Have you ever gone out of your way to eat at a restaurant just so you could regain your mayorship on Foursquare? A little bit of friendly competition can be a powerful way to change behavior. There is a corollary in the enterprise, and it goes far beyond location. Making the transformation to a social business is going to require new technology, and changes in process and culture. Recently I met with the leadership team from a Houston-based company named ChaiOne who is tackling this opportunity.
Tribes
While Foursquare is an individual competition, Tribes puts people into teams to accomplish quests and earn rewards for business outcomes like completing an e-learning course, or submitting your time report. You and your tribe grow experience points by doing things like sharing knowledge. Each Tribe has a leader, and members can even switch tribes if they have the permission of both Tribe leaders. If you are into such topics as game theory, social psychology, and game mechanics you will understand how this goes far beyond the simple mayorship or a completion badge.
When there’s an impetus and/or incentives that make people want to contribute, participate, and collaborate in achieving goals, your organizational culture fundamentally changes.
Behavior Modification
The recurring theme heard in every organization’s journey into becoming more social, is how to change the company culture to lose its command and control attitude, organize itself more like a network, be more collaborative, and to stop hoarding and start sharing information.
What better way to change behavior than to introduce elements of gaming and competitiveness? Think of the Foursquare leaderboard. Everybody wants to see their name in the Top 10. What if your Tribe is depending upon you to complete a task for success? Peer pressure is also a powerful motivator. You might just find that people are turning in their expense reports on time for a change, completing that online e-learning program that they’ve been neglecting, or finishing quarterly reviews of their staff.
Mindfulness
In Kate Niederhoffer’s talk at the Social Business Summit in Austin, she referred to a study in social psychology by Elliot Aronson in 1992 that showed that you could change someone’s behavior if they were made aware of an issue, and made a commitment to change their behavior. Not changing creates a hypocrisy condition that introduces an uncomfortable level of cognitive dissonance. One way to make people mindful of a desired behavior is to make a commitment to the rest of their Tribe, and to be on a continual quest to earn badges and points for desired business outcomes.
An example of this might be an employee who you would like to attain a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification status. Rather than just another task, this could become a quest in which the employee is made aware of the benefits of the PMP course knowledge, and makes a commitment to their Tribe to complete the quest. Having the quest badge uncompleted on their intranet page for all their Tribemates to see creates constant mindfulness of the task. Someone in a mentor role could also assign points or other benefits for using PMP principals on-the-job.
The Push/Pull of Your Team
Applications like Foursquare and Gowalla are in their infancy, but it is this type of technology, attention to culture and behavior change, combined with support for processes that will help organizations become more socially calibrated.
The way that we work, interact, and reward people in the enterprise of tomorrow will be very different. How likely is your organization to adopt similar concepts?
What’s the reference to plows and equally yoked? Are you saying the users are chattel in your eyes? Is it a reference to the dating service for religious extremists? I’m lost by the title which does not appear to correlate to anything written in the post body.
Since you’re anonymous, and I can’t tell anything about you, let me start with the obvious. Work animals are yoked together to accomplish tasks like plowing. When one doesn’t pull their weight, it makes the job tougher on the other one.
In any system that is comprised of people, some pull their weight and others don’t. If you can create some transparency around the completion of goals and targets, you may be able to change behavior among the under-performers. Much in the same way that people try to game the system with Foursqare by checking in at locations when they aren’t really there, people are sure to try to game a system like Tribes.
Excellent post Bryan!
