Graham Chastney

Once upon a time man roamed the earth looking for food in those days the ability to find food was power.

Then we learned how to cultivate crops and farm animals. Land became power.

As the land became used up we needed to protect our land so weapons became power.

Then the industrial revolution happened making facilities and factories power.

Then we saw the dawn of the Information Age and facilities became less important because we didn’t need them to process information. Information became power.

Then an interesting thing happened – information became FREE. If information is free it can’t be power.

All along people were connecting with people, making deals, giving the inside track, offering advice, ignoring organisational structures, giving and receiving favours, dining together. People were making relationships.

Then along came the start of something new, it got fancy new names like “social media”,“social networking” and even “business networking”, but really it was just another way of making relationships.

It’s those relationships that make things happen. Relationship is power.

Today I watched Clay Shirky presenting at TED (via their excellent podcasts). Clay outlines a number of challenges to the way that we imagine people’s motivation. He explodes the premise that we all love to be “couch potatoes” and highlight a number of examples that demonstrate that as he says:

We like to create and like to share

People don’t just contribute when there is payment at the end, they contribute when they are creating, and with the currently available technology the opportunities for creating are becoming ever broader.

This effect creates a global surplus of cognitive ability of “a trillion hours a year”. There’s a lot you can do with a trillion hours of creativity if only we treat it in the right way. he calls this Cognitive Surplus.

Not only is this concept a huge challenge to the way we approach social projects, but it’s also a challenge to the way we approach business projects.

My perception of many business projects is that they are constructed with the assumption that people won’t want the change, and hence a stick is required to get them to change. If people truly do" “like to create and like to share” then engaging people in a creative constructing way in the change process will turn them from blockers to enablers. It might even get them to invest some of their own cognitive surplus.

The latest example of this, for me, is the location tagging of a Glastonbury picture that is underway. Thousands of people are tagging themselves in a picture taken at Glastonbury. The reward for this is little more than the feeling that you have been part of something. They’re all using their cognitive surplus to create a shared experience.

Coming to think of it – why is it that I write this blog?

There’s a saying that I use quite a lot, which apparently comes from Voltaire the French philosopher:

“Common sense is not so common”

What I regard as obvious is likely to be different  to what you regard as obvious. What I know is likely not what you know. My experiences, my understanding, my perspective is always going to be different in some way to yours, sometimes it’s going to be radically different to yours.

This isn’t new information, and if you’ve been around a while I suspect that you read it as “common sense”, but that’s not the way that we behave.

Whenever I enter into a conversation I make an assumption that the person I am talking to knows certain things and sees some of those things in a similar way to me. The way that I communicate with that person is massively influenced by the assumptions that I have made about the person that I am talking with.

So why am I surprised when they understand the conversation differently to me?

Surely my expectation should be the reverse. It’s far more likely that someone will understand a situation in a different way to me because they see that situation from a different perspective. It’s highly unlikely that they will see it in the same way because it’s not likely that their perspective will be the same as mine.

In some ways it’s a miracle that we ever communicate at all.

How would changing our perspective change our communicating?

I was reading  the Michael Sampson: Currents blog the other day when I read this:

Is Twitter / Yammer / Socialcast the "new cigarette?"

His question was based on a posting by Joel Stein in Business Week titled “The Secret Cult of Office Smokers”

Joel observes the power of the meetings that occurring every day in the huddles of individuals sharing in the smoking habit.

One of my first bosses was a smoker and I used to marvel at his ability to know things – it didn’t take me long to work out the source of all of his inside information. If something was going to happen he always knew way before it actually occurred, sometimes he would tip us off, but on many occasions he would leave it as a surprise. He’s always be perfectly positioned to take advantage though.

I’ve worked alongside other smokers and without exception they have been well connected, and normally connected above their station in the organisation. There are times when I’ve joined them for the chat because I’ve seen the potential.

Back to Michael’s question: are the social media tools replacing this kind of interaction?

To a certain extent I have found that my connectedness has increased through the use of social media, twitter has connected me with all sorts of knowledgeable and influential people within the IT industry.

Internal connectedness is a bit different, but similar. We run a system based on Jive internally and my ability to connect across the organisational structure has been great. I’ve written more extensively on some of the topics I write about on this blog, on the internal system, resulting in a number of very valuable connections with highly connected people in the organisation.

I have to say, though, it’s still not the smoking corner. There’s still not the serendipitous moments that you get from a chat over some tobacco in a paper sleeve, and I’m not sure why. I’m sure some of it is because the level of honest and openness on the lies of twitter is nothing like the honest we’d display in a much smaller group. But I think there are other factors too.

Some wisdom from Seth Godin today:

A car is not merely a faster horse.And email is not a faster fax. And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard. And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex.

Play a new game, not the older game but faster.

I work alongside IT organisations who are often so focussed on getting “more for less” they completely miss the game that is changing around them.

So often the question is focussed on upgrading rather than transitioning – “if I upgrade the corporate email system will it be cheaper” rather than “what opportunities do we have for delivering communications in a better way”. People don’t want corporate email they want communication, and while they are all looking at the corporate email system this thing called social networking comes up behind them and changes the game.