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Tag: social media

Work psychology thinks about work on 1,2,3,4,5,6 dimensions

Published March 5, 2010 by Jo Jordan

The cloud, work, working and the cloud

For three years now, I’ve been engrossed in the overlap between social media and work psychology.

A  memo published by Techcrunch today purporting to come from Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft sums up the new opportunities in the cloud wonderfully simply.

Substitute “work” for “cloud” and you have the vision of work psychology.  We don’t only work with the cloud.  We work in the same way though on all dimensions.

  • The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
  • The cloud  learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
  • The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
  • The cloud wants smarter devices
  • The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud

Poets make exactly the same points.  We are shaped by our work and work is shaped by us in turn. Work is good when it actively engages with our imagination, helping it to flourish and in turn being shaped by our curiosity and innovation.

Clearly Ballmer is talking about the artifacts of the virtual world of telephone line, servers and satellites in space.  If imagination is our fifth dimension.  Then the cloud is our 6th.

Work psychologists think about work on all  dimensions: 3D, time, imagination & the cloud.

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Which sector are you in to and how does that affect the social media that you do?

Published March 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Social media, advertising & FMCG’s

Lots of my friends in social media have been chasing what, I imagine, they see as lucrative work for advertising and media agencies. Seeking Alpha has an article today that they should read.

Seeking Alpha explains the income statement of FMCG firms.  FMCG’s, like Coca-Cola, stack them high and sell them cheap.  FMCG = fast moving consumer goods.

Collectively, FMCG’s account for 40% to 50% of the world’s advertising.

The flip side of this small fact is this.  If you are chasing advertising accounts, then you are probably chasing work with FMCG’s.  It’s worth knowing that.

The alternatives, of course, are durables and cars, which are relatively slow moving; capital intensive firms like aerospace.  There must be a 4th category.  There always is in business theory which is fond of 2×2’s.  The public sector is another.

Social media and collective purpose

Personally, I am a little more interested in social media for collective purposes – like disaster response, for example. When we compare the task of coming together to achieve something quickly with individual behavior, like grabbing a fizzy drink, we can see that social media has to be be vastly different.

Which sector are you in to and how does that affect the social media that you do?

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Haiti: where is social media in disaster response?

Published February 25, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Social media in disaster response

Yes, where were we?  Social media was in Iran .  .  .   but not Haiti.  Or did I miss something?

This week, I listened to a very good “post mortem” on our response to the earthquake in Haiti.  A surgeon had mobilized an entire team, got funding for a plane and then discovered the realities on the ground.  First, they were diverted to the Dominican Republic. Then they found conditions in Haiti very different to what they imagined.

These were my three takeaways.

#1  Western professionals are very accustomed to have a system around them that they forget that someone has to organize the lights, the water, the diesel, the cleaning.  In other word, the system in the west has become so taken for granted that it is invisible.

#2 The doctors lamented that no one seemed to take charge and coordinate.  There seemed not even to be a map (though there might have been) to help first responders see where different services were located.  It’s not enough for us to each take the initiative, even if our initiative is breathtaking in its brilliance.  We must have a way of coordinating ourselves.

#3  The doctors didn’t mention social media.  It is likely that cell phone towers were destroyed by the quake. But where was the social media response?  Don’t we have the capacity to move in with temporary towers?  What kind of dashboards are up-and-ready to go?  Do the Red Cross, UN and Medicins sans Frontiers, etc have social media packages ready to roll?

Does anyone know?  Who is working on social media in disaster response?

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Thinking out my 2 steps for building early stage forums

Published February 23, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Get specific help fast on the internet

Ask specific questions on Linkedin

A long time ago, I asked a very specific question on Linkedin.  “How do we find a ship at sea?”

Through the weekend, insurance professionals and ship’s captains coached me on how to deal with Lloyds, how to track the vessel’s responders, and even how to detect illegal changes in a ship’s registration number.  It was great.  Real experts stepped up and coached me on important details.

