At the Dachis/Headshift Social Business Summit #sbs2010 in London this week some interesting insights around social business emerged while we discussed the practical challenges of transitioning from hierarchies to networks.
I was privileged to be asked to act as a synthesizer for the Summit, (Lee Bryant and I opted for a stylish 1970’s moog as it’s my era). This post’s an extension, having had the chance to reflect on what happened.
A key take-out for me is that understanding the impact social business can have on organizational design has a lot to do with managing the middle, by being able to make clear the connections between corporate strategy, positioning, culture and relationships.
Many organizations resist becoming lean and agile through the use of tools and networks because it involves new and unfamiliar behaviours, just like people; so the connections between corporate strategy, positioning, culture and relationships have to make sense and be motivating.
One of the great things about #sbs2010 itself is it’s been a dynamic happening, the hashtag representing a multidimensional experience moving fluidly from Austin to London to Sydney.
In this sense, the Social Business Summit’s been a way of thinking about identities and what networked brands may be in the future, the collection points of real time experience that allow iterative, and formative exchanges to happen collaboratively. Hashtags represent a group mind, events that can capture attention, a collection of cumulative insights to create shared value, with very little organizational fat.
As this series of Social Business Summit’s been happening, each event has been varied in content and style. The London Social Business Summit, refreshingly, veered away from show and tell, and Jeff Dachis opened his keynote with the timely reminder or two – that social business is more than the new means of delivering a one-way marketing message, and digital shortens the distance between everything.
With only two keynotes and perhaps referencing Scott Gould’s recent well-made point that social media events are often social in name only, the Summit was the alternative that walked the walk, an example of how action learning can reap dividends as an exercise.
We discussed initiatives across innovation, marketing and customer service, practical perspectives, and the internal, external dimensions and the ecosystems of social business. J.P. Rangaswami illuminated the room during his keynote by talking about the value of social business as being what you might call search with brains. In true social business style, then, that’s what the focus was.
The questions were how to move beyond the adoption of social tools, to consider business impact, the implications for organizational design and affect change. And the key question it seems to me, is one of balance, because social business design has to harness the exponential value of node multiplication, and yet also be able to steer a course true to a central strategic intent to be successful.
Hierarchical structures are characterized by middle management, a group that has neither the benefit of the vision and vantage point that leadership has at the head of an organization, nor the experience of connecting with customers or the competition as an interface at its fingertips.
And grasping that nature of middle management, addressing through doing so the dynamics between strategy, culture and relationships is, it seems to me, the key to answering some of the questions.
Developing operationally coherent connections at scale is a challenge that social business design must seek to solve. This is just as applicable for supporter networks and it’s a universal issue.
Beyond a certain point, data management becomes a morass of numerics without emotional meaning and social business becomes statistics. This is the challenge of managing the middle.
The failure of current management design, the reason why there’s been reduced levels of real return on corporate value over the last ten years, is a growing credibility gap between what’s being promoted as benefits by organizations and what’s the reality in terms of the needs of users. That’s a gap worth minding in the middle.
The value of social business is that it can address this credibility gap generatively through user-centric business models and the ability to understand existing corporate ecosystems in detail, bridging the gap between how things are now and how they can be is, as I see it, a vital part of helping organizations to transition, encouraging them to adopt the network ethos characterized by social business.
There is a real dilemma around the middle. Middle management is the gateway between the leadership and operational interface and, in certain instances, it can be not dissimilar from the layer of visceral fat that exists around the middle of the human body; a layer designed to protect and look after central organs, but that can cause and accelerate disease because of the way it impairs ease of movement, vital information and the flow of resources.
By definition there must be a middle, and an average. The sheer volume and numbers in society that sent us into the industrial age created the middle classes and a globally networked world does more of the same. Yet, when J.P. Rangaswami reminded the Summit of the real value of social business are the nodes in a network that can increase value exponentially, he spoke of something that speaks to this directly.
The ethos of middle management is in complete contrast to the kind of thinking we’re now talking about, of additional nodes that increase the value of a network as rapid and scalable value.
We’re beginning to appreciate it’s the value of the linchpin, the personal profile, the key nodes that create value, yet there are some serious people and scale reversals to negotiate, as J.P. Rangaswami suggested, as part of a shift to social business. How do we solve those?
The Summit’s ecosystem group talked about how co-creation can be in effect snuffed by marketing one-way messages and by making it fake. We also talked about how ecosystems can often work to protect the way things are as their means of survival. How do we deal with that?
Social business design can address this shortfall by truly understanding the nature of the clients business that its serving, by helping clients to be better connected across strategy, culture and relationships, by dealing with the credibility gap between what’s promoted as benefits and the reality of user needs, and by helping to manage the gap between them that existing management models often create in the middle.
The web makes value granular, and webscience is helping us to understand digital culture isn’t about cookie-cutting, but about cultures as clusters of unique DNA.
Successful social business design involves deftly managing the middle in several ways, by better connecting needs with resources, by identifying how value can be created for the collective whole, and by how organizational, social and personal value can be generated across nodal networks.
That’s the note of my moog, thanks to Jeff, Lee, Livio at Dachis/Headshift, Arjen and Judith at Somesso, and everyone who made it the event it was.
