I recently purchased and read The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media, by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner.  I care about this topic for many reasons.  I care because i am a student and a teacher, who cares deeply about how people learn about and change their worlds, often as a part of organizations. I also care because i am a researcher, who wants to get at and explain to others some of the roots behind the actions and interactions of people, in organizations, using technology.  Finally, i care because our company SociaLens has made it our mission to help people and organizations to do the right things, the real things, the sometimes hard things, that it takes to thrive in the digital age.

I think The New Social Learning is a very helpful brick in the foundation that will help us all to build a common understanding of how organizations can thrive in the digital age.  The authors have put together and nicely framed a large series of case studies that supports the book's stated goal "..to help senior executives and managers understand the power of social media for learning." (p. xxi)  It doesn't quite so fully support the goal implied by the title "A Guide to Transform Organizations Through Social Media."  As a member of a team that is also writing a book, i am guessing that the wording in the title may have been influenced by the publisher's desire to sell books, so this comment is not a knock on the authors, but instead a suggestion that readers go into the book expecting to have the first goal met and not the second. Perhaps the best way to frame this is through a few ideas of what the book may do for you (and why) and what it may not do for you (and why). I, of course, am me, so your results may vary.

What the Book May Do for You: 
Provide a lot of great examples of what can be done with social media. The examples of the knowledge sharing at TELUS, the CIA, etc. were great as inspirational tools for senior executives or managers who are still dubious about what can be done with social media.  Additionally, these examples are framed in a way that makes the case for these things pretty obvious. 

Provide simple, rational arguments to counteract some of the irrational fears and objections that people have to the use of social media for business purposes (to be clear, there are completely rational fears and objections to the use of social media).  For example, the argument suggested by the authors that immersive environments like Second Life are no more "sci-fi" than was television at some point in history may help both proponents who are trying to answer questions, or skeptics who are still feeling like virtual worlds are purely for people who regularly speak Klingon.

Provide some great, practical recommendations for how to get started using social media in your organization.  A big part of learning has to do with modeling (here's a nice overview if you're interested), and a big part of modeling is showing what can be done and how to do it.  These simple examples like how to "create onramps" for users in virtual environments, and how to "give executives a direct link with employees" should be helpful to anyone looking to get things going.

What the Book May Not Do for You:
In my opinion, this book won't be sufficient to serve as a guide to transforming your organization any more than reading AG Laffley's excellent book The Game Changer is a guide to turning your company into an innovation machine.  They are both books chock-full of positive examples of what has been and therefore what can be done, along with some helpful tips for how to get there, but neither is going to tell you a whole lot about the specific ups and downs your people or organization are likely to hit, and how to think through that overall process at a high level.

All of the books i have read have overlooked a key point that has emerged out of our research with organizations who are struggling with understanding and adopting social media, which is the importance of digital fluency. We have found that fluency is a key element of an organization's success with anything digital, and perhaps especially with social learning. For more on digital fluency, you may want to check out this previous post. For the company who is inspired by the case studies in The New Social Learning to get their social on, they may be surprised and frustrated to find out that they can't do what the CIA or TELUS has done (at least not the same way that those organizations did it), even with great tools and a solid strategy, because they have different fluencies and different fluency levels. 

Hopefully this provides some helpful perspective on this book.  I enjoyed it, and think it is worth a read.

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When we consider the adoption of new media, one of the often-overlooked factors affecting this is the psychological affect that the use of a particular type of medium or method of use has on the comfort level of the user.  I was reminded of this again recently when reading an article by Jeff Bardzell, Jay Bolter and Jonas Löwgren in a recent issue of Interactions Magazine/Journal.  [1] 

The following quote from the article reminded me of this:

"Many popular digital forms today are highly performative in this sense: The users project themselves or perform before an audience of friends, acquaintances, or indeed strangers in applications such as Facebook, Twitter, 'World of Warcraft,' and so on. These applications are successful precisely because they make it easier for users to reinvent their identities in the act of performance."

The use of different media in different contexts may be entirely different types of performances. So using email with three colleagues in an organization is a completely different type of performance for most people than using a company social network with 3,000 employees. If this is true, then if follows that expecting fluent users of email to easily adopt the use of a corporate microblogging like Yammer or a company collaboration platform like SharePoint is as silly as expecting closed-set movie actors to instantly feel at home performing at an improv club.  There are some things that translate, but there are others that most certainly do not.

From this perspective, when slow social media adoption occurs, it is probably look beyond some people's mere resistance to change or a lack of basic knowledge of how to use new tools (what we are now calling literacy), and to include an exploration of people's comfort levels (related to what we are now calling fluency) with how to perform in an environment where so many things about the dynamic between user and user or actor and audience are so different.

[1] Interaction Criticism : Three Readings of an Interaction Design , and What They Get Us. Jeffrey Bardzell, Jay Bolter, Jonas Löwgren (2010) Readings 17 (2) p. 32-37

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The right balance of digital fluencies is an important but often overlooked factor of an organization's success, along with the more traditional factors of proper technology selection, strategy, and organizational structures. To help organizations make sense of this, we developed the SociaLens Digital Fluencies Framework.

For this blog post, we have included simple definitions for each of the six fluencies to get you acclimated. As this series of blog posts progresses, we will reveal the more specific definitions.