Present the pertinent facts to fellow experts on Stackoverflow

Other examples of great information exchange also take place on the internet.  Stackoverflow is a forum where computer professionals also pose specific questions usually as a short paragraph stating what happened and what they have already tried.   Members give each other advice and rate both the answers and the questions.

Stackoverflow platform and other communties

Stackoverflow is rather a famous forum because it works.  Late last year, they released their code as a white label so that other communities can use it as platform for their specialist forums.

Stackoverflow rarely works as well though for other communities though.  This seems to be the reasons why forums “fail”.

3 reasons for “forum fail”

#1  People come to “chat” rather than to ask questions.   Their goal is to punt for clients or to gain some kind of nebulous networking status.

#2  The situations are not “important”.  The only person who benefits from the answer to the question is the asker (if they even asked a genuine question).

#3  The situations are not “hard”.  The situations are ambiguous and uncertain, to be sure.  But they ae not “hard”.  “Hard” situations involved double or treble loop.  The basic question in a “hard” situation is “Is it me or should it be this hard to do?”  Forums do not do so well on triple loop learning where we are asking how, how hard AND whether it is important.

3 guides for “winning forums”

To turn these problems around, forums might succeed when

#1 There are genuinely “important” problems.  That is, there is something I must do to to help a customer.

When I am in IT and I am trying to get IT running to support an entire organization, that is important.  Figuring out how to please my professor, on the other hand  is not “important”.  It has not importance outside of itself.

#2  The situations are “hard”.   That is, it is hard to tell if we are making a mistake or if the solution is not possible.  In these conditions, a expert coach helps our learning curve enormously.

Stackoveflow asks its members to ask questions that can be answered rather than “discussed”.  Most forums are dominated by questions that are broad and vague, or, they are not specific about what the asked is trying to achieve and what they have tried so far.

#3  A community of expertise already in exists.  A community of people have very similar problems to solve and shared ways of attempting solutions.

Far too often, questions on forums require a thorough audit of context, resources and skills.  That is, they require intervention of a professional to ask what is required here, what resources do we have and what skills do we have.  On Stackoverflow, professionals are speaking to each other, and the learning task is to cope with double loop learning (and render it single loop by providing help, coaching and support).

Thought experiments about forums that work and forums that don’t work

To test this trio of criteria, I’ve thought up a two forums and used the criteria to think about when and how the forums would work

A cooking forum

# 1 Importance

I am cooking for someone else.  I want to them to enjoy their meal.

#2  Hard

I can search endlessly for the “right” recipe with locally available ingredients.  Or, I can take directions from someone who has already located available ingredients and isolated what can be done with them.

#3  Community

There are other people who cook for similar social situations with similar ingredients.  I have lived in communities who don’t put a high premium on cooking well.  Cooking has a limited range of ingredients and skill, and quantity is more important than quality.   In these communities, there is no call for a cooking forum.  Equally, in a large city with many single people, there may be call for a community interested in the best places to get good food.   It is simply not cost effective (or pleasurable) to cook pizza, English breakfast, dim sum, and so on for one person in a tiny apartment.

A forum for professional psychologists

#1 Importance

Do we have a common understanding of our customers?  Clincial and educational psychologists might have a common understanding, but do we in work & organizational psychology?  Do HR managers have a common understanding of their customers?  Hmm . .

#2 Hard

In my experience of small groups of work & organizational psychologists who trust each other, “hard” questions usually hinge on engaging the customer.   In groups who do not trust each other, technical questions are usually a proxy for the question – how do I frame the issues for these customers (who I shall not name either because I don’t trust you or because I am embarrassed by my lack of know how.)

#3 Community

Is there a community of work & organizational psychologists who are commited to this project of understanding their customers.  Or are we, like my cooking community, who only worried about eating more?    Are we competing with each other rather than collaborating on the common project of solving problems that are important and hard?

How to develop a community before we launch a forum

So what do we do when it seems that our forum sucks because we don’t have a community?

