Here in the Netherlands we could vote for a new parliament, yesterday on June 9th. Our parliament is a classic example of consensus decision making, also known as the “polder model”. A key element is that the interest of the whole is more important than the individual interest. The interests are so diverse, but consensus is needed to make decisions. Otherwise the process of decision making would be unnecessary inefficient. That is exactly what is needed. People must negotiate, they must give some and take some, in order to come to a collective agreement. In the case of our new parliament, it will be a difficult task when you consider the result and the differences between the parties.

It happens all the time in the airline industry. CDM (Collective Decision Making) is even a known and accepted term there. It is based on a common situational awareness, a shared view of the constraints of the “system”. Some points that have to be agreed upon (from Center for Collaborative Planning), and are useful in many other situations:

• everyone knows how – and agrees to how – decisions are made
• ensure all members have an opportunity to participate in decision-making
• choose the right decision making tool
• understand the benefits of using consensus
• use data to make informed decisions

Then there is this threat, also known as “Groupthink”. This is a phenomenon that comes to surface when many like-minded come together. Instead of finding the best possible outcome, people focus on the consensus and strive for unanimity. This often overrides their motivation to focus on realistic outcomes, they tend to ignore important signals that should be considered in the decision making process. This is a threat for creativity and critical thinking, both needed ingredients to strive for a good outcome. Groupthink will not be a threat in the coming coalition discussions to form the new parliament…

People from many disciplines are needed in order to have a fruitful creative process. Creative processes can lead to many possible implementations or solutions for a given situation. So how do we create a situation where the best possible outcome for the whole will be realized? You can ask yourself questions like: Do we need the same people that contributed to the possible outcomes when making decisions? And how many people do we need? Do we need people that haven’t contributed before, some experts from outside, or just people with the authority to make decisions, or are empowered? Important considerations.

Collective decision making is not just possible, a diverse group of people from many disciplines is even a prerequisite to fuel the decision making process. Without that fuel, this process can not be run through optimally. In other words, to make good decisions, we need a collective. Without a diverse collective there is no good decision making. Decisions need to be accepted and internalized by all the people that are affected by it. These people should be involved when making the decisions.

One of the important rules is that it is always up to you to update your status. It’s not required to do so. There are pro’s and con’s about doing it or not doing it. It’s an activity that you’ll have to feel comfortable with. Another thing to remember is that in one-to-many communication it is likely to have more people in the audience than in broadcasting. So it is ok for people to keep track of other people there statuses, without updating theirs. Sharing and reading is voluntary, like it is with many communication methods.

The best known channel for this kind of communication is Twitter. Many people use it for their own needs, it can be for news, fun, nonsense, anything really. Good enough for personal use, when it’s not a problem that all ‘tweets’ are public, and are indexed by search engines. Not very attractive for usage within a company. As a response, there are many vendors that offer a similar service, but not for the public. For example, only people in your organziation that share the same email extension (you@company.com) are allowed. Services like Yammer, SocialCast and Present.ly are some examples. However, privacy and security concerns can still be problematic for many organizations.

I think sharing statuses can be really valuable when used in organizations, especially for organizations where employees that are geograpically distributed. It makes it possible to know who is working on what, in an easy manner. When applied rightly in intranets that people are used to, it can be a very effective addition to one’s work.

Some of the advantages of sharing status updates:

• inform your audience
• decide where to act upon
• get informed
• discover what is going on
• enforces involvement and collaboration
• form bonds with others from the community
• foster the ability to form teams

Disadvantages:

• inform more people than you would like
• it can’t give a complete picture of what’s going on
• people are reticent in sharing in the open
• can take too much time
• privacy and security concerns

The challenge is not in using such a tool, but in how to use it, or, better, in how to empower employees to use the tool best. How to overcome the disadvantages? It should fit in the daily work and routines of the people using it, it should not become an extra burden for the majority. That makes it extremely important how such a tool is introduced to the potential users. It is not about the tool, but about the people using the tool. This is something that is often and easily underestimated. Such a tool can only be introduced once. That one time is the chance to have the advantages overcome the disadvantages, and to have many people feel not too uncomfortable from the beginning.

