On the left:
Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the current 60% target would be replaced by a higher goal.
And on the right:
They are being left out because there is no system for sharing responsibility for international emissions.
Archive for the ‘Work’ Category
[Crossposted from the Headshift blog]
A few posts ago I mentioned some models of human motivation that might help answer the question, “why would anyone bother contributing to social media?” The best known model is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but as several commenters pointed out, it’s a pretty simplistic model that doesn’t really stand up to much close scrutiny.
There’s any number of alternative models to choose from (intriguingly, most of the research seems to date from the early Sixties for some reason). But before looking at any of those, it’s worth considering another theory that has a bearing on the way in which social media gets adopted in organisations.
In 1960, Douglas McGregor extended Maslow’s model and came up with what’s become known as Theory X / Theory Y. In the neat bipolar way beloved of social scientists, he divided managers into two camps – the pointy-haired Theory Xers, who think their employees are work-shy layabouts that need to be coerced into action, and who avoid responsibility in search of security above all.
The flip side are the cuddly Theory Ys, who look benignly on their teams as self-directed responsibility seekers, creating innovation at all layers of the organisation.
Diagnosing which camp a person falls into has become known in Headshift circles as the “Facebook test” – if mention of the ubiquitous social networking platform causes foaming at the mouth and mentions of web blocking software, the chances are that you’re dealing with a member of the Theory X camp. To them, social media is a Waste Of Time – give employees access to Facebook and they’ll spend all their time poking and throwing sheep at each other.
Theory Ys tend to have been there, done that when it comes to Facebook and the like – in fact you’re just as likely to have connected with them on LinkedIn as you are to be talking to them face-to-face. I’m exaggerating both cases to make a point here, but the underlying rationale remains.
The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes. There *are* people who will “abuse” access to social media, in just the same way as people have “abused” web access more generally, or email, or the phone, or their typewriters and so on back to the days that a few sneaky flint axeheads were tucked inside furs. That’s human nature, and it’s going to take more than a few years of Web 2.0 to change that.
But the fact that there’s a long-term trend here tells us something else – it’s not the tool that’s at fault. If your teams are slacking off on Facebook when they should be doing whatever else it is they’re supposed to be doing, isn’t that a management issue? After all, if they were spending all day gossiping at the coffee machine, you’d probably deal with it by asking/telling them not to, rather than banning hot drinks.
It’s not a new issue. Going back ten or fifteen years, email in organisations was by no means universal – and I remember distinctly a conversation at the time with a finance director who banged the desk while declaring that email was a waste of time, and would be used in his firm over his dead body. Fast-forward to today, and a refusal to countenance email would be professional suicide in most businesses.
There’s partly an issue of demographics at work here, as well. Anyone under the age of about 25 has grown up immersed in an online world, and to them it’s part of the furniture. It’s the older generations (which I’ve got to put myself into, seeing as I was into well into double-figures by the time I had my first email address) who are having to make the adjustments. So when the Generation Y kids come into the workforce, they’re often taken aback that the kinds of tools they’ve taken for granted are regarded as something exotic or dangerous.
The question for organisations is whether they’re going to take advantage of the possibilities that social tools provide – while managing around the occasional downsides – or whether the response will be to put barriers in the way. And if your unspoken message is that you don’t value the new kinds of skills that the next generation of your employees are arriving with, what effect will that have on your ability to find and retain the best people?
[Cross-posted from the Headshift blog]
mashup*, who bill themselves as a “membership based community of executives, entrepreneurs and investors affected by and working within the commercial application of digital technology, products and services” put on an event last night looking at “Data and Government 2.0“.
It was held at the splendidly-named Speechly Bircham, which despite sounding like a character from The Avengers is actually a law firm with rather swish offices off Fetter Lane.
There were a range of speakers from different parts of government and the public sector, including a few who are right at the heart of government. William Perrin heads up the Power Of Information Taskforce in the Cabinet Office, which is about as close to the seat of power as it can be. He had a number of examples of the Power Of Information- for example, tax advice being handed out on Moneysavingexpert.com which is crowdsourced community self-help around information that you would normally expect to come from HMRC.
One of the major issues that he faces is turning around the culture of government – getting across the idea that these kind of innovative projects don’t have to be huge, in fact many can be done for a few thousand pounds. If one of large usual-suspect systems integrators had tried to build Theyworkforyou.com, they’d have charged somewhere in the region of £8-10m for it, and would have given up 12 months into the project complaining that it was impossible.