# [Hard] Answer our own questions.  Write a blog?  Writing clarifies thinking – it does for me, anyway.  That is what I am doing now.

# [Important] Clarify the social situation of our question, at least for ourselves.  For example, single well-off people in a big city don’t want to cook.  But they do want to eat well.  We can write about what they want to know, which is where reasonably priced food is exquisite. Work & organizational psychologists don’t know much about their customers.  So write about customers and concerns from the customers’ point of view being quite clear which elements of psychology were useful to them (and which were not)?

# [Community] In a previous incarnation, I was able to use institutional means to develop a professional community.  We developed programmes.  We developed alliances.  We arrange mutual continuing education by doing a ‘stretch’ project together each year.  We collaborated to create face-to-face sessions that linked noobes to experts, noobes to noobes, and experts to experts.

When we don’t have institutional resources at our disposal, we can use the internet to put ourselves out there.  Web2.0 facilties like blogs, Slideshare Linkedin, Twitter, Yahoo Upcoming and Dopplr help people find us.  So do contact forms on our websites and blog technologies that allow people to comment directly onto our website pages.  The apex of “2.0”, I think, is aranging meetups and hackdays to bring people together to develop mutual projects.  Well that was our mutual annual CPD project – those were fun days.

I haven’t seen many stories of people who have developed communities from scratch.  It is improbable anyway.  Because we must share an “important” concern and believe it is so “important” that we will help each other to navigate “hard”.  So we are looking at latent communities.

  • Step 1.  Begin with the customer who we don’t serve well, perhaps.  Not the customer who is a cash cow.  But the customer who needs something done and whose lives would be so much better if it were done.
  • Step 2. Then use Web2.0 technologies to allow people who are searching for answers to find you.

And document it!  We need more stories.

Comments?

Build the roads to bring people to you.  Host the conversation, in other words, but don’t expect the success of Stackoverflow at the outset.

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Social media is a river of social purpose undermining old companies

Published January 31, 2010 by Jo Jordan

The challenge of social media

I’ve recently been given two independent but related challenges.

Joe Tooman of BizLink asks:  Which of the FTSE100 companies will use social media in the next 3 years and what for?

Tom Morris, warrior geek philosopher set this formal philosophical test:  Which business in the world will not benefit from social media?

My Answers

I painstakingly looked up each of the FTSE100 companies and sorted them into piles. I found myself thinking about the purpose of the company, rather than its raw materials, processes or customers, and that led me to what has been my chief insight.

Competition between businesses will not matter very much. Once social media kicks in within a sector, the sector will change so much that we will effectively have a new segment.  Now the Boeing 787 has flown, who will seriously ever try to build a plane from start to finish (yeah, I know, AirBus).

Old strategic models matter less than our social purpose.  What is it that we want to do?  And what are the different ways of achieving our purpose.  Hence the title:

Social media is a river of social purpose undermining the foundations of old companies.

As for Tom’s question, I think it is excellent.  When I first began thinking about business models and social media, I thought there might be some businesses, like mining and the army, which would be scarcely affected by social media, but his question sharpened my appreciation.

Social media is like the telephone and the penny post. It is such a radical change in communication that it affects everyone and everything.   The only question will be how and when.

A new question

So that is the question.  How and when will social media affect any particular business?

Let the party begin!

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Social Media needs to work harder to show people its potential

Published January 4, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Dear 2010 – phishing, scams and poor service from corporates

My first task of the New Year was to block any possible damage from a phishing exercise.  I received an email from “Virgin Media” saying my direct debit had bounced and that I should login to their ebilling to sort it out. I did.  But didn’t reset my details.  I went first to my bank site to check what was happening then looked at the email more closely.  I followed up an odd looking html address marking the place of a blocked picture and discovered this was a scam.  The owner of the website address had posted the details on 30 December 2009.  I was disappointed that Virgin hadn’t warned its customers and set about changing my passwords.  What a mission. I’ve still to drive to the next town to change the passwords at my global bank, locally.   You know who I am talking about.  The local branch is good but their global IT sucks.  What would happen if I was 1000 miles away from the local branch as in my last billet?

