Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Innovation-Speak

Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell wrote a book that draws a distinction between “innovation-speak” and innovation and creativity (I added imagination because it's step one). Spoiler-alert, the book is really about the critical role of maintenance in enduring work.

Can you guess why we don't we talk more about that? Because repairing and routines are not as exciting as innovating and inventing. Imagine two profiles. One says, reliable and steady. The other, trailblazing and surprising. Which one do you pick?

Hence, an under investment in repairing corporations, communities, conversations, and even consciousness.

It's an interesting phenomenon that happens in communication. Adapt sounds a lot better than adopt. Efficient feels more achievable than effective. Innovation sounds more interesting than improvement.

One argument central to the book: Just as technology has the power to shape our lives, language has the power to shape our thoughts. And Silicon Valley has used both to ruthless effect.

Here's how it goes:

• Innovation-speak allows us to acquire the power of Imperial Rome while insisting on its fundamental innocence.
• It lets us declare with absolute certainty that disruption is inevitable, unavoidable, and for the long-run benefit of humankind (and, incidentally, our short-term gain).
• It makes us winningly bashful about all the attention we get, and the influence a few of us have over billions of others.
• And it helps us sustain a childlike wonder at the trillions of dollars that keep pouring onto our balance sheets, which almost (but not quite) distract us from our mission of Bringing The World Together, or whatever.

Yet all is not well:

• People keep complaining that this flavor and form of technology is leading to invasion of privacy, data leaks, loss of jobs to robots, child addiction to screens, and elections and democracies subversion.
• The pursuit of novelty for its own sake takes resources and attention away from maintenance and repair. Which matter to keep things going.
• More modest activities are undervalued in just about every way.
• Despite their invisibility, they are indispensable, and absolutely essential in a crisis.
• There’s nobility in “keeping daily life going, caring for the people and things that matter most to us, and ensuring that we preserve and sustain the inheritance of our collective pasts.”
• “It’s the overlooked, undercompensated work that keeps our roads safe, our companies productive, and our lives happy and secure.”
• Our focus on innovation leads us to under-invest in maintenance, which in turn makes innovation harder to sustain. Remember the pace layering diagram that shows how lower levels sustain the ones above?

You'll find similar jargon in other industries: home “remodeling,” spas “rejuvenating,” career “reinventing,” and so on.

Why How we Work Shifts What and Who has Power

In a recent conversation with Cal Newport, Jason Fried explains how email has ushered in a world where conversations happen out of context. The trouble this mechanism creates has a cumulative negative effects on how we work. And you're not going to solve it with hacks.

There's no hacking human nature. Conversation is important because it's an emotional tool we use to negotiate meaning. Lack of conversation means decreased empathy, which is the root of the characteristically human qualities we need to succeed in the future.

Email is a technology created to accelerate efficiency in the transmission of information. But like social media streams and many other other tools, email creates energy debt. Acceleration and ease, alone, make things faster, not better. How we work together shifts the patterns of potential.

 

From what to who, because when

Newport traces back the dominance of the explosion of email to the 1990-1995s. It was a more convenient way to push information than a fax. As a new tool, it also ushered a more informal language. The ease of the medium encouraged unscheduled back and forth, “we'll figure things out on the fly” messages.

Look at operations and production, and you find that in those areas of work, easy started to equal effective. But with communication, the tools seemed to go in the opposite direction. There was little to no consideration to the science. Hence email and then social media have exacerbated a social issue.

Conversation creates a context for shared understanding. Comments, back and forth messages, and threads in chat rooms or social media create distraction, instead. People start confusing the “what” or substance of a message with the “who” because of the “when” it happens.

The last message first creates an incentive to have the last word. It also buries useful information below the visibility threshold. And it results in dispersion of knowledge. This, ironically, creates information deficit. As the right answer is not quite within reach.

Context is critical to value creation. Using time as a key measure of value has blinded us to the effects of available energy. Especially before and after a given change. Hence energy debt and a reduction in the value to a company, person, or society.

 

Two reasons why

Human nature embraces convenience. In evolutionary terms, whatever is easier outlives other options. Even when they could be better with a little bit of work. Instant gratification wins over understanding implications of scattered information.

Hence convenience over the right way for the human brain to work. This worked when tools created ease for physical labor. But knowledge work is different: it requires concentration. The second reason why companies adopted email was the pace of work.

On a social scale, people seek advantage over others. With the advent of the Internet and digital media, companies felt the pressure to move faster. The idea that bigger was better was in step with scale being good. Fast forward a couple of decades and you can see the “growth” imperative.

Jason Fried observes that around the time email emerged, businesses' expectation grew. People saw the opportunity to make money faster. The ethos was to get big quickly. “Move fast and break things” was the motto created by people who didn't have to live with the mess in its wake. Throwing more work down people's throats had suddenly become possible. Yet, nothing good has ever come from “reply all.” 

The tech sector did set the tone. And we should remember that throughout history, technology has been a large contributor to creating culture. So, in this sense, tech has been eating the world. Open offices were another cultural signal.

Tech companies sacrificed some productivity for creating a symbol of disruption. And give people a reason to want to work there. Open offices stuck because they're cheaper, not because they're more effective environment for knowledge workers or creators.

 

Persons vs. resources

Saving on space made sense if you think people are just resources. As it's often the case, words preceded the mental model. The “personnel” office became “human resources.” Hence it heralded a mechanistic view of people from industrial age into knowledge work.

Spare parts thinking creates convenience. You can provision people in similar ways to things: make a detailed list of tasks, match with the item that has done it before and can do it faster. Technology has created convenience in hiring. But it's broken its human side.

Open space increased flexibility for companies. You could hire more people and expand with demand quickly. The two went hand-in-hand. This way of thinking can create advantage. But there are trade-offs. How persons actually work needs concentration.

Knowledge work is a conception of management theorist Peter Drucker. He came up with “management by objectives” theory. Give people goals and don't worry how they get things done. This way of thinking left a lot to the worker. Organizing your work is up to you. Hence going for easy.

