shift and share

If you’ve maintained a steady pulse over the past few years, you have – no doubt – heard a bunch about Web 2.0. It slices, it dices…it enables mass collaboration…etc. But what if you wanted to actually do something with this nebulous thing we call the read/write web?

That’s exactly the challenge we have for a client in an upcoming session; how to apply this stuff into some tangible gain for the company?

Specifically, how can web 2.0 tools be used to change the way employees interact with the company? With each other? How do suppliers and vendors interact and collaborate using these tools?

As part of our “scan” for this session, we want to put together a virtual tour of Web 2.0 tools, showing some of the things that have caught people’s interest; some of the tools people use in their personal lives and others that they have carried with them into their professional lives.

So what do you use? If you had a visitor from 1995, what would you show them on the web – on your web – to make them realize the staggering extent to which their internet was static, stagnant and irrelevant?

What are the tools that make the new internet indispensable for you?

Here’s a few of my recent favorites…

Housing 123

Sifting through endless pages of house listings on static pages is mind numbing. How do you figure out where it’s located? How can you tell a pricey neighborhood from a slum? This mashup pulls data from Canada’s MLS (real estate) listings and plots it on Google Maps, so you can see the listings by location, with the pins color coded by price. Now you can see if you’ve got the best house on a bad street, or the worst house on a good one! Chip, of course, one-upped me on this one with his fancy American site, zillow.com.

Google Reader

Okay, this isn’t new, but I love it. I could go to 20 different web sites to get my daily dose of reading, or I could use my handy-dandy RSS aggregator to pull together stories from all of my favorite sites…with a few of my friends’ blogs thrown into the mix for good measure.

Kayak

In my pre-kayak days, I used to search about 10 different sites to find the best fares. But you know, good data just wants to be free. Kayak digs up fares from all over, then lets you slice the list any way you like with tweaks to your original search. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

LinkedIn

Facebook seems so innocent, now. LinkedIn is social networking with an agenda, constantly telling you how many connections you’ve made, and how many opportunities there are within “x” degrees of separation. Whoa. Submitting your resume is sooo old-skool.

YouTube

Okay, I can not only upload video, but I can embed and share it? You mean, I can subject THE WHOLE WORLD to my baby videos? Wow.

So? If you were to give a tour of the new web, what would be on it? What are the best YouTube videos you’ve seen? How do you share your documents? What’s the most amazing site you’ve been to?

Steve Rubel wrote an interesting post today on the disappearance of deep blogging and the steady transformation of the ‘blogosphere’ into the ‘lazysphere’. He points to the current practice of many bloggers of simply jumping on the bandwagon of the story-du-jour without adding anything in the way of insight or added value to the discussion.

This is, indeed, an interesting trend, which I think highlights a number of features in a maturing blogosphere.

First, where blogs emerged originally as a new medium of self publishing and self expression, where individuals outside of traditional media could express their views, it has since evolved into a ‘set-up-your-account-in-five-minutes-and-speak-to-the-world’ tool for any and all to use.

This change is important. With no real barrier to entry into “publishing”, the field has become crowded and the commitment to creating content need not be particularly high for someone to, nonetheless, go ahead and start blogging.

So what’s the motivation? I would like to believe that there is a desire to share, to expose your ideas to others and to gain validation and further insight from their responses. This is, ideally, the collaborative core of blogging. Let’s not call it content; let’s call it ideas. Ideas are fed to the world, where they can flow freely between connected writers and readers quickly, being built upon and improved as they go.

But there is also more immediate motivation. To be ‘well known’. Nowadays, getting a spike in hits and a jump on technorati is the same as getting published. And this leads to more readers, more exposure and – maybe, just maybe – the chance for some kind of tangible payoff, nay, fame.

So how does one achieve this? Well, the network effects are all about flocking and aggregation. You could somehow do something so astounding that the world will notice, or tag along behind a topic that everyone is already looking at, hoping to snag some long-tail readers and traffic. By chasing after every little blip in the consciousness of the network, a blogger not only increases their chance of getting collateral readers, they also fulfill the desire of the crowd to have a steady stream of new (let’s not call them ideas, let’s call it…) content.

