Month: September 2005

Wild. I just had this wonderful vision. I saw this small village and through the middle of it ran a river. Everyday the people of the village went down to the river to gather water, wash their clothes, or to travel to other villages further down the river. Throughout the day, all of these people near or on the river all talked and had conversations with one another. And when they talked, I saw their conversations flowing from their mouths and going from village to village just like the river flowed between them. What I became aware of was that not only did the river sustain the people but so to did their flow of conversations as well.

Synchronicity? I’m not really sure. I wanted to talk about the importance of promoting a culture of openness and guess what I read on Dave’s Scripting News this morning. A lengthy post about how his interaction (or lack thereof) with companies who are not promoting openness (but instead the typical old business approach of control and exclusivity) left him feeling detached from those companies and not really wanting to have a relationship with them or share anything with them again. Who were these companies? One was Microsoft (which probably won’t suprise a lot of people) and the other was Google (which probably will surprise some people).

All I can say is that obviously a change of culture is occurring at Google. The small personable culture that everyone assumed they had is slowly disappearing and being replaced by that familiar old business culture that we’ve seen in other larger corporations. The following quote taken from their website is proof enough of this change (although I’m wondering how Danny Sullivan got it because Google has an Iron Curtain around their Zeitgeist Conference site and you can only get in with a password).

All speeches and discussions at Zeitgeist are off the record. To ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly, no press coverage or blogging is permitted.

The hilarious thing about this quote is that it sounds like they are trying to promote openness (i.e. “ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly”) when in fact they are promoting control, closure, and exclusivity as Dave mentioned. I mean what is so open about, what sounds like, a bunch of fearful zealots huddling within a fortress speaking in secret so that no one can attack them (and question their motives in the press or in the blogosphere). Or are you trying to tell me that when these presenters speak on the record they are not speaking openly and truthfully about things because they can’t? Either way you word this, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth and doesn’t make you want to trust these people very much or have a relationship with them.

Businesses need to start waking up and realizing that every action they do (and don’t do) defines their culture. That culture they are defining is in turn influencing and affecting others who come in contact with it. If that culture counteracts the culture that others are trying to promote with their own actions then those people will not want to interact with you because they won’t want to interact with the culture that you are promoting. In a nutshell, you can talk all you want about how great a culture your company has but those interacting with you will define that culture by your actions not words.

For example, by relaying most of my thoughts on this site (even the ones I’m not sure about) anyone can take them and build off of them. Potentially this allows groups of people to collaborate and collectively solve problems or discover solutions which may not have been possible before with just one person. By sharing my thoughts and by being open with them, I’m giving them out in the hopes that we can all become stronger through our shared knowledge.

Of course my focus is on creating a better world, not making craploads of money. Therein lies the problem I think. When people start talking money, that’s when the walls are built, fear starts to spread, and people start whispering their ideas behind closed doors. That’s when the old culture of business begins to clamp down on things. When you talk about changing the world though, borders are broken, hope is spread, and people start shouting their ideas from their rooftops to as many people as they can reach.

We need to promote this open culture because it is the culture that every good relationship is built upon. It is the culture of the world.

I’m exhausted and ready to hit the sack but I just had another thought that I wanted to get down before I forget. The more I think about what I’d like to achieve here with this idea of connected communities the more I realize that technology alone won’t achieve this. These are my exact same thoughts I had before when I spoke of businesses trying to blog. I said that just because you are using blogging software isn’t doesn’t mean you are blogging. Spewing out a business press release on a blog isn’t going to make your business look and sound any better, no matter how you package it. For the change to occur it has to come from inside of your company. In other words, it isn’t so much a technological change as much as a cultural change that needs to take place. And as difficult as that technological change is to undertake, the cultural change will be ten times harder. That is why so many companies just don’t get it and, more importantly, don’t want to get it. They don’t want to accept the cultural change which will totally change how their business will work and operate.

So what am I talking about when I speak of a cultural change? Well, I hinted at this before in my post entitled I Work For The Web where I said that “I work for a daring, imaginative, adventurous, sharing, caring, diverse, open, trusting, honest, flexible, responsible, and connected company.” I’m talking about how the Web works and also the type of company I’d like to work for. If you break down those traits and look at them closely, they’ll show you a way for groups of people to work collectively together as equals on shared goals to achieve things that we never dreamed possible before. More than anything, this type of culture breeds passion, something that every Fortune 500 company dreams of creating in their employees because of the efficiency and productivity it creates. But that’s the problem with these companies again. They just don’t get it. You can’t force passion into a person. It has to grow from within them. Their surroundings, the culture of the company that they are immersed within, will help that passion to breed and grow. Therefore to breed this passion, you need to literally change the culture of your company and effectively alter how you work and operate.

