Twitter, Pheromones and Collaboration

“Why would I care when my friend brushes his teeth?”

It hasn’t taken very long for that response to become pretty tiresome in response to a suggestion that someone should check out Twitter. As Howard Lindzon, a hedge fund manager and angel investor, said at the Mesh Conference, “there are 250,000 people joining Twitter every day and 245,000 have no idea why.”

Here’s where I think Twitter fits into my world and into the world of organizations and collaboration. It starts with a quick introduction to the notion of BioTeams. A writer by the name of Ken Thompson has been writing about how we can a learn a tremendous amount about team and organizational work by studying the behaviours of animals. From his site, it looks as though he first started publishing about BioTeams in 2005, a full year before Twitter debuted, but I’m sure he had lots of unpublished work before that.

He writes that pheromones are part of nature’s oldest and most advanced signaling system. Even dinosaurs, who had comparatively small brains, had highly advanced senses of smell in order to hunt prey. Most people associate discussion of pheromones with human sexual attraction but in the bigger picture pheromones are really about communication. Ants and bees use very elaborate systems of tastes and smells to organize themselves very quickly and effectively and with great ability to be flexible and innovative within their changing environment.

In his BioTeams book, he notes 13 characteristics that make a pheromone based communication so effective. I will list them here and then make some of the more compelling connections to Twitter, if you don’t make them by yourself as you go through this list.

1. Broadcast and Individual
2. 1-way
3. Whole species
4. Simple vocabulary
5. Intraspecies and Interspecies
6. Robust Delivery
7. Low energy
8. Longevity potential
9. Message Range
10. Multichannel
11. Quick and Slow Responses
12. Anonymity of sender
13. Location Information

And now for a discussion on how some of these principles are manifest in Twitter:

1. Broadcast and Individual: Pheromones are predominantly broadcasts to many but can also be used between individuals in a species. The Twitter analogue here is pretty obvious. When you tweet, all of your followers know it. Or you can take the Direct Message route but I’m sure that most people would find that functionality to be used less often than a broadcast tweet.

2. One Way: Messages through Twitter don’t have the same level of expectation of a return note. A Tweet is simply a piece of information that is put out into the world with no expectation of reciprocity. People can do whatever they want with that info. Eventually, if I’m not being valuable to my followers, I’ll become noise or unfollowed. How many useless emails have you sent to people just to show them that you have read their note. Highly inefficient.

3. Whole Species: This is a bit of a stretch because if we consider Twitter users to be a sub-set of the human race, it certainly isn’t the case that everyone on the Internet is a regular user of Twitter. And of course not every human is on the Internet. If you consider Twitter a “universe” unto itself than the syntax is pretty simple and universally understood. @, #, and a few other symbols make up almost the entire grammar.

4. Simple Vocabulary: Here’s what Ken wrote in 2005 – “You should as try to put the essence of the message into a short amount of characters (100-200) or even to use a set of abbreviated message types e.g Feedback, Vote, Opportunity.” RT, FTW, Fail. ‘Nuff said.

5. Intraspecies and Interspecies: Some species’ pheromones can be interpreted by other species. This is useful if two species share a common predator or one species can send out propaganda in order to fool a predator species. The analogy that popped into my head is that I automatically cross post my tweets into my Facebook status and I get notes from people all the time on Facebook wondering what the hell my status is and wondering why it contains strange code.

6. Robust Delivery: Good communication should be multi-platform so that if a message is blocked on one path, there are multiple ways of that messaging finding recipients. This smacks of annoying spam to me so I’m careful to not send out too many messages in parallel just to ensure that one gets through. I don’t like receiving an email, followed immediately by voicemail and a txt msg. We’re social animals and there are relatively few messages that require quite as immediate a response as messages about food and predators.

7. Low Energy: Pheromones take little energy to create or receive, relative to other forms of biological communication such as chirping. The nice thing about the 140 character limit of Twitter is that the simplicity is built in. Long, redundant emails and voicemails are naturally curbed. This fits in nicely with the smartphone form factor as more and more people will be using devices such as Palm, Blackberry and iPhone as their computing platform of choice.

