Technology and Organizations

Yesterday was the beginning and the end of the DARPA Network Challenge. MIT’s Red Balloon Challenge Team won in less than 9 hours. (Press Release pdf) DARPA tested the power of social networking and found it powerful. According to CNN, DARPA will be interviewing the participating teams to understand how they built their networks, motivated participation, and collected their information. Realize that false positives were an issue (certainly you can ask people what they see — but how do you know if you can believe them?)

From the DARPA site:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

…and I missed seeing any of them (one was in San Francisco’s Union Square — so I had a shot).

The MIT strategy focused on the viral creation of a social network of support:

Sign Up, Invite Your Friends, Help Science, Win Money! We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all — we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on…

They made sure the payoff model was clear:

It might play out like this. Alice joins the team, and we give her an invite link like http://balloon.media.mit.edu/alice. Alice then e-mails her link to Bob, who uses it to join the team as well. We make a http://balloon.media.mit.edu/bob link for Bob, who posts it to Facebook. His friend Carol sees it, signs up, then twitters about http://balloon.media.mit.edu/carol. Dave uses Carol’s link to join… then spots one of the DARPA balloons! Dave is the first person to report the balloon’s location to us, and the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team is the first to find all 10. Once that happens, we send Dave $2000 for finding the balloon. Carol gets $1000 for inviting Dave, Bob gets $500 for inviting Carol, and Alice gets $250 for inviting Bob. The remaining $250 is donated to charity.

Brilliant.

• Motivation: For you, your friends, for charity
• Opportunity: The MIT Red Balloon homepage was built to easily accept the finds), DARPA made sure they weren’t hidden in invisible locations
• Ability: MIT gave clear hints about how to do this — invite your friends (why didn’t anyone invite me?!), use Twitter, Facebook

Yes, this was a social networking story — but you can also look deeper to understand the value in the MIT approach. They didn’t just rely on social networking, they practiced TOP Management. Technology: They built a solid website enabled to take in exactly the information they needed and then certainly had some technical processing to manage and evaluate that data. Organization: They created clear organizational practices – “This is how to organize your friends,” “this is how you get paid.” People: They used tried and true foundations around the management of human performance — Motivation, Opportunity, Ability.

Well done! Other insights into MIT’s process (or those of any of the other teams’) appreciated.

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Modern organizations are increasingly complex across all three dimensions of TOP Management (Tech, Org, People):

• Technology has become an underlying utility for our organizational strategies — yet is it constantly in flux
• Organizations are global, partnered with other organizations and more and more run via virtual teams with limited physical interaction
• The people of the organization are more diverse given globalization and crossing generations of vastly different backgrounds

Over the next week or so I’ll provide examples for each category. For today I’ll focus on Technology. Thank you to BL Ochman for providing this example within her post Three Top Ways to Damage Your Brand With Social Media for the blog, SocialMediaToday. Her three points are each examples of using technology without bringing together the organization and the people:

1. Start a Twitter account then don’t use it
2. Don’t track your brand in social media using either free or paid monitoring tools.
3. Start a social media program, but don’t tell the rest of the company about it.

Time Warner provides her examples for points 1 and 2; the small company Uprinting.com provided the example for point 3 — though they acknowledged the problem and seemed to be moving to correct it (the same could not be said for her experience with Time Warner).

The image tells the story of a problem that has not been corrected in the six days since the post: TimeWarnerCares, doesn’t seem to. They have still not used the account and they are still not following any of their followers, who are possibly Time Warner fans. Ochman reports that although she used Twitter to document her service problems – using their Twitter account name – she had no reply in 24 hours. She says, “That’s approximately one week in Internet time.” This suggests that no monitoring is in place.

Time Warner seems to have had someone think that using technology was good — but that person either wasn’t in a position to bring the organization and people onto the project, or they didn’t understand that they should.

Ochman also provides an example of success – and of a success that seems to cover all of TOP Management’s dimensions: Comcast has become famous for their use of the social messaging service Twitter. Frank Eliason, a customer service director, has been using Twitter to support Comcast customers for over a year. BusinessWeek describes him as the most famous customer service manager in the in US, and possibly the world. Monitoring systems are in place at Comcast so they can follow what people are saying about them and/or any problems customers are experiencing. Comcast has developed systems for acting on this information: other customer service reps are available and know how to use the tools.

The moral of the story is that new technologies can be great triggers for innovation — but the use of the technology should be thought through and integrated with organizational practices and employee skills before going live to almost 30 million U.S. users.

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In the last couple of days both the NFL and professional tennis governing bodies have made proclamations regarding how their players and officials (and families, etc.) will, and will not, use social media. The Associated Press reports “The use of social media by NFL game officials and officiating department personnel will be prohibited at all times.” The US Open Tennis Championship has signs up with the following header, “Important. Player Notice. Twitter Warning.”  Andy Roddick, for one, is not impressed, “i think its lame the US Open is trying to regulate our tweeting.. i understand the on-court issue but not sure they can tell us if we can’t do it on our own time” — sent via Twitter.

A TOP Management Failure is one where organizational decision makers error by not considering all aspects of the foundations of organizations: Technology, Organizations, and People.

Technology: In this instance, the governing bodies are clearly considering the technology attributes of social media use and not liking what they see. The Tennis Integrity Unit notes that the information provided could be used as “inside information” and relate to the “Tennis Anti-Corruption Program Rules.” They are thinking about the technology and possible detrimental organizational outcomes.

