Creativity: “Not Required”

I was talking to a large Canadian company about their possible need for facilitation consulting services. The person I was talking to is in HR and has “collaboration” in her portfolio. She suggested that her company would most likely not be in need of my services because the corporate frame of mind was one of “retrenching” and therefore no innovation or creativity would be required.

In my view this is a very narrow and myopic view of how collaboration, visualization and creativity (CVC) can be utilized in companies. CVC does not have to be about brand new product ideas, 10 year plans, hockey stick growth or “out of the box thinking”. A well designed, facilitated workshop with CVC can allow creative thinking to be applied to extremely tactical, operational details.

Case in point: At the beginning of November I worked with the technology group responsible for delivering the infrastructure for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I’ve blogged about this project before as I’ve worked with them quite a bit over the years. On November 2nd the Olympic Opening Ceremony was 100 days away. On a project of this size, you can be sure that there is not a whole lot of new thinking going into the technology. Almost everything is locked and loaded and yet here we were with a group of 60 people representing 30 different Olympic venues applying the principles of collaborative work so that each group could rapidly identify outstanding issues, determine solutions and get the sign off from leadership in situ, before the end of the day.

The collaborative exercise began weeks earlier when a web-based collaboration tool was used to start a conversation with the 500+ technicians who will be servicing the Games with the following question: “What Issues are Keeping You Up at Night”? In other words, what are the most pressing technical issues 100 days from Opening Ceremonies. Many of the answers were around process and procedure for certain situations. The facilitation team worked in advance to identify themes and trends, categorize like answers and  and to offer insight into how the work should be tackled.

We made sure that the subject matter expertise was in the room during the face to face event and created a process where small teams of experts created solutions to the issues, filled in common templates and permeated the answers throughout the room to make sure that other teams knew what work was being done and, finally, got the requisite approvals from the executive team so that when the day was done, the work was complete. I would suggest that a typical meeting of 60 people in a hotel conference room would not have effectively solved over 40 pressing issues in one day without some process facilitation.

The point is that collaborative process doesn’t have to simply address “innovation” or “blue sky” issues but when done well can effectively accelerate the most detailed, operational, tactical work. Being more effective, more nimble, doing more with less, “retrenching” can always benefit from people’s creative power and a good collaborative process will help unleash that potential.

Novatel MiFi: Cool Device for Remote Events

Bell Canada is about to launch the Novatel MiFi 2372, a combination device that includes high speed wireless broadband on the HSPA network plus a wifi router plus an SD slot. For people who work collaborative events or conferences this is quite the all-in-wonder package. Internet service at conference centres can be really expensive or really shoddy. Being able to travel with small, reliable, reasonably priced gear is quite the boon. Of course the consistency and reliability of a wireless device can leave lots to be desired so while the MiFi might look good in theory, interference and network stability might make it less than awesome. And of course lots of conferences are in bunker like structures so the cell service is weak anyway. I’m looking forward to trying it and getting reviews of real world performance.

Uffe Elbaek and the Project Paradox

On October 15th I had the pleasure of attending the latest Design with Dialogue session, hosted by Peter Jones of ReDesign Research and Greg Judelman of Bruce Mau Design. The special guest of the night was Uffe Elbaek, founder of KaosPilots and the CEO of the World Out Games in Copenhagen which took place this past July.

Uffe was amazingly candid and generous in sharing his experiences, good and bad, in getting a huge undertaking such as the World Out Games off the ground in just 2.5 years. Having worked on the Olympics technology planning, I can tell you that 2.5 years to get an entire event off the ground and successful is a Herculean feat.