Collectively, you create an environment where managers hand down tasks. The perception is that the more tasks you can grab and get done, the more value you have. From perception to incentive. That's what people do. Fried calls it “the hero complex” of being constantly utilized.

Many creative agencies operate this way: they manage resources by billable hours. “People do what other people think they want them be” applies here. Yet, the incentive might not align with creative work.

Reaching for the easy in faster cycles is a prerogative of technology. While it creates efficiencies in computing, it wreaks havoc in cognition. Burnout is a symptom. And it's also a signal of a company culture that treats people as resources.

“Who cares if these people burn out? There's more people we can hire” matches “people as consumers” and not persons on the customer experience side in culture. Persons and not resources, create human capital. 

 

Optimizing the brain

Silicon Valley's ethos worships optimization. Squeezing or eking every ounce of productivity from everything is at the center of everything. But people are not processors. Elite athletes and their coaches known the importance of sleep and recovery.

Nutrition and diet are critical in creating strong performance. When Andre Agassi got serious about competing in Opens and high-stakes tournament, he hired Gil Reyes as his fitness trainer. Reyes was the strength and conditioning coach for the basketball program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas before meeting Agassi in 1989.

Reyes changed Agassi's training, but also his diet. “Gil is the reason why I've won more Slams after the age of 29 than I did before,” said a 35 year old Agassi. “He's the reason why I'm still out there playing this sport at a time in my life when I can really understand and appreciate it.”

We optimize physical conditioning. We optimize production. We don't optimize the brain. Yet, if we want to reverse the harmful effects of constant busyness to our health, that's where we should focus. We need to start addressing the context of our work.

Silence and stretches of time alone to think create the conditions for prototyping ideas. And on the relatively cheap. Conversations are a productive and relatively cheap way to cut to the chase on what's going on. But they don't scale as well. And they're kind of squishy to control.

Yet, their effects extend to so many areas of the person. Coaching, psychology, even law wouldn't be multi-million dollar industries, were it not the case. Conversation is a tool we can use to reclaim how to pay attention and give a voice to our thoughts and actions. 

 

Are you paying attention to the power shift?

When we measure the value of conversation, as many other human activities, we measure it in time. Ironically, the fact that an awe-inspiring piece of art took a lot of study, skill, insight, and work to make, and for that reason is priceless, escapes us. 

Short-term, long-term hide the truth about reality. Value has nothing to do with time.

Available energy is the best predictor of longevity.

But in a world that converts everything into money, including things of higher value in energy terms, we're stuck with time as money. Hence the high cost of not optimizing the brain. If you're hounded by VCs with the imperative of growing faster, creating an environment that is sustainable, where people want to work and can do their best work is not a priority.

Improving the way we work is a luxury. Only companies and leaders who are focusing on a culture that values input capitals appropriately, can support and maintain their existence over all time horizons. They're the companies that know how to turn potential into positive energy.

Mental conditioning is an obstacle. When I work with executives and founders, that's the part that requires conversations as negotiation. The story we tell ourselves is quite powerful. And it ends up influencing the culture of a company, division, or group of people.

But when you crack that part, you can literally feel the power shift.

 

1. The conversation between Jason Fried and Cal Newport provided inspiration.
2. Cal Newport's new book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in the Age of Communication Overload released this week and has become an instant bestseller.
3. How we Work Basecamp handbook. How do you want to build things in your company?

A Reflection on Scale

The end and beginning of each year bear prediction gifts. But our beginnings never know our ends. Calendars are conventions. The work is in the middle. For that, reflection is more useful: pre-mortems, reviews, activity, and observation are tools for the job to be done.

There's tremendous upside to building and creating. But the existing technologies and paradigms are solutions with problems non the side. Take for example micro- or niche communities. Sari Azout shared a note about scale#. I'd like to emphasize and sharpen it.

She says:

Scaling intimacy is the million-dollar question for digital micro-communities. I’m surprised by how under-discussed this is.

We talk about digital communities being the next big thing, but rarely about how the community software options we have today make it impossible to retain the feeling of closeness and empathy at scale. 

Over and over I’ve seen the signal-to-noise ratios of these communities suffer as more people join. It’s network effects moving in the opposite direction — as more people join, the experience worsens.

All of this has me thinking about what happens when we focus so much on disruption, and not enough on preservation, on building products and services that can withstand and improve with the passage of time. 

Maintenance is not the same as status quo. Evolution should be part of it. Because there's tremendous upside in figuring this out. You see it all the time with creators. The conversation is nice and cozy when there's a core group. Then more people join, and all of a sudden, you kiss any chance at a reply goodbye. You're just one more member or subscriber. 

It's a similar problem companies face, isn't it? You work hard to get new customers and then need to figure out how to keep them happy when they're too many for the white glove approach. I'm in awe of any small business that figures it out. Because the answer for them is often not to throw money at it.

But why aren't the platforms doing more heavy lifting? Could all the tech innovation-speak be holding us back here? As I said in More agent, a little better conversation:

Our focus on innovation leads us to under-invest in maintenance, which in turn makes innovation harder to sustain. Remember the pace layering diagram that shows how lower levels sustain the ones above?

The other strong point is around empathy. Social media favors the fly-by, in fact that's the whole point to keep you producing content for their digestive systems. But, this method is often a short shoot to the intestine. Yes, I remember the conversation around filter failure. It's even more relevant today.

We can do better work. Some things don't scale as quickly as technology does, but their role in building and maintaining infrastructure is critical, not just as valuable. As Sari says in her next point on maintenance, it's worth reflecting on the trade-offs: What do we want to preserve? 

 

There's no ROI in Likes. The ROI is in Connection.

[Ponte Vecchio, Firenze, Italy. Photo by Valeria Maltoni.]

[Note: I published this article on LinkedIn on March 5, 2019 with the promise I would post it to my site. Then my friend developer died and I got busy. 2020 was, well, 2020. So here it is in all its 3k+ words glory.]