Now the thing to realize is that I’m not just talking about businesses here, I’m talking about any organizational structure in our society, be it business, political, whatever. In effect, yes I’m talking about a new way of working and collaborating with one another. Pretty radical to some I’m sure but not as radical when you think about it. I’ve already seen hints of this change underway and groups of people in organizations and businesses already working in this general direction (and talking about it). Over time I think we’ll start seeing more and more of it. As usual, change often doesn’t happen overnight but is like a snowball rolling down a hill, building slowly up until at the last minute it comes out of nowhere and bowls you over! 🙂

And now if I tell you that my psuedo name that I use when playing online is “Gentle Nova”, maybe you’ll understand why I called myself that. You see, yes, change is constant but it may not always be evident. Yet if you stop and listen, more often than not you’ll feel the ground gently rumbling beneath your feet and see the signs of it as it approaches from across the horizon. By then you’d better brace yourself though, because once it arrives there’s no stopping it. 🙂

Back a few years ago when I used to play first person shooter games quite frequently, I often helped other players by sharing with them the knowledge and experience I had acquired over the years. One piece of knowledge that I always passed on, time and time again, was the importance of utilizing situational awareness when playing as a team. With it, you could almost always overcome any opposing team, even if their individual skills surpassed those of your own team members. The reason being is that with situational awareness a team almost became like a symbiotic entity reacting instantly and immediately to different situations and threats without being slowed down by a central command and control. In effect, no single person in the team gave orders to the others, instead everyone relayed their situation and everyone else in turn reacted on their own to assist the other people in the group when the need arose.

One such perfect example was when we were playing a team who we felt we were on par with or possibly even exceeded with regards to our individual skill levels. However, after a few rounds of play we quickly realized we were doing something wrong. Round after round, we stuck close together, preplanned our moves in perfect detail, and then proceeded to get slaughered by the opposing team. Finally after being frustrated round after round, I said at the start of a new round “Forget it! Just do whatever you want!” Can you guess what happened? We won that round of course. And as soon as we had, I had know what I had been doing wrong. I had been trying to force my team members to work the way I wanted them to (through a central command and control approach) instead of trusting their skills and judgement to maximize their own unique strengths in overcoming the enemy. In effect, we were playing incorrectly as a rigid centralized perfect team against a well connected yet flexible decentralized team. We didn’t stand a chance, as we were like a bear trying to swat at a million bees buzzing around us.

Now for more information of what situational awareness is and what it can do for people working on collective goals, the US Coast Guard has an interesting site that talks about it in detail. Of particular interest is this quote below.

Effective team situational awareness depends on team members developing accurate expectations for team performance by drawing on a common knowledge base.  This concept, known as maintaining a “Shared Mental Model” allows team members to effectively:

• Anticipate the needs of other team members.
• Predict the needs of other team members.
• Adapt to task demands efficiently.

To ensure a Shared Mental Model of the situation, team members must share their knowledge relative to:

• The task and team goals.
• Their individual tasks.
• Team member roles and responsibilities.

To provide a solid base for building team situational awareness, team members need to have information that will help them develop relevant expectations about the entire team task.

I don’t know about you but that has collective thinking written all over it for me especially when they mention the “Shared Mental Model”.

BTW one very important fact that I forgot to mention is that for this situational awareness to work, the rules for team collaboration had to be extremely simple. For us, it really all came down to what we called the “10 Second Rule”. If another team member relayed a situation that we knew would put him at risk (i.e. multiple enemy inbound!), then we had 10 seconds to decide what we wanted to do and to respond. If he didn’t hear that response then he knew he was on his own. If he did hear a response (i.e. Affirmative, on my way!) then he knew that help would be showing up within 10 seconds as well (which means the person responding knew they had to get there in that time before confirming action). That’s really it though. A single simple rule. Everything else came down to combat training (i.e. when this type of situation occurs then here are a few ways to react to it) which created this “Shared Mental Model”. And that shared mental training allowed everyone to take action as they saw fit, being flexible enough to handle every situation, and yet also allowed everyone to work on the “same page” as well.