E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

It’s Not Filter Failure, But Thought For Food

Ever since Clay Shirky first used the quote “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure” at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, back in 2008, there has been an ongoing, everlasting, but rather passionate discussion from both sides of the story pondering whether it’s really all about facing and dealing with information overload or whether it’s just purely filter failure. I am sure that this is one of those topics we are never going to get tired of talking about, conversing, share our first hand experiences, try to convince others about our own point of view, etc. etc. You name it.  But what if we throw food out there into the mix? Yes, you are reading it right. What if the key towards dealing with information overload is not just filter failure but a matter of food. Actually, thought for food.

For a good number of years I have shared across my admiration, praise and just pure delight for having the continued unique opportunity to pick up on the brains, and muse further on, from a great group of rather talented and insightful thought leaders in the Social Computing space, who, if anything, have always managed to get everyone thinking differently about certain ideas, trends of thought, and whatever else, around that social transformation of the business world; not to mention as well the impact of our societies going digital, and how we deal, in general, with information and knowledge to make some sense into it, without asking anything in return. One of those folks I have been truly admiring for a long while is JP Rangaswami, a.k.a. @jobsworth. Why? 

Well, not only because of the superb writing that he keeps putting together over at his blog “Confused of Calcutta – A Blog About Information” or his various tweets, amongst several other online places he gets to share his thoughts out loud on, but mainly because, just recently, he may have given us a new way of looking into information overload and how we can deal with it making plenty of good sense, in addition to Clay’s mantra about filter failure. And it’s got to do that with one of my favourite topics du jour as well. Food!

Who would have thought about that, right? Information / knowledge and food walking hand in hand to explain one of those current issues we keep facing in today’s more interconnected, intelligent and information abundant world than ever before. Yet, making perfect sense. Take a look and read further JP’s recently blog entry on this topic under the suggestively provocative title “Thought for food“, where he referenced his recent appearance at TED Salon in Austin as he delivered a truly inspirational speech of a bit over 8 minutes long, that exposed one of those brilliant analogies that, when going through it, as you watch him further dive into it, you realise it just makes perfect sense! Why didn’t we all see it before? 

Take a look into the TED Talk video clip itself that I have embedded below. Like I said, it lasts for a little bit over 8 minutes, but it really is worth while watching in its entirety. And you will see what I mean after you finish it off. So here it goes: 

Basically, on that short dissertation JP comes to confirm what may well be the potential solution to how we deal with information in the knowledge economy. Yes, it may well have to do quite a bit with collaborative filtering; term I have grown to become rather fond of while describing how the networks you keep treasuring and cultivating are those very same ones that will be filtering the best, topnotch content available out there for you!, but it may well not be good enough. JP explained it beautifully with this quote on what really matters at the end of the day on how we handle such information abundance: 

“Information, if viewed from the point of view of food, is never a production issue. … It’s a consumption issue, and we have to start thinking about how we create diets [and] exercise“

And this is where it hit me. And big time! This is where I realised about that wonderfully inspiring connection between information & knowledge AND food. You see? There used to be a time when I didn’t care much about the food I consumed, nor the portions, nor the quality of the ingredients, or the variety, etc. etc. Whatever it was good to fill my belly up with and move on back to what I was doing was just good enough for me. Exercise and good working out sessions were out of the question, too!, for yours truly. I just didn’t have the time and I wasn’t that interested at all. Till around July last year when I reached what I would consider my own tipping point, that is, 101.5 kgs. / 223 lbs and on the brink of reaching 40 years of age. No, not to worry, no body warnings or body alarms blew off, but, right there, right then, I realised I needed to start doing something about it, because I was entering that dangerous situation where I was no longer feeling healthy, based on my food intakes and the non-existent exercise habits. 

As you well may remember, I eventually blogged about that transformation I started right there, how by doing three simple things I have managed to change that dangerous path towards an unhealthy lifestyle with everything that entails. Those three simple things were: 

1. Watch, much more, what I do eat, looking for variety and healthier foods (fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes, etc. etc.) in much smaller portions aiming for no longer feeling full meal after meal. 
2. Start doing daily exercise and some workouts, in order to carry on burning all of that bad stuff I have accumulated over the course of the years. I started small, walking, then fast walking, then moving on into slow running, and, finally reaching a certain level of running where my body feels comfortable and I, too, fell comfortable without putting too much strain, but still getting the job done; then every so often a bit more of rowing, some yoga and off we go. The journey began… and it never stopped ever since.
3. And, finally, ensure that every night I would get a good night sleep, of, at least, 7.5 hours, if not more, since that seems to be the best quality sleeping time I can get, as Sleepyti.me bedtime calculator taught me over the course of time.

