Doing business in a complex world means looking past straight lines

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Is your software investment/community/engagement strategy going to drive revenue?  That’s a very important question, so let’s treat it that way.

Here’s a conversation going on between some of the most influential thinkers in the world today about how business is changing.

Consider this question with two things in mind: buying committees and non-linear “customer journeys,” where prospective customers don’t just avoid straight lines, they don’t event spend most of their time thinking about a company with that company.  They spend most of their time talking about or reading about that company with other people entirely.

Gartner says that only 20-30% of IT investments have a *direct* business impact. The other 70-80% have an *indirect* impact – and that’s often where the *biggest* impact is made.

Superior strategy, since at least the days of the Roman empire, takes into account strategic sequences of events, not simply single cause-and-effect moves on the chessboard.

(Below, a great Gartner graphic via Bob Apollo via Gartner’s Hank Barnes.)

 

 

Nexus causality is a concept that says almost everything is caused not by one single thing, but by a whole nexus of contributing factors, many of which may be necessary but not sufficient.  This is hard for the human mind to comprehend, so we tend to look for a single factor to attribute all causality to.  The factor we feel like we might have the most control over – often feels like the convenient one to point to.

Asking whether something will have a direct and immediate business impact is not the right question.  Asking whether something is a strong leading indicator of success, whether there’s high or increasingly high correlation between a thing and success, those are better questions.  Asking whether a thing can provide substantial competitive differentiation, and then basic competence can take care of the last mile, that’s an interesting question.

Another Way to Frame the Culture Change of Digital Transformation: Machine, Platform, Crowd

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Transformation is a phenomenon, and digital transformation is a big thing these days – but it’s hard to put your finger on just how to explain it.  It’s not just a matter of digitizing business processes – in best cases it’s about building a digital-first business model.  What does that mean? And what do people mean when they say it’s not just about technology – it’s also about cultural change? That’s often the biggest obstacle, in fact, to successful digital transformation: leadership stuck in old cultural ways.

Here’s what I think could be a good way to explain the change going on in the economy and world.

“In the dynamic between mind and machine, product and platform, core and crowd – the latter of each has grown so much stronger that the relationship between each of these pairs must be re-examined…The business world is always changing but in transitions as profound as this one, things are even more unsettled than usual.”

That’s from the book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson.  It’s a good book.

I think this also offers a good model for self-examination.  How much are you relying on your own mind – and how much are you leveraging the power of the machines you have access to?  I know I think of a lot of ideas, but observing the output of technologies offers a whole new level of insight into what I’m working on.   I get pretty excited about the product of my labor, but the true power is increasingly from the networks, the platforms, and if I’m not keeping my eye there, on the opportunities and the consequences, then I may be missing the lion’s share of what’s available.  For example, I work a lot with Twitter data on a product, but I’ve got to mind the value emerging out on the network of Twitter users and conversations.  The products I use help me gather that value.  And of course the core of any company these days is remiss if it doesn’t pay attention to, and tap into, the crowd it aims to do business in.

I’m going to try using this historic shift toward the power of machine, platform, and crowd as a way to talk about digital transformation.

500 Ways to Be Inspired by Wikis

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When I visualize a positive future for the world, it’s networked, interconnected, creative, and emergent.  It’s collaborative and aware of its history.  It looks like a wiki.

Like podcasting has, wikis (beyond Wikipedia) may still prove to be a technology that saw a burst of nerdly excitement, then a long period of obscurity, and then a break into the mainstream.  I’m hoping so.

The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in Portland, Oregon in 1995.  It’s still up online!  Cunningham has now been working on something called Federated Wiki, a very cool project that celebrated its 7th birthday this week. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and in an era of rapidly increasing information warfare, there are few communities as experienced and prepared to help as the community of Wikipedia. Google, Facebook, and all of us should give it a lot more money.

