Social Leverage Points

[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

Quantity or Quality? Measuring Enterprise 2.0

[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?

Social contracts

Spotted on Hugh McLeods’s blog - “how does a software company make money, if all software is free?” - an observation about the difference between closed-source aka Microsoft and open-source:

It took me a while to figure this out, but what applies to Open Source, also applies to Microsoft.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you’re not just getting ones and zeros. There’s also a form of “social contract” implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.

A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.

Which is only true for a given subsection of the Microsoft user base. If you don’t have access to that level of support - and most organisations below a certain size don’t - then you’re thrown back on the exactly same type of community resources regardless of whether you’re using open or closed source. The difference being that the open-source model provides the visibility of the source code, and the potential for fixed that this presents.

Apparently we *are* all doomed

This week’s New Scientist cover story is about the “Collapse of Civilisation“, and it’s well worth reading - as if the sub-prime banking crisis isn’t enough, civilisation is only two square meals away from collapse at any given moment.

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which explores the reasons why a number of formerly successful civilisations disappeared. He focusses primarily on ecological factors as he’s mainly concerned with ancient societies - the New Scientist article looks at modern Western civilisation, but their conclusions are equally gloomy - basically, modern civilisation is amazingly vulnerable.

It doesn’t take long to figure out why, and it took me right back to playing around with supply chain models during my MBA. Building reliable systems is about removing single points of failure, because failure probability is usually multiplicative. Put crudely, doubling the components halves the risk of failure. So coming from a background of designing networked systems, my instinctive reaction is double-up critical equipment and build in backup paths and redundancy. And where consumable items are a factor, the response is to hold buffer stocks.

But that’s a problem from a supply chain point of view, because duplication and buffering are adding in redundancy and inventory - both of which have a cost associated with them. I remember reading somewhere that the scheduling systems for components at Nissan’s Sunderland plant have to take into account the traffic conditions on the A1, because if there’s a jam it delays the trucks bringing components from the seat factory up the road. That’s apocryphal, but entirely believable.

So rather than a supply chain, we end up with a single-point-of-failure chain.

When you start to look at where the single points of failure lie, it starts to get scary - the average supermarket would be cleaned out within 3 days, so if there’s noone to drive the trucks with replenishments, the food supply is disrupted very quickly. The joke about the Little Chef restaurant being unable to serve an omlette because they haven’t been delivered suddenly isn’t quite as funny anymore.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the point at which to start worrying about the impact of a pandemic is when the schools are closed - because at that point, it takes parents out of the workforce, and most organisations would collapse as a result.

Treating supply chains as a network problem and reducing the single points of failure would seem like an obvious insurance policy, but that’s difficult to do when the financial systems are biased against this kind of thing. Simplistically, shareholder capitalism is about maximising short-term shareholder returns through minimising costs - and a just-in-time inventory system with little or no buffer stock is a very efficient way of cutting cost out of operations. So while operating “fatter” might be a hedge against disruption, it’s discouraged in the short-term, because disruption is only a future probability, while the need to cover this year’s dividend is a certainty.

Maybe capitalism will be our downfall after all?

Downing Street Twitters

I’m fairly late to the party on this one, but Downing Street is Twittering. As is HMGov, which came first - both being official UK Government presences in the Twittersphere.

My initial reaction was “meh” - about the very last thing anyone on the planet needs is yet another conduit for the tedious, unadventurous, corporate and just plain bland waffle that characterises the spoutings of central Government PR. After 11 years of New Labour media management, my default setting when hearing anything emanating from government is - to misquote Jeremy Paxman - “why are the lying bastards lying to me?”

And that pretty much sums up HMGov - it’s regurgitated press releases that noone read previously, shovel-wared via RSS into Twitter so noone will read them now that they’re only 140 characters long. Nice example of how to do it technically, but a waste of time from a “contributing to the good of humanity” point of view.

Downing Street started in much the same way - “PM marks 90 years of the RAF and 100 years of the Territorial Army in Downing Street statements”, “PM outlines measures to protect the UK from turbulence in the global economy at his press conference”, that sort of thing. But then as other Twitter users started to prod it to see if there was actually anyone behind the front door, Downing Street actually started to respond. Which is pretty much unique, as far as I can see.

Of course, the responding is being done by Downing Street staffers - I would guess they’d have to be civil servants, given the rules about how official Government channels can be used - and not the actual political inhabitants. Which is a shame, because it’s the politicians who need to be plugged into this - about the only people left in the country who think 42-day-detention is a good idea are Gordon Brown and Jacquie Smith, and *still* she spent Sunday morning lecturing Andrew Marr about how “the Government are listening”. Exposing them to something as immediate and conversational as Twitter could only be a positive thing.