You don't get connection from status. You get it by enlivening each other other, making people stronger through engagement. Status may give you self-esteem, but alone it does not create change. It's social energy that drives civilization. But we need to figure out how it works and how to use it to benefit from it.

One month ago, I posted an open invitation to talk to 30 people in my LinkedIn network. My intent was to test some ideas about the science of networks. I wanted to learn more about the strength of online ties when isolated from popularity or any particular type of activity associated with status—e.g., viral article, award, promotion, photo opp with famous person, etc.

Popularity and kudos draw a kind of attention that is hard to separate from genuine connection to a person. We want to be associated with winning, and it's more efficient to use proxies like existing wins to gain personal status. Status is not a proxy of change.

To gain status we trade social capital and work. Social networks extract our social capital and work with the promise of status, but do not give us back something more valuable in return.

But before we get into why it's important to understand how all these variables work in platforms like LinkedIn, a little more about what happened in the last 30 days.

 

 

How social capital accrues in networks

15 years ago, Duncan Watts wrote that networks evolve under the influence of social forces. His research found that we may do very well in one environment and do poorly in another. Because people change and situations change. In our physical lives, we're constantly called to choose how to respond to things that happen to us. Good things, and bad things. Our network therefore is dynamic.

In real life, we interact with material things, including people. Interactions with people allows us to create social capital.

The connections we make through physical activities—talking, sharing a space, doing work, etc.—create a store of energy. It is this energy accrued with physical action that transforms the connections into a durable network of relationships. This bond is the reason we can reach out to someone we worked with or with whom we had engaging conversations years ago, and rekindle the relationship. In cultures that value social aspects of connection, people literally pick up where they left off.

More broadly, our responses to what happens to us in real life depend on the narrative we have running in our heads about who we are, our heritage, needs, and environment, how we see the world, and how we interact with people and things. Because identity is a very strong component of how we show up.

[the image above is part of an introduction to a program I taught at the Bologna Business School]

But many of us are also increasingly living a second (or third) life online. Here we can choose to have a different identity. In fact, social networks are finely built to bank on it.

 

 

How social networks use connections

Social networks like LinkedIn—where I chose to run my small experiment—are built to exploit the principles that underlie human nature. We seek status, and we want to do it as efficiently as possible. Eugene Wei has a very articulate explanation of how social networks do it. He calls it “Status as a Service,” which has a nice ring to it.

As you'll see below, the words we use to tell the story are critical, so I changed them around a little. The general concept holds—social networks mine our work and social connections and capital to exist. They promise status, which is volatile and doesn't lead to change. Positive change is a store of value. Social networks use our value to increase their value.

In the status game, cultural assumptions are in play as well. Social network algorithms are encoded with the cultural assumptions of their country of origin. LinkedIn, for example, is a U.S. creation and it incorporates the values Americans absorb in their environment—e.g., individuality, work hard, play hard = success, the sky's the limit, competition, efficiency, etc. Hence the cultural assumptions are based on the ideas that individuals should control their social and physical environment, anything should and can be improved, we should have as many choices as possible, and so on.

[I'm not picking on LinkedIn. I'm using it to illustrate my experiment because I ran the test there.]

As a result of both forces—cultural assumptions based on values and how social networks are built to exploit human nature—something happens to our online identity.

In the real world, when we make decisions we ask three fundamental questions—Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Our answer is based on context. When we talk about identity and the web, the context changes based on the features the technology offers and how the algorithm is programmed. Online, authentication, representation, communication, personalization, and reputation drive identity.

The sum of components social networks use to drive activity and build a business on top of it are designed to reward certain kinds of behaviors.

They use questions we ask in real life like “what does this mean to me?” and “what should I do?” to their ends. Therefore the avatars and updates we see here and elsewhere don't fully represent what's really happening to us. They don't provide information about the context in someone's life, how they feel, what we need right now. We know even less about the latent opportunity in the hundreds or thousands of links we have, which go way beyond our physical limits.

 

What I learned in my experiment

30 days after I shared my invitation to reach out on LinkedIn, I learned that the proven aspects of the science of networks work. Social capital accrues in physical networks. It's a store of energy that has remarkable durability.

Based on the research, for social distance to create a strong connection or tie in a network, we need at least two dimensions or two things in common to come together. In my test, I found that the two strongest things in common that created a reason to connect—and stay connected—were:

• Physical engagement—geography was helpful, but not critical
• Work—as in having done something together or witnessing actual work

Both dimensions are very much a product of life in the real world. Network density created with physical engagement is thus much stronger. In person, we exchange a type of energy that is most closely associated with feeling alive.

It should not come as a surprise. This is the social energy that created entire civilizations. Social capital is based on engagement in actual things we do. Work influences how we relate to one another. Together, these two social dimensions make connections durable. Which is why sharing a physical space with someone or something (like nature) creates a richer experience.

Without exception, every single person who reached out from past connections had shared a physical space with me, and witnessed my work. We were colleagues, they came to the events and conversations I organized, we spoke on a panel together, we met frequently to talk about our work and lessons learned, we were part of a community of practice.

People who were not already connected with me also reached out through warm introductions—second degree links, same type of work and problems we solve, people looking for help in the physical world. Phone and video conversations are a good step in the direction of forming a connection. A step toward durable connection includes working on a project together and meeting over coffee or at an event. Context and opportunity drive timing here.

Prominent science of networks researcher Albert-László Barabási says, “replace the corporate ladder with a social bridge.” We should think more about how our physical presence and our work impact others. Some of the great stories I heard in the last 30 days bear witness to the power of reaching out to others and comparing notes. The activities that don't scale—meeting in person, working on a project together—create the most value.

The context in which we operate is more fluid today. Professional associations are no longer enough of a social bridge. Brian Eno popularized the term scenium to indicate a collaborative space for dialogue and mutual influence. That's a much more appropriate vehicle for durable connection, because it translates across jobs, titles, and situations.

As an example of scenium, Ted spoke about booking a space to meet with peers who did the same kind of work to ask questions, learn from each other, and solve common problems. Bruce talked about partnering with peers in the science of complexity to offer workshops and teach people how to problem solve. The positive effects of building a physical context for connection create cumulative influence.