Steve Palmer is the CIO of the London Borough of Hillingdon, a large council in North-west London and generally considered to be one of the more advanced public sector organisations in terms of the way that they handle their information. One of his major issues is that he’s dealing with the legacy of past abuses of data – he made the point that Hillingdon weren’t able to use the Electoral Roll as the basis of their smartcard rollout because it’s less than 70% accurate. That’s at least partly due to people being reluctant to be on the Roll in the first place after they’ve been sold off to private companies for marketing purposes.
From the non-government side of things was Mike Bracken of the Guardian – and formerly of MySociety, the group who have done more than any other to force the pace of change and shine some bright lights in some very murky areas. His point was that local governments in particular are still stuck in a mindset of websites, when what’s actually needed are APIs rather than service. Rather than trying to anticipate the needs of ordinary people – and often getting it wrong by thinking in terms of the type of measures that SocITM find appropriate – it’s better to allow access to data and let people take it into their own hands.
Also speaking was John Sheridan, Head of e-Services in the Information Policy and Services Directorate of The National Archives – he spoke about the “Unlocking Service“, a site which acts as a conduit for requests for data and funnels them to the appropriate area of government. The idea of having a one-stop-shop approach seems to me to be a good one, although personally I’m still troubled by some of the concepts of Crown Copyright in the first place. It seems that a lot of the current work is “fiddling around the edges” of a system with more fundamental problems.
The so-called trading funds – the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, Hydrographic Office and so on came in for a bit of a kicking from the floor when the questions opened up. The problem for many in the audience was that by taking a very narrow view of the value of the data, the trading funds were missing the bigger picture – while it’s (relatively) easy to quantify the revenues that you can make by charging for information, it’s much more difficult – and hence doesn’t get done – to look at the wider societal benefits that might accrue by allowing open access.
I came away from the evening with the feeling that we’re beginning to see a change in attitude in certain sectors of government around the way they handle and grant access to their data – but that progress is at best uneven, and there’s still a long way to go. Partly that’s a legacy of the obsession with competition and markets that’s been a hallmark of the government behaviour of the last thirty years or so – but the kind of rapid innovation that Web 2.0 technologies make possible may be starting to change that. Whether the likes of the Ordnance Survey will ever be convinced of the public capital of the data that they own remains to be seen, but the trends seem to be heading in the right direction.
Picking flaws with recruitment agencies is something of a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel process at the best of times, but since the financial climate has become cloudier it seems that desperation has begun to set in.
I never, ever, ever – and I mean ever – deal with an agency that sends me an unsolicited CV. It’s rude, it’s unprofessional and it betrays a certain lack of competence on the part of the candidate if they’re allowing themselves to be represented by an agency that pulls stunts like this. Sending out teasers isn’t quite as egregious as attaching full CVs, but it’s still not cricket as far as I’m concerned – especially if I’ve told the agency “stop doing this” in the past.
So today’s unsolicited broadcast from <name redacted> is something of a classic. Let’s count the ways – firstly, it’s unsolicited, despite me telling this individual twice in the past to go away and stop sending me spam. Secondly, it’s completely inappropriate for my organisation – an MCSE helpdesk person, however talented, is going to get very, very bored in a Mac-and-Linux-only environment. And thirdly, it’s just – well, crass, really. I cringe to think of the kind of organisation that this would get a response from.
Here’s the email, with names removed to spare too much public embarrassment, although I was sorely tempted to hold the firm concerned up to public ridicule.
From: <redacted>
To: tim@headshift.com
Subject: Do you need a female in your IT team?*****HERE COME THE GIRLS!!!*****
Too much testosterone in your IT department?
Too much talk of football and cars?
Do you think a woman’s touch is need on your helpdesk?
Right now I am in the very exciting position of having not 1, but 2 female
IT Support Engineers looking for work<female name redacted>
<female name redacted> is an MCSE 2003 qualified helpdesk engineer with
4 years experience working for 2 separate companies. She has experience of
1st & 2nd line support for up to 250 staff, logging over 35 calls a day with a 70%
first time fix rate. <redacted> thinks its time to move on and get a bit more
experience so is looking for a firm that can improve her IT skill set as well as offering
her career progression. <redacted> is looking for the £24k mark<redacted>
<redacted> has more experience than <redacted> and is packing more of a punch technically.