One year ago this Summer, I was reading that first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, and thought – I want a wiki of my own!  And so my private, personal, mobile-responsive wiki was born.  (I use PMWiki software unloaded to my web host account.) It’s now my second-most visited site on the web (after Twitter) and I adore it so much! I put all my notes from reading in there, my notes from meetings, personal brainstorms, lots of things. I LOVE MY WIKI! I usually edit and read it on my phone. I love my “all recent pages” page, I love my “randomized list of 3 other pages” page.

I was talking to internet pioneer Howard Rheinghold about wikis on Twitter today, just because I noticed that we had discussed wikis on Twitter ten years ago in 2008! I brought the conversation back up, some other people joined in, we talked about what we needed today for a good wiki UI, and why it seems like wiki software development has slowed (Howard guesses Google Sites and Docs have filled a lot of the needs). It was great fun.

In celebration of the larger wiki world, here is a network map of 721 wiki experts, thought leaders, organizations, and more on Twitter. (zoomed in details below, graphs made by Little Bird, of Sprinklr) The accounts are the nodes, and the lines are a sample of the follow relationships between them. Sub-communities have formed where, for example, the community colored green was discovered by noticing that these people all follow each other more than they follow people in the yellow community. Flavors of wiki community – try them all!

Also notable, back in 2008 when Howard and I were talking on Twitter about wikis, only 123 out of 721 (17%) of these wiki community leaders had created their Twitter accounts yet! Ten years later, Twitter and at least Wikipedia are powerful, widely used platforms enabling public discourse. May many more wikis flourish in the coming years.  If you’d like some more inspiration, here are some people and organizations that are right in the thick of it!  Here are 500 of them in an easy-to-explore Twitter list.

Another good bot.

 

Simplicity, Gut, and Complex Decisions

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There’s a saying that simple decisions are best made with rational thought alone, but complex decisions benefit from a big dose of gut feeling as well.

I’ve been employing two methods for dealing with both types of decisions that I thought I’d share here.  I think of things like these as tools I can learn, practice with, get better at, and then deploy in my work.  I typically pick them up reading online, record them on my personal wiki page for reading notes, then transfer them monthly into a variable repetition mobile flashcard app where I review and learn them over time.

For simple, but hard, decisions, I’ve been using for several years a method I call “write it all down and pick 6.”  I learned it in a print edition of HBR that I picked up at an airport , I think it was Stanford’s Baba Shiv that suggested it but to be honest I didn’t write that part down!

The idea is: write down all the factors to take into consideration in your decision.  As many as you can possibly think of.  This feels great, like you’ve really given it a good thought.  Then, pick a very small number of those factors that are most important – at most 6.  Now look just at those 6 most important factors and honestly ask yourself what decision they support making.  This may be more powerful than it sounds.  It’s great.

Second, when you’ve got a complex decision, it can be helpful to break it down into simpler considerations first. “Simple is about relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths,” writes Adrienne Marie Brown in her wonderful recent book Emergent Strategy.  “Part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.”  Brown credits  Rachel Plattus of Beautiful Solutions with that insight.

That’s a new model I’m going to try out. If it’s a simple decision, use Pick 6.  If it’s a complex decision, try to create some simplicity by thinking about constituent relationships, then pick 6, then add gut feeling.  Gut feeling is high-bandwidth, high-context, powerful stuff too.

Related: The Conscious Competence model. When you start learning a new skill you are unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, then consciously competent with practice, until ultimately you can be unconsciously competent. Competent with far less effort.  That’s from Ed Batista’s blog post on Authenticity and Leadership.  Ed credits Martin Broadwell, a Bible teacher in Decatur, Georgia, who developed the Conscious Competence model in 1969.

Please share any related thoughts.  Thanks!

Finding new value in old notes

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One of the journals I keep is a Daily Q&A journal, which asks the same question each calendar day every year for five years. It’s a great exercise in seeing what’s changed in your life and what’s not; where I’m moving toward my goals and where I’m stuck.

That ability to better understand the present in context of the past is one of the many things that’s valuable about old notes. I’ve thought for some time that if I was going to start another company right now, it might focus on re-surfacing new value from old notes. I love thinking about how old wisdom or information sheds new light on new circumstances. That’s a phenomenon I’d like to think about a lot more. For now, some specific examples.