Five things stood out for me:

1. As the organizer of a major event, Uffe dealt with many sponsors, vendors, partners, political organizations and sub-committees…and in many of those instances Uffe was asking for something, whether it was money, products, permission, support, time. There were lots of asks. However, to make the entire experience beneficial for everyone, he authentically posed the question, “What can we do for you?” He really viewed the relationships with all of the stakeholders as a true two way street. But he didn’t stop there. He also viewed his role as the “hub” in all of this activity as a connector of stakeholders. He made sure that relationships were forged between sponsors, between political organizations and really acted as a catalyst for new connections. The committee could have been in a  ”take, take, take” situation but saw the opportunity to create a new eco-system around the goal of putting on a spectacular event.
2. This is Uffe’s design process, in a sense. It starts with an idea such as “let’s host the World Out Games”. Uffe’s assertion is that all too often people skip straight to the concept, put together a team, organize the team and then execute. He calls this the “Bermuda Triangle” because the important steps of figuring out what needs the idea fulfills, what the purpose is what values are held don’t inform the concept. This can result in conflict well into the project because there isn’t a cohesive understanding of what the team is trying to accomplish. In deciding things such as which sponsors to approach, a lack of unity on needs and purpose can result in interpersonal conflict and the project can suffer. Spending time up front to work on the first few steps can save time and conflict later in the project. Uffe’s took the time to write a manifesto of this work so that anyone could go back and visit the manifesto when tough, contentious decisions had to be made. Revisiting the question of why they were doing this in the first place helped make those decisions easier.
3. Your purpose should be succinct enough so that you are able to pee it in the snow. Apparently this is a common saying in Denmark. I guess it applies more to men than women. No visuals for this point.
4. Uffe’s team wrote a run book on how to deliver an event of this magnitude just BEFORE the event took place. The rationale is that the run book shouldn’t be tainted by the perceived success or failure of the event. While things will go wrong at an event of that magnitude, you wouldn’t want those mistakes to be overly represented in the run book. With a month before an event of that size, everything is pretty much locked down. Not much will change but a run book won’t be overly influenced with the emotion that comes with delivering the event if it’s done just before launch.
5. The Project Paradox. Uffe explained that in a big project with an end date you start with tons of decisions to make and very little knowledge . You end the project with all of the knowledge but no decisions to make. The challenge is to shrink the gap in those two curves so that the project kicks off more effectively. One way of doing that is to quickly ramp up on the knowledge curve or hire people who have that knowledge before making key decisions. Curious if there are any comments on the paradox and ways in which to overcome it.

Designing with Grade School Kids

On Tuesday I was fortunate to be invited by Mike Doell of Ross+Doell Design to kick off a design project that he has been running at his kids’ school for the past few years. Each year Mike guides a class through the design process to eventually create models and prototypes of all kinds of new products. In the past, Mike’s classes have created new toys, games, candy and clothing. This year Mike will be guiding the class to create entries for the Exploravision Awards, a design competition geared to K-12 students.

Mike asked me to join the class for a 1 hour kick off session as a “brainstorming expert”. Believe it or not, kids in the gifted program are already seeing the world in Gantt charts and project plans even at the age of 9 and need to be facilitated through lateral thinking exercises. While that’s a sad commentary on the education system, I’ll leave that for another blog post. Mike suggested that the biggest “problems” to overcome for the class were:

1. fixation on the first idea to pop into their heads
2. setting aside judgement of ideas.

So in the hour that I had between recess and lunch I decided to break out my old, reliable technique,  improvisation. As of right now, I feel that the principles behind improvisational acting are core to creativity and innovation.

Initially I introduced the group to the idea that “problem solving” is different from “design” by  asking them to shout out the answer to: 2+2. In 1 second everyone yelled out “4!”. I then asked them to shout out the answer to “What is the best video game?” There was a full 60 seconds of yelling out answers. Many people yelled out more than 1 answer. The point: Design processes have to let go of the idea of the “right/wrong” mindset because different designs might be better or worse depending on who you are designing for. The teachers pointed out at the end that this went against almost everything they’re used to. Startling at such a young age.

I then did a few rudimentary improv exercises that the group seemed to enjoy.