Tactical Fluencies

(these enable a person to get things done at the individual level)

Information fluency—The ability to gather information, to ensure that information is credible and relevant enough to then act upon it and to share it with other people.

Interaction fluency—The ability to critically choose and be confident in one's representation of identity (or identities), and the related ability to engage effectively with groups of people.

Innovation fluency—The ability to critically reflect on past and present situations, to creatively imagine future scenarios, and the ability to make those creative scenarios a reality.

Strategic Fluencies

(these give a person the ability to enable or constrain other people to get things done at the group level)

Inspiration fluency—The ability to serve as or provide motivation for others, based on the ability to understand and recognize what stimulates people to act.

Involvement fluency—The ability to help other people be aware and make sense of their situation, and to match other people's strengths with that situation in a way that empowers them to accomplish their objectives.

Imagination fluency—The ability to look ahead at what a group might face or might do, and the ability to get that group to move toward that future.

Before you go, here are a few important tips for thinking about this framework:

Fluency Has More Than One Level. Fluency is a level of skill and comfort. It helps to think of it in two general levels. In most cases, a person must achieve the first level in order to reach the second: 

• Literacy—the ability to know how and what to do, like knowing how to post a message online.
• Fluency—the ability to know when and why, like knowing when it is appropriate to post a particular message, given the context.

No Fluency Is An Island.  No fluency can be usefully considered in isolation from the others in a person or in a group. For example, a leader who exhibits questionable inspiration fluency by assuming that all her employees are motivated by money may be squashing those employees' desire to improve their innovation fluency by experimenting with low-cost, personally-rewarding digital projects.

Fluencies are a Result of Nature and Nurture.  A person's fluency is a result of both who they are, as well as what they've experienced and what they've learned. This means that fluencies can be developed, but that different people will develop those fluencies differently. 

Digital Fluencies Aren't All About Digital.  It is important to note that none of these fluencies are completely unique to the digital age. People have always needed a form of information fluency, for example. But the rapid digitally-related changes in the world have changed how some of these fluencies look, and the mix that is appropriate for different situations.

In the next series of posts, we will share a little more about the history leading up to this framework, and will look at some case studies through this lens to see what it reveals.  Until then, please feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments below.

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There it was! The missing link. (no pun intended) So, @kruse has two blogs. There was a feed summary of his other blog on his LinkedIn profile page (which you can only see if you are logged in to LinkedIn, by the way). That is where he has been hanging out since he abandoned his other blog. Tons of great stuff, especially for those in the healthcare field to help patients "who are increasingly marshalling digital technologies and communicating with peers to actively manage their health."

Confidence restored - and a lesson to be learned for all of us.

The web is not a linear, sequential, controlled medium. Which means we never know when, where, or how someone will connect with us. One of the fluencies in the SociaLens framework is interaction. As we grow in our own interaction fluency, we can help others interact with us as well - even if they are not as fluent as we are. In @kruse's case, he could do some things to help his Twitter followers find his current blog more directly, either through his Twitter bio or on the site that he links to from his Twitter profile page. There are probably a few other options that I am not even thinking of at the moment.

Another one of the fluencies is information - how do we access and use information for our own empowerment. I am pretty confident that most people would not have taken the the number of steps I took to discover the existence of his second blog.

• How could @kruse have shared this information with me to help me find it in a more effective manner?
• What factors do you use when deciding who to follow on Twitter?
• What are you doing to help others be more informed and more interactive with you when they find you online?
• How are you and your organization addressing these issues?
• Do you have any examples where you found "holes" like the one discussed above, either on your own site or someone else's
•  If so, what steps did you take to alleviate them? 

This is an issue that we all face, whether we are aware of it or not. Hopefully, this discussion will help all of us develop our own fluencies so we can help others do the same. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this. Now I need to go read @kruse's other blog!

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Despite the fact that many people consider me to be working on the cutting edge of research, business and technology, i generally go through my days a little oblivious to the massive amounts of change that are occurring in the world right now.  Tonight, though, i found myself bowled over by it.  Here's the scenario: At around 10.30pm i was working on a SociaLens project at home, when the following message reached me via Twitter, via Chris Andersen, the Editor of WIRED magazine:

The development and testing process has been highly-documented online, as you can see from this video of the testers jumping the first car they are producing: 

So tonight, while working on another project, i followed a live stream of the launch party for the opening of their Chandler, AZ micro-factory. During the live stream, i "met" Aurel - one of their designers, who ambled up to the laptop and answered a few questions:

..and we chatted with Nyko, who walked around with the laptop to show us a location in the building where he had almost lost his hand working on the wood floor..

..as well as their CIO (the guy in the white shirt to the left - to the right is the band for the event)..

Now, when i step back and think about this for a second (and, i might add, write this blog post, which is instantly available to you the reader anywhere on earth), i'm bowled over by the media's effect on Local Motors, on my PhD, and on SociaLens. Our use of the Internet has pretty radically expanded the speed and scale of what we do.  The times really are changing.

(oh, and by the way, if this post was written badly i hope that you will forgive me.  You see, i was watching the launch party live and writing the post in real time--a fact which is interesting in and of itself!)

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Change is not new.

I am sure you have heard it said that change is the only constant. Much has been written about the impact that change is having on organizations today. Two of the all-time bestselling books, Jim Collins' "Good to Great" and Johnson & Blanchard's "Who Moved My Cheese", were written to address the problems caused by change. Clayton Christensen's "Disrupting Class" and Roger Martin's "The Design of Business" were both written to help organizations and their leaders adapt to the forces of large-scale changes that have occurred in the fields of education and business.

