Tag: Facebook

behaviour changebusinesspublic healthsocial mediasystems science

Genetic engineering for your brand

on April 5, 2018

shutterstock_551281720.jpg

DNA doesn’t predetermine our future as biological beings, but it does powerfully influence it. Some have applied the concept of ‘DNA’ to a company or organization, in the same way, it’s applied to biological organisms. Firms like PWC have been at the forefront of this approach, developing organizational DNA assessments and outlining the principles that shape the DNA of an organization. A good brand is an identity that you communicate with yourself and the world around you. A healthy brand is built on healthy DNA.

Tech entrepreneur and writer Om Malik sees DNA as being comprised of those people that form the organization:

DNA contains the genetic instructions used to build out the cells that make up an organism. I have often argued that companies are very much like living organisms, comprised of the people who work there. What companies make, how they sell and how they invent are merely an outcome of the people who work there. They define the company.

The analogy between the DNA of a company as being that of those who make it up is apt because, as he points out, organizations reflect the values, habits, mindsets, and focus of those who run them. For that reason, understanding your organizations’ DNA structure might be critical to shaping the corporate direction, brand and promoting any type of change, as we see from the case of Facebook.

DNA dilemma: The case of Facebook

Facebook is under fire these days. To anyone paying enough attention to the social media giant the issue with Facebook isn’t that it’s happening now, but why it hasn’t happened sooner? Back when the site was first opened up to allow non-university students to have accounts (signaling what would become the global brand it is today) privacy was a big concern. I still recall listening to a Facebook VP interviewed on a popular tech podcast who basically sloughed off any concerns the interviewer had about privacy saying the usual “we take this seriously” stuff but offering no example of how that was true just as the world was about to jump on the platform. I’ve heard that same kind of interview repeated dozens of times since the mid-2000’s, including just nine months before Mark Zuckerberg’s recent ‘mea culpa’ tour.

Facebook has never been one to show much (real) attention to privacy because its business model is all about ensuring that users’ are as open as possible to collect as much data as possible from them to sell as many services to them, through them, about them, and for others to manipulate. The Cambridge Analytica story simply exposed what’s been happening for years to the world.

Anyone who’s tried to change their privacy settings knows that you need more than a Ph.D. to navigate them* and, even then, you’re unlikely to be successful. Just look at the case of Bobbi Duncan and Katie McCormick who were outed as gay to their families through Facebook even though they had locked down their own individual privacy settings. This is all part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the folks at Facebook refer to as “connecting the social graph.”

The corporate biology of addiction

In a prescient post, Om Malik wrote about Facebook’s addiction to its business model based on sharing, openness, and exploitation of its users’ information mere weeks before the Cambridge Analytica story came out.

Facebook’s DNA is that of a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost). More growth and more engagement means more data — which means the company can make more advertising dollars, which gives it a nosebleed valuation on the stock market, which in turn allows it to remain competitive and stay ahead of its rivals.

Whether he knew it or not, Malik was describing an epigenetic model of addiction. Much emerging research on addiction has pointed to a relationship between genes and addictive behaviour. This is a two-way street where genes influence behaviour and behaviour influences a person’s genes (something called epigenetics). The more Facebook seeks to connect through its model, the more it reinforces the behaviour, the more it feels a ‘need’ to do it and therefore repeats it.

In systems terms, this is called a reinforcing loop and is part of a larger field of systems science called systems dynamics. Systems dynamics have been applied to public health and show how we can get caught in traps and the means we use to get out of them.  By applying an addiction model and system dynamics to the organization, we might better understand how some organizations change and how some don’t.

Innovation therapy

The first step toward any behaviour change for an addiction is to recognize the addiction in the first place. Without acknowledgment of a problem, there can’t be much in the way of self-support. This acknowledgment has to be authentic, which is why there is still reason to question whether Facebook will change.

There are many paths to addiction treatment, but the lessons from treating some of the most pernicious behaviours like cigarette smoking and alcohol suggest that it is likely to succeed when a series of small, continuous, persistent changes are made and done so in a supportive environment. One needs to learn from each step taken (i.e., evaluate progress and outcomes from each step), to integrate that learning, and continue through the inevitable cycling through stages (non-linear change) that sometimes involves moving backward or not knowing where along the change journey you are.

Having regulations or external pressures to change can help, but too much can paralyze action and stymie creativity. And while being motivated to change is important, sometimes it helps to just take action and let the motivation follow.

If this sounds a lot like the process of innovation, you’re right.