And that’s why blogs like Steve’s are valuable; though there is a huge amount of chatter out there, engaged individuals within the network can help steer us towards those who, despite the pressures of the swarm – continue to produce…what shall I call them…

ideas.

I spoke with Andy Heppelle yesterday, who was fresh back from Holland. He passed on a quote – which I found rather inspiring –  from a top executive who had just been through an ASE:

“I find my team works best when I am silent”

I loved that. I love that it not only takes an incredible amount of courage and confidence for a leader to vocalize that, but it also shows the pride and confidence that that leader has in his team. I’m always impressed when people assemble amazing teams, then take that step further to actually recognize the collective capacity and strength of the team they have assembled. That’s when you know you have a great team that has not been hired for the sake of vanity, but to get things done.

The quote Andy passed on reminded me of a poem by Chuang-Tzu, which has always served as my ideal blueprint for leadership since I first read it in Thomas Merton’s The Way of Chuang-Tzu:

The wise man, then, when he must govern, knows how to do nothing. Letting things alone, he rests in his original nature. He who will govern will respect the governed no more than he respects himself. If he loves his own person enough to let it rest in its original truth, he will govern others without hurting them. Let him keep the deep drives in his own guts from going into action. Let him keep still, not looking, not hearing. Let him sit like a corpse, with the dragon power alive all around him. In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing, he will see all things grow ripe around him. Where will he find time to govern?

That last line still gives me a chill whenever I read it…”Where will he find time to govern?” The concept that to lead is to enable people, as opposed to direct them,  is truly inspiring to me. It asks, what can I do to allow my people to succeed?

Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear someone come out of an ASE with the answer to that question.

I read a wonderful book not too long ago entitled “The Culture Code”, which had, as its thesis, the concept that each culture has a “coded” set of primal affinities and aversions. Through group regressions, the author – Clotaire Rapaille – claimed to be able to distill the essence of a culture’s feelings for a particular object or concept at the most basic, reptilian level of consciousness. The book is a fascinating read.

What hit me most as I read it, however, was the gulf between people’s stated impressions based on rational explanations versus their “true feelings” which lay beneath, deeply imprinted upon them by their culture.

And that got me thinking about collaboration. My suspicion is that collaboration is not “on code” for North Americans. We love the concept on an intellectual level. It makes sense to collaborate, to work together, to leverage the experience and intelligence of the group; but my guess is that the concept makes people nervous on a visceral level.

Doesn’t it mean that you, personally, aren’t worth very much? Don’t we value champions? Shouldn’t we want to “Be a Tiger?”

While doing some research on Wikipedia not too long ago, I came across a great quote by someone arguing that it is not the end product of Wikipedia that people object to, it’s the process by which it was (and is) made.

Culturally, collaboration is seen – I think – as a bit of a rip-off. Where’s the hero? Who’s idea was it? Who gets credit? Who profits?

Test it; what does collaboration mean to you? If you’re gauging only by results, collaboration seems great. But don’t you really want to be able to say “That was my idea”?

Last week I was a part of a very inspiring session with some clients in Cupertino. Inspiring because the executive sponsors of the event did what is very hard for executives to do: they trusted the group to not only have input into the answers, but to help define the problem.

The timing of this was interesting for me. On the flight down to California I had been writing furiously about the difference between knowledge work and “widget work”, that is, work that is mechanically devoted to the production of physical artifacts.

Widget work requires tasks to be divided between people or roles. Sure, the widget can be broken down to its smallest individual component parts which can be produced in parallel, but to avoid “too many cooks in the kitchen”, you generally cannot have multiple people doing the same thing at the same time…nor would it add any value to do so.

Knowledge work, on the other hand, is based on the creation of non-physical artifacts, be it content, concepts, software or, well, knowledge. By removing work from a strictly physical set of constraints, a new set of models arises which is not bound by the same physics or rules.

Enter collaboration.