What is new is the speed and complexity at which change is occurring today. "Change" does not do justice to what we are experiencing. Let's try transformation, metamorphosis, or conversion. Perhaps those terms help to add sufficient weight to the completeness and degree of change that this increase in speed and complexity are having on organizations. Personally, I like "metamorphosis", which denotes a change in form into something completely different. We are now operating in a culture that is unlike anything we have ever seen before. We are not dealing with a horse of a different color. Not only is it not a horse, it isn't even an animal! Metamorphosis has created the problem that is the subject of this blog post.

One of the biggest dangers in asking wrong questions is that they sound "right". We use metrics all the time, especially in business. Many organizations are still attempting to apply the traditional forms of measuring performance to something that is completely different than anything they have ever seen before. This often creates a false sense of security and confidence. I understand why people keep doing this. They are good at answering these traditional types of questions, have developed proven methods to work through them, and often appear to be generating useful information.

The problem occurs when we attempt to apply metrics to the wrong thing. If we start with the wrong question, our data is virtually useless. Anyone who does that is setting themselves up for massive amounts of frustration, confusion, and exhaustion. Unfortunately, many are still completely unaware that they are asking the wrong questions. Social media is one specific example of how this is playing out. There have been hundreds of debates and discussions surrounding the issue of measuring the ROI of social media for an organization. Wrong question! 

Fortunately, the folks at Proctor and Gamble didn't fall into this wrong question trap. If they had, we wouldn't be telling each other "I'm on a horse." [This is not to be confused with the previously mentioned horse of a different color.] P&G launched the "Man Your Man Could Smell Like" advertising campaign in February, 2010. However, it wasn't until they started posting real-time responses on YouTube in July 2010 that things really started heating up.

Take a look at the Google Trends chart below, which depicts the search trends and news references for the term "old spice". The Old Spice YouTube video responses were started right after their third commercial was released, resulting in the huge spike you see in the month of July 2010. They are now the #2 all-time most subscribed YouTube sponsor channel, with over 143,000 subscribers.

If the people at Old Spice had used traditional measures to determine the ROI on social media, they may never have launched this campaign or achieved such success. They recognized that the advertising medium has gone through a metamorphic change. This caused them to start asking completely different questions, which led them to the highly successful YouTube real-time response video idea.

How many companies do you think are trying to figure out how they can duplicate this? Until people start to recognize that a metamorphosis has occurred, there is a high probability that they will keep falling into the same old "wrong question" trap. It's now easier than ever.

Swan dive!

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There is a series on Animal Planet right now called "The Last American Cowboy". It chronicles a year in the lives of the families and employees on three different ranches in Montana. While most of us probably think of playing a harmonica under a star-filled sky and chewing on a piece of straw, this series provides ample evidence that some of the most innovative, imaginative, and inspiring people on this planet are cattle ranchers. They face circumstances and situations almost every day that are beyond their control. Whether it is a freak spring snow storm piling two feet of snow on them at the peak of the calving season or a herd of stubborn cattle that just don't want to cooperate, they figure out how to get their work done. There is no question that it is hard work. But it is also about working smart. When things go wrong or you don't have the optimal resources for your project, maybe you can learn a lesson or two from these cowboys who have to figure out innovative solutions all the time. Nothing epitomizes this like the scene in the video below. Just to set the stage a bit, Scott Hughes runs a 12,000 acre ranch with 400 head of cattle and 400 calves - by himself! When you run a ranch by yourself, you have to get creative. Watch Scott scatter feed using Cowboy Cruise Control. This is one innovative cowboy!

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One indicator of fluency (in anything) is a person's ability to refrain from using it.  

I had a fascinating conversation last night with a woman who told me, a little proudly, that she preferred face-to-face communication over digital, and recently went without a cell phone for a few months in order to prove that she didn't need it.  She was surprised by her feelings of dependence (and the feeling of loss in the absence of the phone) at first, but in the end, was very happy to report to me that she was now aware that she could do without the phone. I think she had assumed that, as a person who uses a mobile device and whose career has a lot to do with digital communications, i would be shocked by this. Instead, she was a little surprised when i applauded the way that she had increased her fluency with digital communications. 

Just like fluency with a language helps me to know when not to speak it in a particular group of people, or fluency with drums helps me to know that i don't need to play them for every song, fluency with things like digital communications helps me to know not only how to use them, but whether i need to use them at all. 

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Did you realize that the military has explicitly included design as part of its operational doctrine? Why, you might ask?

Here's what they say:

"growing uncertainty, rapid change, increased competitiveness, and greater decentralization. Given these trends, our leaders must expect and be prepared to confront a variety of complex problems, most of which will include myriad interdependent variables and all of which will include a human dimension." (p. 1)

Sound like your organization's situation? Read on.

(i posted the stuff below as a response to a comment on our LinkedIn group, but i thought it might be useful to post here as well)

I have been studying the military a bit for a while now as part of my research into organizational theory, and i think it's instructive for all organizations. Not that they should all be militaristic, of course, but that the military deals with some of the most difficult situations that any organization might deal with, so it makes a handy bell-weather for organizational theory.