I expect that this initial burst of conversational engagement will be fairly short-lived, as the more risk-averse holders of the levers of power hear about this - presumably by email - and clamp down. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before our Prime Minister Twitters personally. Trying as hard as I can to *not* be cynical about our government - and god knows how *hard* that is - it’s nice to think that this might be the *start* of something. And I’m impressed that I got followed back within 10 minutes of following Downing Street - so either there’s someone monitoring it, even at this late hour, or someone’s written an auto-follow bot. Both impressive in their own ways.

Hugh’s Law and Twitter

Richard Stacey of the Social Media revolution (in 15 minutes per week) points to a sudden jump in the number of his Twitter followers and wonders if that’s start of Hugh’s Law coming into play.

I’m not sure that’s the case. Hugh’s Law certainly applies to a lot of social networks - I more-or-less gave up on Facebook a while ago because the signal-to-noise ratio fell below acceptable levels amidst the welter of zombie biting and groups campaigning for Richard Hammond to plait his nasal hair (OK, that last one might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one).

But the key point about Twitter is that the follower/following mechanism gives a very clear and unambiguous signal about a potential follower’s intentions. If their ratio of following to followers is canted to following, it implies that they’re either a bot or they’re trophy hunters. And in either case, the solution is a simple ‘block’ action, which leaves you largely immune from their attempts at connection.

Technorati Tags: twitter

Reciprocateable Ambient Intimacy

It sounds slightly heretical given what I do for a living, but I’ve never really fallen in love with social media like Facebook in the way that I’m apparently supposed to. The closest I’ve come to this is Twitter, which I do use, although I’d be hard-pressed to describe exactly why.

One of the terms used to describe Twitter was coined (as far as I know) by Leisa Reichelt, who calls it “ambient intimacy” (a long quote, but worth citing in full):

“Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for who being social is very much a ‘real life’ activity and technology is about getting stuff done.

There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.”

This is a useful description, but it doesn’t quite get it for me - Twitter is actually more than just ambient intimacy. It helps to contrast it with blogs: which are, fundamentally, a broadcast medium. Now I realise that this is a statement that’s probably going to get me blackballed from the Social Media Brotherhood, but bear with me - while I know that “blogs are conversations” is the conventional wisdom, experience suggests that actually blogs are POTENTIAL conversations.

Having the facility to comment does not a conversation make. And in some circumstances, having the facility to comment actually DECREASES the signal-to-noise ratio, as anyone who’s spent any time reading the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site will know. It’s not so much conversations, as a thousand opinionated drunks in a bar all shouting over each other.

So why is Twitter different?

Firstly, there’s the 140 character limit. Expressing yourself in a smaller space is far more difficult that doing so when space is unlimited (which is why this post is three screens long) . The limitation emphasises the NOW of the “what are you doing right now” that is Twitter.

Then, there’s the follower / following function. Unlike blogs, I can see exactly who is reading my tweets. And not only that, but I have the option to follow them back - which together with the ‘@’ function means that the Twittersphere (appalling term, I know) seems like a bar with a number of people of varying states of inebriation having more or less coherent conversations. Some take this to the extreme, twittering bowel movements, but in general the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty high.

And overlaying the follower / following, I have the option to block potential followers. The result of this is a near-total lack of trolls and spammers - it’s incredibly easy to make a quick judgement on someone’s worth as a follower by looking at their following / followers ratio. All of the Twitter spambots have without exception had a massive inbalance in the relative numbers.

The end result is reciprocateable ambient intimacy - I can follow someone, they can follow me, but we both have complete control over the relationship. Which is a far closer analogue to real-life relationships that anything that’s come before.

Digital dark ages?

Last weekend I was in the process of clearing out some of the junk that seems to accumulate around my life, and came across a box of CDs.   It represented about 50% of my physical music library and a good 10 years or so of building a music collection, going back to some of the first CDs I ever bought in the early 1990s.
After the ritual process of ratching through the box going “ooh” and “aah” over the memories that my increasingly-dodgy taste in music seems to remind me of, I was all set to pass them on to Oxfam for someone else to add to their collection.   There’s no real reason to keep hold of them, because they’ve all been (illegally) ripped to MP3 and now exist as spots of flux on the various hard disks that clutter my life.   But actually letting them go was a suprisingly difficult decision to make - and it was even more difficult to decide whether or not I should get rid of a box of vinyl records that turned up shortly after.

While the information density of a CD or DVD is infinitely greater than that of a vinyl record - and the sound quality is greatly improved, notwithstanding the blatherings of the oxygen-free-copper community - from the point of view of future accessibility, the CD doesn’t have a lot going for it.   For a start, their longevity is open to question - there were several in the box that were showing signs of decay or delamination.   And from the point of view of accessibility, they’re not much better.  Accessing the information stored on a CD takes a significant chunk of microelectronic engineering capability and precision mechanics.   Accessing the data on a vinyl record takes a turntable, a rolled-up cone of paper and a needle.   It might not have the sonic qualities that even the cheapest and nastiest CD player is capable of producing, but it’s a damned sight less hi-tech.