Social Media: at least we acknowledge #So.ME

With this dismal start to 2010, I calmed down with a cup of coffee and read blog posts with a jaded eye.  Straw men.  Blither and blather. Eventually, I got my head in order and replied to a post on Made in Many.  I think my reply will be incomprehensible to them but it may make perfect sense to people from turbulent places.

  • Social Media is a revolution.
  • It perhaps was not a deliberate revolution but those who wanted social change are chortling.
  • The old guard and the old guard who have got left behind are fretting.
  • The old guard who are fretting are wishing away the changes to communication and pecking orders.

So far, so ordinary or so “dittohead” to use Social Media slang.  This is where experience of living in a place that changed rapidly and often helps.

Social Media and Wars of Liberation

There are plenty of times in life when change is discontinuous.  We may have seen the change coming. We may not.  But discontinuous change is by definition abrupt and more importantly changes who are the winners and losers in life.

We are quite happy with change when we are winning.  We are obviously distressed when we are losing.

What do we do with people who are distressed by change?

First, let me tell you what does happen.

  • They “get it” and join in
  • They resent it and try to use their residual status to negotiate the change away (they try to blackmail us).
  • They resent it and “go underground”
  • They exit or withdraw
  • They are ejected.

We notice the second group and we are eventually bitten by third.  The fourth and fifth might cost us through their loss.

Let’s deal with the second group, as they were the subject of the Made by Many post.

If this had been a War of Liberation, we would have deliberately set out to change the pecking order. We would have had little sympathy for the losers but might have pragmatically included them in a policy of reconciliation ~ not because we loved them, you understand but to mitigate the cost of groups 2 to 5.

The parallels between social media and Wars of Liberation

Social Media was not a deliberate War of Liberation but it has similar revolutionary effects.  The old guard is being displaced. They could join in but for the most part they refuse.  Should we just ignore them?  Should we chide them for their surliness?

I don’t think so.

What should we do about people with high status who are trying to “wish away” change?

I think there is no going back. Social media has introduced a more democratic world.  Not a perfectly democratic world but a more democratic world.

I won’t be blackmailed by the old guard who refuse to use social media and use their old positions to try to block change.

But I will lay out a clear road map and tell them

  • How to take part
  • How they will benefit
  • Make them feel welcome

The issue is inclusion

I won’t be blackmailed. But I will put myself out to welcome them ~ because that is the issue. They have to come to terms with the new pecking order.  That is unavoidable.  And they will do that faster when they feel welcomed and accepted.

But there will, sadly, be those who persist in undermining or feel they have to “leave”.  We can only regard each of those as our failure to show them possibilities.  We can only regard each as a failure to show them possibilities.

Social change is never pretty.  And those who lead it should budget for side-effects.  They don’t have to put up with blackmail. They do have to budget for showing people the way (or spending money on defense).

You see, this is a common story. It’s happening as we speak in other arena too.

Social media is a peaceful revolution. But it is a revolution.  We have choices.  Go with history. Or don’t.  Lead others. Or don’t.  When we confront history we get hurt.  When don’t help confused people understand, we get hurt.

Social Media needs to do the work of bringing people into the fold

We need to get organized.  We cannot leave people behind.  Yes, it is their choice how they use social media but have we truly shown them how and assured them of their welcome.  Not their old status but the freedom to interact on the same terms as everyone else.

It is too expensive to leave people behind. We have to try again. And again. And when we are tired. Let someone else try. Maybe that is all that is needed to let the light burn in their eyes.

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Get the internet on your side in the career of your life

Published December 21, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Dynamic not static portfolios

For some time now, I’ve been interested in creating online portfolios for students. Students could start a blog, they could start a chat room. They could do any number of things.

