Positive Structures

CivicConnect - an online community and problem-solving site

 
The Idea

 
CivicConnect is an online community and problem-solving space that I have been working on (with my colleague Jim McGee) for the past 18 months with Civic Consulting a unique and wonderful organization in Chicago. CivicConnect has been a successful testbed for some important ideas about how to use to  social tools successfully for problem-solving.

Civic Consulting is a not-for-profit backed by the business and philanthropic communities of Chicago. It provides free management consulting to the City of Chicago and related agencies. Civic Consulting has a core group of 6-8 consultants who work on teams that draw dedicated pro bono assistance from leading professional service firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, AT Kearney, Leo Burnett, Mayer Brown, etc.

  



Civic Consulting's network of alumni and friends is rich and talented but not as connected or as valuable as possible. To strengthen it, Civic Consulting agreed to explore CivicConnect for its alumni and friends. CivicConnect gives members of the network who have a shared interest in Chicago and a shared experience at Civic Consulting the chance to meet each other. It also lets them  keep contributing their talents to Civic Consulting's ongoing work, even though they cannot come back for another 3-6 month stint.

How CivicConnect looks and works

CivicConnect looks like a social network crossed with a collaboration site. Because so much good work happens "at the water cooler or the coffee bar," CivicConnect has the social network and the problem-solving space in the same place. The social side starts with profiles that ask different questions than other sites might, such as:

What are you good at helping people with?

What problem-solving experiences continue to influence your thinking and approach to new problems?

What books or people have influenced your thinking about problem solving?

What broad scale issues or problems most capture your attention today?

What have you done to help someone who is also in CivicConnect?

What else are you working on (so other people know what to help you with)?

The problem-solving (or solution-advancing as we like to call it because the problems that we are tackling eventually require spilling over offline and bringing in other affected parties) is done both synchronously and asynchronously. On any question, we have periods of asynchronous structured problem-solving, carried out in very small pieces, called "inch pebbles", as opposed to milestones. After the asynchronous work has progressed to a certain point, an online (Webex or competitor) meeting is held, and we facilitate it with Compendium (an open source discussion management tool) in order to organize and document the conversation.

 
The results so far

We've demonstrated that real, analytical, fact-based problem-solving can happen in a collaborative way online. People have done analyses, and other people have reacted by bringing new facts to bear.

We've worked on three problems:

• How to take advantage of Chicago's cultural riches to attract more tourists from overseas
• How to reduce violence in Chicago
• Why would you "friend" the government?

We've also demonstrated that the network creates magic that is unknowable in advance. A topic introduced in The Water Cooler (a part of the site to put things you think others might find interesting) have led to surprising discussions and even the prospect of action.

The people who have participated have gotten to know each other much better.

What have you seen like this? What lessons are there for Enterprise 2.0 installations?

Systems thinking made clear

I just saw this video (from 1994) by Russell Ackoff. It's about systems thinking, and what it means. It's very clear and very powerful. Systems thinking, in the way Ackoff talks about, is central to understanding how positive structures are created -- they are systems that work because of how they allow people to interact in new ways. There's a very brief intro and then Ackoff gets started. Enjoy!!

 

How to get multiple answers to a problem

An individual (not the one in this story) often gets stuck with one or two possible answers. A group of diverse people should be able to come up with lots of possible good answers. Here's one version of an inspiring (to me) fable -- and a link to what some other people thought of.  The story is copied straight from www.snopes.com.  No need to tell it better than they do (I just underlined each solution) Thanks Snopes.

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."

One student replied: "You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."

This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics.

To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows: "Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."

"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."

"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T =2 pi sqr root (l /g)."

"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up." "If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building."

"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for physics.

A group of science joke lovers apparently got quite interested in generating even more ideas for solving this!!  My favorite from that list is something like "go to the top of the building, throw the barometer off making sure it hits someone. Then turn on your radio and hear a report that 'Someone was injured when they were hit by a barometer that was thrown from the top of the 432 foot high Science Lab'". Let the journalist do your research.

How can we get people we work with to think like this? I think it has something to do with collaboration. What do you think?



Making Enterprise 2.0 Stick

For the past few months, a few colleagues and I have been trying to figure out how to make Enterprise 2.0 solutions work much better. We've got a few ideas, and a working prototype (to be discussed in a future post), and plans for more. Our key insights are:

1. More infrastructure is needed than the software typically provides (and much of what's needed is not hard to add), and
2. The social process of joining and being in the Enterprise "community" (we put quotes on deliberately -- it's a vague word) must be orchestrated and managed. Some people do this -- they just may need to do it more, better and longer.