While I’ve got CD players to hand, it’s not much of a problem.   But there’s going to come a point in the not-too-distant future where there aren’t any CD players to hand - or at least they’ll be a damn sight more difficult to find than they currently are.  They’ll effectively be obsolete, they’ll wear and they’ll break down.  And while repairing the mechanical components might be reasonably straightforward, repairing - or worse, having to reverse-engineer - the electronics required to recreate sound from a series of microscopic pits etched on a fragile aluminium substrate is going to be much, much more difficult.

Which in some respects is a metaphor for the information legacy that we’re going to be leaving for our grandchildren, assuming that they’re interested in the legacy that isn’t rising floodwaters and a buggered planetary climate.   The concept of searching back through the archives is a much more difficult one when the archives consist not of yellowing paper, but rotten silver disks of proprietary encryption.  And that assumes that the information has been saved in the first place - when communication was via some form of written physical manifestation, there was at least a reasonable chance that a proportion of it would survive for future archivists to refer back to.   Once an email is deleted, that’s pretty much it - while there might be the odd backup hanging around, chances are that it will be in a closed, transient and fundementally inaccessible format.

Which starts to beg the question, are we destroying the future’s history without realising it?   Without these physical forms, where are the historians of tomorrow going to get their source material?   And what effect is that going to have on their understanding of us?   Are we in fact inadvertently creating a new Dark Ages through our abandonment of a technology that’s thousands of years old - writing - in favour of alternatives with half-lives measured in a few years?

I’ll go and hand myself in, then

The Metropolitan Police have launched a campaign to make sure we all stay frightened alert for the imminent threat of being gunned down by trigger-happy coppers blown to bits by suicide bombers.

There are several suspicious behaviour traits, apparently - taking pictures, owning more than one mobile phone, and - er - apparently, using doors.

Since at last count I had three mobile phones, at least twenty cameras of various description, and a front door, I suppose I’d better save someone else the trouble and go and hand myself in…

A picture’s worth a thousand words

As it’s Sunday, the British railway system is running at restricted capacity because of engineering works - something that always comes as something of a surprise to anyone who’s used to rail services in continental Europe, as they seem to manage to fit their engineering work around running trains.

Chiltern Railways serves the London to Birmingham via Aylesbury route, and as privatised rail franchises go, it’s run pretty well. It’s the route that I commute on daily, and the service is generally not bad - although longer trains in the morning wouldn’t go amiss at peak periods.

This Sunday, they’re digging up their track in a couple of places, which has resulted in suspension of service along part of the route. This is (verbatim for both content and formatting) the information that they’ve provided:

Sunday 24th February

Kidderminster-Birmingham-Stratford-Upon-Avon- Leamington Spa- Banbury- High Wycombe - London
No trains will operate between Warwick Parkway and Birmingham. No trains will operate between Leamington Spa and Stratford- Upon- Avon.
There will be 2 trains per hour between london Marylebone and Warwick Parkway.
Buses willl run between Leamington Spa and Stratford- Upon-Avon and Warwick parkway and Birmingham Snow Hill.
Passengers travelling between Birmingham and Leamington Spa and stations south thereof are advised to use Cross Country services to/from Birmingham New Street changing at Leamington Spa.
In addition to engineering work at the North end of the route a major event is taking place at Wembley Stadium therefore trains are likely to be busier than usual due to passengers travelling to/from Wembley. We have taken account of this by adding carriages to our trains and ensuring most trains call additionally at Wembley Stadium Station.
Aylesbury- Amersham- London
There will be NO trains on this route today buses will operate from Aylesbury to Beaconsfield calling at Stoke Mandeville, Wendover, Great Missenden and Amersham.
Change at Amersham for London Underground services to Harrow on the Hill.
Change at Beaconsfield for connecting trains to/from Marylebone.

Which makes me want to claw my own eyes out in frustration at the verbosity and lack of clarity.

Firstly, it mixes up four types of information about cancellations, reduced service frequency, peripheral information about events and alternative routes.

Then it uses inconsistent wording to describe the alternative services.

And finally, none of the information is presented graphically - the only way to work out what is going on is to read - and re-read until you understand - the text provided.

Imagine instead, if they’d taken a few minutes to provide a map (which took me five minutes in Omnigraffle):

But even now, I’m not quite sure if this is right - because I can’t figure out for sure whether the buses stop at intermediate stations between Warwick and Birmingham. The buses between Aylesbury and Beaconsfield do, because it’s explicitly stated - but that’s not the case elsewhere. So do they, or don’t they?

Is this picture worth a thousand words, or so?