In the long run though, they don’t just want a portfolio of who they are. Life isn’t only about ‘stock’, it is about ‘flow’.

We want students who are at ease with the interconnected world and who can get things done when and where they need to get this done. Our portfolios need to be organized dynamically, around ‘doing’ and ‘action’.

Jane McGonigle lists the social characteristics of ‘new’ work.  Adnan Ali has a list of 6 technical skills which we should all be able to do in a rudimentary way.

6 technical skills for getting the internet on your side in the career of your life

I think it would be reasonable for students to have a course where they do a project on each of these 6 skills. Moreover, they should think up experiments to ‘break’ their work ~ that is, to test its limits. In that way, they learn to think analytically rather than subjectively about what they are doing and move from being amateurs to professionals.

1. Market Identification

Understand the structure of the internet as it lies today.

Which keywords do people use to label their work and how do the keywords vary from one group to another?

2. Conversion Model Development

Understand the actions that are taken on the internet.

What action do they want people to take on their page? How is that action depicted? How is it counted? How is it aggregated to have value to the business?

How are various actions connected onwards, for example, through petitions, paypal, etc?

What proportion of visitors are likely to take these actions?

3.  Landing Pages

Understand the ease with which people use the internet

What do visitors see when they arrive and does the page fulfil their needs? What are the different kinds of landing pages (FAQ, blog, profile, etc.) and what solution it is providing? How usable is the page and how does usability affect conversion?

4.  Traffic generation

Understand how people find pages on the internet

How do people find a website through Google? How does a page rise to the top of search? How do advertisements draw traffic? How can we compete for advertising space that draws the best traffic (for us) and how much does it cost?

SEO, Pay per Click, Pay per Acquisition are the technical skills here.

5.  Conversation Management

Understand the 2 way web and our preference for interaction on sites where we control part of the conversation

How can we stimulate conversation between 2 or more people? Why does bringing them together assist them (and us)? What is our role? Should we host the conversation or take part in a hosted conversation? What makes a good conversation?

6.  Analytics Tracking

Understand the mechanics of tracking web traffic and simple experimentation

Track every part of the value chain and run simple experiments to test proposed changes using Google Analytics and other automated tracking mechanism.

Career Psychology and the Internet

One of the principles of career psychology is to train at the ‘level’ that you intend to work.

We want students to manage their entire career, not small parts of it. From the outset then, students should set up a portfolio and ask themselves each week and each month, what did I achieve? How did this portfolio help me achieve and how have I displayed my achievement?

Then each month, they should take one of the six parts and do a focused project to learn more skills. Let’s imagine they have done this 7 times from the beginning of their GSCE curriculum (2 rounds), through university preparation (2 rounds) and through their bachelor’s degree (3 rounds). It is very likely that they will be highly accomplished and goal oriented by the end.

For those of us late to the party, well we can just begin! In a year, we should be as good as a 16 year old! We’ll get there!!

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My customers come to me to interact with other customers. Yes they do!

Published December 11, 2009 by Jo Jordan

The Dummies’ Guide to Social Interaction Design (SxD)

A few months ago, Adrian Chan of Gravity 7 explain Social Interaction Design in simple terms.  Here it is again. But even simpler.  Gen X and Baby Boomers like to begin with an overview. Once we have got the outline, we can drill down to the finer technical details.  This is for view.

Hopefully, Adrian will correct what I have got wrong.  When you have an outline, head over to Adrian for details.

1.  Who is the user?

Basic Idea: Don’t think about your product or your website, your mission or your purpose: simply describe your user.

Basic Technique: It’s tough to write a persona. You want to say what the user looks like, where they’ve come from, and most importantly, what they are looking for when the arrive with you. Think socially. Who were they hoping to talk to and why?

Advanced Techniques: Each user arrives with skills, social competencies and understandings about the way things will be done (variously called scripts and frames). What are people able to do easily when they first arrive? What do they expect?