<redacted> has a solid grounding in service desk support and has also managed
a small helpdesk team. She has supported a wide range of Microsoft networks
and products dealing with everything from MS office support in a legal firm
to hardware support in a marketing company. <redacted> can interview with 2
days notice and is looking for around £27kBoth of these career women are keen to move so if you want to know more about either
<redacted> or <redacted> call me, as I know these two are going to get
snapped up. Just think to yourself “How often do experienced MCSE qualified female
IT support Engineers come on the market?”Please call or email me to find out more about <redacted> or <redacted> or to discuss
any other IT related roles you may be struggling to fill.Remember, I spend 10 hours a day, 5 days a week speaking to and recruiting
for IT professionals in London. I have candidates from all walks of life an
d for all situationsWe specialise in roles including PC/Network Support, Software and Web Development
and Design and Senior Appointments, both on a contract and permanent
basis. To find out more about <male name redacted> or <male name redacted>, or to
discuss your current IT requirements and how we can help you, please contact me on
<phone number redacted>.Kind regards,
<female name redacted><male name redacted>
<firm redacted>
<phone redacted>
I wish the two women well in finding new work, but I can’t help but think they’d be better off with another agency.
A neat example of the differences between the UK and Sweden:
Sweden’s Foreign Minister calls his new Mac ‘a new world’
Former Swedish Prime Minister (and now Foreign Minister) Carl Bildt has, “after much reflection, examination and discussion” decided to switch to a Mac. (link)
This being the UK, we’d have some Ministerial nonentity regurgitating a press release written by a Microsoft marketing-droid about the value placed on the strategic partnership between them and the UK government. Neatly glossing over the fact that it’s virtually impossible to use anything other than Windows and Internet Explorer in UK government thanks to endemic Sharepoint and a Microsoft monoculture.
[Crossposted from the Headshift blog]
On the face of things, it’s a tricky question – why would someone spend valuable time and effort contributing to something like Wikipedia? In a work environment, how can you persuade people to contribute their hard-won expertise and knowledge into a corporate wiki when they’re already doing perfectly well at their jobs with that knowledge secure inside their heads?
These are key questions when trying to maximise the chances of a successful social media implementation.Fortunately there are a few academic theories that might go some way to explaining the potential problems – although most date from the mid-Fifties and have varying degrees of evidential backing, they’re superficially attractive and provide some quick “rules of thumb” about some of the factors in play.
The best-known theory of human motivation is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Basically this states that as humans, we’re motivated firstly by the need for food and shelter, then security and protection, then acceptance and friendship and so on. There are five “needs” in the hierarchy, and as the lower ones are satisfied, so you’ll move onto the higher orders. At the top are the needs for esteem – internal factors like self-respect and autonomy, and external ones like status and recognition. Then at the pinnacle of the hierarchy there’s self-actualisation – the drive to become what one is capable of being.
So what could this tell us about the effectiveness or otherwise of social media? Drawing parallels into the work environment, this suggests that one of the key motivators is recognition and attention. By contributing to, say, an organisational wiki or a group blog, you’re advertising your knowledge and expertise – hopefully leading to recognition and reward.
But if your lower-order needs are threatened – inadequate pay and rations, or the threat of restructuring or redundancy, say – then the theory suggests that you don’t care about upper-order needs like recognition and self-fulfillment. In order to get the most out of a process which depends on esteem and recognition factors, the organisation needs to focus first on the basics.
And there’s also an interesting diagnostic opportunity here if you subscribe to this theory – if you’ve got healthy and dynamic social media in your organisation, it suggests that you’ve cracked the lower-order issues of reward and security.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a simple and apparently attractive theory that’s easily understood – the problem is that there’s an unfortunate lack of hard evidence to back it up. It’s been expanded and revised over the years, however, so in another post I’ll take a look at a couple of other later models to see how they might improve on understanding of why people contribute to social media.
[There are a number of classic references on motivation - and any amount of appalling airport pop-psychology such as Who Moved My Cheese. The hierarchy of needs is explained in depth in Abraham Maslow's Motivation and Personality, and another tome which covers a similar area is Edgar Schein's Organisational Culture and Leadership. There are good synopses of both, and many others, in the Ultimate Business Library edited by Stuart Crainer.]