In the US Military, the shift to the doctrine of CI (Commander's Intent) occurred a while ago as a result of the need for quicker adaptation on the battlefield.  The idea was that a commander could issue a "5-paragraph order" to a group, then let soldiers go do their job, without micromanaging them every step of the way.  A later extension of this was the shift to NCW (Network Centric Warfare) in the 1990's which leveraged instant communications networks in service of the Commander's Intent doctrine. The most interesting thing, in my mind, is the newest addition to military doctrine: Design. It takes up an entire chapter in the brand-new Army FM 5-0 Operations Process manual (http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm5-0.pdf), published in March 2010. I think it's one of the best examples of an attempt to promote design thinking intentionally at every level of an organization. 

Check out these interesting quotes: 

"Commanders leverage design to create and exploit opportunity, not just to ward off the risk of failure. Design provides the means to convert intellectual power into combat power. A creative design tailored to a unique operational environment promises— 

• Economy of effort. 
• Greater coherence across rotations among units and between successive operations. 
• Better integration and coordination among the instruments of national power. 
• Fewer unintended consequences. 
• Effective adaptation once the situation changes. 

Design requires the commander to lead adaptive, innovative efforts to leverage collaboration and dialog to identify and solve complex, ill-structured problems. To that end, the commander must lead organizational learning and develop methods to determine if reframing is necessary during the course of an operation. This requires continuous assessment, evaluation, and reflection that challenge understanding of 
the existing problem and the relevance of actions addressing that problem." (p. 52) 

..and lest this sound completely top-down.. 

"Under mission command, commanders delegate most decisions to subordinates. Doing this minimizes detailed control and allows subordinates the greatest possible freedom of action within the commander’s intent. Collaboration among commanders during execution supports mission command as leaders in contact interpret the situation, seize opportunities, and coordinate with each other to gain advantages." (p. 20) 

Perhaps the biggest lesson from this for any organization is that the military is using de-centralization and design thinking, mixed with things like commander's intent and hard data gathering, not as some mooshy-gooshy touchy-feely idea, but as a core way of gaining situational advantage in a rapidly-changing world.

By the way, there's a lively discussion of this and related organizational/design topics going on on our LinkedIn group here.  Jump in any time!

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Getting to the Root

I like to do landscaping and gardening.

Anyone who has done either of these things for any period of time knows that weeding is a necessary ingredient to having a great landscape or garden. In order to do a good job at weeding, you need to get the whole plant out of the ground - "getting to the root". If you don't, it is just a matter of time before that same weed pops it's ugly head up once again.

In non-agrarian environments, we get to the “root” by asking one simple little question - "Why?" Sakichi Toyoda, a Japanese industrialist and inventor, developed the 5 Why's method, which essentially involves asking that same question at least five times in order to get to the root of more complex issues.

Not only does "why" get to the root cause of issues, it is also a critical element that effective leaders use to inspire individuals and organizations to take action. Simon Sinek explores this in great detail in his book, “Start with Why”. Here is a video of a TEDx talk he gave on this subject.

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

Why SociaLens?

Why did I choose to join this group?

Join me in my own personal journey down “Why Lane”.

During the past two years, while I was a graduate student in the HCI/d Master’s program at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing, I was constantly impressed with how the principles of design thinking could be applied to get to the root of any kind of problem.

When I thought back to experiences I had during my 20+ years of experience in the business world, I realized that it would have been nice if I had known about these principles back then. Today, we are seeing design and business come together in programs such as the Stanford d.school and University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Roger Martin’s book, “The Design of Business”.

Why are these new programs gaining such widespread recognition?

Why is design thinking only now getting incorporated into business school programs?

Perhaps this might help us move closer to the root cause.

Tony Hsieh, one of the founders of Zappos.com, recently published “Delivering Happiness”. It is his story of the Zappos.com success story - “why” it has been a success. Tony presents his story around three P’s - passion, profit, and purpose. He gives many examples of how his quest for happiness resulted in the successful attainment of these three P’s. It’s a great book. Read it!

Why did he write this book?

“...as encouragement to established businesses as well as entrepreneurs who want to defy conventional wisdom and create their own paths to success.”

Why would anyone want to “defy conventional wisdom”?

Why do we need to create our “own paths to success”?

I think we might be getting closer to the root.

Clayton Christensen is a professor at Harvard Business School and has written extensively on innovation and how it has disrupted numerous industries, including education, health care, and business.

innovate |ˈinəˌvāt| verb
make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products : the company's failure to diversify and innovate competitively.

Innovation is a fancy way for saying “change”. Change usually disrupts.

One more story before we take a stab at getting to the root.

The 2010 IBM Global CEO Study is the culmination of over 1,500 interviews with CEO’s from companies of all sizes, thirty-three different industries and sixty countries. These CEO’s stated that their most pressing challenge was not simply change but the increasing rate of change - volatility. The Army War College expands it further with the acronym (what a surprise - a military acronym!) VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. They came up with this term soon after the events of September 11, 2001.

The Root of SociaLens

When I started looking at all of this change, I got distracted by social media, thinking it was the root. During the course of our research, we all came to the realization that social media was just one (of many) catalysts of change that we have been experiencing throughout history. Social media falls in the same category with the printing press, telegraph, telephone, television, and the internet. Remediations - all of them. Thank you, Marshall McLuhan and Lev Manovich! The difference is that the rate of change has accelerated dramatically, especially with the introduction of Web 2.0.