Another challenge is that there should be some intelligence attached to the usage of the tool. Otherwise it would be a black box, very useful, but hard to understand and to act upon. For example, good intelligence makes it possible to identify social and informal relationships between employees, other than the hierarchical and formal relationships as they exist on paper. This and other metrics add to the richness of analyzing communication between employees, and can add to the understanding of other online and offline behavior, which ultimately can lead to a better business.

These social networks are becoming customary tools in organizations as well. Like other niche markets, it becomes easier to extract value for people, or employees, by participating in these relatively small networks. However, to extract relevant value for employees, you can not copy the features of a social network and go from there. It strongly depends on the goals, the number of participants, the prevalent culture, the expertise of the participants, to name just a few dependencies.

Networks for employees that share the same expertise, are not social networks. We prefer to use the term ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP), after the principles of Etienne Wenger. Wenger is known for his work on Communities of Practice. He has written some important books about the subject. He tries to understand the connection between knowledge, community, learning, and identity. You can call a CoP a practical community as well, however that would be a misuse of the term CoP. A CoP is more than a community for practitioners, it focuses more on knowledge and learning. Goals of a Community of Practice often refer to the exchange of knowledge, enabling you to doing your job better, or more efficient.

Why is that? What phenomena do you undertake that are just too time consuming? Do you recognize some of the following?

• not knowing the goals of your colleagues
• not taking the time to share success stories
• departments that do not know what other departments are doing
• the usage of wrong processes or procedures
• project delays by too many talking and decision making
• tasks that are being done redundantly
• updates that are being e-mailed to everybody
• searching information that takes too much time
• searching the right people that takes too much time

One of our objectives for a Community of Practice is to make the above time consuming phenomena more efficient. The above list is just a small sample of the phenomena. Other goals can be identifying critical moments, collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and many more. It depends on the variables I noted before.

Social networks for organizations, or Communities of Practice if you like, are becoming more important. Many companies understand the opportunities for such a community. Employees are better equipped to make use of tools that are becoming quite familiar due to the reach of the current social networks. It is important to make the distinction between social networks and Communities of Practice and understand the true potential of a CoP. However knowledge about implementing a CoP within an organization is still in its early stages. That’s one of the challenges we’re facing these days.

Some time ago I was researching an employee-driven innovation community (EDI). The community was developed for the purpose of optimizing and innovating business processes, procedures and products by starting a dialogue between staff members and other employees. Main mechanism was sharing ideas and thoughts, followed by discussion to shave away the edginess to eventually result in a useful concept for that particular organization.

Background
First let me give some background on my research object. KLM is a Netherlands-based airline. Ground Source is one of its online communities, designed and developed by Favela Fabric for KLM Ground Services. This division of KLM is in charge of processing the daily intake of passengers. Ground Source was divided in two separate areas, which were the themes area and the bulletin board. The themes area was structured and divided into themes in which solutions or suggestions were sought by KLM. Reactions were possible in the form of textual comments and voting. The other section was called the bulletin board, which provided more freedom to participants on which matters to discuss. The main restriction was that posts should somehow be related to KLM Ground Services. Besides innovation related threads, this also led to threads being opened with mainly a social function or with technical questions regarding Ground Source.

The aim of my research was to study stimulating and inhibiting factors of innovation-related behavior within an EDI. Giddens’ Structuration Theory was used for the sociological perspective. However, due to the abstract nature of this theory, other theories concerning creativity and user roles were added for an operationalization of the modalities from Giddens’ theory. This sociological approach is not witnessed much in other research concerned with these kinds of communities, which is strange. If you think of a brainstorm session; does it yield innovative behavior because it is called a brainstorm session or is it something else? The outcome of such a session is a logical consequence of an accumulation of social related behavior. I believe this is also true for an online community which has the goal to yield (innovative) ideas and suggestions.