Organization: The organizational aspects are broad reaching. These include: the internal organizational mechanisms that were used to make the decisions; the implementation mechanisms, for example, getting the word out and letting the parties understand the consequences; and the mechanisms of enforcement.

There are also organizational boundaries to consider. Others report that individual football teams have banned, or tried to ban, fans’ use of social media at practices by banning cell phones and laptops. These organizations have a right to manage their facilities (e.g., you can’t bring in your own alcohol), but these are complex issues when you are talking about multipurpose technologies and a particular behavior. Laptops don’t send tweets that bookies might read, people do. (Apparently the Colts even tried to prohibit reporters having paper notebooks at practices, but quickly changed their minds.)

TechDirt shared this additional perspective on organizational boundaries, “What if the ref’s job during the week requires the use of social media?”

People: This aspect may be the simplest in this setting. In TOP Management, the people aspect relates to the human component — the basics of motivation, perception, and the like. I can come up with a variety of issues that might matter (e.g., habits, perceived “need” to tweet, psychological contracts perceived regarding personal versus work space). I don’t see these as being bigger levers in this instance than the organizational issues.

Some organizational changes are too complex to rationally parse and effectively address all at once. Nobel Laureate Herb Simon noted that people have “bounded rationality” in that we cannot rationally process all the information all the time. For complex changes, TOP Management may mean to create small wins starting with the big levers, checking the feedback, and moving ahead. Don’t bite off more than you can chew — or at least more than will let you credibly predict the outcome.

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A few weeks ago I ran across this IdeasProject video of Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur. He opens with descriptions of how sharing changes everything — sharing versus protecting your ideas. Good points, but he really hooked me when he talked about the value of sharing ideas with social media friends, and how this gives you instant access to their thinking:

It has already changed the way I think. I feel like I live in a room, which is across the world, but I can just call a friend and there will always be someone to answer one of my questions, as long as I share as well with them. It’s two ways. It’s about living in a world with a community that can help you….

It changed me completely. I cannot think alone anymore. I need to think with my friends, all the time.

I think you can extend these ideas to blogging and other public writing. I blog and tweet to think with my friends (join with them in a virtual conversation). I gain from their comments as Loic mentions, and I benefit by having the goal of framing my thinking to join with that of my friends. Psychologists describe this as the “cognitive benefits of teaching.”

The opportunity to microblog, blog, and/or post to Facebook all also have the benefit of being motivational. My friend Leslie Coff and I were talking Monday about how we are often inspired by our friends to write a particular post. For her it is when she has had multiple similar questions from her patients (she’s an amazing acupuncturist and provides a blog as additional outreach). For me, it’s often when I’ve heard similar questions from my students or business colleagues. Our friends can inspire a more thoughtful response than we might be able to give that the end of an appointment or in a quick question and answer period. We are inspired to think, to think for the benefit of our friends, and hopefully for the benefit of engaging in a conversation on the topic.

Do you have time to tweet, blog, or post to Facebook? How do you not have time? If your job is to have ideas, and/or to find ways to share ideas, then enlisting your friends in the work — even if only by giving you a virtual audience — can speed the thought process. I also find great value in documenting my thought process. It took a while for me to be willing to share my alpha drafts with the world. As Loic says later in his interview, “The new way of doing it is getting feedback from the very beginning.” This has its risks, as Loic notes: your friends may tell you you’re wrong, your competition may see what your up to — but the benefits to your thinking win out.

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In a recent contribution to the Ideas Project, Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) notes:

The big shift that we’re seeing in organizations that are leveraging social software thoroughly is this shift from a need-to-know to a need-to-share culture; the ability to increase productivity by the way that you’re coordinating your organization, in not just ways that are pre-subscribed, that are intelligently designed, but enabling them to emerge.

In the video, many of his examples focus on the signaling capability of micro-blogging tools like Twitter (or Socialtext Signals – an enterprise tool with security built in) — both for how such tools can support the fast pace of internal activities, and for keeping track of your brand and customers’ needs.

The organizations making this shift are more agile and can gain an augmentation to the hierarchy as knowledge flows more directly to where it is needed, at less cost to those with the answers.

Ross also acknowledges the power of learning from Gen Y (see my thoughts here), “There are also generational shifts that most people are aware of, not just the kids who grew up doing their homework on Facebook; we called that cheating when they were in school. They come to the work force, demand similar tools, and we call it collaboration.” Gen Y, and even some of of the rest of us, understand that knowledge can be easily shared given modern tools and actively seeks effective strategies.

Case in point: A current MBA-student of the Stanford Graduate School of Business demo’d a tool she’s building based on the needs of students studying together — apart. She noted that current distributed forms of work make it harder to just ask a friend for homework help, yet intelligent tools could provide support — without becoming too intrusive.

This is exactly the balancing act we need in organizations. We need seamless response to our information needs, without breaking into the immersive performance of our colleagues. While I can’t point to any perfect solutions yet (examples appreciated if you know of some, or even some with just slight imperfections), both Ross and the Stanford entrepreneur are illustrating clear options.

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Yes, I’m a fan of Socialtext. Scott Schnaars (Senior Sales Exec at Socialtext) and I are doing a workshop on August 25 inspired by my Kill Email post. More formally titled, Value From Communication & Collaboration Tools: Put Email in its Place!, we provide frameworks and case examples of how to engage the power of collaboration and social networking in real-world situations. This isn’t about the one particular tool, but rather an approach to managing collaboration in your firm. Join us!

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