We want to be predictable and make it easy for them to find their place on our territory

More Stuff You’ll Add After You Have Answered The Other Questions: Personas for other users: rich descriptions of various users in they many shapes and forms.

2.Who are the other users?

Basic Idea: Your visitor didn’t arrive to be lonely. Or to talk to you! Who else will they meet here? And what will they do together? And what about the reverse -who are they trying to get away from?

Basic Techniques: More personas, concentrating on how different everyone is not how much the same they are. Forget averages and typical. Think diversity and difference.

Advanced Techniques: Now describe how the users interact with each other. What do they say? How do they respond to each other? How do they encourage each other? How do they learn from each other? What scenarios are taken for granted by the locals that are not at all obvious to an outsider? When we are locals describing our own space, it is hard to describe what we take for granted. Ask what annoys people? What makes them contemptuous of other people? That’s a sure-fire indication of a norm being broken.

More Stuff You’ll Add After You Have Answered The Last Question: What is the difference between a gathering of users that is successful and one that is a flop? What is the feeling that people have when they say a gathering is fabulous?

3.   What social outcomes happen because the users are interacting with each other?

Basic Idea: Our actions come together to create something over and above our own wishes and desires, intentions and actions.

Basic Technique: What happens that cannot happen by one person alone? For example, we can sit at home and talk to ourselves about Coca-cola. That’s interesting. It probably prompts us to put Coca-cola on the shopping list. But so too is it interesting when one user talks to another user about Coca-cola. The conversation about a brand, and any downstream effects, becomes possible because of the interaction. If you get stuck, list all the interactions that people fear and turn these on their head.

Advanced Techniques: What are memes, tropes, fashions, fads, myths, and beliefs that seems to prevail among your users when they are together? How do they pick up on these norms? How quickly do the norms change and how do they change?

More Stuff That You Will Add After You Have Answered The Last Question: How many interactions happen before this new sense emerges? How can we prompt people to ask questions and to listen to each other? How can we prompt them to reflect their outside world in our world? How can we encourage an attention to positive processes? How can we learn to interpret the less positive interactions in the positive sense of seasons?

How do we add value to businesses, communities and organizations?

~ Trust, belonging & confidence are the foundation of action & initiative

4.  Beginning with Question 3, we have some understanding of the social outcomes that emerge from interaction. These are phenomena like belonging, trust and confidence. Hard-headed business men and women might scoff at these but the scoffing, the negativity, demonstrates the point. There is something they are looking for in the interaction must happen before the abandon their skepticism and react with trust and enthusiasm. What is it the business people need so badly before they will trust other people? When we can put our finger on that bruise, we may have identified the essence of our business.

~ We love our differences and riff them like mad

5. Question 2. We have some understanding of how people interact with each other in our community, in related communities, and in whichever context is our specialty. We learn fast about interaction because we pay attention to interaction. We are never ‘foreigners’ for long and even if we are marked out as different by our physical characteristics, accent or professional qualifications, we understand how people expect to behave and how they expect others to behave. We mix and match those expectations to help them ‘mod’ and ‘riff’ and have fun with each other.

~ We love our guests and find it easy to be kind

6. Question 1. We understand the diversity of people who arrive and the range of their social competence. What do they find easy to do? How can we help them find their feet in a gathering? How can we help them settle down, yet meet more people, and expand their horizons. How quickly do our wall flowers and the rambling roses become a magical bouquet?

Ready now for more details? Head over to Adrian Chan at Gravity 7. He’s the expert!

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What do you do about local businesses who Twitter but don’t follow back?

Published November 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Internet reciprocity and local business

Tell me, what is my obligation to help a local business who won’t help anyone else? Or if I am at work, what is my obligation to help a colleague who won’t help anyone else.

Reciprocity norms under scarcity and abundance

My instincts are all wrong.  I come from a country where just about everything is in short supply.