If it's in person and personal meetings that open more doors, why spend more time on LinkedIn than in real connections? Because we're social, and it got us there.

 

How the status seeking monkey brain gets us

When I explored the difference between power and status, two major dimensions in social hierarchy, I elaborated on the work of Adam Grant. But I got it slightly wrong. Because I didn't pay enough attention to the definitions of power and status. Power is the ability or capacity to perform or act effectively. It's our capacity to do things, to affect change, to use information to make each other stronger that gains us social capital. That is power in a very literal sense.

My small experiment illustrates how social capital is a durable store of energy. Building social capital is worth out time because it generates energy, which converts into power.

Status, however, is not a proxy of change and is not worth more than our time.

What I should have said is that when we believe we have no power, we think status will help us get heard. Some say status is something we earn through respect and competence. Maybe that's true, maybe we should just work on developing our skills, on being useful, and people will find us.

But the hard work should go to building social capital, because that accrues over time, rather than putting too much stock on status, which is volatile.

The status seeking monkey brain developed in response to evolutionary forces. it prompts us to look for the most efficient path to building social capital. Eugene Wei says social networks work because they not only encourage this aspect of our nature—they optimize for it. Hence we end up trading social capital and work, which take time to build and create, for badges and stickers.

Seriously, I've been on LinkedIn for 15 years and the return on any energy I put into it has been mostly self-esteem. LinkedIn has not given me anything more valuable in return for my work and social capital. In fact, its algorithm has optimized many of my articles out of sight even from my personal network. Which is why I still maintain a personal blog to store ideas. The higher density in topics over the last 13 years takes advantage of Google's search algorithm, but also of the durable connections I've made over the years through my work. (You can subscribe by email.)

My time is much more valuable as a creator. Hence why I'm writing an article instead of publishing a status update. I can use this article as a vehicle to test and work on my ideas and intellectual property, while the status update is engineered to boost my ego. I promised to publish here, but I believe in keeping my work all in one place I own and will update the last two posts on Conversation Agent soon (soon-ish).

 

How social networks work on us

Social networks' promise is to make it more efficient to connect with each other. Who would disagree with wanting scale? But we better watch out who benefits from it and calculate the costs, even as it's much harder to quantify intellectual work. If we look through the actual “Jobs to be Done” lens for social networks based on the seven deadly sins, LinkedIn's fit is greed.

In phase 1, LinkedIn was focused on creating a mechanism people could use to provide proof. We accrued some status with connections–initially tied to real life. The network effects were more proof-derived – e.g., physical engagement, work history, search and discovery. Groups where the mechanism where we could share our “proof.” See LinkedIn—phase 1.

Barabási says that in the absence of proof of performance, networks determine success. In the absence of intrinsic value metrics for work, online proof of likes and volume activity confer status. Vanity metrics vs. actual results. Hence the number of links indicating a bigger network size started becoming a proxy of proof. The logic then goes that since others give status to us, we seek the shortest path to getting it. Groups with moderators and discussions were a good idea early on to have enough content and sustain a level of activity to bring more people into the network.

For a while groups grew steadily, but eventually they plateaued. Because volume is harder to sustain in a smaller network. When LinkedIn grew beyond a certain size, groups were no longer enough. To keep more people on the network, activity needed a broader platform on which to provide more kinds of proof.

Hence the content streaming engine on the home page, which got an upgrade with automatic refreshes in 2012. Introduction of the content stream created more visibility to the status potential people could gain through proof, people tags, and likes. Other features that had less velocity were minimized in the new design. See LinkedIn—phase 2.

Eugene Wei calls a version of this mechanism “Social as a Service.” The content streaming function on LinkedIn favors short, spontaneous updates over links to articles and even posts like this one. Over a certain threshold of activity, the stream becomes noisy. To keep the noise-to-signal ratio within certain limits, social networks introduced the algorithm.

Links take people elsewhere, so they're not as desirable as articles on the platform for the social network. But articles like this one take time to read and thus create less activity, or take more time to create activity. By taking over, the algorithm changes the constraints.

The velvet rope no longer works when everyone is in… so the network needs an artificial construct to maintain some form of caste system. It's the same mechanism airlines use for points programs—to keep people aspiring and paying for a higher place. On LinkedIn, we pay with actual work and social capital to maybe provide proof and get status.

“Status relies on coordinated consensus to define the scarcity that determines its value. Consensus can shift in an instant,” says Wei. Good news for LinkedIn and other social networks, not so good news for us. In the absence of concrete ways to measure influence or obvious evidence, perception of success creates success—vanity metrics win over actual results.

We seek status, social networks seek activity—we keep the flywheel spinning at a personal cost in time, energy, and attention.

 

Why we should not undervalue social capital

Creating any durable advantage using work in social networks is hard—because this kind of network traffics in proof and status. Hence the games. No matter what we say about games, they can be gamed, and social networks will continue to tweak the algorithms to keep up on the flywheel.

They're not dissimilar from older forms of games in concept. Being published in Harvard Business Review confers a certain status. While it's probably easier to get in now that HBR has a website that needs content to keep readers coming back and subscribing, there are still certain standards we need to meet—published authors and academics seem to fare better.

Lists like Thinkers50 and the top professional lists in any field also have a certain set of requirements. How about the TED and TEDx franchises? We go for awards and recognition by our peers because they increase visibility. In 2018, after issuing the list of winners, the World 50 Best restaurants announced a change. The organization noticed that the same “best” kept trading positions at the top. To make room for new entrants, they retired winners to the Hall of Fame.

Wei says, “Life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests,” and I tend to agree with him. With a caveat, which is the genius of social networks like LinkedIn and why they keep people coming back. It is the apparent promise of meritocracy, that anyone at any point could score big in the status game that keeps us producing work to use for proof. We keep trading social capital for a potential promise of status to stay in the game.