Principled for change

Inspiring change in an organization, particularly one where there is a clear addiction to a business model (a way of doing things, seeing things, and acting) requires the kind of therapy that we might see in addiction support programs. Like those programs, there isn’t one way to do it, but there are principles that are common. These include:

  1. Recognize the emotional triggers involved. Most people suffering from addictions can rationalize the reasons to change, but the emotional reasons are a lot harder. Fear, attraction, and the risk of doing things differently can bubble up when you least expect it. You need to understand these triggers, deal with the emotional aspects of them — the baggage we all bring.
  2. Change your mindset. Successful innovation involves a change of practice and a change of mindset. The innovator’s mindset goes from a linear focus on problems, success, and failure to a non-linear focus on opportunities, learning, and developmental design.  This allows you to spot the reinforcing looping behaviour and addiction pathways as well as what other pathways are open to you.
  3. Create better systems, not just different behaviour. Complex systems have path-dependencies — those ruts that shape our actions, often unconsciously and out of habit. Consider ways you organize yourself, your organization’s jobs and roles, the income streams, the system of rewards and recognitions, the feedback and learning you engage with, and composition of your team.  This rethinking and reorganization are what changes DNA, otherwise, it will continue to express itself through your organization in the same way.
  4. Make change visible. Use evaluation as a means to document what you do and what it produces and continue to structure your work to serve the learning from this. Inertia comes from having no direction and nothing to work toward. We are beings geared towards constant motion and making things — it’s what makes us human. Make a change, by design. Make it visible through evaluation and visual thinking – including the ups, downs, sideways. A journey involves knowing where you are — even if that’s lost — and where you’re going (even if that changes).

Change is far more difficult than people often think. Change initiatives that are rooted solely in motivation are unlikely to produce anything sustainable. You need to get to the root, the DNA, of your organization and build the infrastructure around it to enable it to do the work with you, not against you. That, in Facebook terms, is something your brand and its champions will truly ‘Like’.

 

* Seriously. I have a Ph.D. and am reasonably tech literate and have sat down with others with similar educational backgrounds — Ph.D.’s, masters degrees, tech startup founders — and we collectively still couldn’t figure out the privacy settings as a group.

References: For those interested in system dynamics or causal loop modeling, check out this great primer from Nate Osgood at the University of Saskatchewan. His work is top-notch. Daniel Kim has also written some excellent, useful, and practical stuff on applying system dynamics to a variety of issues.

Image credit: Shutterstock used under license.

behaviour changepsychologysocial mediasocial systems

My troubled relationship with social media

on April 1, 2016

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Do you care about donuts? I did, once. I’m not so sure anymore.

I used to love donuts, was passionate about donuts and spent the better part of my early career looking at the power of social media to transform our understanding of and engagement with donuts. Just this week, I had a paper published that I co-authored with colleagues looked at Twitter is being used to engage audiences on donuts, er vaping and it’s potential public health implications. I’m still into donuts, but the question is whether donuts are still serving the purpose they once did. It’s left me asking….

Is it still time to make the donuts?

Twitter turned 10 this past month. When it was founded the idea of communicating short 140 character chunks of content to the world by default (unlike Facebook, where you could restrict you posts to your ‘friends’ only by default), the idea seemed absurd, particularly to me. Why would anyone want to use something that was the equivalent of a Facebook status update without anything else? (Keep in mind that link shorteners were not yet in wide use, the embedded pictures and lists that we have now were either not invented or highly cumbersome).

However, social media is a ‘participation sport’ as I like to say and by engaging with it I soon realized Twitter’s enormous potential. For the first time I could find people who had the same quirky collection of interests as I did (e.g, systems science, design, innovation, Star Wars, coffee, evaluation, soccer, politics, stationary and fine writing instruments – and not necessarily in that order, but in that combination) and find answers to questions I didn’t think to ask from people I didn’t know existed.

It was a wonder and I learned more about the cutting edge of research there than I ever did using traditional databases, conferences or books much to the shock, horror and disbelief of my professional colleagues. I’ve often been considered an early adopter and this was no exception. I did research, consultation and training in this area and expanded my repertoire to Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and pretty much everything I could including some platforms that no longer exist.

I developed relationships with people I’d never (and still have never) met from around the world who’s camaraderie and collegiality I valued as much or more than those people I’d known for years in the flesh. It was heady times.

But like with donuts, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. And also like donuts, where I once loved them and enjoyed them regularly consuming them now starts to not sit so well and that’s maybe for the better.

I’m left questioning whether it’s still time to make the donuts.

The river I stand in

This river I step in is not the river I stand in – Heraclitus

Like with donuts the experience of social media — the context of its use — has changed. As I age, eat better, exercise more wisely and am more mindful of how I feel and what I do, donuts lost appeal. They probably taste the same, but the experience has changed and not because the donuts are different, but my dietary and lifestyle context is.

The same is true for social media.

I have never been a techno advocate or pessimist, rather I’ve been a pragmatist. Social media does things that traditional media does not. It helps individuals and organizations communicate and, depending on how its used, engage an audience interactively in ways that ‘old media’ like billboards, radio, TV and pamphlets do not. But we still have the old media, we just recognize that it’s good at particular things and not others.

But the river, the moving and transforming media landscape, is much faster, bigger and bolder than it was before. Take the birthday girl or boy, Twitter, it’s grown to be a ubiquitous tool for journalists, celebrities and scholars, but saw a small decline in its overall use after a year of flatlined growth.