Enterprise 2.0's challenge is often called "adoption," but to us the issue is usefulness. To be picked up and used, the tools and processes must be useful to people, valuable to them (which includes their value in doing a particular task but also includes other ancillary benefits they may get) and be easy to use.

Most Enterprise 2.0 implementations focus on picking software and managing the introduction of the software to the target audiences. The hope is that a critical mass will be built and then that the people using the system will generate value for each other. We'd suggest that more is needed.

The first addition is workflow. As indicated in a previous post, it helps to have workflow structured enough so that people can easily do what you want them to do in the collaborative setting (which means that you need to think about what you want them to do). At the same time, you need  flexibility for people can invent their own ways of doing things; you can't know ahead of time what will happen, and much that you don't know will be good!! That's one of the reasons you are installing Enterprise 2.0 tools.

The second addition is social processes that facilitate the creation of bilateral relationships within a collaboration. In most collaborations, the focus is on the joint task. But good, caring relationships among even a small number of pairs of participants will make any collaboration (online or offline) work much better. In the offline world, these can sometimes be generated by a beer after work; in the online world they need to be planted, nurtured, and watered systematically (which is a good idea offline too).

 

The social processes can consist of, at least:

• Carefully constructed profile pages. Profile questions can be asked in ways that provide many hooks into who a person is. This lets people understand each other in ways that are outside of the immediate work context, but which can provide "glue" between them.
• Aggressive management of initial participation. Community managers (yes, you need one for your internal community) can contact joiners early on, and help them find their way around. Or the community manager can facilitate contact by someone else in the community. Encouraging -- or requiring -- some offline conversation among site participants can be very powerful; if two people talk for 10 minutes on the phone, they have a much stronger tie than online alone usually creates.
• Ongoing management of social interaction. Enterprise 2.0 communities have the same challenges and life-cycle events as other online communities -- they need the same kinds of moderation and support that interest-based communities and customer communities need. Otherwise people will come, participate a little if you are lucky, and then wander off.

What have you done?  What do you think?

 

 

The role of workflow in collaboration

My friend Jim McGee and I have lately been prototyping a unique online problem-solving community. It’s a place where people who are mostly strangers can come together and productively work. I’ll be writing more about that in the coming weeks.

Today, I’m focused on one issue we’ve encountered – which is building the right amount of workflow into an online collaboration. To me, the right amount of collaboration is enough to guide people to do what you want them to do, but not so much to constrain them to do only that. Or to paraphrase a long-ago manager of mine “the job of the collaborators is to do exactly what I tell them – or something better.” 

Ideally, there’s enough structure built in so the tool is useful, but not so much that the structure significantly reduces the chance of discovering other reasons for working with the people you encounter (beyond the reason that first brought you together) or other ways of working with them. 

Enterprise 2.0 platforms generally skip workflow. Few people would think it would work well if you just invited a large group of people to a face-to-face meeting with no agenda and no planning but that’s what the typical Enterprise 2.0 online collaborative platform assumes. In most Enterprise 2.0 applications, many tools are offered (blogs, wikis, microblogs, forums, etc.) but no workflow or structuring mechanisms. You can post to your heart’s content, and comment on other people’s work, but if you want to do project management within the system, you have to cobble something together. If you want to do a particular complicated workflow, you have to cobble something together. If you want to let your collaborators invent workflows on the fly, you have to cobble something together.

The danger of tools without purpose is demonstrated, some say, by the recent decision of Google to kill off its much heralded GoogleWave. GoogleWave had a lot of capabililities, but not enough people could figure out how to use it for something they wanted to do.


On the other hand, some companies, like Cisco, have at least at times stressed the need to understand what the purpose of collaboration is, and have encouraged people to build collaboration around a specific need. And certainly, there are purpose-built tools for specific collaborative efforts, like Spigit and Imaginatik for managing collaborative innovation processes. These tools have workflows built into them. These efforts seem to me to ignore the possibility that these same people may want or need to collaborate on other tasks.

The blending of easily customizable workflows into collaboration tools seems like it is a critically needed step. I’d love to hear about collaboration tools that let people take advantage of the ability to find new people through profiles and searches and lets them craft ways of working together.

Managing a value network

If we can map social networks into value networks and quantify the value each person receives and the value of the network as a whole we could answer some interesting questions and figure out some strategies to respond to what we learn.

1. Where is the network most at risk?  We can look at the value each node of the network (each person) gets and at least in theory compare it to the alternatives that person has. If being in the network is costing someone -- that is, they don't feel what they're getting is worth what they're giving, aggregated across all their relationships in the network -- we should expect them to drop out. Their alternative is to participate in no network, which would likely be a zero (and therefore higher) value choice. People who net relatively little from the network might also be at risk, because they may have other more attractive relationship and network choices.
   