Social currency does affect behavior. From a psychological standpoint, actions like sharing imply altruism and affinity with a group or cause and desire for self-expression. But they also signal need for validation, and need for social status recognition. When our name is called out, we're more likely to engage (unless we don't know about it, or care about this type of signal.)

We should not undervalue social connection. Network may not be something we actively create, but it's something in which we engage actively. Our energy is a source of power. How we choose to share information can either help us make each other stronger, or it can take away from us.

We're alive through physical engagement and work. These are real.

Status and proof are volatile. Others dictate the rules of the game. I would rather use my work to transform the power of an idea into something tangible. Thank you if you're among the 30 plus people who chose to engage in real life. Let's keep that door open and keep creating social capital.

There's no ROI in likes. The ROI is in connection, and we don't get connection through status. We get it through social capital. That's how we feel alive and do our best work.

 

Implications for business

Corporate environments rely heavily on email, messaging programs to communicate, and (sometimes) Intranet or knowledge portals to share information. There are plenty of meetings, but they often malfunction—that is the consequences don't match the intent. People try to do too many things at once without an organizing principle, or are not clear on what they're trying to do.

We crave connection and purpose at work, but we hardly ever create the space and formats to engage social capital and do the work together. As for the flow of information, results vary wildly—from not having access to relevant information to email chains that provide little to no context and are hard to sort. Somehow, there isn't time to address the questions for which we most need answers.

In fact, many organizations may function like social networks in that status and proof become seemingly more important than social energy and work. It's not thus surprising that engagement is down, and work is not alive.

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P.S. There's a reason why I used the image of Ponte Vecchio for this article. It's a great example of a meeting place that has connected parts of a city and the activities of its citizens for centuries. It was even spared in the WWII bombing. Because people recognized it as the beacon of civilization.

But lately it's become a crowded stage for selfies in one of the major European cities that continue to experience rapid growth in tourism numbers. To the point that many are talking about overtourism. I was there December 2018 and experienced it. Overtourism creates an artificial environment where hosts and guests, locals or visitors, feel the quality of life and quality of experience has deteriorated considerably. This means extraction of value without putting value back.

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Resources:

My gratitude to Peter Tunjic for the conversation that helped me clarify my thinking, and for his contribution to Defining Value with a Capital Idea.

Watts, Duncan J., Six Degrees: the Science of the Connected Age, W.W. Norton, New York (2003)

Barabási, Albert-László, The Formula: the Universal Laws of Success, Little, Brown and Company, New York (2018)

Thanks also go to Quartz for distributing Eugene Wei's article on Status as a Service, which gave me an insider's view into the mechanics of social networks. It was very timely and thought provoking.

Find the description of the project in The Network: 30 People in 30 Days

The Age of Data Malpractice Could be Over: a Shift in How we Understand Relationships

“It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting—it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web. I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!”

It was 2007#. More than a decade later, Tim Berners-Lee announced Solid#, a path to preserve the decentralization of the web by putting you and your data at the center of it:

Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance — by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.

Data is the undercurrent of the web. Achieving “personal empowerment through data” is an apt principle for this initiative. 2020 kept us rooted to smaller spots physically. But thanks to online tools some of us have been roaming the world.

And that's why Solid and inrupt, the company Tim Berners-Lee created as the infrastructure for Solid to flourish, could be critical to our work and lives.

 

Transfer of value

Consider how in the last 14 years I've changed a few jobs—from corporate to agency advising colleagues and clients on all things marketing, communications, then applied to social media, web experiences, digital commerce, and ultimately culture—yet my online home here has remained the same.

More than one decade of consistently creating and (sometimes) visualizing value—like when my rudimentary graphic representing new media went viral—in one place has made Conversation Agent a vessel of that value. With RSS feeds mostly forgotten, my activities on Twitter (mostly), and now LinkedIn, continue to function as triggers along with search to transfer that value to you.

But, this is just the tip of the iceberg of my online activity, isn't it?

I also make purchases through select few stores. Transactions are the highest form of preference, but not the only valuable activity online. I belong to two Slack communities, and I talk to family and friends through Skype and Zoom. Text is for select connections, mostly to get things finalized.

Twitter lists allow me to browse by interests: industries, titles, categories I've created to group activity and get signal. LinkedIn groups, once a thriving area of interest and now de-emphasized in the quest to increase posting activity (to serve ads against) were areas of interests.

I cannot travel physically, but I can do so much more than used to be possible. For example, I just shopped for gifts to have delivered to my family in Italy.

 

Identity and the web

Ben Thompson has a long article about what he calls social networking 2.0. The part about Twitter incompetence is worth reviewing. Because all power users at the time saw the potential. Many of us wrote articles with suggestions about the interest graph and the missed opportunities.

Thompson mentions identities: how he can use multiple identities on Twitter for different purposes. You can create different handles to use for different purposes. You could conceivably build a media network to appeal to different types of buyers, rather than creating a corporate handle for press stuff and a customer service account for support.

I've seen companies do the customer part well, but don't know of any that are behaving like living systems and talking to different people in different ways.

As I said, identity is a lens we can use to understand the web, it drives our behavior—both directly and indirectly.

Our identity is made up of several things:

• heritage—where we were born, where we live, our age, educational background, etc.
• environment—transient external factors such as the economy
• needs—they include both what we truly need and what we think we need and actually just want
• interactions—we also define ourselves in relationship to others

We can mix and match interests moving from context to context. So in fact we have multiple identities, each aspect of us appeals to people also interested in that conversation. For example, if you're a fan of Italian Style, I created a site, Twitter list, and a companion Flipboard magazine about it.

But mainstream social networks have mostly insisted on the one identity. Which brings us to relationships.

 

Managing relationships

As Thompson says, the next iteration of social networking puts you at the center of your network. Messaging apps and tools where you can have different handles helped. Even as many of the tools are inadequate for us to become agents of our own experiences, there is a significant market movement in that direction.

But it takes knowing “who I am” in this context to connect me with the proper vessel of value and trigger to transfer value to me.