TwitterMonthlyActive 2016-04-01 13.50.14(Twitter monthly users via Tech Crunch)

As for Facebook, it’s faring OK. While it still has growth, I’ve struggled to find anyone who speaks in glowing terms about their experience with the service, particularly anyone who wishes to change their privacy settings or wishes to stem the flow of ads. Over at Instagram, my feed has seen the rise of ‘brands’ following me. No longer is it the names of real people (even if its a nickname) it’s usually some variant of ‘getmorefollowers’ or brands or something like that. This is all as I see more ads and less life.

Information overload and filter failure

Speaking to an audience in 2008, author and media scholar Clay Shirky spoke to the problem of ‘information overload’ which was a term being applied to the exponential rise in exposure people had to information thanks to the Internet and World Wide Web. At the time, his argument was that it was less about overload of information, than a failure of our filter systems to make sense of what was most useful. 

But that was 2008. That was before the mobile Internet really took off. That was when Twitter was 2 and Facebook just a couple years later. In the third quarter of 2008, Facebook had around 100,000 users and now its got a population of more 1.6B users. The river has got bigger and more full. That might be nice if you’re into white water rafting or building large hydro-electric dams, but it might be less enjoyable if you’re into fly fishing. I can’t imagine A River Runs Through It with a water feature that’s akin to Niagara Falls.

As journalist Douglas Rushkoff has pointed out in many different fora, the Internet is changing the way we think.  Indeed, ‘smarter technologies’ are changing the way we live.

This all brings up a dilemma: what to do? As one who has studied and advised organizations on how to develop and implement social media strategies I would be a hypocrite to suggest we abandon them. Engaging with an audience is better than not doing so. Humanizing communications – which is something social media can do far better than speaking ‘at’ people — is better than not. Being timely and relevant is also better than not. Yet, the degree to which social media can answer these problems is masked by the volume of content out there and the manner in which people interact with content.

Walking through any major urban area, take public transit, or watching people in line for pretty much anything will find a substantial portion of humans looking at their devices. Even couples or friends at restaurants are left to concoct games to get people paying attention to each other, not their devices. We are living in the attentional economy and what is increasingly valuable is focus, not necessarily more information and that requires filtration systems that are not overwhelmed by the volume of content.

Emotional pollution and the antisocial media

I recently wrote about how ‘the stream’ of social media has changed the way that social activism and organizing is done. While social media was once and invaluable tool for organizing and communicating ideas, its become a far more muddled set of resources in recent years. To be sure, movements like Black Lives Matter and others that promote more democratic, active social engagement on issues of justice and human dignity are fuelled and supported by social media. This is a fantastic thing for certain issues, but the question might be left: for how long?

Not so long ago, my Facebook feed was filled with the kind of flotsam, jetsam and substance of everyday life. This was about pictures of children or vacations, an update on someone’s new job or their health, or perhaps a witty observation on human life, but the substance of the content was the poster, the person. Now, it is increasingly about other people and ‘things’ . It’s about injustices to others and the prejudices that come with that, it’s about politics (regardless of how informed people are), it’s about solidarity with some groups (at the willful ignorance of others) and about rallying people to some cause or another.

While none of these are problematic — and actually quite healthy in some measure — they are almost all I see. On Twitter, people are sharing other things, but rarely their own thoughts. On Facebook, it’s about sharing what others have written and the posters emotional reaction to it.

Increasingly, it’s about social validation. Believe my idea. “Like” this post if you’re really my friend. Share if you’re with me and not with them. And so on.

What I am left with, increasingly, is a lost sense of who the ‘me’ and the ‘them’ are in my social media stream. What it feels is that I am increasingly wading into a stream of emotional pollution rather than human interaction. And when my filters are full, this gets harder to do and I’m not sure I want to be less sensitized to the world, but I also don’t want my interactions with others to be solely about reacting to their rage at the world or some referendum on their worldview. It seems that social media is becoming anti-social media.

In complex systems we might see this is as a series of weak, but growing stronger, signals of something else. Whether that’s collective outrage at the injustices of the world, the need for greater support, or the growing evidence that social media use can be correlated with a sense of loneliness, I’m not sure.

But something is going on and I’m now beginning to wonder about all those donuts we’ve created.

Photo credit: Chris Lott Social Media Explained (with Donuts) used under Creative Commons License via Flickr

About the author: Cameron Norman is the Principal of Cense Research + Design and works at assisting organizations and networks in creative learning through design, program evaluation, behavioural science and system thinking.

 

food systemsjournalismpublic healthsocial mediasystems science

Frogs, Pots, Blogs and Social Media

on December 30, 2015

Frog_and_saucepan

Our information landscape has been compared with our diets providing an ample opportunity to compare what we ‘consume’ with how we prepare food and perhaps draw on the analogy of the frog and the boiling point of water. Are we slowly killing our ability to produce independent thought through vehicles like blogs as we draw our gaze to and focus on the social media stream?

Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan was one of the few who opposed the state-imposed media messaging about what was (and has been) happening in Iran. For that, he was jailed. Writing in the Guardian news service, Darakshan, once referred to as Iran’s ‘Blogfather’, discusses how blogging enabled him to be this voice and how he’s become increasingly concerned with how that option is getting slowly silenced not necessarily by governments but by social media.

Darakhshan’s perspective on social media is made all the more interesting because of his role as a prominent blogger before his arrest and the 6-year prison term that disrupted that role, offering something of a time-travel experiment in social media that he illustrates with a story from the Qur’an (known as the tale of the Seven Sleepers).

Upon his return online, Darakhshan noticed that the patchwork quilt of perspectives that were present in the blogosphere was being replaced by ‘The Stream’ that social media provides.

This stream is no longer about a diversity of perspectives, but rather something custom-tailored to meet our preferences, desires, and the needs of corporations seeking to sell advertising, products and services that align with their perception of what we want or require. This stream also allows us to shield ourselves from perspectives that might clash with our own. Groups like ISIS, he suggests, are enabled and emboldened by this kind of information vacuum:

Minority views are radicalised when they can’t be heard or engaged with. That’s how Isis is recruiting and growing. The stream suppresses other types of unconventional ideas too, with its reliance on our habits.

The Stream & our information diet

What’s interesting about The Stream is that it is about bits and bites (or bytes) and not about meals. Yet, if we consider the analogy of information and food a little further we might find ourselves hard-pressed to recall the snacks we had, but (hopefully) can recall many memorable meals. Snacking isn’t bad, but it’s not memorable and too much of it isn’t particularly healthy unless it’s of very high-quality food. With no offence to my ‘friends’ and ‘follows’ on social media, but most of what they produce is highly refined, saccharine-laden comfort food in their posts and retweets, with a few tasty morsels interspersed between rants, cat videos, selfies, and kid pictures. To be fair, my ‘offerings’ aren’t much better when I look across many of my recent Tweets and posts as I am no more than a box of sugar-topped Shreddies to others’ Frosted Flakes. (Note to self when composing New Years Resolutions, even if they are likely to fail, that I need to add less sugar to my stream).

Yet, we are living an age of information abundance and, like food abundance (and the calories that come with it), we are prone to getting obese and lethargic from too much of it. This was the argument that political communicator Clay Johnston makes in his book The Information Diet. Obesity in its various forms makes us slower, less attuned, more disengaged and often far less mindful (and critical) of what we take in whether it’s food or information. And like obesity, the problem is not just one of personal choice and willpower, it’s also about obesogenic systems that include: workplaces, restaurants, communities, markets and policies. This requires systems thinking and ensuring that we are making good personal choices and supporting healthy, critical information systems to support those choices.

The Stream is actually antithetical to that in many regards as Darakhshan points out. The Stream is about passing content through something else, like Facebook, that may or may not choose to pass it on to someone at any given time and place. I’ve noticed this firsthand over the holiday season by finding “Getting ready for Christmas” messages in my Facebook feed on Boxing Day and beyond.

The problem with The Stream is that everything is the same, by design, as Darakhshan notes in an earlier post on his concerns with his new post-imprisonment Web.

Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online. Writing on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become while I’d been gone, and so I knew one thing: If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.

So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.

An information food web

Diversity of perspective and content is critical for healthy decision-making in complex systems. Our great problems, the wicked ones from terrorism to chronic disease to mass migration to climate change, will not be solved in The Stream. Yet, if we push too much toward creating content in social networks that are no longer controlled by users (even if the content is produced by users) and designed to facilitate new thinking, not just same thinking, our collective capacity for addressing complex problems is diminished.

Wicked problems will not be solved by Big Data alone. We cannot expect to simply mine our streams looking for tags and expect to find the diversity of perspective or new idea that will change the game. As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, we need to rewire our feeds consciously to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of our problems and world, not just accept that we’ll choose diversity when our information systems are designed to minimize them.

Much like a food web, consideration of our information ecosystems in systems terms can be useful in helping us understand the role of blogging and other forms of journalism and expression in nurturing not only differences of opinion, but supporting the democratic foundation in which the Web was originally based. Systems thinking about what we consume as well as produce might be a reason to consider blogging as well as adding to your social media stream and why more ‘traditional’ media like newspapers and related news sites have a role.

Otherwise, we may just be the frog in the boiling pot who isn’t aware that it’s about to be cooked until it’s too late.

Postscript

It is interesting that Darakhshan’s piece caught my attention the day after WordPress delivered my ‘Year in Blogging’ review to my inbox. It pointed out that there were just 4 posts on Censemaking in 2015. This is down from more than 90 per year in past calendar years. Clearly, I’ve been drawn into the stream with my content sharing and perhaps it’s time to swim back against the current. This blog was partly a response. Stay tuned for more and thanks for reading.