Like all other posts really, I love how individual versus group and human behaviour is being increasingly brought under the attention. Ellen, Caroline, Brian: fantastic posts, thank you very much
Alex William’s post is interesting but the 2 years prediction made by Hugh is daring if not just wild. I’m employed by a sizeable enterprise as you might know, and all my customers are (multi)nationals or Global100 companies, and I do get around – and haven’t seen or heard of more than a wiki here and there, a blog or two, and some Yammer use
It is getting there, sure, but very slowly. 5-10 years in order to become mainstream and settled, but not 2
There’s a big difference between social and enterprise, however. The rule on the internet is absence: we connect across Usenet, IRC, peer-to-peer networks and now social networks. Why? Because we’re disconnected by distance. The enterprise rule is the opposite: presence. We all stand in the same traffic jam in the morning in order to make it to the same location so we can sit next to each other and do (sometimes completely) different things
No, that doesn’t make much sense anymore, even less and less these days, but still
So we can socialise across an enterprise, which is pretty much the same as striping a RAID array: connect the dots vertically as well as horizontally. Makes stuff a lot faster! and redundant as well
But can we use location within an enterprise? It doesn’t make much sense to me in a traditional one, where you have one huge building that forms the single location for your enterprise, with a front door for visitors and a back door for suppliers
In fact, “knowing where your people are” might keep ye olde control centre in place even more than we like or need to
But incentives and impetus within an enterprise? Can’t have enough of those really, as long as they’re fair and square. It touches the Knowledge idea submitted into ideascale: if you make it easy, cosy and fun, it will be so much greater and more valuable than plowing through KM silo’s with faceless docs and presos by the (hundreds of) thousands
I find that there’s always room for mindfulness / deepening relationships within an enterprise. Everytime I do, I’m astonished at the relative ease with which such happens, and the depth it can have. On a business level, but also on a personal level. Business intimacy leads to personal intimacy leads to an increased effort to “strive”, “do your best”
I’ve also found that absence of reward and punishment leads to what I call “faceless bureaucratic institutions” that are one step away from extinction. And they hold very, very unhappy people that don’t protest or object out in the open, but just do what they want in perfect isolation. http://www.martijnlinssen.com/2010/02/maybe-your-company-is-just-beyond.html contains more thoughts on that
I sure see lots of opportunities for a more mindfull approach towards “goals” or KPI’s as they’re sometimes called (how unattractive and generalised some stuff is, in enterprises – maybe even renaming some will help greatly). These (certificates, grades) are mostly tick-off-the-box and not very satisfying. I keep track of our annual grading nominations, go through them all (hundreds!) and make a point of contacting those colleagues I want to contact. Usually, they’re very surprised and happy or even proud to be congratulated
I remember when a few dozen of us Dutch worked across in the UK, “taking the bus” (plane) home on Friday. People would drop everything on Thursdays around 2 PM because that was exactly 24 hours before the Friday flight home – online check-in time! and the fight-for-the-best-seat
I quickly spoiled all the fun by claiming a seat while booking, and making reservations up till 6 weeks ahead – I do like to win while cheating
But it gave us a common topic, and during the few weeks of “competition” every single one came up with smart ideas and sometimes dirty tricks to win – all in good fun of course. I was pleasantly surprised by the degree of pursuit of that goal
I see great use in forming tribes. It’s a step towards hives, and this way it’s a safe way to virtualise it within the existing enterprise, put it to the test, and tailor it to your needs. Because I’m absolutely positive that the 100K+ people enterprises will not exist in the very same form in 5 years from now
That’s a good point about how the public social applications deal with users that are spread out and isolated, while inside the enterprise people are more co-located. Perhaps that could reduce the ways to game the system if there is more real world proximity.
Regarding your comment about certificates and grades, I’m reminded of how powerful these can be. I’ve seen cube dwellers assign precious wall space to certificates of achievement from many years past. Many times right next to pictures of friends and family.
I’ll stick by my two-year transition from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0. There are really two separate aspects of Foursquare and Gowalla that may end up there: game mechanics and location check-ins.
Bryan’s post is a good look at the former. And you’re right – the gaming mechanics are not new in some ways. Achievements and recognition have always been an important of work life. What’s different is the incredible amount of activities that can be tied in thanks to the advance of digital platforms.
Hey Bryan – great article. We should talk – my company has a software platform that provides game mechanics (including teams) as a service. Our customers are using it to motivate customer and employee behavior. Drop me a line at partners [at] bunchball.com
Bryan, thanks for the opportunity to respond.
“Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward sign of the change. It has not been openly assailed, no conspiracy has been formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly secede; day by day a few of them abandon it, until at last it is only professed by a minority. In this state it will still continue to prevail. As its enemies remain mute or only interchange their thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of uncertainty they take no steps; they observe one another and are silent. The majority have ceased to believe what they believed before, but they still affect to believe, and this empty phantom of public opinion is strong enough to chill innovators and to keep them silent and at a respectful distance.