While I can tweak and adapt social networks to suit my needs, like I did with Twitter lists, companies still have very one-dimensional views of me. They just “talk at” based on what they've got.

Peter Drucker nailed the proper intent:

What gives life to and sustains the corporation resides on the 'outside,' not within its direct control, and the customer is the primary mover of those external realities and forces. It is the prospect of providing a customer with value that gives the corporation purpose, and it is the satisfaction of the customer's requirements that gives it results.

Transfer of value happens when the trigger is close to value for the customer. And that changes. So. it will take an explicit act from each person to actually get there. Doc Searls has been working on APIs as personal systems in the networked marketplace for more than a decade. Still a work in progress.

But what if we could shift the balance of power through data?

In the same ways we put “me” at the center of our relationships, could we do it for companies' offers and products? Three decades of the world wide web and we still have system design that creates perverse incentives. Value takes a hit when accountability is not possible or very difficult.

The web, as it currently exists, fragments our data into “social network silos,” over which individual users have very little power. “They're not really webbing, they're not connecting together as peers,” says Tim Berners-Lee. These silos are ready for exploitation, “leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused.”

 

Connecting interest with intent

The current social networks have been mishandling our identities with the data as well. As Thompson says, the settings haven't favored a more nuanced approach. Groups, messaging, and Rooms on Facebook have been an attempt at giving people different ways to network based on interests, albeit tied to one identity.

We haven't been able to use our identity in conjunction with the interest graph. And many social networks have been copying what scaled so far, all focused on attention. Instead, the opportunity is to tie interest with intent. You don't get there through attention tricks. And there is social media fatigue. My most popular letter this year was about the social dilemma, tweaking the settings in social networks to fit your needs.

Berners-Lee says:

It's not just about privacy, it's actually about enablement. About a year ago a lot of people were writing in the business press about privacy and imagining that the user's desire is to hoard [...] But when they get into Solid then really the empowering thing is about being able to use their data.

The Internet offers convenience, but as anyone who's tried to find the perfect item online knows well, it still falls terribly short.

What if we could reverse the current system? Once upon a time, we'd go to the carpenter and ask for a product to certain specifications. You'd have a back and forth, give him access to your home to see the space and get data. Today, we could put those online and companies can search for jobs to be done.

As Berners-Lee announced in an update:

The web was always meant to be a platform for creativity, collaboration, and free invention — but that’s not what we are seeing today. Today, business transformation is hampered by different parts of one’s life being managed by different silos, each of which looks after one vertical slice of life, but where the users and teams can’t get the insight from connecting that data.

Meanwhile, that data is exploited by the silo in question, leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused. That in turn has led to increasingly complex data regulations.

It should be super clear to companies that people are willing to participate in the transaction. But if we can't trust a company to use that data appropriately, which is to provide a service or product we seek, then the tendency is to believe they're the hoarder. With the data being exposed to third parties that are not part of our agreement as collateral.

Last week I went nuts trying to find a compact item for a small room in my house. I could have saved tons of time by submitting specs to a central place. Companies that make that kind of item could then search the list of customer requests and message with their item. Eliminate the extra steps, and you have true convenience.

B2B marketplaces are already configured a little like this. Amazon is attempting a version of this, but it doesn't create enablement. Figure that out, and the age of data malpractice could be over. As for social networks, Thompson is an optimist. He says:

“the role for [Facebook and Twitter] will be as a bridge between attention-focused products on one side, and private interest-defined trusted groups on the other.”

To that I add a maybe.

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This is my work. I'm a cultural lens for reading the world. I do the work so that your work becomes easier, richer, and more satisfying. Durability comes from having a cultural link.

For Every Successful A-Side, There's a Suprising B-Side

[Coming up this week. Sign up here: http://bit.ly/reframe-connect]

A B-side was the song on the flip side of a 12" or 7" vinyl single that backed the A-side originally. That's where you put the song that wasn't going to be promoted or receive radio play. They were meant to make it worth your while to buy the single. You'd know the songs because diehard fans raved about them initially, then they spread.

Metaphorically-speaking, B-side stands for for the less-obvious part of a story, personality, or other. It gets less attention, but it has more power. Because a B-side contains more clues on what got an artist, author, product, or service to its polished version.

When you want to figure out why and how something works, you look under the hood, behind the scenes, to the path that got it there. For every successful A-side, there's a surprising B-side.

 

Cultural meme origin

After studio sessions for a band's album, the songs that weren't quite good enough became B-sides. They went on the reverse side of a single. It was a bonus track, made it worth buying.

But the truth is that many B-sides were better than A-sides. As fans quickly discovered, U2's “The Sweetest Thing” was the treasured B-side of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” Paul McCartney's  “Hello Goodbye” had the excellent John Lennon's  “I Am the Walrus” as B-side. 

And since we're talking singles, culture borrowed liberally. “Il lato B” is an Italian expression typically used when admiring someone's backside. In English, your B-side can mean the uncensored, unadorned you. There's an element of surprise in it, too.

In B-sides, artists could push themselves intellectually and experiment without being constrained by the forms their record labels believed would be a commercial success. In fact, when the format disappeared due to the rise of cassette tapes, artists, continued to distribute their expertise with mix tapes who could not get produced in a studio.

Today, collectors appreciate musicians' B-sides for the nuances and intricacies of talented recording artists. Connoisseurs love to get their hands on unedited work for they can hear the early signs, or discover talent and possibility.

 

Appreciating nuance

Nuance is critical to understanding how something works. Your product is likely not a poem or a musical hit. But the part in it that is you is still important. What you've experienced and learned, the issues you want to address, the gap in the market you found are the motivation to get going.

Every single product—real or virtual—we use today started with someone looking for a solution that didn't exist. The more real and urgent the problem, the more work in finding the solution that went beyond being a stopgap. Many didn't make it. Few survived. But that's what makes B-sides more useful to retrace steps in a process than A-side or finished product.

Go back to the trade-offs others made and you can make different ones. It's the concept of Sliding Doors, but you get to build a parallel path. Maybe there's more information, or the market has matured and current solutions have not kept up, the tools still wanting.

