes.

More importantly, they (and any others who choose to organize) could determine the role of government in our lives (vs simply the people who occupy the posts). Why? Because more so than ever, there are tools that allow people to participate -- in companies, in democracies -- far earlier and far more than by simply buying or voting.

Democracy is predicated on an ongoing conversation between the governors and the governed. While not voting is a significant market signal to send to the governors (ie "we don't believe in the process and we don't believe you make a difference for us"), it's an insufficient one. The overwhelming value in a democracy is the activity of developing a point of view about who represents what matters to you most. When developing the point of view consists of speaking with others -- both individuals and policy makers -- all involved are more a part (and have a greater stake) in shaping what's created.

It's the prep that counts. The vote is merely the final step.

This participatory value creation shift is already occuring in business. Companies know it's in making a product where a majority of the value is added. Today, more and more customers are involved in shaping their purchase options (Ebay customers, for example, create Ebay every day, collaborating both on the transactions as well as on all the tools and policies). A purchase is nothing more than a vote for a product. It's the final step in the value creation process.

In the past, casting a vote was the only visible, persistent signal to send. It was a one day, low bandwidth conversation that occurred once every 4 years. Now with social software (wikis, blogs, etc), the cost to coordinate with others, and further, to build on their thoughts, is nearing zero: People can participate in more meaningful conversations at same time. And unlike face-to-face communication, the cost to merge these conversations into blocks across time and place is neglible.

As a result, people can shape candidates' platforms and officials' policy through their conversations, amongst themselves and with the officials (& their teams) year-round, not simply during election season.

High bandwidth governance however is only as strong as the people who participate. Because a democracy is defined by the group it serves, when we're missing large tracts of people (whether voting as a block or not), the democracy is weakened. In biodiversity terms, it's endangered.

She19 and Women's Voices, Women Vote are playing the invaluable role of encouraging people to participate. Support them. Find the folks who are organizing around what you care about most, support them too. Above all, add your voice to the conversation more than once every 4 years.

Voices: Overheard at AlwaysOn

Some rising memes heard at the conference. These are not verbatim -- they're scribbles of quick outtakes.

Kevin Conroy, EVP and COO, AOL for Broadband:
The industry is coming to terms they're in the music business, not the record business.

Dan Gillmor, columnist & blogger, San Jose Mercury News:
When you cover technology in Silicon Valley, you realize that the readers know more than you do, and they're not afraid to let you know. If you have some common sense, you realize it's not a threat, it's an opportunity. Blogging allowed me to have a better conversation with readers.

Tony Perkins, Editor, AlwaysOn:
The fatty food backlash will hit media too. On TV, people are being fed fast food.

Joe Trippi, Author and former campaign manager, Howard Dean for President:
Harry Truman spoke to 19M people criss-crossing the country by train. Eisenhower looked into the camera, and spoke to 19M people instantly. What was missing for Ike was the socializing. Truman was able to socialize his message. Now, both are happening. With the new technologies, there's both broadcast and conversation.

Virtual audience member in the live chat session:
In europe you work to live. In the US you work for the bottom line. Can't compare.

Rob Glaser, CEO, RealNetworks:
Flaky revenue is worse than no revenue. Flaky revenue can lull an entrepreneur into false confidence.

Ronnie Lott, Co-founder, HRJ Capital, and Pro Football Hall of Famer:
How many people when they play football...right at that moment when they hit someone, they pause, even slightly for a half-second, in anticipation of what's about to occur? I didn't do it that way. I wanted to give it all I got. I wanted the hit to come from all of me. All the way down from my toes. Like i'm hitting a ball out of the park.

Joe Schoendorf, Partner, Accel Partners, about to begin his brief overview of China:
900 seconds. 1.3 B people. That's a lot tall challenge.

Dave Sifry, CEO, Technorati.com:
There's advertising that you see. There's advertising that you read.
Now, there's advertising that you can share.

Collective Advantage

During the AO Summit today at Stanford, Joe Trippi, much lauded campaign reinventor, raised the hoarding principle:

We're not in the information age. We're in the empowerment age. In institutions, which are top-down, people tend to hoard information, which gives them power. Then the net comes along, distributing information, all around, and all the way to the bottom, to the edges.

His observation raises one of the many versions of fear: If i give this up, then I won't have it anymore, and I won't get anything back. As a result, people invest mightily in holding onto what they have. With information, however, just as it is with relationships and other non zero-sum assets, giving away does not mean no longer having. In fact, contributing is really the only way to have.

Take the example of building a Lower Manhattan 9/11 memorial. If you have an idea for how to do it, you have two options. You can hoard it, in which case you possess the idea, but because it is not part of context where others can build with it, practically speaking, it does not exist. If you choose to put the idea in play, you still have the idea, and now others have it too. And because they got it from you, it's more yours than ever.

Whether the idea receives initial attention is driven largely by one's reputation among the group. One's reputation is driven largely by previous value provided. Previous value comes from, yep, contribution. Back to Step 1. While in capitalism it takes money to make money, in a meritocracy new ideas can come from scratch (or at least: a trust fund is not required to post an idea). Plus, these days the cost of meritocracy is dropping: it's getting easier for people to add value, to give and build upon ideas of others.

Trippi continues:

There's an open source revolution going on right now. It's starting to impact governments. It's going to affect corporations.

It already has. One recent Socialtext customer shaved 1 month off a 4 month product cycle by working in an open collaboration environment. Instead of hoarding, waiting for the optimal time to give, the workgroups used online shared workspaces as a common place to get work done. Given that price premiums can be charged when you're first-to-market with a needed feature set, that means profit -- for the firm and the individuals.

Working openly is not a breeze. People are afraid they won't get credit. They're concerned others will judge their "unfinished work". They have higher perceived control when they keep private spaces. Yet, as Ross likes to say, giving up a little bit of control can lead to a little more trust.

We'll see if Trippi's prediction about an open source revolution in politics comes to pass. Joi's Emergent democracy? Could be a worthy experiment. At a minimum, working openly will happen for many companies. The advantage that accrues will be too tempting to pass up.