Some theory
An in-depth consideration of Giddens’ Structuration Theory goes beyond the scope of the post. Therefore I restrict myself to a brief explanation of the three modalities from the Structuration Theory, which are interpretive schemes, facilities and norms. This was also the focus of this research.

• The Interpretive scheme can be seen as a framework, from which people think, reason and communicate with each other (e.g. in a particular setting users are discussing the economic situation at a very academic level, other people joining that conversation start exhibiting the same behavior)  .
• Some users have more facilities than others, enabling them to exercise a higher amount of power (e.g. having the ability to sanction others).
• Norms are mostly determined by culture and societal layers. They shape the way we are ought to behave in a particular situation.

Results
Results of my study showed that users with more facilities are crucial in an EDI, since their interventions have a massive impact on the interaction within threads. Furthermore, it is also clear that highly creative expressions are important for setting up a creative interpretive scheme that positively affects interaction. The most important conclusions that can be drawn from my research are now summarized in a nutshell:

• Highly creative expressions at the beginning of a thread set the interpretive scheme for that what follows in a particular thread.
• Not only moderators and theme managers have a considerable amount of power, also people who present themselves as an authority in a particular area enjoy almost the same amount of power. They all have a large impact on the interaction within the online community.
• The presence of controversy has a positive effect on the level of innovative behavior (e.g. voting negatively or creative behavior); except when that controversy is coming from someone who has more power or when no controversial reactions are given (positive votes and lots of encouragement).

Creativity, controversy and power seem to be key elements for the success of an innovation-aimed FOC, as can be deduced from above. However, it is not just simply more from these elements, to make such a community a success. It is a delicate social process.

By having said all above, I can now return to the title of this post: “To intervene, or not to intervene”. Community moderators should be very careful in when and what they say in a discussion, because it may have a massive impact on the course and content of a discussion. For example, by questioning the feasibility of a particular idea the discussion changes from innovative to defensive thinking or bleeds out completely. Moderators can also shift the whole nature of the discussion from innovation-related to something different by just asking the wrong questions. More positively, moderators’ constructive criticism seems to interact with highly creative expressions at the beginning of a thread, which enables them to steer a discussion without constraining innovation-related behavior. Noteworthy is that these results affected the moderation style of Favela Fabric.

In my concluding remark I stress that the results of my research indicate that it is worthwhile to handle a sociological perspective in this research area and thus should be explored further in future research.

Upon visiting the MyStarbucksIdea site you will see many ideas that have been submitted countless times. And you will see a limited number of ideas that are truly original and potentially valuable. A thought leaps to my mind: Would a two-day brainstorm session with some lead users and experts produce similar results? The crowdsourcing evangelist would say: Ah, but just suppose you would have hit upon that one brilliant idea, why care about all the redundancy? And do not forget, one of the reasons of congregating is the opportunity to bask in the glow of an icon brand. We all love Starbucks and sharing this affection is a primary driver for participating. So…

Okay, I agree with the brand engagement argument. MyStarbucksIdea is a collective brand experience. And it is a crowdsourcing platform for aggregation. To be fair, there is even a remarkable degree of community interaction and validation. In fact, setting up a platform merely for validation and insight mining is a perfectly good reason. The focus on finding THE BIG IDEA distracts attention from what is essentially the primary benefit of many crowdsourcing initiatives.

The reason why StarbucksIdea works is that people allot Starbucks a far bigger brand delivery repertoire than just good coffee. They see Starbucks as a location-based occasion for relaxing and reenergizing, for personal contemplation and social discourse. This mental brand position offers a much wider scope for discussion and idea generation than the average coffee retailer. It allows people to show their expertise in other fields than just coffee.

An icon brand draws huge attraction. The fact that people join in droves does not mean that they duly accept everything Starbucks says or does. On the contrary, aficionados tend to be critical of a brand stepping out of line. They need little prompting however to explore ways how to improve or deepen their Starbucks experience.