Your expertise can be your lifeline: be it strategy, operations, art, craftsmanship, finance, management, or something else. You don't have the reinvent the entire wheel, but capitalize on what you know and can do.

 

Media's A- and B-sides

“People are surprised that in the early days of Netflix, we didn’t have automation in our warehouses when we were shipping hundreds of thousands of DVDS, but automation is antithetical to what a startup is. Machines are great at repeating and scaling up. They will do exactly what you tell them to do — forever,” says Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph.#

“But a machine can lock you into a specific way of doing things. In a #startup, you don’t always know what you want at the outset. You have to search, to try new things. You have to experiment.” This is also true of the media side of business, which includes marketing. Things work until they stop working.

Last week, I shared some thoughts on media production, media distribution, and community impact. Everyone focuses on those three. The polished side of media. But few take an in depth look at the effects of media consumption, media sources, and community participation on their output. These will be the topics of this week's note (subscribe here.)

As Randolph says, there's more nuance to it.

 

Look both ways

You wouldn't cross a busy road without first looking both ways. And yes, you want to do that even when it's a one-way street. Because you could be looking on the wrong side, out of habit. When you're working on production, consumption gives you ideas that can help with formats and quality, for example.

As you think about distribution, vetting sources is useful. You learn who's credible and why, and avoid a potentially painful association through ad:tech. Impact is a direct result of participation, so it could be easier to see how they're each the flip side of the other. But, as is often the case, the degree of importance determines execution.

There are many digital services, and newer options may be available quickly. In fact, there could be infinite versions of something you're working on. But what makes your version valuable is the skill, talent, and practice you put into it over time. The tweaking and experimenting with love and care, the honing through elimination of what's superfluous, the refinements and craftsmanship are all part of the appeal.

Build on your strengths, what makes you unique, the intersection of things and experiences only you have. That's how you differentiate.

It's never the right moment to do or act on something. You make it right by working on it. For every successful A-side, there's a surprising... number of B-sides.

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This is my work. I'm a cultural lens for reading the world. I do the work so that your work becomes easier, richer, and more satisfying. Durability comes from having a cultural link.

Inventing Things Without the Words

On October 29, 1969, the first node of a network called ARPANET was connected. There wasn't a word for what was happening yet. That came later. Internet and TCP / IP, its fundamental protocol for the transmission of information, became a word a few years later.

But the vision was to create a “unique intergalactic network.” That's what one of the pioneers of that company said in early 1960s. No word, no word of mouth, apparently.

It was hard to predict what that connection would mean, exactly. On the morning of 29 October 1969, at 3420 Boelter Hall of the University of California in Los Angeles, there were zero reporters.

A few months later, on July 15, 1969, a tiny article appeared  in UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin. “Country's computers linked here first,” it said, explaining that they were working on a new network. The first computers would be connected to it, and it would be up and running the following year.

Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock is quoted in the article. Kleinrock's early work on queuing theory would contribute to the basic technology that allows the internet to function. Gizmodo published the full text in 2013.#

People had no idea how important this would be. And that's the thing, it usually works that way. Bringing something knew to the world takes a lot, including redefining some of the truths we consider sacred.

But imagination is invention's friend when applied to a question. What would  happen if we connected all existing computers to each other, so we could communicate using this protocol we've identified to transmit information in seconds?

Take a step back in time with me.

It was 1964. RAND researcher Paul Baran began thinking about the optimal structure of what we would call the Internet. He envisioned a network of unmanned nodes that would act as switches, routing information from one node to another to their final destinations.

Baran suggested there were three possible architectures for such a network — centralized, decentralized, and distributed. While he felt the first two —centralized and decentralized— were vulnerable to attack, the third distributed or mesh-like structure would be more resilient.

His task of designing a “survivable” communications system led him to suggest the Internet's design should have a distributed architecture. But because the analog communication system of the time could not handle messages broken down into small packets able to travel independently of one another along the network, his proposal was nixed.

Jack Osterman of AT&T quashed Baran's vision saying it couldn't possibly work, and if it did, “damn if we are going to allow the creation of a competition to ourselves.” AT&T was the communication monopoly at the time. It had all the words.

Years later, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), President Eisenhower's answer to the Soviet's Sputnik's launch, came up with the same vision independently of Baran's proposal. “By that time,” says  Albert-László Barabási in Linked, “the Internet was well along its course of development.”

The Internet was designed as a network of routers that communicate with each other through protocols. Once it was out there it took a life of its own, and it looks more like as an ecosystem —as in Baran's original vision— than a centrally-driven structure.

Inventing things without the words is possible. It takes the ability to look beyond the things and the words we use currently, and observe the relationships and structures in which they do and could engage.

Ecosystems are more resilient than monopolies in the end, because they become stronger based on shared values, each voice able to travel independently of one another along the network.

The word comes next. New words make connections visible. That's when building on top of the idea scales.

Mistakes Happen. It's What we do With them that Makes a Difference.

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

When we say “done is better than perfect,” we're not saying forget testing. Steve Woods, CTO of Nudge.ai, put the philosophy to the test# recently. He got into a sales meeting, and when he came out the phones were ringing off the hook—hundreds of people had received repeated invite/cancellation/invites messages to a webinar.

Nick Haughton, growth engineering at Nudge says, “I moved into this role 2 weeks ago, and we already had this webinar in flight. I had never done a webinar before, but we needed to get things live ASAP as our partner was depending on us.”

Sometimes trying to do things fast means we cut corners. He was saving the registrants to Salesforce, and not sending them a registration confirmation email. Nick says in a panic moment he realized no one would have the time of the webinar blocked off in their calendar.

So he made an event in a public Nudge calendar, and invited everyone to it, using Zapier to automate inviting the already registered webinar attendees. Somehow some people were getting over 10 invite-and-decline emails for the event.

One person wrote back,“Dude, what's going on with my inbox,” he panicked and deleted the event, making sure not to send a notification that the event was deleted. But then he got an email from someone asking why the event was deleted.

