Social Glass

Barry Schwartz, an economist who studies how human psychology is linked to economics and author of The Paradox of Choice, recently spoke at Ted about how process has replaced wisdom.  His thesis is (and I’m paraphrasing), that process exists because policy makers don’t trust “doers” to make the right decisions.  Process curbs risk and act as an insurance policy.  The result is less catastrophe and more predictability.  But process also assures mediocrity.  It denies the people who execute processes the freewill to improvise based on immediate circumstances.
Barry tells the story of a father who takes his son to a baseball game.  During the game the son says that he’s thirsty.  So the father goes to a drink stand and buys two cans of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, unaware that this drink has alcoholic content.  He returns to his son and the two start drinking the “lemonade” together.  A concerned fan notices and calls security.  Security calls the ambulance who rushes the boy to the hospital to remove the alcohol from his system (it turns out the boy had only very minor traces).  The police meet the father at the hospital and arrest him.  Social workers place the kid with foster parents for a few days.

The father then has a hearing before a judge.  He asks that his son be allowed to return home.  The judge agrees, but only if the father moves out of his home and is accompanied by social workers on scheduled visits.

And along the whole journey the security guards, parametics, police, social workers and judge each apologized to the father for doing what they had to do.  But they had to follow procedure.

Wisdom, commonsense, would have ended this madness at the baseball game.

Now, I’m not saying we should do away with structure that promises some sense of predictability and repeatability.  But I like the word “framework” instead of process.  To me, frameworks provide basic direction to a group, but allows said group the freedom to make micro decisions.  It’s like saying “go northwest and you’ll get there”, instead of giving turn by turn directions.

I struggle, in my work life, with finding a balance between providing enough structure that the team arrives at desired destination while fomenting the talents of each team member in order to get there in the most efficient manner (and just where is “there”?).  But I’ll favor the wisdom of my team over regimented process any day.

We use Skype all the time at work to communicate with our remote teams.  Most of my conference calls are done with Skype, and to be honest the call quality is better than what we get with our ip phone-base conferencing system.  We use MSN for private IM conversations, and Yammer for public IM conversations (Yammer rocks).

But (back to phones) what I find interesting is that social etiquette is different when conference calls have video than when they don’t.  Today, for example, I had a conference call with two people who’d never met in person (but had spoken on the phone).  Through the Skype video link they could both see each other.  I felt compelled to introduce them.  They felt compelled to be introduced.  The etiquette, when there’s video, is much more like it is when people interact in-person.  And that’s what I love about it.  It creates a more personal bond between collaborators.

I couldn’t imagine managing a remote team without Skype.

Ted, probably my favorite website, is hosting an event in Melbourne, Australia (my favorite city) on 17 January, 2009.  Check out the Ted post about this here.  I’m glad to see Australia getting some love.

I’ve been finding it difficult to stay focused on Enterpise 2.0 after having worked at Active for about 9 months now.  As a consultant, I was living Enterprise 2.0 every day.  As a Development Manager, I’m more concerned with keeping a team of Software Engineers, QA and IT busy and engaged.

I have a new found appreciation for the middle management layer,  and I’m ever more aware that management is an art (and I’m not sure how good of an artist I am yet).

But, I plan on visiting this blog more often, hopefully to include more information about how I’m working with my offshore team, the business and IT in the most efficient and emergent way.  I also think we should be talking more about agile software development when we talk about Enterprise 2.0.  It seems agile wants to remove barriers and flatten hierarchies for the sake of efficiency and high-quality output, just like Enterprise 2.0.  As we’re trying to be more agile at work this is definitely a topic I’ll be touching more on.

When Yammer launched its public Beta I jumped on board and setup an account straight away.  I then invited everybody I knew at work to join, and within a few hours we had 30 people create accounts.  It was cool, people in Canada updated their status and people in China responded to them etc.  I even flew from San Diego to Florida, had a layover in Dallas, “yammered” that I was available for 30 minutes from my iPhone app if somebody needed to talk, and received a call from an IT guy with a question.
The diversity of participants was perhaps the coolest factor.

But then it started to die down.  While our company user count is high in Yammer, volume is restricted mostly to a small group of 15 people, all of whom work in the same division.  Maybe it’s a coincidence that we work on the Consumer Media side of the house, and that the others who initially signed up are less social media savvy.  But I think we’ve drowned the other guys out.  The 15 remaining people use Yammer to:

• Share links to Proof of Concepts or blog posts
• Broadcast when servers are being rebooted
• Declare deadlines for code deployments
• Indicate when a service is down or unresponsive
• Let others know they’ll be out of the office for an hour

But what I’m really interested in is what’s happening elsewhere in my company.  What new service is the enterprise services group releasing into Beta?  What new ad campaigns is the marketing group launching?  Does anybody want to start a Ruby on Rails is not scalable debate?

My conclusion: Yammer is great for my team, but the signal to noise ratio flushes the rest of the organization out as others don’t seem to care about what’s important to my group.