If you can see this, it means that the server migration has worked and the DNS has updated successfully.
Hoorah.
[Cross-posted from the Headshift blog]
One of the advantages of working somewhere surrounded by really smart people is that you get to hear about what they think are really cool ideas.
Tom Taylor’s personal blog led me to a paper by Donella Meadows, late of the Sustainability Institute on “Leverage Points: Places To Intervene In A System“. It’s an explanation – crystal clear, and from the point of view of systems theory – about what leverage points are, and how they can be used to influence systems. And it’s a paper that should be compulsory reading for anyone in any kind of a position of power – and preferably tattooed on the inside of politicians’ eyelids.
Reading through it, I got to wondering about which of the 12 leverage points described social media would fall into. The basic concept is that small shifts in one thing can produce big changes in everything – and we often use the terminology of small, incremental changes in behaviour when talking about social media.
According to Donella Meadows, there are 12 broad categories of leverage points with increasing levels of effectiveness. Ninth of twelve is the length of delays relative to the rate of system change, which is something that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever wrestled with a shower thermostat. The longer the water temperature takes to respond to the control, the more likely the chance of alternately boiling and freezing.
The point here is that the more rapid the feedback, the more effective at reducing oscillations. The social media analogue is the ease – and therefore rapidity – of publishing information. If getting your message out is as quick and simple as publishing a blog post, then that’s going to be far more effective than waiting for the marketing function to approve and publish a press release via their weapons-grade content management system.
Sixth in the list is the structure of information flows – one example of which is that placing an electricity meter where people can see it will tend to lower consumption. If you can see what you’re consuming, you’re more aware of the rate of consumption – and if it’s expensive, you’ll tend to slow down.
Where social media fits in is surfacing that information. Very often, key information is buried, whether it’s in emails, spreadsheets, report documents and so on. By taking it out of the “containing media” and sticking it front and centre – on a blog post, for example – it’s the informational equivalent of taking the meter out of the cupboard and putting it on top of the TV.
Fourth on the list is the power to add, change, evolve or self-organise system structures. Now we social media types have to be careful here – it’s very easy to make grandiose claims about the ability of social tools to change the world, and the reality is that their effect is often less than we’d like them to be.
But the key point here is that the tools themselves can adapt – big, monolithic enterprise software takes years to plan and implement, by which time the conditions that formed its design have long since passed. What’s left is organisational scar tissue.
Small-scale social tools – small pieces, loosely joined – can react far quicker and far more flexibly. Rather than trying to bend content into an organisational taxonomy, an emergent tagging structure will adapt to the material rather than the other way around.
And there’s also a warning here for the “that’s not the way we do things around here” brigade, which is worth quoting in full:
“Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning. Cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic or social, that becomes so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.”
I’m going to try to remember that for the next time I’m talking with an internal IT function that trots out the “oh, we’ll only use Microsoft products here” line.
Technorati Tags: socialtools
[Crossposted from the Headshift blog]
One of the most common barriers to adoption of social software in enterprise settings is the perception that using social media isn’t “real work”. Instead the term “social” in “social media” is seen as a synonym for frivolous and time-wasting.
To an extent, there are aspects of social media that reinforce this stereotype – Facebook is often cited as the poster-child for this problem. Give your staff access to Facebook, runs the argument, and they’ll spend all their time poking and throwing sheep at each other.
This is actually a debate that’s as old as management itself – I’ve been around long enough to remember the same debates around rolling out email, and I’ve no doubt that phones were seen as a terrible distraction and waste of employee productivity.
At the heart of the issue, it’s a generic management problem and comes down to whether you subscribe to the Theory X or Theory Y view of your staff.
But when applied to Enterprise 2.0, this issue is accentuated by the intangible nature of a lot of social media. How do you apply a value to contributing to a wiki or a forum?
A recent post by the Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee looks at this problem, and he’s come up with an intriguing take. His point is that this kind of activity is too broad to reduce to a single metric – and that attempting to do so can cause unexpected side-effects. Measure contributions by volume, and it becomes easy to game the system with quantity overriding quality.
