Open Networking - Where Will It End?

This post is prompted by a tweet from Euan Semple to the effect that he is considering relinquishing control of his LinkedIn account and just accepting invites whether or not he knows the person.  In LinkedIn parlance he will become an "open networker" and if he wants he can have a (LinkedIn) badge to prove it.

For me this all wrong.  But if Euan is considering it, I need to investigate whether it is wrong, whether I'm wrong or whether it doesn't really matter. This is my start. Trying to articulate views.  And showing where I have sympathy with alternate views.  I'd like to chat with others to increase my understanding of the alternate views.

Before I go any further I need to make it clear that I am not "having a go" at Euan.  I have a lot of time for him.  I introduced him into the organisation that I worked for to start opening sceptical eyes to the potential of Social Media, as he hates it being called. And I follow his blog, newsletter and tweets avidly.

Euan says he went "open" on Facebook a while ago. I am still considering whether to drop some "friends" from my massive total of 93. Some are really colleagues, and not even the ones I would go out for a beer with. Some colleagues are friends - the go out for a beer/coffee/wine is not quite the acid test but it is a good first sieve for me.

Image by John-MorganI tend to be lazy about the non-friends who don't say much - they are not cluttering up my wall. (I understand why it is called a wall, but I think of it more as a stream with little paper boats, made by friends, with notes and pictures attached, floating down it). I get annoyed with those who only communicate by publishing game scores.  But I can and do filter out game communications.

My ideal wall is full of little snippets of news about what my friends and family are doing, thinking and considering.  I particularly enjoy little insights into things my family probably wouldn't bother telling me because they'd think it was not that important, or they forget before we have a chance to talk.  I also enjoy getting snippets from perhaps not so close friends who have moved away. In previous times we'd probably drift apart or have the round robin newsletter at Xmas in an attempt to keep in touch. But now we can get those little pieces of news that keep them in mind and let you at least feel that you are keeping in touch, without forcing it.

So given my idyllic view of mountain streams and paper boats, being open on Facebook would be like having 100 tons of slurry dumped upstream. "Where did the boats go?"

So much for the subjective feelings.  I can do objective.  I realise that I can filter.  On Twitter I don't so much follow lots of people (enough to keep the all friends feed moving 1-2 times a minute) but I have search term feeds some set very wide, and I am learning to dip into the stream rather than try to drink it all.  I know the techniques for coping with large volumes of stuff: tight search terms; filter; lists etc and use them for professional aspects of my life, but I don't want to have to mess with that with friends.

LinkedIn may be different.  The people are different.  They may overlap with friends but the sense of obligations are different. And LinkedIn is pushing people into this more open networking environment by limiting what you can see unless you pay for one of their premium services.  Seeing full names of 3rd level connections has recently disappeared - but there are ways around this. However I have this view, that your connections say something about you. They also a) might ask you for a small reasonable favour - i.e. that costs you little but benefits them - an introduction say.  How do you respond?  "Sorry I don't know you"? or "Let me introduce Fred, I've no idea who he is, or whether you should bother talking to him"? and b) their status updates again may swamp your LinkedIn wall/stream driving more relevant stuff downstream before you notice it.

I think for me, I want to group things and people - to organise them so that I can behave appropriately to them and show some kind of courtesy to them.  By that I mean in the old days I wouldn't come in to the office and show my holiday snaps to every colleague I bumped into.  Nor did I try and explain the intricacies of my professional life to friends.  Obviously there were overlaps, but not trying to push specific contextual conversation into other social contexts seems to me a basic courtesy.  Nowadays it is easy to breach that courtesy without thinking.

I realise that the social media environment is different. Posting a link to your holiday snaps as a LinkedIn update is not the same as button holing a colleague in the corridor and pulling out the dreaded colourful envelope ... image by Rubin 110But the volume issue is so much greater now than ever before.  Just the act of filtering out irrelevancies becomes time consuming, and it is easy to define such a tight filter that serendipitous items never occur. Anyway if someone really wants to see my holiday snaps and I don't mind them seeing them a) they can search for them b) they can get an RSS feed on my Flickr account or c)  they could ask me.

I guess my punch line is that RSS or "persistent search" for me fills the gap.  If someone I have tagged as friend set wants what I am pushing out ro professional colleagues or the world, they can get it with RSS.  Similarly I use RSS to compensate for my relatively closed networking approach.  

What do you do?

Leadership, Initiative Overload and Social Media

A Twitter conversation between people I respect has caused me to want to explore the issue of initiative overload in organisations.

image by anwerpenRI need to make some assumptions explicit as part of this exploration, and these have to be simplified and not reflecting the variety that you see in any organisations.  So imagine a simplified organisation with 100 people. 10 initiatives are proposed. Each initiative will succeed if it has strong sponsorship and 50% of the people are behind it. Initiatives get started with at least medium sponsorship and at least 25% support. Support for the 10 initiatives is fairly evenly spread across the population. Each person supporting only 3 initiatives, because they know through experience that this is the maximum that they can cope with.  (This means that every initiative has 30 "votes".) Perhaps the most important assumption of all is that whilst the leadership of the organisation can impose their choice, success of initiatives that do not have sufficient internal support is usually short lived.