1. Association: While in one big circle, I told one student to say the name of an animal out loud and the person to her left had to say the first thing that popped into his mind based on what the previous person said. We went all the way around the circle. This exercise is meant to diminish the self-judgement that often occurs when brainstorming and to reinforce that there is no wrong answer. In the words of Bruce Mau, “the wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question.” We did this exercise twice, trying to improve our time around the circle, ie. be more spontaneous.
2. Malapropism: The kids walked around the room, pointed at an object and called it something that it wasn’t with conviction and enthusiasm. The kids seemed to find this easier than adults. Most adults find it difficult to walk up to a chair and call it a bowl of spaghetti. Our brains are so wired with patterns and taxonomy that we find it physically difficult to jump out of those well worn ruts. The mechanism that makes our brain so efficient at creating and recognizing patterns makes it difficult to force the illogical and nonsensical.
3. It’s Not A…: This game involves everyone sitting in a circle with a hat in the middle and people running to the middle of the circle, grabbing the hat and using the hat for anything other than cranial fashion. The point is to come up with as many possibilities for the hat as the group can. Lots of interesting, zany ideas emerged and there was definitely a “build” as we went on as the kids riffed on each other’s ideas. None of them were wrong.

Moving past the fun and games we talked about one of the jobs of designers being to identify problems in the world and to come up with creative solutions to those problems. To continue the theme of generative, lateral thinking we asked the kids to grab some Post-It Notes and write down a few things that were problems in their own life. The ideas ranged from “my brother is a dork” to “fossil fuels” to “internet is too slow at home” to “cottage cheese” and 50 others.

We sat on those for a bit. Next, I asked who in the class was an artist. Surprisingly only 6-8 people raised their hands. I thought it would have been higher. I explained the importance of being able to sketch out an idea, as words often can’t capture the essence of a design. As DeBono writes in Lateral Thinking, “it would be a pity to limit design by the ability to describe it.”

The task, in 60 seconds, was to sketch out a cup that wouldn’t tip. Awesome results. Even awesomer was that the kids attacked the problem from different angles. Some drew a cup with legs. Some drew a cup that suctioned to the table. One kid drew a hovercup that simply eliminated gravity from the tipping equation! Root cause analysis! I explained the importance of creating 40 possible solutions in 60 seconds and suspending the evaluative process of what was possible, affordable, etc.

Then I asked them to pick one of their “problems” from their list and to draw out the problem on a Post-It without using words. Lots of creativity here and one sad one. One student wrote “I Can’t Draw” on their Post-It.

And that’s where we ended after one hour. Lots of lateral thinking, free association, suspension of judgement and some drawing. All of the “problems” are stuck to the blackboard and next week they might go through an affinity exercise of some sort. Still TBD. The ultimate goal is that groups of 3-4 will form and create a product that will solve the problem of their choice.

To summarize:

1. Kids in grades 4-6 have trouble with notions of generative thinking and suspension of judgement.
2. The kids are being taught to map out their projects on Gantt charts.
3. Not many young’uns consider themselves artists.
4. Running things with kids shouldn’t be as seamless as with adults. Instead of handing out pens to everybody, they should go back to their desks to get their pens. They need to stretch their legs more often than adults. The one minute that it takes to get the pens from their desk will give you an extra five in attention span.

Physical Space: The Forgotten Factor

I happened to stumble upon some notes that I had in an old notebook  about a project that I had some involvement with while working at Bell Canada. It was about the development of Bell’s “campus” that was being built in the suburbs of Toronto. The idea was to collapse all of the smaller offices in and around the city into one big campus for the purposes of increased collaboration amongst employees. The assumption was that if everyone was located in a few buildings on the campus the company would be able to move more quickly, be more proactive, nimble and all of those other good things that companies strive for.

Our group became involved in the real estate discussions because as professional collaborators we thought we could contribute to the discussion based on our experience in designing for human interaction (albeit on an “intervention” basis) and in designing physical space to support those human interactions. In conversing with the architects, we learned some interesting things.