8. Longevity potential: Pheromones have the potential to stick around in the environment for a period of time. This can be good, so long as the information is still relevant. An ant colony wouldn’t want to mobilize forces to collect some food long after it has been harvested or scooped up by a competitive colony. Twitter can have a bit of a problem in aligning to this principle in a practical way because with a lot of tweets streaming past a moderately connected user (100+ followers) it’s very easy to miss lots of relevant information. The search feature on Twitter works well to counteract this phenomenon as do any number of clients that have sprung up to deal with Twitter streams. Tweetdeck being one example.

9. Message Range: Thompson writes that some messages are more important to certain members of a group than others. I’m sure you’ve experienced projects where there is a core team and extended teams where members of the extended team might not receive all correspondence, just some of the more strategic messages. Again, Twitter by itself doesn’t have the ability to group messages, but some of the more advanced clients do so organizing the people you follow into different groups is key to adhering to this principle. As well, I do pay more attention to any @ messages on which I’m included. There is also a certain amount of natural selection. When I see a tweet from people whom I know personally and trust, they command more of my attention than people whom I have never met but still enjoy following.

10. Multichannel: Similar to point 6, I tend to not overwhelm people with multichannel broadcasts. That’s just my personal style. What I will do is use Twitter to offer up a 140 character teaser of information. For example, I’ll tweet about this blog post in order to share a bit of information and to provide a link to the full text. An amuse bouche, if you will. Two platforms, but not used in parallel.

11. Quick and Slow Responses: Some types of pheromones are designed to inspire immediate action such as “attack!” Others are designed to initiate longer term action such as caste transformation. The “High Priority” exclamation point in email was a good indicator of what type of response the sender of the message was looking for. I personally haven’t come across a particular structure within Twitter that’s designed to attract attention and immediate response. I find that I’ll come across people who are looking for specific information and if I see it will respond immediately if I have the answer. Is there a symbol or hash tag that I’m not aware of that is like a “911 call”?

12. Anonymity of Sender: This has pros and cons, as we’ve seen. Lack of authenticity and trust (not to mention spam) are synonymous with anonymity, at least on the sender’s part. However, anonymity can be helpful when requesting feedback from colleagues. Some people argue that within an organizational context anonymity can work in hierarchical, fear driven organizations where people are afraid of bringing up unpleasant news for a boss. At best, this anonymous approach is a weak band-aid on a significant problem. I feel as though if that dynamic exists there are better, more sustainable, healthy ways to address it.

13. Location Information: Pheromones can be used to create trails to food. I’ve used Tweets to mark out my trail on a busy Saturday night going from bar to bar. This may not have much use in an organizational context (at least from a physical geography perspective) but I’ve also found it interesting to witness someone’s thought process through Twitter. I’ve followed people’s tweets from conferences and seen the evolution of their thinking on certain topics in near real time. But the time and geography trail is also in the here and now. You can automatically post the time and GPS location of your tweets so people can follow you. And with Google latitude it’s possible to have an aerial view of your entire colony’s whereabouts.

OK…so that was a quick synopsis on how Twitter is a tool that is a great analogue for complex biological systems. What does that have to do with collaboration and team work?

With so many virtual teams and virtual organizations evolving out of more traditional, mechanistic organizational structure, Twitter is a great tool for keeping track of your colony. Where are there job opportunities? Who has written a compelling post? Who likes shade grown organic coffee? These pieces of information when viewed on their own, and in aggregate, represent a real time picture of predators, food supplies and partners. As well, long term information (primer messages) can be communicated and we get things like #hohoto and #twestival.

As Karen Stephenson writes, there are the formal structures of organizations that are rigid and the informal networks that are amorphous and flexible but bisect every organization. Twitter represents a way of connecting outside the formal structure of an organization and tapping into the power of a network. It’s a way of developing weak ties within a network. It’s a way of discovering who are the “hubs”, “connectors” and “gateways”. And because Twitter is asynchronous (ie. people aren’t necessarily “friends” and don’t have to mutually decide to follow each other)  more types of connections are possible versus networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

There are many executives who don’t yet believe in the power of “older” social media tools such as blogs or wikis to super-charge collaboration within organizations and it will be some time before they’re the rule in an organization rather than the exception. “Micro-blogging platforms” such as Twitter in the enterprise are still a few years behind them because Twitter represents a very clear opposite to the command and control structure, but it will get there in some form or another.

And that’s why you should care when your co-worker brushes their teeth.

@danielrose

P.S. I can’t believe you made it to the end of this monster post.