So, in this organisation all 10 iniatives could get started but none completed and eveyone operating above their "iniatives limit" i.e. stressed.

What do you think of the analysis? What about the assumptions? Are some stupid, naive, or unrealistic?  Are there some important assumptions unstated? What parameters are completely wrong - can people cope with 5 not 3 organisation wide initiatives? How would you restate the assumptions to make them more realistic?

Having re-articulated the assumptions to your satisfaction, do you recognize the condition in practice?

If so, what can we do about it? Press on regardless does not seem a reasonable option? I feel that it would be sensible to surface and agree the values of the key parameters then work within them.  But working within the parameters in my artificial case means choosing a maximum of three initiatives and getting the support for them increased from maybe 30% to over 50%, presumably through persuasion and trade offs.  Some compromise is needed by virtually everyone.

It maybe that social media has a part to play here.  If there were a place where the case for each initiative could be shared, discussed, challenged and maybe improved, it is possible that some would change their minds voluntarily, some would see support for their favoured initiatives dwindle and with good or poor grace switch allegiance. Cases might be made that a particular initiative would be more successful after another had succeeded.  In any case, it may be possible for leadership intervention to succeed in reducing the options further from, say, 6 to the necessary3.  Why would this succeed given what I said before about leadership unilateral action?  Well it would not be unilateral action.  Leadership would have decided after all who wanted to do had aired their views, and if the leadership could demonstrate that they had listened and that their own thoughts on options had been swayed, it is likely that their action would create greater support for the chosen options.

Of the assumptions I've made above, the two most important are:

• Initiatives don't succeed long term without sufficient support from the members of the organisation
• Everyone has a limit to the number of internal initiatives that they can cope with and that imposes a limit on the number of organisation wide initiatives that should be attempted.

Discovering what the "organisation initiatives limit" is would seem to be an important consideration for leadership.  Maybe good leaders have a feel for the answer intuitively? Maybe they are able to increase that limit for their organisation?

A Public, A Private And A Secret Life?

A few years ago when looking at the growing number of social networks and tools I had the idea that I would compartmentalise my sharing. I would put business stuff in LinkedIn, personal stuff in Facebook, and maybe use Plaxo for crossover stuff as it enables you to categorise business colleagues, friends and family.

Since then I have realised that whilst this approach is not entirely wrong it was based on a false assumption that what is put somewhere stays there. The reality is, that once shared on the web, a nugget of information will eventually travel across all of your networks, finding its way like a fugitive seeking refuge with the furthest scattered potential recipient to whom the information will be of the slightest interest. Assume so anyway and you won’t be disappointed. The web has huge capacity to connect people, and we welcome the opportunities it provides for the few hundred people scattered around the world with an esoteric interest to find each other and share. We have to accept that another consequence is that all of the networks centred on you are seldom connected just by you, and the act of sharing some information can rarely be constrained to one network.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously said that every man has a public, a private and a secret life. Well the web means that the public life is gaining at the expense of the private.

It still makes sense to me to share in certain directions, but this has more to do with one of the modern day business courtesies, filtering what you send so that you do not overload your colleagues. I have been involved in more or less successful attempts to address email overload in organisations; and have found that much email overload is caused by copying in or cc’ing. There are many reasons for cc’ing some positive like wishing to be inclusive, some quite venal – like covering your ass; perhaps the biggest is lack of thinking and just because you can. So you might think that tools such as Twitter, or the Wall on Facebook where you can share with the whole world, and with your “friends” respectively would add considerably to this sense of overload. In the main they don’t. In part because no answer is expected, no sense of obligation is passed in the same way that occurs with receiving an email. Tweets and Wall status updates are floated out there for who-ever wants to pick up, they are not forced, like email, into your presence like a baton at a relay race.

I still haven’t quite worked out the details of how best to float things in certain directions. I am more confident of status updates in LinkedIn or Facebook. But with Twitter, where my tweets cover beekeeping, social networking, personal observations, bits of news etc and I am sure that the Spanish beekeeper who has an active interest in my attempts to enter the mysteries of beekeeping is less interested in knowing I am at Reboot Britain. I not only tolerate but enjoy wide ranging tweets from people I know, or think I know, even when their twittering becomes close to wittering, but I am less forgiving when people I have classified as an xyz guru wanders into the problems of travelling to towns I have never visited.

Do you see this increasing public-ness of life, particularly if you engage on the web as an issue? Do you try to use different channels for different interests? If this increased public life educed private life is true for individuals, what does it portend for organisations?