We live at a time that has witnessed the most rapid changes of opinion in the minds of men; nevertheless it may be that the leading opinions of society will before long be more settled than they have been for several centuries in our history; that time has not yet come, but it may perhaps be approaching.” – Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book II, Chapter 20
Human Action Never Kowtows to Human Design
The most fascinating aspect of this post, for me, specifically, and business intelligence, generally, is the that “business” is finally identifying that by aligning enterprise design and organization with the natural, dynamic actions of the individuals that comprise the organization–what “We’re” now calling social business design–enterprise can not only be more agile and garner greater visibility across the organization, but also streamline to the delivery of the organization’s customers’ immediate need, in real time. (This polemic is old as the day is long in economic circles–a polemic that rather than integrating action and design, pitted them against one another. Case in point: Austrians and Keynesians, respectively.) More precisely, in plain English: business leaders, managers, and individuals cultivating value within the framework of the enterprise are finally extending their imagination beyond narrow milieus to the biggest questions of social structure, culture, and conflict (productive friction). More and more, these individuals appear more like actionable entrepreneurs , so that the greatest strength of the enterprise is no longer its greatest weakness. (Frankly, this should/could be Dachis Group’s tag line.)
Reports are static and not interactive; real time communication, in all its forms, is dynamic and can be stored so that leaders and managers can get a bottom-up understanding of their organization AND, most importantly, the value and characteristics of the individuals participating within the organization–a process that could essentially reinvigorate the principles of merit. Those not participating in the success in their own right, and certainly not for the success of the organization can no longer hide behind the aggregate numbers and businesses are no longer valuating people, arbitrarily.
Historically, the aggregate sum and analysis of social systems whether in the form of enterprise management or economic centralized planning, while devoutly quantitative, rarely if ever approaches the qualitative; and yet as time marches on, the deference to numbers without a face, without a soul, applied to a relatively arbitrary unit measure, creates a lack, a lack that permeates an entire team, an entire organization, an entire community, an entire state, an entire country.
Anecdotally Speaking…
Imagine if Microsoft’s xbox 360 live development team was communicating with the Siri development team, only to realize that when gaming their plow, the integration of Siri’s semantic search to Xbox’s communication network amongst networked game players could deliver targeted hyper local advertisements to convert in real time? When playing EA Sports Tiger Woods 10 for Xbox from my entertainment room in Austin with my buddy in Houston, I mention to my friend that I am hungry for pizza (it has happened before), and within seconds a banner appears in the top right corner of the screen that Yum Brands’ Pizza Hut was running a special on a new soy cheese pizza they were introducing to the market, only to extend a deeper deal to my friend if I converted and ordered the pizza from my gaming console? Is this delivering value? Absolutely. I asked for it; you delivered it… everyone from me, my friend, the organization supporting networked gameplay, the advertiser all win. And the technology is available right now, but these two dev teams in their respective production silos are clearly not talking; and most advertisers within gaming environments are only using the medium for brand awareness, which is too bad, cause awareness in B2C does little to promote velocity in the market in the short-term. Dev teams for Microsoft working in silos might take months or years to come together and bridge that opportunity… unless they have a system that allows participants to harness the power of internal, voluntary communication exchange regarding the good stuff their respectively working on.
Imagine the application in a co-operative learning environment, the mission based social benefit organization that needs to deploy personnel to the filed in order to dig water wells, the government agency that has landed on the ground after a natural disaster… and the immediate, affirmative feedback that can be had by this type of technology… this typ of design based on the fundamentals of free thinking individuals working collectively to accomplish an mutually agreed and contracted end? Freaking Awesome.
Great post Bryan.
Towards creative fidelity,
JS
I could write a book on these questions/issues/observations, and just might, so I won’t belabor it here. Suffice to say, as I’ve said elsewhere before, that “social business” and “enterprise 2.0″ aren’t new thinking. When you talk about a “two-year transition from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0,” I assume you mean from today, because we’ve been talking about Enterprise 2.0 longer somewhat longer than that. We have a sense what that means, but it’s not a technical implementation, but a culture change, and culture changes is hard. If it takes longer, that’s why. For some, it will feel like their world is falling apart.
Whole Foods Market was pretty effective at using individual goals and commitment to further the goals of the organization within a more social framework, some time ago, without the more pervasive social technologies we have today. The WFM culture was considered unusual back then, more decentralized and entrepreneurial, and generally pretty satisfying for those who worked there. It evolved that way; it’s much harder for a more traditional top-down or command-and-control structure to become more of a network with flatter hierarchies and omnidirectional communication. One challenge is in determing how leadership works in that context. There’s a tendency to have ad hoc groups form with emergent leadership, but also sometimes without effective leadership. Nominal assigned or appointed leaders don’t necessarily have a handle on information and action in a network context. Supporting with yammer and wikis and other tools won’t necessarily work without a culture assessment and change and a reconsideration and realignment of business processes. A company going 2.0 without managing that change effectively could be challenged (I don’t want to say “train wreck,” but it’s possible). (Also challenging to merge companies that are more into the network approach with those that are not).