And there are other factors in play, too. Analysis that I’ve seen done of the commenting patterns on a large UK network of blogs show a pronounced long-tail effect in action – active commenters are VERY active, leading to a pronounced power law curve when comparing activity across the population as a whole.
Professor McAfee proposes a multi-dimensional rating, that combines a number of activities. Authoring blog posts, editing wiki pages and contributing to discussions in forums would all build towards an overall rating – and measuring a number of activities allows some rather neat visualisation techniques.
Although this is still fundamentally a volumetric approach, it should also be possible to add in a rating factor – rather like eBay feedback, there are a number of techniques for rating contributions for quality.
I’m sure this model would work to an extent, although it would also likely suffer from eBay’s flaws – negative feedback is disproportionately weighted compared to positive. That’s particularly the case if you’re the proud owner of a flawless feedback record – a single negative rating hurts that in a very visual way. And eBay have in fact moved away from a straight-forward “buyer-rates-seller-rates-buyer” model to something which is slanted more in the buyer’s favour.
And there’s also the issue about how likely you are to negatively rate the contributions of people that you work closely with – frank and honest feedback is a hallmark of some cultures, but I do wonder if there would be a lot of “pulled blows”?
Perhaps the question is whether measuring the effectiveness of Enterprise 2.0 tools at the individual level is actually the right place at all? On the one hand, social tools are predicated on the idea that the total is greater than the sum of the parts, as network effects come into play. So perhaps a truer measure of effectiveness would actually be found by looking at a more aggregated level?
It’s said that you should never meet your heroes in case they turn out to be a disappointment. That’s not something that’s ever really bothered me before – the chances of bumping into Asterix and Biggles is fairly low – but I was a bit apprehensive about seeing Tim Berners-Lee speak at NESTA’s The Future Of The Web event last night. In the event it was a bit of a disappointment, although nothing to do with the man himself.
Mr Modesty
The Great Man himself probably doesn’t like being billed as that – refreshingly, he comes across as being totally free of ego. Ten minutes prior to the presentation, he was on his hands and knees plugging in his Mac, which is the antithesis of the superstar CEO keynote speaker.
Hearing the story of the genesis of the web from the man who invented it made it worth the trip, although he was at pains to point out that he wasn’t the web’s creator – just the inventor of a small part of it. And just as fascinating was hearing that in the early days, he had difficulty in explaining to people what it was.
Berners-Lee also has passionately held opinions about net neutrality and privacy. One of the later questions referred to ISPs as the “villain of the piece”, which prompted the nearest thing to an outburst that I think you’re likely to hear from him – he wants just three things from an internet service: “give me plenty of bandwidth, don’t sell my clickstream and let me connect to anybody”.
And the others
And that’s about as much as it’s possible to say about Tim Berners Lee, because that’s about all we got to hear from him. He was bookended by Charles Leadbetter, author of “We Think“, and Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4. Whether that was because the organisers thought the audience might get bored of just one speaker I’m not sure, but the end result was frustrating in the extreme – Leadbetter is such a talking head it’s possible to hear him any night of the week, whereas Berners Lee speaks much less frequently.
And Andy Duncan was something of a bizarre choice given the main speaker. I really wasn’t sure about his description of Channel 4 as “open source television” – I suspect he might have different ideas if I was to take a creative commons approach to his content and start remixing it? His other main point seemed to be a plea to Google to “put more back” – presumably the cry of a man watching his traditional advertising revenues disappearing online.
The evening itself was the usual tired NESTA format – three suits on a stage, compered by a simpering Chief Executive. There was no attempt to control either of the two subsidiary speakers, who rambled on at length, and that was aggravated by the frankly bizarre practice of taking questions in threes. All that happens is that the first two get lost, particularly if the chair doesn’t prevent the habit of the usual suspects forgetting that questions have a question mark at the end.
Fortunately for my blood pressure, there was an active backchannel on Twitter, which was being “monitored” during the event itself. I know there are conflicting opinions about the benefits or otherwise of a backchannel, but if it rises above the bitching it can become a great aggregation tool for catching points and opinions that you might otherwise have missed.
See you there again?
Despite the problems with the format, it was an excellent evening – it’s not often you get to meet the person who started this all. And despite the inevitability of the format being repeated, I’ll likely go along to the next one, if only because they tend to attract interesting people to talk to – and moan about the format with – over the canapes afterwards.