Image: Frog & Saucepan used under Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Foundation.

science & technologysocial innovationsocial systems

Social innovation, social inclusion

on August 27, 2015

Inclusion means everyone

Social innovation is about bringing new ideas, products and services out into society with others for social benefit and improving the lives of our communities. While not every innovation will benefit everyone, there is a need to examine more deeply the question of who benefits(?) when we consider social innovation and that means taking some hard looks at who we are innovating for. 

On August 15th 2015 the New York Times ran a feature story titled Inside Amazon, which looked at the corporate culture inside one of the largest, most innovate retailers in the world. In the piece written by award-winning journalists Jodi Kantor and David Strietfeld, they interview more than 100 current and former employees of Amazon and find a culture that is fast-paced, exciting, dynamic, creative and sometimes cruel, relentless in its expectations of its employees, overwhelming and harsh. What was interesting is that many interviewees spoke in conflicting terms about working for the company which offered great compensation and a stimulating workplace with lots of opportunities to grow while simultaneously burning them out and challenging their sense of self in the process of delivering feedback that wasn’t always experienced as constructive.

Across the news aisle we find another example of innovation in the news. In the September issue of the Walrus Magazine, editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay returns to the front lines of reporting with a feature story called Uber v. Taxi (or The Truth about Uber on the cover), which takes a comparative examination of changing business models and culture around cars-for-hire comparing tech start-up Uber with the traditional taxi model. The piece involves Kay signing up to be an Uber driver and also completing the City of Toronto taxi school to get a first-hand look at both systems from the perspective of driver and passenger. In an interview on CBC Radio, Kay was asked about the differences between the two and commented on how Uber was working well for the young, the mobile and able-bodied whereas traditional taxis were left with the others, creating a gap in income and opportunity between the two services:

That’s where drivers make a ton of money. Uber is taking that. Taxis are being left with older people, people with special needs, people who require wheelchair access and the visually impaired. Those are the people who require special training and vehicles that taxi fleets can provide but that’s not a particularly profitable part of the trade. Those trips take a lot of time and effort and passenger care. There’s not enough money on the table left for the taxi drivers to make a living.

Innovating for whom?

What these two stories have in common is that it profiles the way innovation spaces can divide as much as unite. On the surface, we see two examples of ways in which new thinking, careful product design and marketing, and a focused attention on user experience can generate value for consumers. However, what they also illustrate is that what is perceived as value is largely contingent on whom it is being asked and that this perception is not a minority position. This is not a case of blacksmiths getting outraged at the dwindling market for horseshoes due to the automobile or manufacturers of picture tubes castigating people for buying digital televisions. This is a case of entire segments of the population being left out.

Both of these examples are based on age to illustrate a point of commonality.

In the case of Uber, its the young, urban professional who does well by its innovative model. It’s the person who has few things to carry, needs little assistance, and likes to travel to the popular places where there are many others like them, which creates an ideal marketplace. For taxis, they are being asked to go to out-of-the-way places (like doctors appointments), deliver people and their parcels (for people who aren’t highly mobile), and are bound by a set of rules that Uber is not to ensure that they assist those who need it in using their service. Uber gets the cream of the market, while taxis are left with what’s left and that is mostly older adults.

But what ‘older’ means is a matter of perspective as we see with Amazon. As the reporters explain, old age isn’t what it once was:

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would “bring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work.” Mr. Shipley is 25.

Every innovation produces ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, but what is striking in both articles is that the ‘winners’ are a very narrow band of the population, young, urban professionals. A look across what we often gets heralded as innovation (pick up any issue of Fast Company magazine to see it) and you’ll see a world dominated by (mostly) young, (mostly) white, (mostly) male, (mostly) middle class, and (mostly) tech-driven innovations that come from places and cultures like Silicon Valley. Facebook, Apple, Google, Uber, AirBnB — they are all based in Silicon Valley.

How we design innovations and the cultures we create in that process can have enormous implications. Are we creating our own silicon valley for social innovation?

“Slamming the Door on Silicon Valley”

Jess Zimmerman, writing in The Guardian, remarked on how Silicon Valley’s culture is one of entitlement and male hegemony, pointing to work of women’s groups aimed at making the work culture in the valley more female-friendly. Even though Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is a product of that environment, it not of that environment. “The Valley” is an environment that fosters both Uber and Amazon (which is should be noted is based in Washington State and not Silicon Valley, but nonetheless is part of the same cultural milieu discussed here). That ethos is one that is characterized by cultures of hard work, long hours, dynamism and youth. As a result, a path dependence is created based on the design specifications proposed at the start and leads to products that are, no surprise, a reflection of their makers.

Facebook’s features of ‘extreme openness’ as evidenced by it’s settings that make it hard to keep things private and rules against using pseudonyms can be traced back to Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard and his personality and personal belief system about what social life is to be like. As a result, Zuckerberg’s design has influenced online interactions of more than one billion users worldwide and continues today.

