Author: simongterry
Control and Community are Oil and Water
No wonder the challenges of community management drive many people to frustration. Communities don’t respond to control. There is a great expectation gap between what organisations expect of community managers and the real role of fostering and developing purposeful mutual relationships. Like oil and water, control and community don’t mix. Worse still, too much control and you will have an oil spill that kills every living thing for miles.
Many organisations fear that their communities will become a chaotic & lawless place. They don’t want open two-way discussion of what matters to their community members. They want everything neatly locked down, authorised and controlled. Control is seen as a way to protect their brand, their business and their strategy. However, the neatly ordered brand, business and strategy they want to achieve is only realised through decisions of the same people they seek to control.
Your community will become a wild west of lawless conversation, if that is what your community needs to get value from their purpose and relationships. They don’t see it as lawless. They see it as a valuable relationship. Shut down the activity you don’t value and it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes elsewhere. If too much of the valuable conversation goes elsewhere, so does your community. Losing relationships is rarely a good thing when they determine the success of your business and the value of your brand.
Think for a minute of your home town or suburb. Hopefully, your local neighbourhood gives you a sense of an open and inclusive community. You have networks of interactions with others through family, commerce, schools and work that help bring value to your life. You don’t agree with everyone about everything and not everything works as planned, but the collective interactions mean everyone fulfils their needs in their own ways. We know from history that communities are led to disaster when external forces seek to govern all the relationships. Control breaks down community by undermining individual purpose, initiative and relationships. The lessons from history of efforts to design, relocate or control the interactions of whole villages are worse still. What is left after these efforts is rarely a community because of the work of those exerting control. The community only remains because of the determination of the individuals to stay connected, despite the external forces.
If there is one thing that is important in managing community, it is realising that it isn’t about you, your wants or your performance. Community management is first, last and always about what it takes to realise the potential and purpose of a community of mutual relationships. Focus on work with influence through your community, not using control against them.
Inspired by a conversation with my friend & community management expert, Melanie Hohertz. Read more (and better) on community and control see Melanie’s perspective on our conversation.
Keep moving. Explore and everything becomes clearer.
Present
Our lives are full of distractions. Many organisations sole purpose is to distract, to hold or to shape our attention. In our hands we hold devices that are a window to a global world with distracting images, notifications and the insistent call of unread messages. Our attention wanders.
We find it harder than ever to be present. Here. In this moment. Now.
Earlier this week at the end of a long day, I was going through the motions of life wrapped up in my thoughts. Luckily my intuition twigged me that something was not right. When I stopped and paid attention to what was going on, I found a little change that helped another person. All I had to do was be present, make a connection and ask some questions.
If we aren’t here now, we can’t make the change that is ours to make.
Presence underpins our awareness of our context. Presence gives us the time to be aware of our intuition, our purposes and our capabilities. Presence enables us to truly see and engage with others.
When we take the time to be present, we give ourselves the chance to make a difference.
What’s your difference?
Presence
See the opportunities that life presents.
Forgetting
What we forget, we must relearn through experience. Corporate memory loss is a barrier to effectiveness, change and adaptation.
The pressure of now in organisations can be incessant. It can feel like there is no time for history. When I work with an organisation, I like to ask questions about the history of the organisation. The stories and insights are always worth the conversations. In all organisations, history shapes many drivers of current performance – community, context, purpose, values, customer value propositions, strategy, structure & culture. Sometimes this shaping is an explicit choice to be one way or a choice to not be another way. Often the influence has been forgotten but the legacies remain in the structure of performance in the organisation.
When organisations forget their history, they lose the context to be able to review current performance and these drivers against the past. Past success on its own is a terrible guide to future performance. Past strategies without context or understanding are even more dangerous. Usually strategies are born of successes and failures in specific contexts. When we forget the failures and the context, the strategies become harder to interpret, implement and adapt. Effective organisations understand their failures, successes and the context for each. They understand what they have learned ongoing.
Failures forgotten, or worse hidden, will be repeated by future generations. Many organisations enter a cycle of repeating the same series of decisions in a circular effort to improve performance. Centralisation fails and decentralisation follows. Decentralisation fails and centralisation follows. The cycle continues without progress until someone with the history and the understanding can challenge the binary choice and learn a new way to manage.
The same process of forgetting dooms many change programs. Launched for a specific reason at a specific time, that context is soon lost. The project develops its own logic and soon the organisation moves on to another change leaving the change orphaned. If the project succeeds many will question why. Later the organisation will return to this change to try again.
Help your organisation to understand the full context of its history and experience, both the successes and the failures. The lessons of this experience will be the foundation of future adaptation.
Context
The dysfunction in organisations is often a lack of shared context.
Part of any community is a shared context. That context is a common set of facts and understanding of the world. At its best that context includes shared goals and purposes. This context enables people to see the world in enough of a shared way that trust and collaboration is possible.
Civil society breaks down when people stop sharing enough context to collaborate and reach consensus. Much of the dysfunction of politics globally is influenced by the breakdown of shared context. We can find our own media that reinforces our own worldview. Politicians actively reinforce this to strengthen their following and influence. The vitriol and political dysfunction is an outcome of a lack of shared context.