And that was it! That was my discovery journey into figuring out that I needed to start working my way on not only how I would consume food, but also how I would burn it all, or a large chunk of it, and how I would need to get better sleep which helps oneself, as you all know, fully charge your own batteries ready for the next day. Right now, as I write these few words, I’m at the stage that I would call on maintenance mode, having lost 19 kgs / 41 lbs; and if I were to describe how I feel at the moment, both physically and mentally I would probably be able to do so with a single word. This one: liberating!

Indeed, feeling and being healthier altogether surely has got its traits and whatever other perks, and it’s just the beginning on to, hopefully, a better good quality life. To me, it’s just that experience in the last year that I have found strikingly close to what JP mentioned throughout his talk about how we should be looking into information, not from the perspective of what we produce, or see others produce, but more from the point of view of how we consume it. That’s what matters. 

That’s where we need to realise that in such a world of over abundance of free information flowing back and forth, and just like we ourselves continue to be more proactive on looking after our own health promoting and living further along with a good number of healthier habits, we should probably be equally religious as well on figuring out how we are going to best consume the information that’s available out there that would matter the most for us and our needs. And I suspect that the key magic trait that would probably make it all work for us is, as JP brilliantly mentioned, how we are going to put in place not only those various different (information) diets, but, much more importantly, how we are going to exercise the mind into figuring out what works and what won’t work as part of that healthy and nurturing mental activity.

In that matter I suspect critical thinking is going to play a key role, just as much as endorphins play it when we engage on some kind of physical activity. The key challenge though is whether we are going to be able to put a stop to the always tempting, increasingly everlasting, and irresistible urge of information gluttony. Because I can imagine that with the huge amount of information and knowledge available out there our brains, most likely, will continue to be enticed by that massive flow of abundance that’s probably going to be far too tough to tame, if at all. Collaborative filtering, as we all know, may well help out, but we may as well be much more effective if we start training our brain(s) about when to strike for the balance of consuming the right info, figure out the right portion, and exercise it well enough so that we can make the best out of it, without having that pernicious feeling of empty saturation. We probably don’t need it any longer. We will be, most certainly, much better off without it, don’t you think?

Social Business – Where Bosses and Managers Become Servant Leaders

In the past we have talked a couple of times about the undeniable impact that social networking (for business) is having in traditional management and thought leadership by helping reshape and redefine some of their various long time existing conceptions . There have been, indeed, a few great articles out there that not only have they assessed the importance and relevance of social technologies to help define the next generation of management, leadership and employee engagement, but they have also ventured to state, and rather accurately, how traditional management would need to keep moving on with its own social transformation, if it would want to survive over the course of time. Long gone are the days of command and control. Long gone are the days of micro-management, of managing by fear, power, bullying or mediocrity, or, just simply, by believing that the mantra “I am the boss; do what I say … or else!” would still work in today’s current business environment.

But if that’s the case I am sure at this point in time you folks would be probably wondering what’s the new role of leadership then in the world of Social Business? Can we define it nowadays in some sort of form or shape? Or will we have to create a new one altogether? Well, we may not. Once again, we may not need to go ahead and reinvent the wheel, since we may have had it all along over the last few hundred years and we never noticed… Welcome to the Era of Servant Leadership! 

Indeed, Servant Leadership is 

“[…] a management philosophy which implies a comprehensive view of the quality of people, work and community spirit. It requires a spiritual understanding of identity, mission, vision and environment. A servant leader is someone who is servant first, who has responsibility to be in the world, and so he contributes to the well-being of people and community. A servant leader looks to the needs of the people and asks himself how he can help them to solve problems and promote personal development. He places his main focus on people, because only content and motivated people are able to reach their targets and to fulfill the set expectations” (Quoted from Wikipedia’s reference article on the topic)

and while catching up last week with my good friend, the always insightful and equally thought provoking, Stowe Boyd I just couldn’t help thinking about how we may not need to redefine much what was already hinted hundreds of years ago about servant leaders, but perhaps just fine tune a little bit more the work carried out eventually by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 on this very same topic, as a way to help define what will be demanded of, a few decades later, Leaders 2.0 in the knowledge economy of the 21st century where social technologies have finally introduced wirearchy in the corporate world for it to stay, moving right along, with traditional hierarchy. 