2. What is the value of each person to the network as a whole? If someone leaves the network, how much will its value production decrease?  You could measure the value of each participant using something analogous to the “shadow price” of the value everyone else receives. If you take someone out of the network, what happens to the net "plus value" of the whole network? 
   

And maybe the situation is even worse. Maybe taking that person out makes the network so much less valuable for another person (or other people) so that they too would leave the network if the first person left. (As an example, when a particular partner left a consulting firm, 10 other people decided to leave too; without the mentoring this partner provided them the costs of staying at the firm now outweighed the benefits). And then if a group of adversely affected people left, what would happen to the others who were getting benefits from people in that group – and so on down the negative cascade?  It may be that one particular person leaving would drain a large part of the network of its value. 

On the other hand, maybe the network has some “self-healing” capabilities”. Can people in the network get (at some reasonable cost) what they previously got from the now-missing member?  We could figure this out by surveying people about how they'd compensate for the unexpected departure of each of the links that are important sources of value to them (if that value person was, figuratively, “hit by a bus”). We could also ask if they would redirect any of their outbound value flows (e.g., “Since I wouldn’t be busy providing emotional support to Tom, I would provide it to Susie instead”).

With these measures in mind, and our overall quantification of the value network, we might face some challenging management issues. Suggestions on how to handle these are very welcome.

1. When someone's value is low or heading down, what can we do to bring it up? How can we improve what they get form existing contacts, or add a positive inflow contact for them?
2. When someone leaves who is very valuable to the network, how can we minimize the negative impact by consciously addressing people who will be affected?
3. How can we divide up the benefits of the network among its members? How can we provide extra compensation to people to add to the overall strength of the network, and make sure everyone gets compensation consistent with their contributions?
4. What should be our goals in managing a network? How important is it to maximize value created, and how important is it to ensure resilience? The more you think about a network as similar to an ecosystem, the more you begin to consider the value of resilience and flexibility to changing circumstances, and the less important growth (especially if fragile) seems. We tend, I think, to underestimate the value of resilience in a system?

What do you think?

Measuring value in value networks

In the previous post, we looked at how social networks could be looked at as value networks. We could map the tangible and intangible value (e.g., links to valuable information, job leads, business referrals, social support). that people receive from each other through the network. 

If we could quantify what an individual gets from the network and what the network produces altogether, we could begin answering some interesting questions like:

1. Where is our network most at risk?
2. How much contribution does each person make to the network?
3. What changes could enhance the productivity of the network?

In short, we could have some quantitative tools to actually manage the value of the network. (We can also use the tools to manage the resilience of the network,thinking about it like the ecosystem it is – but that’s subject for another day). Let’s look at how we might tackle these challenges.

Quantifying an individual’s perception of value received

The value received by a person would be the sum of all the values that they get from each relationship in the network (and from the community as a whole). Here's what Sue gets and gives from people in a network.

A challenge would be converting all the different kinds of value received and given to one metric that you can sum across types of value. For example, how much is an order perceived as being worth by Sue, as compared with emotional support? We could figure out how much Sue values different benefits (or how much her different contributions cost her) by asking her a set of questions using conjoint analysis, which is expressly designed to ferret out this kind of comparison. Then we can quantify what she gets and gives in units we can add together.

Quantifying the value of the entire network

Quantifying the value of the entire network seems a little harder. It’s straightforward to say that the value of the network is the sum of the values received by each person, but it’s not straightforward to compare values between people. If we measure with our unit of currency set by what each person views emotional support to be worth, we’d get a different answer than if we used a different currency, such as the value put on having your “reputation enhanced.”  So the best answer for now (and I am definitely open to better ones) might be to look at multiple views of the network using all the available currencies, and perhaps average the results.

In the next post, we'll look at answering some questions using the information these quantifications provide.

Social networks and value networks

Networks can be incredibly “positive structures”, but understanding them requires thinking about both social networks and value networks. These two similar but distinct concepts are rarely brought together (an exception is Verna Allee’s work) but they should be. And after they have been brought together conceptually, tools can be implemented in social networks to improve the performance of those networks as value networks.

Social networks are graphs that document relationships between people. Here’s an example.

Social network analysts can mathematically describe the structure of a social network. Researchers have discovered fascinating elements of social networks, such as the “weak ties” made famous in Mark Granoveter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties; he found that for some purposes (like finding a new job) the important links are the ones where your ties exist but are weak – because those are people who move in a different crowd than you do. Or Ron Burt has talked about structural holes – the places where someone can intervene to bring two separate parts of a social network together, such as someone connecting two departments in a company. While social networks can map any kind of relationship between people they are often used to just map the relationship “X knows Y.”