Once we got this cleared up, we were finally confronted with something that we knew all along. We let all of these other “things” compete for our attention and take our focus off of what we have always believed is most important. You can see it in all of the situations outlined above - the root of the issues is people. Human-centered.

Regardless of how many systems, procedures, methods, approaches, or programs an organization tries to implement, the capacity for success is directly correlated to the degree to which the people associated with that organization are empowered and equipped with the capacity for adapting to and effecting change (innovation).

And that is why I am on the SociaLens team.

We believe that the root of virtually all manifestations of problems an organization faces is found in what we have labeled as fluencies - “change” fluency, if you will. Whether you are talking about design thinking, happiness, disruptive innovation, or volatility, the least common denominator is the aggregate change fluency of an organization’s leaders, employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

We are on a journey. In some ways, it has just begun. In others, we are joining in on a journey that has been going on for centuries. It is fun, exciting, challenging, and extremely rewarding. I encourage you to join us on this journey.

Why not?

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Marty Neumeier posted the following twitter message recently: 

"The biggest hurdle to innovation is a corporate longing for certainty."

(here's the original)

I'd like to expand on an important point implied in this statement.  I'm pretty sure Marty would agree.  What Marty is not saying is that corporations should not try to gain certainty where and when it is appropriate. He is saying that, when certainty is not possible, a corporation must adjust its mindset, its methods, and its structures appropriately if it is to thrive.  It must stop longing for something it can't have and get on with the business of using what it does have.  Perhaps an example from the field of epidemiology can help illustrate, as told to me by Alex Vespignani, one of my dissertation advisors, who is a theoretical physicist, computational epidemiologist, and an all-around great guy:

In the days before airline travel, epidemics spread in a more or less linear fashion across a continent, because a disease could only spread as quickly and as far as a person could travel per day.  So there was a greater degree of certainty that could be attained about where an epidemic spread would go next and how fast it would get there.  In other words, if an outbreak of the Bubonic plague occurred in Marseilles in 1347 (which it did), you could be relatively certain that it wouldn't reach London for quite a while.  In the age of airlines, however, an outbreak of Avian Flu in Hong Kong in 1997 can spread to anywhere in the world within days.  

What epidemiologists like Alex have had to do is to change their mindset and their methods to adapt to this new, less-certain reality. They now use probabilistic models (where you assume that there are more or less-likely scenarios) instead of deterministic ones (where you try to find the exact answer), because longing for too much certainty would hamper their efforts.  As a result, they were able to come up with a very innovative solution, using the worldwide airline network as a key part of their model, which does a pretty good job of predicting the spread of pandemics.

Organizations today are facing similar situations in many parts of their practice.  Messages about a brand are spread faster and more widely than ever before, and are far more easily fragmented, making the link between cause and effect less certain.    In many industries, the speed at which a competitor can arise and take away market share has increased, making long-term planning more difficult.  The challenge for most organizations is to adjust their longing for certainty appropriately.

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I'd like to make two claims here to see what you all think: 

1. The more fluent we are with a technology and its context of use, the better we can create or understand its potential functions, and therefore the value of using it

2. Without fluency with a technology and its context of use, the more likely we are to limit or misunderstand its potential functions, and therefore the value of using it

Here are a few illustrations from my life: 

My Crappy Beach Volleyball Gear
In the late 1990's, i spent two years training to make the AVP (association of volleyball professionals).  The more my rankings improved, the more often i began to wear old golf shorts in games along with a beat-up, Red Sox baseball cap.  Here is what they look like now (they weren't that much better then):

My teammate Peter wore similarly unprofessional-looking gear, despite the fact that our opponents often decked themselves out in expensive clothing and high-tech sunglasses.  Why? Due to the fluency we'd developed with game of beach volleyball and the "technology" of clothing, we knew that the best function of our clothes was not athletic performance, but symbolic deception.  You see, our unprofessional clothing convinced many less-fluent teams that Peter and i were amateurs, giving us a mental advantage for the first few points of the game (which is more than enough to ensure a win).  This practice became so well known among experienced players, in fact, that they said that they began to play harder against teams the worst they were dressed.

My Ever-Present Notebook
I have been carrying a sketchbooks almost everywhere i go for the last ten years. I carry them to lectures, to lunches, to church services, to friends' houses and on walks.

Despite this effort, i almost never go back and look at the sketches and notes--a fact which has puzzled more than one of my friends. So why do i lug it around with me? At first it provided a way to remember interesting things that people said.  As i have become more fluent with the "technology," however, i have found myself writing things that i am thinking while listening to other people - a sort of mixed reflection on what they are saying and what i'm thinking.  So the value of the notebook for me is personal reflection-in-action, rather than a pure record of what people said, which means i don't measure its value by the frequency with which i look things up later.  In fact, if i lost the notebook, it would still have been 100% worth the investment of time.

Twitter
I have been using Twitter for a few years now, and have only 387 followers.  When i first began using it, i was under the impression that i should try to increase the number of followers of my account.  Fortunately, i did not try very hard, because as i became more fluent with the technology and the context in which i use it, i began to realize that its function for me is as a smaller, more homogeneous network of people with whom i share common goals and interests, and with whom i can share ideas and off-the-cuff thoughts.  As a result, i measure the return on my time investment there in terms of strengthened relationships rather than size of my network.