So what does this have to do with social innovation? Consider the literature — wide in scope, thin in detail as it may be — on social innovation methods and tools from social labs to design thinking. What we might find is an incomplete list of items that looks something like this:

  1. Be bold, bring wild ideas to the table and lots of them to the table; no idea is a bad idea
  2. Co-create with others
  3. We live in a VUCA (Volitile, unpredictable, complex, ambiguous) world and need to work accordingly
  4. Flat organizational structures work best for innovation
  5. Innovation doesn’t happen during 9-5, it happens anytime
  6. Information technology will leverage creative innovation potential everywhere, anywhere: it always wins
  7. You have to ‘move fast and break stuff‘, including the rules

The list can go on.

While I have  belief in what is contained in this list, it’s a restrained belief. Each of these points (and there are many others) can be upended to illustrate how social innovation can exclude people, ideas, cultures and possibilities that are as harmful as helpful. As I’ve argued before, social innovation has embedded in it an ethic of social justice if it’s to truly be a true social innovation. This requires attention to the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of innovation in ways that go beyond a call to innovate and change, it means paying attention to the cultures we impose through the innovation process.

Do we place too much emphasis on disruption vs harmony?

Where is the role for contemplation in the speed to create new things?

Is there a place for an introvert in the innovation table?

While innovative ideas might not respect the 9-5 clock, many paycheques, office spaces, commuter schedules, daycares and employee benefits do, what does that mean for those who rely on this?

Are these values those of innovation or those of a particular type of innovation from a particular context?

The Trickle of Innovation Streams Through the Valley

If we are to adopt social innovation on a wide scale we need to create a culture of innovation that is more than just a new version of a trickle-down model. Indeed, as Geoff Mulgan from Nesta writes, innovation has the potential to be another ‘trickle down theory’ that rewards the most advantaged first and then eventually to others in some modest form, creating inequities.

Yes, we now know much more about how to cultivate buzzing creative industries, universities, knowledge intensive industries and so on. But we have almost nothing to say to around half of our population who face the prospect of bad jobs or no jobs, and look on with dismay and envy at the windfall gains accruing to the elite insiders.

Silicon Valley is currently the place of privilege in the innovation world. If you have the privilege of not needing add-ons to your taxi ride, require assistance or have to drive to a neighbourhood that’s off the beaten path or have to pay by cash, Uber is great. If you can work flex hours and long hours, are gregarious and extroverted, and aren’t temporally limited by the needs of a spouse or partner, children, a loved one who requires care, or pets (that can’t be brought to work for obvious reasons — and I’m thinking of you cat owners) then a place like Amazon is maybe for you.

When we use these spec’s as our models to design innovation more widely, including social innovation, we create systems that exclude as much as include and that might get us innovations, but not necessarily real social ones.

behaviour changecomplexitypublic healthsocial systemssystems thinking

The New Zombie

on October 24, 2013
Zombie stare

They are among us and hungry for brains

Zombies are attacking us; not for brains, but for attention. The consequences of this is that they are everywhere and sucking the intelligence out of human systems. 

Forget orange, zombie is the new black.

Zombies are hot. TV shows, books and films about zombies are more popular than ever, and this time of year the public’s attention to the undead is at its nadir. The CDC in the United States even got into the act by using zombies as a health promotion vehicle to support emergency preparedness. From zombie walks to art shows, the staggering brain-eating, brain-less are everywhere.

Yet, there is a new breed being formed that doesn’t eat brains and has them, but may not be using them well and they are all around us everywhere.

They walk among us

Look around and what do you see? People online, on the phone, texting and walking and driving, being everywhere except where they are. Examples of people walking into fountains or falling into a sinkhole while on the phone are often seen as comi-tragic, yet they belie a remarkably powerful trend towards disengagement from the world around them. Charlene deGuzman and Miles Crawford‘s beautiful and disheartening short film I Forgot My Phone plays this for further comic and sad effect as they portray a day in the life of someone paying attention to those not paying attention to anything away from their screen. The film highlights the modern paradox of being more connected than ever, yet overwhelmingly alone.

Emerging research is showing remarkable spikes in risks associated with mobile phone use and injury and mortality. We might laugh at people falling into holes or bumping into things, but only when it hurts the ego and not the body. This is serious stuff. Keep in mind that we don’t see non-reported injuries (e.g., someone bruising their head) and the many near misses between person and object — including cars, which have their own epidemic of problems with texting and attention.

Indeed, zombies embody paradox: a brainless being that is undead seeks brains to stay unalive. Whether they are alive or dead depends on where you stand and that is what makes them a complex character despite their surface-level simplicity.

Brains…need…more…(use of science) brains….

Zombie Science

Zombie Science?

While it might be easy to point to those on phones, zombie behaviour occurs elsewhere in places where the effects are far less comic and just as dangerous. The latest issue of The Economist features a cover story on the problems science is having with it credibility and quality control. Some of this is due to what I would call zombie-like behaviour: mindless attention in a manner that restricts awareness and appreciation of one’s immediate context and the larger system to which that behaviour occurs.