The Starbucks case shows us the following critical requirements for successful collective mobilization:
• A strong connection
• A vested interest
• A multilayered product
• A rich situational context
The context criterion cannot be underestimated. A rich yet demarcated context allows people to play a pivotal role in the daily reconstruction of the brand experience. They become actors in a setting where every item, every action, every word contributes to the Starbucks Idea.

The Starbucks case is not easily emulated. Icon brands are by definition exceptional. And even icon brands do not always have a rich context. Take Coca-Cola, the most iconic brand of all. Its context is diffuse, for the simple fact that Coke has always stressed its generic message of being ‘always everywhere’ (No doubt Coke marketers beg to differ..).

For mainstream brands the open call will not work, let alone unleash similar mass following and output. These generic brands are less able to rally their customers around their brand. They often lack a rich context. They need to narrow down the scope of the open call to prevent general disengagement (not for me..). In fact, they need a burning issue to arouse attention. They have to prove much harder that they are truly capable and committed to the outcome of the process.

In other words, crowdsourcing is hardly a free ride. The omnipresence of social media does not entail that your audiences will jump to the opportunity offered. The sobering conclusion is that it takes serious effort to mobilize your audience and spark valuable contributions on a sustainable basis if your name is not Starbucks..

Communitizing enables organizations to absorb and harness the collective wisdom of their constituencies, increasing their capacity for change and innovation. Communitized companies are adaptive creatures, sensing and capitalizing on emergent shifts in market currents.

Examples abound of companies like Semco and P&G, which apparently have succeeded in opening up and connecting in- and outside talent. Unfortunately many more examples hint at a more sobering and even distressing reality.

I mentioned earlier that one of the key hurdles is the lingering lack of trust among staff and outside audience. Is this a temporary fad, a marketing ploy? Is the organization really up for it? Can it persist? If people are expected to converge and interact outside the formal channels, they want an unequivocal message, confirming them time and again in the honest intentions of the initiator.

And this is where we hit the iceberg.. Many companies behave like market places, where a management call often is the start of a subtle negotiation and adoption process, instead of a kick-off for a seamless execution. Ambiguity rules, with the echo of the management call being drowned out by overriding everyday considerations, voiced by middle management. These contrarian sounds may spring from an authentic concern about potential risks, but may also represent vested interests keen to preserve the status quo.

In a highly structured work environment, people have learnt to abide by clear, formal rules and guidelines. At times these rules may be perceived as stifling and frustrating, yet they also offer comfort and safety. Stepping out of this cocoon requires courage, trading a familiar game for a promising perspective that yet has to materialize. If every cautious step is accompanied by contrarian signals, people will ultimately lose faith and lapse into old habits.

So is ambiguity the slow killer? This would be the case if management has overestimated the ease and pace of transformation. Management needs to state empathically its dedication to the communitizing strategy, even if everyone seems to concur. Silent opposition is less visible from the top, but is easily noticed by the workforce as fuzzy conflicting signals start to accumulate. So management needs to speak out and lead by example, while duly noting that a Janus-faced appearance is sometimes unavoidable.

Yet there is something very peculiar about ambiguity. Ambiguity is not only a critical phenomenon in the change process toward a communitized organization; it is also the norm in an open collaborative environment, where people jointly refine their protocol as they proceed. This does not imply that a networked-based model of value creation is anarchic by nature. It does say however that the network rules leave room for interpretation and negotiation. This fuzziness, where contradictions are not entirely erased or cornered, is the inevitable byproduct of self-organization and flexibility. Ambiguity is here to stay. You better get used to it..

For a company, having engaged employees can make the difference between being a regular or an outstanding player. Read the story of Ricardo Semler about his company Semco to get an idea of what we mean. At Semco, decision-making power is delegated to employees. Managers may or may not agree with a particular decision, but by allowing employees to participate, Semco fosters better understanding of management issues and opportunities. Employee engagement boosts awareness of the bigger picture and a shared sense of responsbility. Having engaged employees counts in every business sector.