  • We don’t throw away food. Minimally, it will be boiled up in the dog’s food or made into compost.
  • We don’t throw way packaging. It is reused for something else.
  • We don’t even send spam because people pay for incoming mail. They’ll block us in an instant.

Our instincts are never to waste and always to help. Help first. Ask questions later.

In a land of abundance, what is the right response?

Let’s take a local shop who is new to Twitter

  • We can help them out by following.
  • We can help them out by RT.
  • We can help them out by replying and starting a conversation.
  • We can help them out by DM’s useful information.

But of course we cannot DM them if they don’t follow us. And I have to ask, why do I follow them, if they don’t follow me?

What should be my response?

Should we follow everyone who follows us?

I don’t follow everyone who follows me on Twitter.

Lots of people follow me on Twitter. I quickly learned most of them are bots.

When they speak to me, if they speak to me, I check them out.

If they behave “botishly”, I call them out.

If they reply, I check them out, and I help them. I put some time into helping them. I go out of my way to help them.

The instincts of living with scarcity. Always help a stranger.

Maybe I should be following other people more diligently?

I should probably make an effort to follow people who follow me.

The thing is I didn’t get on to Twitter to sell anything. I got on to Twitter to keep in touch with people. I quickly connect with anyone that I meetup with or who might have some common interest with me ~ like local shops.

Well, I suppose I should check my followers to see who is who. Or they could reply to me about something. After all I chatter a lot.

I think I am confused here. I am certainly annoyed that local shops broadcast and don’t listen back.

Have I answered my own question? What is my obligation to local businesses?

In a land of abundance, should I look after the people around me? I am not sure I should. There is another shop down the road.

Get real folks. We aren’t going to carry your baggage for you ~ not on this road ~ lands of abundance require economic reciprocity ~ you help me, I help you, you help me ~

If I am not sufficiently important to you for you to be sociable ~ then you will have to pay me for my time ~ that’s how it works.

But my instincts from the land of scarcity is that I might have to put up with your bad behaviour and to cajole you out of it? Do I? Do I hurt myself by not troubling myself to hurt you?

What if I just sit and watch you struggle? What if I just behave like one of those characters in sitcoms that sits on the sidelines and makes useless comments in the manner of a court jester?

So follow me back and talk to me!

And maybe I should check my follower list more carefully!  Or perhaps it is that those who set out to sell don’t listen. Maybe selling leads to an instinct not to reciprocate.

Someone straighten me out please!

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Are we doomed to repeat subprime crises – or could we manage better?

Published November 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

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Subprime crises ~ again?

Umair Haque‘s article in the Harvard Business blog of yesterday nudged me to think through Donella Meadows 12 levers to change a system.

Umair thinks a lot of activity in Web2.0, or social media, is little more than a “sub-prime crisis”.  And implicitly, he argues that we will continue to have sub-prime crises until we improve our moral and ethic act.

I think we will continue to have sub-prime crises because it is possible for sub-prime crises to happen. What is possible is possible. We don’t control everything!

But we also don’t have to lurch from crisis to crisis.

Managing systems is a little more than just managing

My argument though is that we have to think more clearly.

  • We can think about systems as systems.
  • We can watch that we don’t confuse our individual behavior with system behavior.
  • We can understand the linkages between our individual behavior and system behavior ~ and work clearly on the linkages without confusing these with our emotional reactions to changes in system behavior.

Sadly, few of us are educated in systems thinking. Even fewer are fluent.

In the management world, we have long separated the work of the line (the people who do work) – from managers (the people who make the system) – from staff (the people who manage the managers).

  • It is very necessary for managers to think clearly about systems without  muddle the overall effect with what any one of us does. The art of management is also leveraging without exaggerating or underestimating any of levers.
  • And the staff – the managers of the managers – have their role in training managers and holding up a mirror of their behavior so they have accurate and timely feedback.

Next step in clarifying my thinking about systems

My next step is to review my current think with what Donella Meadows wrote on managing systems.

The subprime crisis is a good impetus to check the quality of our systems thinking!

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