The recent expose by science journalist John Bohannon published in the journal Science exposes zombie-like thinking in how open-access science journals accept and reject papers. Bohannon’s inquiry was prompted by questions about the way fees were charged for open access journals (which is how they can remain open to the public) and the peer review require to advance publication. Presumably, an article has to pass review from peer professional scientists before it is accepted and then the fee is paid. No acceptance, no fee (except for perhaps a small application processing charge).

As profiled in an interview with the CBC radio show The Current…

Bohannon wanted to find out whether fee-charging open access journals were actually keeping their promise to do peer review — a process in which scientists with some knowledge of a paper’s topic volunteer to check it for scientific flaws…

…In the end, what he concluded was that “a huge proportion” of the journals were not ensuring their papers were peer reviewed.

Even in cases where peer review happened, it didn’t always function correctly. For example, the Ottawa-based International Journal of Herbs and Medicinal Plants clearly sent the paper out to be reviewed by real scientists, who pointed out some flaws, Bohannon recalled. Even so, when Bohannon submitted a revised version of the paper without correcting any of the flaws, it was accepted.

Bohannon’s approach and findings are not without some problems of their own, but they don’t much change the conclusion that there are deep problems within the scientific enterprise.

Much of what Bohannon found can be attributed to greed, but a great deal of it is due to bad scientific practice. As a consultant who is also a publishing researcher and ‘recovering’ academic I know the enormous amount of energy that goes into publishing an academic article in a scholarly journal. As one who is sent between 4 to 5 manuscripts to review from legitimate journals per month I know the demands that are placed on reviews. We also publish far too much for the system to handle. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein and colleagues look closely at the ‘avalanche’ of publishing and shed light on many reasons why the problems that the Economist and Science occur (Note: I’d strongly encourage you to read through the comments as it is as instructive as the article itself).

They are everywhere

To add to the examples of zombie culture I need only look to my own daily life outside of science and  mobile phones. Just the other day I witnessed the following example at a community meeting that was organized in part to discuss the expenditure of funds to make a better living area for people in a building:

Presenter: “…and I am pleased to conclude that the new furniture for the outdoor spaces is going to be made by a company that created the same products at [place] out of recycled materials. We will expect to have the new furniture here in 6 to 8 weeks. Any questions?”

First question: “I love the work you’ve done. Can you tell me when the furniture will be here?”

Sadly, I have many other stories that show that many people are not paying attention. They are sitting through workshops and not picking up basic concepts (even after having asked for it and having been given it multiple times over), asking for materials that were already shared on multiple occasions, suggesting ideas that were already discussed and agreed upon over because that person didn’t engage in the discussion and so on. This happens not because people are stupid, but because they are disengaged.

A simple search through statistics compilations finds enormous material on what kind of inputs we expose ourselves to and its impact on attention. There is more coming at us in quantity and context and that is undoubtedly influencing quality of processing and engagement. I can speak of this personally and through observation. The amount of times I find people not hearing what is said, processing it effectively, or even remembering something said is staggering.

It’s not surprising. We are alerted everywhere: a text message, a phone call, a Facebook message, an email, an app alert, someone coming by the office, external noise outside, and visual noise everywhere. The explicit and ambient signals we are exposed to in a day is staggering. Clay Shirky suggests it’s not that we have too much information, it’s that our filters are failing. I think it’s now both and one reinforces the other.

Coming back…a look at systems

While individuals are distracted, they are products of distracted systems. To look at one part of the science zombie situation, professors are now asked to publish more than ever, get grants from a dwindling pool, teach more students than ever and in more crowded conditions and with greater social needs, and to find ways to make their research more accessible to different audiences while engaging more with the communities of interest affected by that research. All of this takes time. Add to that the probability that the professor her/himself has to raise their own salary and that the only way to do this is to be very successful at the above-mentioned tasks and you get someone who is stressed and overtaxed.

Mindfulness-based approaches do not change any of that, but they can help strengthen the filter. By being more individually mindful, but more importantly create mindful organizations. Building resilient tribes of social innovators and the leadership communities to steward them is another. Granting ourselves the time to reflect, sensemake and listen to the systems we work in is also key. By listening better, we are better able to design systems that are innovative, responsive and humane by building them to human scale.

All well and good you might say, but how? That’s what’s to come in some future posts as we look at designing better systems and making them more attractive so people stay engaged.

Stay tuned….and watch out for zombies.

Photo credit: Zombie Walk 2012 SP by Gianluca Ramalho Misiti used under Creative Commons License

complexityevaluationsocial mediasocial systemssystems science

One leg, two leg, three leg, more?

on September 5, 2013
Exploding into What?

Exploding into What?

In Orwell’s classic Animal Farm the characters often oscillate between their evaluative assessments on the merits of two or four legs. The value was socially constructed, however in practice there are real tangible benefits socially and otherwise to having two legs, which serves as an apt metaphor for understanding the role of scaling in social innovation.

I was fortunate to be born with two very functional legs. Since I could first walk and run I’ve done so continually with enthusiasm onward of decades. However, there have been times through injury, experimentation or fun that I’ve tried navigating my life with one leg.