Value networks describe the relationships between people (and/or organizations) in terms of the tangible or intangible value they provide to each other. So here’s the same social network, with arrows indicating the flow of tangible or intangible value. Tangible value might be an order or a payment, and intangible value might include things like information, reputation enhancement, or social support. In most value network drawings, the magnitude of the flow is not specified and the sign is presumed to be positive. However, the magnitudes could certainly vary and the sign could be negative, e.g., when I provide feedback on your reputation it could be negative. 

 

For a value network to be sustainable, each node must be happy enough with their position in the network. Informally, this means, at a minimum, that they would have to get more from the network than they give. Here’s our network above with some indicators of who is happy and who isn’t.

 

In many online communities, there’s one more source of value. And that is the “community as a whole”. For example, if a Q&A board exists, then Sue gets value from Rafael if Sue posts a question and Rafael answers. But if the answers are accessible to everyone, then everyone else gets value too as a byproduct of their bilateral action.. So we can illustrate this by adding the red arrows on the chart.

 
In my next post I’ll look at how we might track the values of what’s happening in a value network and intervene to help keep the network going.

Involuntarily crowdsourcing the Deepwater Horizon oil fix

I've been thinking a lot about crowdsourcing and the types of problems where it (and some team-oriented variants of crowdsourcing) could work. In my research, I ran across the story - so far - of the crowdsourcing of solutions to the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf. I say so far since as of this writing the problem is continuing only slightly unabated.

BP didn't post the question of what to do on any of the available crowdsourcing platforms, like Innocentive. It didn't launch a crowdsourcing site of its own for a long time, although it has one now that claims to have over 7800 suggestions. However, BP is not very transparent about what it is doing with the suggestions, as highlighted in this article. Other people have leapt into the breach, providing venues for people to offer suggestions. These included the Guardian newspaper and a site called BPOilnews.com. People also apparently began submitting comments the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Open Government site  (since it was open and had "EPA" in the title); eventually the EPA opened another site specifically to deal with the BP situation. The EPA's new site defines the problems it is interested in help with -- which is one advantage of being slightly proactive (even if you are dragged to being proactive by other people).

In a very interesting post, Laurel Papworth notes that the PR advantages of crowdsourcing -- of asking for help and at least pretending to listen -- would have been valuable for BP. Instead, they have taken the route of trying to be the experts and instead looking quite foolish. 

The desire of people to help is impressive. Their capacity to help might be very large. It appears that BP is resistant to taking help, although it's admittedly hard to know (lack of response by them, lack of publicity by them of their response doesn't mean they aren't reading what they are getting, but it does make one wonder). It would be nice to see some response, and some evaluation publicly of the ideas that have been received.

What do you think BP should have done? What should it do now to get the most from the public?

Polymath - a favorite collaboration

I had the opportunity to put together some information on the Polymath collaboration from last year for a presentation in a series called "Collaboration on Collaboration". So it's very easy to share some of the details here. Polymath is a favorite collaboration story because it involves many people working on a single problem.

Tim Gowers (the gent shown here) wanted to answer the question -- Is massively collaborative mathematics possible. He decided to tackle something called the density Hales-Jewett Theorem (DHJ) (and no, I don't know what that is). He had an idea but wasn't sure it was useful -- and thought someone else could perhaps help. He was working on a specific case, when k=3 (in some description or equation). He didn't want to prove the theorem, just to figure out if his approach was useful or have someone tell him why it wasn't

So he launched the question on his blog. Most interesting to me was the set of rules he established, which are paraphrased below but which are listed in full in one his posts. The blog was the setting for the collaboration, although some of the discussion migrated over time to another blog and to a wiki that was set up to help keep track of ideas that seemed solid.

 

The results were outstanding, much exceeding Gowers' expectations. The group succeeded dramatically. It bypassed Gowers' question and went on to prove the case of the theorem that they had begun with, and did it in a way that led to a more general set of insights about the problem and about other problems. In 37 days twenty-seven people made contributions (and many more followed the action).

Gowers' take on this all, reported in his blog, was that while the collaboration was terrific it wasn't as "massive" as he had hoped. Other participants commented on the difficulty of following the developments at the speed they came -- especially since some of the discussion was sophisticated and required meaningful understanding of the problem domain (which many of the mathematicians apparently didn't have).

Despite the lack of "massiveness," this is an intriguing example of people working together in a different way. My view is that the "rules of the road" were important to making it work.

There has been at least one other Polymath effort that is still going on, and another under consideration, and Gowers has also launched another one. It will be interesting to see which make progress and why (and I for one, will be unable to tell you if the difficulty of the problem had anything to do with it!!).

What do you think about this?