What I loved last week was seeing a small group of people saying “I don’t know the answer; let’s put it to the group.” Sure, they had some ideas, but not answers. Where to go from there? What to do next? The group not only came up with great ideas of what to do…they then went and did all the work that resulted.

That hooks in beautifully with the first rule of knowledge work:

If you don’t ask any questions, you are limited to the experience of your own lifetime. For each question you ask of another person, you add the experience of a whole lifetime to your own.

And how much more so with a group?

But what interests me, and what I have begun working out, is the models which enable knowledge work and collaboration to actually work. Widget work requires an end product, a plan, schematics, a way of dividing the work, a space and a work flow (not an exhaustive list). What are the requisites of knowledge work?

I knew the DesignShop process was patented, of course, but it’s eye opening to see the actual patent itself. If you’ve got the time, this is pretty much the most lucid description of the process and its components that I’ve seen.

We know that having time to sleep on something often gives us perspective, but this article in the New York Times goes a long way to pull together some of the research on why that is. It offers a lot of specific insight into the idea that a good deal of information sorting takes place during sleep.

studies “suggest that the sleeping brain works on learned information the way a change sorter does on coins. It seems first to distill the day’s memories before separating them — vocabulary, historical facts and dimes here; cello scales, jump shots and quarters over there. It then bundles them into readable chunks, at different times of the night. In effect, the stages of sleep seem to be specialized to handle specific types of information”

This is, of course, built into the DesignShop process, but for me, it was very interesting to get some further background and elucidation of the theory. Thinking of the sheer volume of information that people are confronted with in our workshops, this helps me to understand how the sleep between each day can impact the overall output of the session. It’s easy to overlook its importance.

Excellent discussion between Don Tapscott and Google’s Eric Schmidt; part of Google’s Author series. This is a useful primer on the ideas of mass collaboration.

An interesting moment, I thought, was Tapscott’s suggestion that success in the old paradigm makes it more difficult to adopt the new one…sounds a lot like our saying; “Nothing Fails like Success.”

A recent recommendation lead me to “Dealing with Darwin”, a superb book on sustaining innovation within the enterprise.

Interestingly, one of Moore’s core models is almost a carbon copy of the Stages of an Enterprise model, but he goes a long way to elaborate on the “entrepreneurial button”, especially as it pertains to the use of technology and the innovation that is necessary to push the button. Better still, he actually breaks down the different types of innovation that are necessary at each stage of the enterprise. I’ve attached the model (geoff_moore_SE_innov_model.jpg) where he illustrates the different innovation types through the lifecycle. In that graphic, he’s also overlaid (bottom left) his “Technology Adoption Life-Cycle” model, which describes the adoption of disruptive technologies. Very, very applicable to Web 2.0 topics, SOA related sessions, or even ERP sessions.

I included the second model, as well, because it is part of a suite of models he uses to illustrate the point that innovation of itself is not valuable, but gains value only when it helps to achieve economic advantage. His discussion in this area serves as excellent guidance in any of our innovation sessions, as it helps to lay out a framework to distinguish between innovation that increases productivity, neutralizes the advantage of a competitor, differentiates one from their competitors, or is just plain wasteful.

Recommendation: get this book!

A new and rather surprising step forward in mass collaboration is taking place in New Zealand, where members of the public are being allowed to help craft new legislation through the use of a wiki. It will be very interesting to see the progress of the project as it evolves, especially as it is open to people all over the world, in the hopes that the insights, knowledge and expertise of people everywhere can help craft better laws.

The question that will be most interesting to have answered, though, is this; will it, indeed, result in better laws? Taking a quick look at the wiki, I came across the following passage:

Police should however be limited in their response to someone defending their own home or business. If a person harms a criminal who enters their premises police are to confine themselves to helping clean up, determining that the criminal was there unlawfully and not lured into the premises and arresting the criminal. Police should not normally charge people who injure or terminate a crim while defending themselves or others, their home, business or property.

This is something that I’ll be following with considerable curiosity and interest. Will a passionate and knowledgeable contributor base come together to craft something that matters? Or will legislators have to comb through reams of strange and difficult-to-interpret edicts inserted into the draft?

The wiki itself can be found here.