It is important, i think, to consider the use of any technology from this perspective.  It's hard to really get a handle on the function/value of wearing a necktie unless you are pretty fluent with its use, and the context in which it will be used.  The same goes for computers, and rollerblades, and cheese slicers, and pig-latin (language is a man-made "technology"), Twitter and YouTube and Wordpress and Flickr.  

If true, then it presents a rising dilemma for people and organizations who want to determine the potential value of using new technology before actually using it.  Fear not, though! SociaLens is working on an approach to this, designed to help organizations consider potential value in the use of new technologies and to speed their road to fluency where that potential value seems to be highest.  More on this soon..

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I discovered yesterday that my email program's settings were misconfigured, leading to this result: A subset of the email messages I've been sending out were never received by the intended recipient. They were never received by anyone at all. Worse, the emails that I know I sent simply no longer exist anywhere in my email archives, even though I double-archive everything through multiple email accounts.

I don't know how to even begin to deal with this mess.

Because god knows how these dropped emails have shaped my personal and professional relationships. How many people think I've ignored them completely, because they never received the email response to their single request? How many people think of me as basically dependable, except for the handful of times that they were waiting for something that never came? How many people think of me as the kind of friend who usually responds to email?

And this doesn't even touch on how my misconfigured email program has undermined my work at crafting my email identity. Like most people, I make decisions regularly about when and how to send email based on how I hope to be perceived by others. This is an important aspect of building a professional identity these days, and if you don't spend time thinking about how your email use colors your colleagues' perceptions of you, you damn well better start thinking about it.

So that's down the toilet for me too. I had to reconfigure my settings, which meant that every email I was holding in my inbox as part of my ongoing to-do list has also been sent to the archives. Which means that the hundreds of smaller things I've been saving to follow up on when the time's right--those have disappeared on me as well.

I can hear the techno-skeptics now: That's what happens when you rely too much on technology. That's where blind faith leads you. That's why nothing beats good old face to face communication.

Which would be fine, if digital communications tools hadn't led to an explosion in sheer numbers of personal and professional relationships that need maintaining. There's simply no way to keep up with those relationships without tools like email. I've had days characterized by dozens of email conversations maintained over hundreds of emails. Say what you will about the "richness" of in-person communications as compared to email conversations, but there are times when rich conversations are unnecessary. There are times when shit just needs to get done.

And email can be a fantastic tool for getting shit done, especially when the tool is working as we've come to expect it to work. When emails get dropped, though, the tool turns into the exact opposite of a shit-getting-done tool. It becomes a tool that complicates things exponentially.

For me, the lesson here is not that I need to rely less on digital communication tools, and it's not that I need to approach these tools with a consistent attitude of skepticism. The lesson is that effective use of digital communication tools must be supported with a critical computational literacy approach to those tools.

Because I'm the one who misconfigured my email program in the first place. I trusted the program to autoformat itself instead of using the manual setup feature. Then, when it first became clear several weeks ago that some of my emails were not being received, I assumed the fault lay with others' programs. I even wondered if someone was hacking into their email accounts, because I trusted my email program.

Even now, I think but am not positive that I've resolved the issue. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I've never spent a lot of time learning about the language of these sorts of things. IMAP, POP, SMTP--none of those letter groupings mean very much to me (though they certainly mean more to me now than they did before I spent a day repairing my broken email program). But the email programs we use don't really bother trying to explain those terms to us. They figure it's information we don't need to know, since we can trust the programs to know how to set themselves up.

Trusting auto-configuration is one of our biggest mistakes.  I can't do much to repair the damage I did to myself by allowing auto-configure to misconfigure my email program, but I can commit to never again allowing auto-configure tools to override me. From here on out, I'm committing to always choosing the manual setup option for every new tool or program I use--not because I believe this will lead to smooth sailing from here on out (it won't), but because I need to learn how to manage the tools I use in order to maintain control over how, when, where, and why I use these tools to interact with others.

Twenty-six years ago, Apple told us it would help us stand up against an Orwellian future. Somehow, in the intervening years, Apple stopped being the solution and started being part of the problem. In fact, if we've learned anything at all, it's that no major technology-based corporation exists to help us think more critically about the tools we use. This is why it's up to us to make smart decisions. It's up to us to be the chainsaw--or, if you wish, the flying hammer--we wish to see in the world.

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Robert Gibbs recently used Twitter to give a shout out to a local bike store.  Here is the original tweet, which reads:

#FF @CraigatFEMA so you know the latest @RevCycles a great bike store & special thanks to Ken and others there for helping me with my bike

This has been spun as an abuse of power by the right, of course, and i haven't taken the time to see how the left is spinning it, but leaving the power issue aside for a minute, this gets me thinking about fluency.  

Generally, when people do something which looks like it violates a norm or a rule, there are three different reasons for it: 

1. They are not fluent in the norms or rules in a context, and accidentally violated those norms or rules
2. They are fluent in the norms or rules in a context, and intentionally violated those norms or rules because they don't really agree with the norms or rules
3. The are fluent in the norms or rules in a context, and intentionally violated those norms or rules to undermine the norms or rules

This tweet on the official white house Twitter account seems to me to be a violation of a norm if not a rule that people in a position of power, as we currently conceive of the notion of democratic governmental power, should be extremely careful not to promote one commercial enterprise over another when speaking/writing/tweeting on behalf of the institution (it might be a similar violation for me to promote one of my students' side business ventures on an official university website).  