On the matter of movement I can say that two legs are not twice as good as one, they are an order of magnitude better. Likewise, I’ve done three-legged races and can definitely say that the benefits of two legs over one do not scale up to three. It’s a toss up whether I’d rather have one leg over three (irrespective of the horrible pant problems three legs would pose to me). I want two and I suspect you do too.

Two legs, no more  or less are optimal. If you’re a dog, that can be doubled. If you’re a millipede, you might need to add a few hundred legs to be optimal. So legs scale, but only when you know what the context is.

Two legs good, Four legs better

We don’t know what will scale with all things (and I would argue most things). I have been and remain critical of the dominant push to scaling social innovation out of a misguided, often patriarchal perspective that holds bigger is better. Bigger is bigger and occasionally that means better; they are not equivalent terms.

To get a sense of what scale means: imagine a shower. If you’re the man below, a shower is a pretty good way to get clean.

Man Under Shower

Man Under Shower

Now imagine you’re an ant like the one below. You still get dirty, but how good is the shower to you? The ant is going to experience those drops of water that are cleaning up the man’s skin much differently in ways that might literally mean life or death.

Ant Closeup

No shower for me, thanks! I’ll just pat myself clean

Now what might happen if you were a woman? Suddenly, the scale works again. Different being, similar outcome.

Is the shower better for the man, the ant or the woman? Did it scale up and down well? The answers have as much to do with what the point of the shower was in the first place and the perspective we take at the outset.

Poolside shower

This is a scalefully wonderful way to get the salt off

 

Facebook as an example of (failing) scale

Facebook provides an example of how scaling is not always human scaled. A look at Facebook’s corporate page will find this:

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

Embedded within this mission is an assumption of scaling that isn’t congruent with human relationships. The accumulation of friends on Facebook — something it strives to support — ceases to reflect a reality where our relations come and go, become more or less intense, and often do so on a time frame that can be momentary or develop over a lifetime. All of these relationship scenarios occur simultaneously. On Facebook, they all happen at the same time in the same way, treating relationships as a matter of linear accumulation than a non-linear, dynamic set of temporal engagements.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has looked at relationship scaling and developed his famous number of 150 (+/- 50 or so — it’s not precise) for the mean amount of intimate or stable relations that a person can have.

Of course, 150 dynamic relations — of which many will not be interested in relating online — is not profitable so Facebook has every investment in having you expand your network in a linear or even exponential manner in defiance of evidence to suggest its futile.

But as a great mis-spoken friend of mine once said (under the influence of a couple beer):

Futile is resistance

Little did he know how prescient he would be (and how many Star Trek fans he might annoy in that statement).

Resistance and futility

One of the ways to gauge scalability is by the level of resistance to the core function of the activity. To return to the matter of legs, one leg creates resistance throughout the body because of the shock of a single, hopping prop used to propel a body not suited to a single leg. When you see two legs move, there is fluidity within the system that enables a movement that is resisted if you add or subtract a leg. In other words: the body was designed for two legs.

In social systems, the designs we work with are co-created and inherited. In social innovation we often don’t know what the scale of something is often because we don’t know what the natural scale of our social creations are, or that we have no evaluative data to make developmental design decisions. Paying attention to scale and resistance is one way to get a sense of where natural human resistance to change ends  and real system-level resistance to scaling begins.  I argue that a developmental evaluation and developmental design approach with the right quantitative and qualitative tools can help immensely if combined with mindful attention to these details.

Research — like that of Robin Dunbar and others looking at social systems — can be a guide. We have evidence of programs and ideas scaling well and some not taking at all. A more anthropological, mindful and evaluative approach to understanding what we’ve done and what we’re doing can help when taken together with strategy and knowing our intent. If what we want is better social worlds, maybe two legs are not half of four, but many times better after all.

Photo credits: ThinkStock used under license and the Wikimedia Commons – used under Creative Commons License and edited using Snapseed

social media

Social Media and the Changing Role of Journalists Covering It

on October 13, 2012

Om Malik from Giga OM writes today about the changing role of media and how the new media is transforming the way the reporting is done in the old media around story selection and amplification. Direct-to-the-world communication is replacing the direct-to-the-media-and-then-to-the-world model of journalism we had. What might this mean for knowledge translation in areas beyond tech to areas like policy, politics, science and health?

Gigaom

For the past few days, I have been thinking about the evolution of what media is and its expanded role in the information ecosystem. What got me thinking was Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to blog his side of the story about his reduced role at Twitter. A few months ago, when Facebook was buying Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg also chose to go direct by putting up a note on his Facebook page. And Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is also not shy when it comes to sharing his views via his Facebook page.

Seconds after Dorsey and Zuckerberg put up their news, it was picked up by casual readers who shared it and tweeted it. Technology media (including blogs) also picked up the news and published it as classic news posts. Some of us added analysis, but in the end both casual observers and publications were doing the…

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