And in that context I just couldn’t help thinking about this superb article at Inc.com under the suggestive heading “8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses” by Geoffrey James that has been making the rounds on various social networks out there and which clearly portraits the kind of shift that traditional management needs to make in order to help prepare the leaders of tomorrow, if not today altogether already. No, I am not going to spoil the fun and try to reproduce Geoffrey’s article with plenty of quotes here and there. On the contrary, I would like to encourage you all to have a look into that truly inspirational dissertation and be prepared to be wowed big time! As a teaser, here you have got the 8 Core Beliefs Geoffrey talks about, just to get you going: 

1. “Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield
2. A company is a community, not a machine
3. Management is service, not control
4. My employees are my peers, not my children
5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear
6. Change equals growth, not pain
7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation
8. Work should be fun, not mere toil”

Pretty powerful stuff, don’t you think? I am sure you would all agree with that assertion, but there is more, there is always more eventually!, because, just as I was putting together this article I bumped into a rather evoking image on Google Plus that can certainly help folks differentiate between traditional management, the boss, and this new kind of management, the leader: 

And as I kept reflecting on that transition from bosses to leaders as the one that is going to shape up management as we know it within the business world, and all of that thanks to social networking, amongst several other timely happenings, I just couldn’t help remembering, quite fondly, the absolutely stunning blog post that Kathy Sierra (Gosh, how much do I miss her mind-boggling blog posts!) shared over 6 years ago!! under the title “Manager 2.0” with this brilliant image that would surely resonate quite a bit with that of servant leadership:

I would happily recommend you all to go through Kathy’s article to realise how close Social Business has been all along, even right from the start!, on helping shape up the way we understand and embrace both management and leadership 2.0 nowadays, 6 years later, into something that perhaps we have been having all along, but that we just didn’t know it, or maybe that we have neglected and ignored for far too long. The reality is that if someone would be asking me to define the new role of leadership in today’s interconnected, instrumented, intelligent, engaged, smarter, trustworthy and transparent social business world the one single key concept that would keep coming up, in a recurring way, time and time again, would be what’s been there all along with us throughout history: Servant Leadership. 

And here is probably the toughest question of them all that will keep coming up repeatedly, now more than ever, and that we all need to try and find an answer for: in todays social business world are your / our current leaders servant leaders? And if they aren’t, what can we do to help prepare them?

Don’t Underestimate the Value of Your Community Managers

If earlier on this week we were talking about the increasing concerns on how high level executives, CIOs mainly, keep taking for granted social collaboration and how perhaps they need to shift gears and stop considering it’s a given, here’s today’s blog post where I will reflect on a recent article put together by the always insightful Rachel Happe at The Community Roundtable under the troubling heading “The Community Strategist Squeeze“, where she comes to highlight the current state of what’s been asked of community managers, facilitators, leaders, builders, stewards, or whatever other term you would want to use: deliver plenty more with a lot less. And the more you do of that, the much better off for the business. Never mind the community facilitators. They never have. 

As you well know, Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable, along with Jim Storer, a rather smart, helpful and very resourceful and talented peer to peer network of community builders that has been around for a couple of years already and that time and time again they keep producing some of the most amazing reports, and other brilliant deliverables, that one can find out there on the Social Web around the art of managing online communities, whether internal or external. Their latest example is The 2012 State of Community Management, a superb white paper / report that I strongly would encourage everyone to read and go through to see what’s happening in this space of facilitating effectively online communities and where we are at that daunting, yet, exciting and rather rewarding task.

I will be putting together another separate blog entry at a later time on that very same report, but going back into the actual piece that Rachel wrote I thought it was incredibly revealing how little things have changed in the last 10 to 15 years, perhaps even more, with regards to online communities. Yes, I know, we do have nowadays better community tooling all around with all of these emergent social technologies, but it looks like some of the most fundamental, deep routed problems are still alive and kicking: businesses keep ignoring the value of online communities, and continue to treat them as just another project resource. When we all know that’s not the case, quite the opposite. They are rather dynamic, living organisms that keep corporations alive providing them with an identity, a corporate culture difficult to surpass and, above all, a strong sense of belonging and ownership by the community members that cannot be found, nor seen, anywhere else within an organization to the point of going the extra mile in getting work done. Just because they all share that common passion: wanting to help and learn from others on that particular subject matter that gathers them around.

Yet, online communities keep being treated as mere resources you can exploit to your own abilities, needs and wants, without realising that they, too, have got their own that you, as a business, would need to feed and nurture if you would want to keep your communities alive in the medium, long term. Communities are different beasts. They are not (project) teams, they are not networks, nor organisations, yet we keep treating them as if they were. See? Nothing much has changed since the late 90s and beginning of the 2000s. 

Back in the day, around 2000, when I was still doing traditional Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Learning, plenty of businesses invested, initially, rather heavily, on the concept of Communities of Practice, the traditional formalised, structured communities and for a good while they were rather successful. However, as time moved on and as the businesses realised how they could start squeezing them one by one to no end, demanding more and more by the minute from their community leaders, having and providing less, as well as the members, with very little in return, the whole model broke down when people stopped relying on them to a great extent. 

No, they didn’t disappear, they never disappeared; in fact, they have always been there, but what at some point were the core critical engine of interactions amongst knowledge workers soon turned out to be that essential resource that everyone could poach to no end till they would eventually drain them to die a painful death by refusing to nurture and feed back some of the most essential, key roles in those same communities; mainly, community leaders / builders / facilitators, core team, knowledge brokers, community managers, etc. etc. 