Assuming for a moment that it is a violation of a norm or a rule, which of the three reasons do you think accounts for it? And if it was a lack of fluency, was this a result of a misunderstanding of Twitter as an official channel? Or do you think it was not a violation of a norm or rule at all?

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I just posted the following comment to a post by Guy Kawasaki on his blog about the premise that people favor cognitive fluency - the idea that people prefer things that are easy to think about compared to those that are not.

Here was my comment: "I presume you may want to include a chapter on the contexts in which "easy" has the opposite effect. During the course of my firm's (socialens.com) recent research on the adoption of new media in organizations, an executive suggested (i'm paraphrasing heavily here) that one of the biggest reasons that C-Level folks have a hard time taking new media seriously is the simplistic names like "Twitter", "YouTube" etc. She jokingly suggested that, if they were to have been named with acronyms or something like "Ascendant Video" C-Level folks would have been all over these new technologies. I think she is probably correct, and if so, the counter-intuitive fact is that publicly espousing or using things which seem too easy is often associated with either a real or perceived loss of institutional or symbolic capital within the group."

I think the concept of cognitive fluency is interesting, but i wonder what happens to people's decisions when we marry cognitive fluency with social pressures?  In my experience, humans do lots of cognitively, physically, and otherwise very difficult and uncomfortable things in the presence of others that they do not do when no one is watching.  For example, many of the women i know will wear uncomfortable high heels in public, but take them off the minute they get home.  I have seen men do the same with regard to neck ties.  Also, many academics do amazing work in their profession, but when they have some down time the first thing they watch is 80's television re-runs.

I have no specific answer to this question, but it bears consideration, i think.  A few possible sets of theories might inform this: 

• Flow - a concept first promoted by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who studied people's ability to get into an autotelic/flow state, where (and i'm paraphrasing here) they are able to match the challenges they face with their abilities.  The interesting thing here is that "easy" isn't always more satisfying.
• Social, Institutional and Symbolic Capital - a concept first promoted by Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and later popularized by people like Robert Putnam.  Bourdieu's concept explored the ways that people in a given community are affected by their quest to build social (connections with people), Institutional (ability to work within institutions), and symbolic (honor, prestige, etc) capital within that community

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Finishing up Elinor Ostrom's Understanding Institutional Diversity today, i was struck by her general claims that, within institutions:

1. The bigger the group of people and the less homogeneous it is, the higher the cost will be for the group to self-organize, in large part because of the difficulty of producing and distributing information
2. The higher the cost, the less likely the group will be to actually self-organize
3. Without self-organization, the group's ability to get itself out of a sticky situation is compromised
4. As a result, higher authorities become responsible to impose organization, despite the fact that self-organization is the more effective way to fix group dilemmas

This argument caught my eye because it feels like an accurate description of the dynamics which led Frederick Taylor to his conclusions in his Principles of Scientific Management in the early 1900's: 

1. Workers of his day were often from different countries, and didn't speak a common language (they were heterogeneous).  Additionally, much of the work he studied (steel manufacturing, etc) included large numbers of workers.  Many of them were also not highly-literate, nor did they have access to communications technologies. As a result, the cost for these folks to self-organize was extremely high. 
2. As a result, these folks did not tend to self-organize in any ways which allowed them to share best work practices, manage projects, etc.
3. Without self-organization, then, their work was often inefficient and lacked consistency
4. As a result, Taylor formulated the idea of a separate class of workers - managers - whose job it was to actively manage individual workers, schedules, etc. and to find, record and train everyone in the best practices for their job

Here's the really interesting part, though.  Ghosts of of Taylor's principles still seem to be haunting management theory and especially its practice today, despite the fact that:

1. Most american workers now speak a common language (certainly more so than in Taylor's day).  More workers are literate than in Taylor's day, and more of them have access to more communication technologies, especially within the workplace.  As a result, the costs of self-organization have now dropped considerably.
2. As a result, people are able to self organize more than in Taylor's day (and they are doing it), largely facilitated by the availability of low-cost, portable electronic communications technology (when they actually do have access to them and the literacy for their use)

I dashed this post off quickly while the thought is fresh in my mind (and therefore not fully-formed), so there may be some logical holes in it. What do you think?

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The SociaLens team has been doing theoretical and observational research at the intersection of organizations, media, people, etc. for many months now (and many of us have been researching these things separately for years now).  As soon as possible, we hope to develop a framework, a methodology and a suite of services designed to help organizations navigate the changing landscape.  

This takes patience.  You see, SociaLens could probably make a lot of money tomorrow by providing clients with an algorithm for the "10 Steps to Social Media Success" (we've had clients in the past beg us for a simplistic 10-step program).  We know, though, that we would be selling those clients an over-priced, under-effective, palliative cure for a deeper need.  To use an over-fished metaphor, we'd be giving them a fish when they need to learn to use a rod and reel.  

So we continue to labor in the mystery stage of what Roger Martin refers to as the knowledge funnel - his representation of the process that designers, organizations, anyone really - moves through in the creation of something new.  The process starts with mystery (looking at the world and searching for patterns), then moves to the development of a heuristic (an identification of the important patterns), to the development of an algorithm (a logical procedure that, when correctly applied, has a predictable outcome).  