In our projects, we try to push employee engagement by orchestrating sustained involvement and contribution. We do this not for its own sake (though we think it won’t hurt), but in order to achieve a particular purpose. According to Gary Hamel, employee engagement can be summarized as:

• the ability to participate in decision-making
• the encouragement given for innovative thinking
• the availability of skill-enhancing job assignments
• the interest shown by senior executives in employee well-being

If I would classify employee engagement, chances are that I would come up with a similar list. It looks obvious. However, the real challenge is creating a situation where employees are truly engaged. Many factors play a role, and reaching a point where you have all your employees engaged can probably not be accomplished if you make this your number one priority. We should not forget where employee engagement is coming from. Employeee engagement can only thrive if management is really participative. Employee engagement can never be the sole objective; it can only co-exist with participative management.

Participative management and employee engagement are yin and yang, they are inextricably connected. You cannot have one without the other. This duality is related to the success of a company as well. What makes employees engaged and management participative? Is a successful company the cause of increased engagement and participation, or do employees become more engaged when business is going well? Here we see another reciprocal relationship. However, success is determined and dependent by several other factors as well. My point here is that employee engagement will not increase without participative management, which can be seen as one of the conditions of employees becoming engaged. Employee engagement can not be one-way. There is no bottom-up without top-down. It is one side of an important duality within organizations.

Usually they are the personnel of a large company, or a large group of individuals, but always connected somehow. They can have real power. However, the power they can possess can only come to surface when all parties involved are great in collaborating with each other. One of our responsibilities is to try to create a situation where collaboration can really occur, to unleash the power of the large group. What is collaboration really, and what is needed to really make it happen?

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals.

That’s what Wikipedia says at the moment. Collaboration consists of three important parts. First, collaboration is a process. Second, collaboration involves people. Third, collaboration pursues a common goal. While the first two parts are very important, the last is maybe even more important. The common goals is what varies the most in the trajectories we undertake with our clients, and their clients which is the largest group. It takes quite some time to research who all the stakeholders are, what their motivations are, to identify opportunities, and so on. This heavily influences the underlying process of the trajectory.

Collaboration for us starts at the very beginning moment we have contact with our customer. Together with our client we gather as much relevant information as we can. This process is never business as usual, the people involved and the differences in companies make it a unique experience every time. Not everybody has the same mindset whenever we start such a trajectory. Every time we have to convince many people what the common goals are (or they have to convince us), what the process should look like, and that we have to work together with all stakeholders. And we learn from this again and again. Collaboration is not the easiest way of working together. Many individuals have their own ideas and goals, which is great, but the common goals should always prevail in the long term. Agreeing on what these goals are, is a very important step to make when collaboration is really having a chance.

The above explanation shows the difficulty of collaboration. When the goals are commonly agreed upon, the process is the way to achieve it. And that process, not necessarily more important that the destination, but of course the way to it. The process should be constantly guided and guarded, and action should be taken to reach the common goals. All parties have a role here, and only with all these parties trying to reach the common goals, collaboration is fruitful.

So what is collaboration? And what is needed to make it happen? Besides the definition and the meaning, collaboration it is not easy, not business as usual, is a unique experience every time, and takes time and patience. But it can be fun and rewarding to all people involved. And it should be.

It is very attractive however to make the infrastructure for your co-creation project the center of your attention. Quite convenient also, since configuring a website is a process you can easily control. It takes your mind off a far more difficult task you face: How to attract a committed audience and how to motivate it to contribute to your cause with ideas, experiences and lively discussion.

A platform will not do that. Elegant lines of code, html and flash programming do not attract or entertain crowds into co-creation. Even the most beautiful of designs does not convince people to let go of skepticism or resistance.

Stirring your target groups into an active commitment is a complex process that takes careful deliberation and a well thought-through approach. It might even be more difficult than getting your customers to (impulsively) buy your products. Co-creation means you need people to get interested, come to your website, subscribe, contribute, and preferably come back for more discussions and the celebration of results.

Co-creation is about people and their emotions, much more than anything else. In our practice, web infrastructure accounts for a maximum of 20% of any projects resources. 80-90% of all energy is pointed towards making the project connect to the real issues that matter to the intended target groups.