Today my daily Q&A journal asks “what was the best thing you read today?”

On this day in 2014, I said it was a Chomsky interview in The Sun. Incidentally, I’m reading a wonderful Chomsky book right now that I got in a Free Library walking down the street. (I live in Portland, there’s Chomsky just laying about here.) Why did it take me four years to get back to reading Chomsky? Because the interview wasn’t that good. The book is great though! It makes me think that a great author shouldn’t be judged from one piece.

On this day in 2015, the most interesting thing I read was my own Evernote file of important thoughts recorded in the month of May. I still keep a file like that and I still review it regularly! One difference is that I now transfer those thoughts to a flashcard app called Anki for review and I record them in the first place in a private wiki instead of Evernote. My beloved personal wiki turns one year old next month, in fact.

In 2016 the most interesting thing I read on May 30th was an HBR article on five key steps for building support for your ideas: show up face to face to describe them, give a good speech about them that frames the discussion, have strong allies, have strong moral beliefs, and be persistent. That’s been in my flashcards ever since then but it’s something I could really use right now. Thanks for another reminder, old journal entry!

Last year on this date I was reading Eric Barker’s incredible book Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He tells a story about how comedians experiment with all kinds of jokes at small shows on the road, often telling jokes that fall flat, but taking note of those that land well. Then when they do a national show, that quantity of experiments provides enough proven wins that they can put together a show that’s 100% funny. That’s inspiring!

Have I produced enough content over recent years that I could piece together a really solid presentation or piece of writing where I know every item would make an impact? Not formally, but perhaps informally. That seems like a smart thing to make a wiki page about: points made that made an impact.

What did I record this year in response to the question, “what’s the best thing you read today?” I said, “my own note I took down some time ago that said, ‘when you say something powerful, stop.'”

Why you shouldn’t rely on social feed algorithms alone

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“We run the risk, with social news algorithms,” Czech media philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote, “of losing our human capacity to select information, an essential part of making decisions, of being free.” (From the Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search)

That’s a powerful  way of saying it.  Making decisions is the essence of freedom, and selecting which information to focus on is a particularly important kind of freedom in an information-dense world.  As is the case with so many other forms of freedom, it’s also overwhelming and frightening.  Exercising it is a skill that we (hopefully) build.  (Mortimer Adler defines a skill as “a habit of following a set of rules,” in his great book How to Read a Book (video summary).)

I like to exercise my information freedom through source selection (following specific people, subscribing to RSS feeds), source categorization (making Twitter lists, folders in my RSS reader), reading the most recent updates from those sources, AND appreciating social news algorithms that bring selected updates to the top.  Today I retweeted my wife for the first time in a long time, because Twitter’s “You may have missed” algorithm made sure I saw her post.  I appreciate that.

Flusser’s exploration of the implications of these algorithms goes into more detail.  “For example,” he says, “redundant info isn’t removed, but highlighted, creating pressure to conform.”

If freedom is important to you, looking outside the boundaries of the algorithmic stream is important.

3 good tactics for building a platform ecosystem

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‍Building a platform ecosystem can be a great way to build community and energy around what you’re doing. Three best practices I’ve learned from software developer platforms are as follows. These aren’t the only things to focus on of course, but I do like these three tactics.

(1) Provide some free level of access that people can immediately begin experimenting with at any hour day or night (Mashery taught me that before they were acquired by Intel).

(2) Make sure you tell people what types of functionality you want them to build on your platform and what types of things you intend to build yourself, even thematically (Several years ago Twitter published the quadrant diagram below and told its ecosystem which of those quadrants it wanted outside developers to focus on and which ones to avoid. The upper right was one to stay away from, they said.)

(3) If you can, it’s great to offer a high-touch preview of your roadmap. Salesforce regularly does a registration-required live video walk-through of what they’ve got coming over the next months.

Those are some of my favorite tactics. Anyone have anything else you’d like to add?