Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: scale through participation

Showing posts with label scale through participation. Show all posts

Monday, November 28, 2011

Customers as partners investing in production

Image via Flickr, Garageband logo, by beoes

Here's a really simple way of thinking about the value of involving your 'customers' as partners right from the off - in an Open Business relationship: The music you buy.

The music you choose indicates the music you would have created yourself if you had the skill/time/access.

It isn't the music you would have created for yourself. It is an approximation. Just as the products and services you buy aren't those you would have created for yourself. They are an approximation.

As a 'customer' to get closer to the product you would have created yourself requires you to invest some of your skill/time/input into the the process.

As an organisation your role is to create the platform to enable your customers to invest.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Participation is the new default

A short while ago I wrote about the 90:9:1 rule - how I felt this was less a rule about human behaviour and more one about opportunity.

The story of the Internet has been one of lowering the transaction cost of forming groups. The lower the cost the lower the motivation required so to do = the greater the opportunity for all parties to engage.

We have the best set of tools in history to connect people (and if you think our current set are cool, wait until we truly get out of the silos). And the impact of their arrival has been to reduce our reliance on organisation from the centre - for our entertainment and our news etc (from Facebook to YouTube, IM to SMS).

When given the opportunity to connect, we take it. Whether it's to move into cities to be together - or to never be out of sight of our mobile phones - such is our reliance on the connection they offer.

The internet and our ever-growing collection of digital toys have given us a new order of magnitude of self-organising behaviour, not a new behaviour.

The 1:9:90 rule suggests it is normal for people not to participate (90% being lurkers).

500m people on Facebook suggests otherwise. Each of them has had to, as a minimum price for admission, contribute their own profile. This is the age of the total community - one in which to take part you have to create part.

And through this we are reminded that as in the real world, so in the digital.
We have an innate ability to identify and punish freeloaders and all-for-themselves bores. The more we and others can express our humanity online the more we will apply those innate abilities. Brands and orgs attempting to join in will have to put down their shields and meet us as equals; face to face and in the flesh of genuine human interaction.

The cost is low, the barriers increasingly surmounted and surmountable. Does anyone still believe only 1% of us is motivated (as the 1:9:90 rule would have it)?

So let's build our new institutions, our updated organisations, with the expectation of 99% participation.
If our governments, schools, businesses etc were designed from the off with that expectation I suspect they'd look somewhat different.

Participation was the old default. And now it's back.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Landing a man on the networked moon

Gordon Brown's plans to 'create innovation and personisation (is that customer-centric for the public sector?) in the delivery of public services will require rather more than faster broadband and a centre to understand and exploit the semantic web.

"Companies that use technology to interact with their users are positioning themselves for the future, and government must do likewise. Mygov marks the end of the one-size-fits-all, man-from-the-ministry-knows-best approach to public services.
"Mygov will constitute a radical new model for how public services will be delivered and for how citizens engage with government - making interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping. This open, personalised platform will allow us to deliver universal services that are also tailored to the needs of each individual; to move from top-down, monolithic websites broadcasting public service information in the hope that the people who need help will find it - to government on demand."

Gordon Brown, PM. read full transcript

For Government,this is truly a mission on the scale of landing a man on the moon.

Not because it seems almost impossible to do, but because the scale of change, the number of barriers to overcome are so large, that essentially the UK system of government, the control from the centre model that matched the industrial age, must be utterly transformed to match the demands of the networked age.

I fear the announcement Brown made today in London is fundamentally too focused on the technology, too little on the organisational changes required to deliver the vision.

The UK Government, like every other government, like every other business, like every other organisation, must be redesigned on the principles of a networked business to deliver its purpose through a platform approach.

In this way they reduce the transaction costs of making things happen; turning a shared idea into an efficient 'fit' through the bringing together of communities of purpose.

There are no hard edges to networked organisations. There can't be. To scale and to enable they have to go beyond traditional boundaries. And they are not made by technology.

The fact that the technology enables transparency and connectedness like never before IS critical. But the desire for, and organisational design for, transparency and connectedness (for sharing; for scale through participation; for search to discover and help us organise through connecting us and our data; and for enabling the always on/not-always-available nature of the web (asychronous/synchronous) is the critical part - not the technology enabling it.

So Government - and all organisations aiming for longevity in this networked world of ours - must adapt (funny how my diagram below looks a little like rocket... perhaps it could land a man on the networked moon...):