I am finding that the tricky thing about our current status on the very edge of the mystery phase (moving toward the development of heuristics) is to maintain the balance between, on the one hand, trusting the stage's importance enough that we don't jump straight into the development of a sub-optimal client algorithm ("10 Steps.."), and on the other hand maintaining a healthy dissatisfaction with staying in the stage too long.  

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Last night, I posted a lone piece of video from our organization's brainstorming sessions. The biggest hurdle was not content (I liked the discussion) or even how it might affect participants (Would Jenna, Matt, and Jay see themselves in the same way I do). It was the lack of clear protocol about how our organization was to become transparent.

 Fuzzy Approval

The video was shot as an afterthought. The camera I used was there to document white board use and snap a few in-situ pictures (neither of which, incidentatlly, I put into a public forum). The video, though, was a chance to share a token of the experience.

Approval was tacit. The five of us had a conversation in one of our weekly meetings several weeks back that gave us the OK to take chances, make mistakes (as Miss Frizzle would say). One of the outcomes of that discussion was this blog and a desire to be more aware about our own process of helping SociaLens live in the digital community. Rather than formulate a policy of use in advance, we decided to let our behaviors generate policy. Try to serve the interests of the organization and protect our partners from our experimentation.

In her response to the post, Jenna noted two key things. First, as the primary speaker in the segment, she had the most at stake. Second, she and the rest of the group had no formal opportunity to collaborate in the decision. The only heads up she got, really, was an awareness that a camera was trained on her for a couple minutes.

The Impact of Awareness

Let's imagine a situation where approval was not so fuzzy. In this alternative timeline, SociaLens has one big difference from the current reality: We have a clear discussion ahead of any meeting to clarify that content is being captured and address any concerns that may arise. This happens before any cameras are taken out of their bags. This is a reasonable policy and, frankly, one I would advocate for later in our group discussions.

However, what does this awareness do? On-the-record mentality is different than off-the-record behvavior. It's possible that Jenna doesn't make her comments in the same way, or even have that conversation with Matt at all. Maybe Jay isn't inclined to get up, motivated by a desire to either stay off camera or not get in the way of the "featured" conversation. If that happens, the content changes, perhaps for the worse.

Another question might be, does protocol matter at that point? Our team has now experienced me capturing video and releasing it via YouTube. Even without any such clarifying discussions in the future, the next time I pull out a camera in the meeting, the others in the group will understand what may happen. This might prompt them to speak to the possibility of a video. It might also prevent us from being authentic, either guarding what we say or presenting ourselves as something we're not.

Social Uncertainty

Heisenberg noticed this problem in physics, when trying to measure very small things with methods on the same scale. The act of bouncing light into an atomic structure significantly changes the behavior of the system you are trying to study. In situations where the presence of light is negligible, the effect can be ignored.

Capturing and sharing social content can suffer from the same dynamics. I wasn't snapping pictures of flying airplanes or ants in a sandbox. I was recording interactions at the same scale as myself. Not only is the awareness of this process potentially impacting the people providing the content, it also has consequences for me as the person managing that content.

In a way, to be effective at social media, it is important to transcend this by being "aware of the awareness." There is a comfort level that comes with practice around sharing and allowing yourself to be shared. Being authentic on Twitter, for example, is a way to practice being authentic in the rest of my life. Allow yourself to change by understanding how the media changes you.

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This is a small snippet of the great conversation and deliberate thought that went into a two-day brainstorming session with SociaLens. The five of us shared the research observations and interviews we have each conducted over the past few months, with the hope of revealing some common themes among them. Nine large wall post-its of notes later, and I think we've got a great foundation for a future framework. I share this video to illustrate a few of the themes that came up:

1. Transparency
   Although I don't think we ever wrote this word down in our notes, we (mostly) share an underlying philosophy that openness is both scary and rich with serendipity. There is a lot of context led up to the start of this clip and continued on after it ended, things a viewer may misinterpret with a 1-minute peek into our work session. Those moments are teaching moments, both for us and whomever might engage us after hearing what we discussed. It can be a point of departure for other conversations, or a chance for us to reflect on how we communicate and what we think.
2. Trust
   As someone who is quite open online with myself and even my family, I found it interesting how much trepidation I felt over sharing this video. I edited down the clip I had to a smaller segment, mainly to shield the name of a participant organization mentioned later. The rest I chose to share without prior approval and only my own instincts to follow. It is possible that one of my colleagues might take issue with any aspect of this decision, from specific content to an absence of formality in posting it to YouTube. In some organizations, there is a policy-first approach to transparency, setting codes of conduct and other criteria for employees to follow. In other organizations, the understanding employees have about shared goals and risks will help inform individual decisions. Most importantly, failure is embraced as a chance to learn. I trust my peers, and I believe they trust me. Even if one of them requests for me to take down the clip, that trust will guard against relational catastrophe as we reflect together.
3. Reflection
   The take-home point of the discussion in the clip is that reflective practice does not lead to the same inevitable outcome. Just because social media has qualities and benefits that justify open and widespread use of these channels doesn't mean that every organization is going to need those benefits in order to fit their mission. Use of social media is largely about evolving experiences and learning. Deciding not to be transparent now doesn't mean the org won't grow into it later. As a consultancy, SociaLens can embrace the value of sharing openly without presenting it as the right way for all clients. That may be a likely outcome of reflective practice, but it is the reflection itself that we endorse.

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