1. Research suggests that workers in large office environments tend to interact with people who are only within 150 feet (50 metres) of their own desk.
2. Up to 87% of knowledge creation is gained informally, through such means as social learning (water cooler wisdom), learning in the moment, communities of practice and other techniques. Information transfer occurs formally, through lectures, workshops and seminars.

* Farrow Partnership Architects

The conclusion I drew from this was that simple co-location does not even come close to guaranteeing increased collaboration amongst employees.

The conceptual solution that I had envisioned was threefold:

1. Apply architectural design principles that are used to build dedicated collaborative spaces to an entire office complex. It’s no secret that traditional cubicle farms don’t exactly lend themselves to lots of interesting conversations among inmates. While the initial dot-com boom accelerated the notion of a more “social” office space as a way of being more creative and productive, there are some deeper principles at play that go beyond free chocolate bars and a pool table. Innovation Labs has a whitepaper on the topic of designing collaborative spaces.
2. Train a network of specialized workers/facilitators/information synthesizers to be responsible for certain physical areas of each office floor. They would help to “design” the work that the employees are doing, facilitate small and large meetings, perform graphic recording, information visualization and other specialized tasks designed to tease out the collective intelligence of the organization. These types of workers would be part of a network of practitioners within the organization who are more in tune with the concept of social business design, the concept of which is now being put into play by the folks at Dachis Corporation. As a network of practitioners they would be in communication with each other and act as a “biological overlay” for the otherwise mechanistic organization. It is a lot to ask for a corporation to switch its mindset to being “social” but if there were networks of people within the organization acting behind the scenes to make this happen, wholesale revolution might not be necessary.
3. Implement the necessary Enterprise 2.0 software to enable knowledge sharing, insight generation, weak signal monitoring and other techniques that will allow the network of practitioners to bring the work from the rest of the organization into their areas of responsibility. They are acting as the eyes and ears to the rest of the organization (and the world at large) for the group to which they’ve been assigned. A further benefit of training these types of workers is that it adds a level of governance and risk mitigation for executives who see social media as being a risky endeavour.

I did my best to sketch out what this might look like at Bell Canada but it’s quite generic and could be applied anywhere. The idea is that with tens of thousands of employees it’s impossible to be co-located. With good design principles, implementation of a soft infrastructure based on principles of collaboration and a hard infrastructure of the right social tools it’s possible to realize a significant shift in how legacy organizations transition to becoming social businesses.

Let’s Not Fight

A new coffee shop, called The Common, opened up in my neighbourhood recently. It’s a very small place with just a few tables so they set up some chairs on the sidewalk. Those fill up pretty quickly so there is nowhere to sit in their shop. This happened to me the other day but I didn’t want to get my coffee to go so I wandered outside of the coffee shop and sat on the ledge of the storefront next to the coffee shop. The store next to the shop is a day spa. Hair cuts, nails, pedicures, etc.

Within a few minutes someone from the store came out and asked me to move and pointed out a sign that I had truly missed, which was asking people to not sit on the ledge, not block the signage, not smoke in front of the store, etc. On one hand, I can appreciate the owners of the business not wanting people hanging out in front of the store. But on the other hand I’m wondering if they’re missing an opportunity on how to be creative with the extra traffic that they’re getting.

For example, they have lots more foot traffic now that a place like a coffee shop has opened up. Maybe setting up a small table giving away free samples in the mornings would be one idea. Maybe setting up chairs in front of their own store, providing seating for the overflow customers in exchange for free coffee for all of the spa employees might be another. Perhaps setting up a “Morning Jolt” program where you get make-up done and an espresso for a bundled price.

Frankly, I don’t know if any of these ideas make sense but the point is that the spa’s “environment” had changed and rather than seek out opportunity in this change they had taken a more adversarial approach with its new neighbour and its neighbour’s customers.

Published in MPI One+

I was recently interviewed for and quoted in the Meeting Planning International’s One+ Magazine for the July/August issue. It was interesting to talk about process facilitation and collaborative event design from an “event industry” perspective. It’s great to see some exposure on the idea that a typical meeting or event doesn’t have to have such a broadcast dynamic, where a speaker or a panel talks at the audience. Usually my work is with a specific organization which is trying to solve a particularly hairy business problem but conferences often have very smart, dedicated people as participants and it’s high time the participants and speakers started working together at conferences to solve some of the hairy problems that we face as a society.