We’ve all experienced the moment where the same action takes on a different meaning in a different context. The car that wants to cut into your lane on a day you are late and stressed creates a different reaction to the same action on a peaceful day of vacation. Context can literally change how we see and react to the world.
In organisations there are many ways that shared context breaks down. At its most dangerous, an organisation can lack a shared context with the customers and other stakeholders that provide its reason for being. Look at any customer service breakdown and there will be a lack of shared context. Organisations lose track of their customer’s context when they stop listening to feedback and stop changing with their customers. Success builds ego and hubris that builds barriers to understanding.
Within organisations, shared context is absent when there are misalignments of purpose or information. The silos that brought us efficiency now promote division and lack of mutual understanding. No two teams can collaborate comfortably when they have their own sets of metrics and differing goals.
A key role for all in organisations but particularly for leaders is to create a shared context. Help people understand the whole system through transparency, understanding and engagement. When there is conflict and dysfunction, start building new understanding.
Community
Communities depend on more than connection. They are fostered by relationships and shared purpose. Change the relationships or purpose and you create a new community. Communities take ages to build but disappear quickly when you break these rules.
The visibility and connection that comes with global networks has driven new attention to the idea of community. Community is a business buzzword and organizations are increasingly seeking to leverage the value of the communities in and around their business.
We can inadvertently carry over our thinking from traditional marketing across to consider these new corporate relationships. We start to treat every segment of our customers, employees or stakeholders as a community. We believe we own these communities because they connect to us. We try to determine our and others’ interactions with these communities. That’s the way our traditional one-way marketing relationships have been managed. We can’t say it has been effective even in marketing. It doesn’t work in community.
Customers aren’t a community. Employees aren’t a community. In most cases these groups of people have no shared relationships and have not considered any shared purposes. They may be interested in interactions with your organisation but it is not yet clear that it qualifies as a relationship with you, let alone similar others.
People can’t be put into communities. They join them. Nobody owns a community, not even the platform owner. Groups of people aren’t a community until they move from connections to building two-way relationships and find a shared purpose. Community involves both what we get from the interaction and what the community as a whole benefits from the interaction. The intentions of a common corporate master matter little unless executed in alignment with these outcomes. This applies even where you have the ability to control and reward employees for participation in your community. One of the reason truly valuable enterprise social communities have been challenging for organizations is that they have failed to understand this dynamic. The organizational masters expect, rather than engage.
The sense of control that comes from traditional marketing’s one-way communication is out of place in this new two-way context. Communities are engaged in, not informed of change. When you decide that you want different membership, different interactions or a new purpose for a community, you are deciding you need a brand new community. Assume you are starting from scratch. There is no migration. You are recruiting for a new community. Don’t be surprised to discover that your wishes are resisted or the community simply moves elsewhere and leaves you out. After all your relationship is only one connection in that community.
Real communities change from within driven by the needs of the members. You can’t expect your current community to follow your wishes. You are asking them to start again and you have unilaterally imposed a change on their relationships and sense of personal purpose. If you want change in a community, you need to engage in dialogue around the purposes and relationships in the community.
Too many communities are simply networks of interactions that create no value for anyone. Treasure the relationships and shared purpose created in community. Respect the magic of these relationships and you will find the value of community.
The Roles of External Experts
Experts are terrible at knowing what’s going to happen. One of the key role of external experts is introducing divergent opinions into a hierarchy.
I’ve been reading Tim Hartford’s Adapt on the role of failure in success. The book begins with a review of the literature on how poor experts are at prediction. We live in a complex connected fast changing world. Experts, whether consultants, thought leaders, academics or futurists struggle to make predictions of what comes next. So if experts aren’t great at knowing what’s going to happen, why are they so popular?
External Experts are a Source of Variation
Even with the limits of their predictive power, external experts do two things well. They can supply confidence for organisations to tackle divergent ideas and they can help find divergent ideas internally in organisations and carry them around or through the hierarchy. The former occurs when senior executives hire external experts to bolster their risky decision. The latter is the source of the classic consultant joke that ‘a consultant borrows your watch to tell you the time’.
In both cases, an external expert helps an organisation to break the patterns of its dominant thinking and explore variation with greater confidence. In an environment of rapid change the ability to experiment with variation is a key to adaptation. The expert may not be right but the learning and adaptation that results can be incredibly valuable.
External Experts Build Capability
That learning is what differentiates great experts from the average ones. Great experts worry less about predicting what’s around the next corner. What they help organisations do is build the capabilities that have value in many scenarios in the future.
Teaching organisations how to learn for themselves through experimentation, how to become more effective in change at scale, enabling teams to work more effectively and enabling individuals to thrive is a winning strategy in almost every scenario. Add the transfer of the way to build particular practices and expertise and you have a valuable proposition.
Once you stop looking for experts to know everything, you can explore their potential to help your organisation to change and adapt through variation, experimentation and new capability. These roles are important new challenges for your internal experts too.
If you’d like to chat more about how to build these capabilities and better leverage your internal experts, get in touch with Simon Terry.