Soon after Nick got a note from Paul, Nudge CEO, saying to call him. “I am so thankful both Steve and Paul have kids, they are very patient leaders, and walked me through next steps. I'm not sure how I managed to do that, but I am not going to mess with google calendar like that again.”

(Note to self, don't mess with Google calendar.)

After failing to isolate who received the notifications, Nick decided to send an apology email to everyone, and to clarify that the event was still happening. Here's his honest and heartfelt apology:

Hi Kirsty,

 

I made a really stupid mistake this afternoon. Some of you saw your inbox flooded with meeting invites and cancellations for the Revenue Operations webinar we're hosting in May.  Some of you might have seen something like this:

 

 

This was a human error on my part, and tomorrow we're putting processes in place to make sure it doesn't happen again.

 

To clarify, the Revenue Operations is definitely happening May 9th at 1pm EST, and I'm (clearly) excited to see you there.

 

Apologies,

 

Nick Haughton

Nudge.ai

Do you think people appreciated the sentiment? Yes, they did. Nick received 15 responses to the apology. Everyone was very positive, and a lot of people shared anecdotes about being in a similar situation. “It made me feel a lot better knowing that nearly everyone has made a careless mistake like this throughout their career.”

What happened the next day was not suprising—people started sharing their own stories and encouraging the company to move onwards. Because we can all identify with the situation. I've just met Nick through an email exchange, and I like him already.

We're attracted to shared experiences, and when something is less than perfect, we feel better about ourselves as we empathize with the people and situation. This happens when it's a genuine mistake, so let's not rush to contrive a disaster (nobody likes that, and we can tell.)

Mistakes do happen. It's what we do with them that makes a difference.

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For a little bit of background, I met Steve Woods when he was with Eloqua. The expression “digital body language,” which I've used for years to talk about how people and networks move online, is originally from his book.

See for example, marketing as a profit center, and ideas for writing compelling content.

4 Ways Technology Impacts our Ability to Make Decisions

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Marshall McLuhan observed the effects of media and technology. “The medium is the message,” “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” and “First we build the tools, then they build us,” are three ways of talking about the impact of technology.

True to the Canadian educator and communication theorist observation that “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers,” we're still working on our understanding of the effects of media and technology on business and human behavior.

Jennifer Sertl says it's important to reinforce the usefulness of being human, rather than thinking of humans in technological terms. We don't have an on/off switch, for example. Our presence impacts people at a deep level—through feelings and emotions.

In an interview with rdigitallife#, she says technology evolves so gradually that, if we're not careful, we could lose our humanity without even noticing. We're losing our ability to do four things that impact decision-making:

1. scenario-plan — this is a strategic method we use to make flexible long-term plans. We create different scenarios for different future landscapes, so we can make better decisions when problems or changes occur.
2. gain perspective — growth is an imperative in business. As we grow, we have a certain way of looking at what happens. When we see things from a different perspective, we gain a broader appreciation of the world. 
3. know ourselves — the aphorism know thyself is ancient. It's about understanding one's own emotions, desires, and abilities. We cannot set goals, go about life, and have successful relationships if we don't know who we are or what we want.
4. empathize — empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. It has four important attributes. Cognitive empathy works in tandem with reason. 

These are the things that separate us from the gadgets. 

Our ancestors were tightly connected with each other, which is why they felt only the pain of their family and the people in their village. As we started to travel more and learn new things, we expanded the circle of sympathy to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and maybe all humankind.

It was a process that at its origin had what physicist David Bohm called “participatory thought” — in some cultures there was a shared understanding that everyone was part of the same experience. In his excellent On Dialogue, Bohm explains the meaning of participatory, it's about “to partake of,” and the idea was everyone drew from the same source of energy.

There's more reason to it. 

For the ambitious, near enough may not be good enough.

These are things we can control through our values and principles. Value never disappears, it just shifts to another place. Technology is a useful tool. But we need to reinforce the usefulness of being human to drive innovation.

How much screen and app time is enough to program us? Can you separate how you hope to be from how you're being with your actions in social networks?

 

A Pragmatic Look at Marketing Trends

This post is part of a new series on industry conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Marketing trends, or how we would call fads if they were with us for the long haul. It's hard to shift through search results and be impressed these days. Or find something pragmatic to do after reading/listening to some of those lists.

    Rand Fishkin has collected a list of top search results# for trends that are hardly new, hardly actionable, and hardly surprising, I might add.

    AI, voice search, chatbots, beacons, virtual and/or augmented reality, blockchain, native ads, video, ephemeral content, micro-influencers, mobile-first indexing, and mobile payments don't deserve to be marketing trends, according to Rand.

    They may seem actionable. But how could video or turning to the human side of marketing be considered things marketers can control or tactics that have proven to be effective? They're too generic, for starters.

    Any list should include criteria for making the list—why is this thing a thing? How is having this thing going to change our decisions about what to do? Is this thing a new development?

    Rand says:

Preparing for a recession by having excellent analytics and controls on cost of customer acquisition vs. lifetime value, on the other hand, strikes me as immensely actionable and wise.

Knowing which channels you're gonna cut, which you're gonna double-down on, where you can find more affordable growth vs. more experimental, etc.

Same goes for voice answers—determining a strategy to either get value from featured snippets in Google (which are what they use as the spoken voice answers for now), or prioritizing different keywords so you don't have to compete against featured snippets/voice answers.

    Jon Burg says we should not confuse technology (beacons), channels and behavior. He has a valid point. Many of the trends that circulate every year don't mix and match at least two of them, best if all.

    Hopefully, the interesting part of why this matters to you makes it to clients and customers. If you run a small business, you're not interested in the same things enterprise brands focus on.

    It's worth mentioning that something doesn't need to be a new trend to have impact on your business. Sometimes quite the opposite happens—missing the fundamentals can be the thing that gets you.

P.S. your search results will vary based on your browsing history, browser configuration, and region of the world. In fact, we have a fragmented view of the world at any one time.

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Related:

How to uncover opportunities in business trends