You would have expected that with the emergence of better community tooling with social networking tools that things would have improved quite a bit and the reality is that they have made things a whole lot better. Key concepts like social capital skills, open knowledge sharing, collaboration, engagement, commitment, passion, trust, etc. etc. are stronger than ever before, but, unfortunately, so is the community leaders squeeze that Rachel talks about on that article, highlighting, once again, how businesses seem to have put very very few resources on helping facilitate effectively online communities hoping that everything will work out and that things would stick around. Yet another time.

The thing is that they won’t. If not, judge for yourselves, to quote Rachel, on the list of pressures that community leaders are facing at the moment: 

• “To assess, reconcile and coordinate the ‘social’ approach across a wide range of enterprise functions
• To justify not just their progress but the ROI when many are still in a highly fluid and experimental state
• To train the entire organization on social media, internal social software, social business, social processes and workflows and community management
• To educate legal, HR and compliance groups about the dynamics and specifics of online social environments
• To understand and report back what is going on – from a conversational perspective – in the online environment
• To share their expertise both internally and externally with a wide variety of groups
• To hire a set of individuals that are hard to find and which their HR departments don’t really understand and then mentor and educate those groups quickly
• To coach executives individually
• To keep up with the ever changing technologies and analytics options
• To integrate internal social environments with closed communities with open communities and with public social channels and none-hosted communities in their markets
• To set up enterprise-wide governance processes and regularly coordinate efforts and approaches globally
• To help the entire organization see the opportunities that social approaches might bring to specific workflows and functions”

And I am certain that’s just a pretty small list of those current pressures. I bet you folks out there would be able to share plenty more in the comments below about the ones you yourselves are currently facing at the moment (Feel free to share them across, if you feel they would contribute into raising some further awareness about them on this post). The reality is that businesses have been playing with fire for a long while, as Rachel quotes accurately with this trend of thought: 

“[…] the limited investment in and strategic exposure of social and community teams is one of the biggest risks to progress in the social business and community space right now  – both in making progress and in keeping staff“

Burnout comes up pretty high as perhaps one of the main reasons that could take the whole thing apart and disrupt it in such a way that it would be rather tough to recover from. And that’s just one of the potentially negative consequences. I am sure there are more. Yet, while I am putting together these thoughts, and as I keep thinking what may well be the potential solution, I can’t help to acknowledge that perhaps the very same ecosystem that we created in the first place around community leaders is the one that’s causing and creating such squeeze.

If you think of community management as an outsourced activity away from the business and its core activities, which I would think most people would assume it is, right there you have got the main problem. With community management what we are basically telling businesses out loud, even at the age of the Social Web, is that they don’t have to worry about doing such piece of work themselves, i.e. maintaing, facilitating, nurturing online social interactions in communities, because someone else will do it for them and effectively enough that I can squeeze them to provide me with what I need as a business and don’t provide much in return, as a result of it.

Now I do see the value of having community builders, facilitators, stewards, leaders and whatever other term that you would want to use in this context. I think they are critical to help a community succeed, pretty much like any other of the traditional community job roles themselves, but I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t have put too much preeminence and paramount importance in the exclusivity of their role, because right there we have given carte blanche to businesses to disengage, withdraw support, sponsorship, leadership and what not, thinking that those smart community managers would be able to pull it off themselves, when we know that they would have had a much better and easier job if the businesses would be involved in helping manage and facilitate those communities themselves. 

So if in my previous blog post I questioned how CIOs should not take for granted social collaboration, because it’s not going to happen just like that, I would come to question as well how we are already passed the tipping point as a business to understand how helping your online communities, as well as your community managers, is going to be a critical core activity of your day to day business operations. And the easiest way of achieving that is realising that you, as a major driver of that business, company, organization, i.e. as an executive, with your business priorities, would need to take charge, come forward and become another community facilitator / builder, so that you could understand each and everyone of those pressures that Rachel mentioned above in order to help address and fix them accordingly, so that online community management activity is no longer seen as an outsourced activity, but more of an integrated, critical, business process of your day to day operations. The way it should be. The way it should have always been.

Only then would we be capable of seeing the job role of community managers survive for the next decades to come. Failure to do that would eventually mean we are already starting to witness the slow, painful death of what it is like being a community manager. Squeezed to no end because their business just didn’t understand how communities operate, how they could help bring further along more business value and sustainable growth and eventually how they themselves, the businesses, didn’t understand right from the beginning that a successful online community management strategy begins with them being at the forefront supporting the efforts, in every which way, from those with a passion to transform the way we do work through networks and communities versus traditional top-down hierarchies.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Wirearchy!