Read the article.

Here’s a quote from Joel Spasky that I JUST picked off Twitter, from @ibmdesigns, which I think is relevant to the article in the MPI magazine: “Design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

What I Want From ChangeCamp

Over the past eight months a movement called ChangeCamp has emerged. On December 31, 2008 a bunch of people motivated by the election of Obama and the proroguing of the Canadian Parliament started to plan an “unconference” that posed the question, “How Do We Re-Imagine Government and Citizenship in the Age of Participation?” By posing such a broad question it allows for conversation on a wide variety of topics but it also makes it difficult to define the movement. It makes it difficult to define success. The issue of “What Change Do We Want to See?” pops up. How will we know when we’ve succeeded in making change?

Given that I’m not particularly passionate about electoral reform or other specific policy issues, I’ve been asking myself the question of why I’m even involved with the ChangeCamp people and the movement. Professionally, I’m interested in the process of collaboration and how to make it happen but my interest runs deeper than that and I think I figured out why. So here’s what I want from ChangeCamp:

I want to connect with my neighbours in making my community a better place to live.

I am a big fan of Peter Block’s work on community development and I feel that I lack a sense of connection, accountability and trust with my community. I love Block’s notion that “citizens” have to work with each other and government to effect change and not rely on government as a “service provider” with citizens as “consumers” of the service. Creating trust and accountability amongst community members is the initial step towards making that happen. I feel as though ChangeCamp is a way of helping make that happen. Trying to define  and agree upon the change we want to see or trying to identify when the ChangeCamp movement has been successful is not a good use of time or energy. Getting people engaged, literally out of their houses and into the community engaging in dialogue that is meaningful to them around the health and future of themselves, their families and communities is a worthwhile goal in and of itself.

In the spirit of Open Space Technology, whatever change emerges from those conversations is the only thing that could have.

With the belief that conversation, connection, trust and accountability is good for its own sake, I therefore believe that the big crazy goal of doing 100 simultaneous ChangeCamps across Canada on one day in September, 2010 would be an important, monumental event even if there isn’t a solid definition of change. The act of planning and executing such a thing would in itself be propagating action and strengthening community.

If you’re interested in learning more about ChangeCamp and engaging in the dialogue around what it could be, contribute to the ChangeCamp blog.

It’s not a box, it’s a lens

A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days training and exploring different methods of collaboration with the partners at Innovation Labs. One issue that we were all wrestling with is where is the “magic” in collaboration? When you break collaborative process design into its core elements you’re left with a set of principles that on the surface look rather pedestrian, yet we’ve seen for years and years that when it all comes together there is a certain “magic” that happens. People’s passion and energy is unleashed, creative ideas begin to flow and people accomplish a ton of work on very complex issues.

We framed up this exploration with a question: “What is inside the black box?”

The idea is that at the kernel of this activity there is a “magic” that happens but we couldn’t really define it.

I would like to rethink the entire metaphor of the black box and articulate a new way of thinking about process design. I propose that the nucleus of collaboration, the “thing” that makes it all possible, is conversation. Two people conversing is the molecule of collaboration, the building block if you will.

Part of the skill in process design is developing the right kinds of conversations for people to be having. Conversations that explore different vantage points or that direct the conversation to the creation of “tangible work products” are the beginnings of great work. It is less about a magic box and more about providing a multiplicity of “lenses” through which to view and explore a problem.

It was after reading Peter Block’s book, Community, that I pondered the connection between the “black box” model and Block’s model of change for neighbourhoods. In short, Block suggests that conversations about the “gifts” that people bring to a challenge, the desired future that people want to see and honest conversations about how each person is potentially inhibiting the creation of that future are all useful in an organizational context as well.

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.

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