We develop three P’s in every project, instead of just one. Apart from a Platform, you need a Programme and a Process as well. Your programme tells your stories and breaks down the generic questions you have for you audience into detailed, specific ones. It entails producing stories, excitement and sometimes even entertainment. Your audience must be grabbed by the project and become curious to see the results of your mutual efforts to co-create. Think cliffhangers, scenarios and a lot of contingency editorial work and orchestration for your –and our- project team.

It may be my background with Endemol, but I sincerely believe that storytelling can be a mighty powerful tool for companies to de-commoditize their products and services and foster customer involvement.

Thirdly, you need a process to be in place to guarantee a clear path to results. Your audience, being new to your organization and co-creation, must be convinced that their contributions will be adequately followed-up and evaluated. I can tell you know that your organization is not ready for a mass dialogue with your intended audience. You need to make it ready. And then you must truly convince your audience that you’re ready for them.

To recap: You need infrastructure, a website, for sure. But don’t think platform. Please do allocate the majority of your precious resources to your (continued) activation programme and a thoroughly prepared funneling process that paves the road to collectively achieved results.

Favela Fabric has jumped all the hoops and hurdles to develop and grow a platform that is by now, after more than three years in business, one of the most sophisticated on the market. We proudly employ it in every project we produce.

My next blog post will deal with the specs a best-of-breed co-creation platform should offer.

So what does it mean? Communitizing expresses the current shift of organizations experiencing the limits of functional stratification, the evaporation of their boundaries and the surge of value creation networks.

De-stratification
We see the rise of a generation less impressed with the hallmarks of corporate life. They have experienced the egalitarian qualities of the Web and do not to acquiesce easily to top-down management. They are more independent-minded and less inclined to suffer corporate attrition. They freely float between private and social entrepreneurialism, between corporate careers and sabbaticals, nurturing their diverse talents. Trying to fit these people into a traditional, circumscribed corporate mould simply does not work.

Social, economic and technological trends have engulfed companies, forcing them to open up and become more adaptive to shifting circumstances. The drive toward more agility and impact raises questions about the enduring benefits of the classic organizational structure. New concepts such as heterarchies, holacracies and creation nets etc. are entering the corporate vernacular. The vertical command chain is giving way to a horizontal value chain, cross-cutting boundaries and linking resources

Evaporation
Organizations wrestle with the growing intrusiveness of external actors. Thanks to the Internet and the proliferation of media outlets, consumers, pressure groups and shareholders can easily keep track of corporate behaviour. Every step is scrutinized, making acceleration impossible without broad consent. Issues can easily escalate, spinning out of corporate control.

Instead of trying to keep these forces at bay, some companies have turned this trend to their advantage by issuing calls for open engagement and institutionalizing outside participation. In other words, they allow themselves to be communitized.

Networks
Web 2.0 has amplified what was already out there: Inconspicuous but thriving networks of people connecting each other on shared interests. As traditional societal structures erode, people increasingly rely on occasion-based networks to bypass daily hurdles. These strings of connections cover both our private and professional spaces, providing for individual leverage and access.

Internet offers a plug-and-play meeting ground for these networks, fostering scale, collaboration and visibility. The diminished costs of access and reach make these networks attractive hubs for outsourced value creation. Communities of practice are booming examples, spanning functional and geographical divisions and recruiting in- and outside experts.

So what’s happening? Companies are being deconstructed, acquiring a fluid, modular shape that allows them to link and absorb external constituencies and resources. People rally around issues and interests, mobilizing their collective expertise and passion to bring about small and big changes. Networks and communities drift in an open organizational ecosystem, coalescing when necessary or dissolving when obsolete. Organisations evolve into open, collaborative venues for value creation, harnessing the collective wisdom within their reach.

This is communitizing. Whether this will turn out to be a force for good, depends on a company’s willingness to abide by one fundamental tenet: mutual benefit and consent. If the balance gets skewed, the long-term consequence is diminished trust and access. In other words, you risk becoming decommunitized..