• oscarberg: Social media would be easier to introduce in organizations if it was called “collaborative media”

So easy to picture an angry boss yelling at employees around the water-cooler: “Oi! You lot – stop talking and get back to work! You’re paid to work, not socialise!”

But that tirade misses a key point: what is ‘work’ in the first place? For knowledge-work especially, what is the boundary – if any – between ‘work’ and ‘socialise’? Or, for that matter, between ‘work’ and ‘play’?

Do we work at a new idea? Or do we play with it?

Since all new ideas depend on other ideas, and in practice also depend on critique from others, when is it ours alone? How and when do we ‘socialise’ it? And is that ‘socialising’ work, or play?

‘Social’ means ‘with people’. ‘Collaborate’ literally means ‘to work together’. By definition, collaboration is social. Preventing people from ‘socialising’ in the name of getting more work done is usually an excellent way to prevent work being done: a strange behaviour for a nominal leader of work…

‘Collaborate’ means ‘to work together’. If there’s no real boundary between work and play, the exact analogue would be ‘to collude’ – ‘to play together’. Interesting, then, that ‘collude’ and ‘collusion’ often seem to have only negative connotations – kind of like ‘conspire’, which literally means ‘to breathe against’. Working together is good; playing together is bad: a strange twist of language, perhaps reflecting the dreaded Puritan hatred of pleasure, joy, creativity, laughter.

So yes, “social media would probably be easier to introduce in organisations if it was called ‘collaborative media’”. It would probably be much harder to introduce if it was called ‘collusive media’. For that matter, it might be easier if it was called ‘knowledge-exchange media’. And yet, in reality, they’re all the same: work, play, relate, learn. Just a difference in name; a word. Yet why does it make so much difference? Odd…

Just an idea to work with, anyway. Or play with. Or socialise, perhaps?

For what it’s worth, I posted a comment to his blog, to restate our position and ask him to at last actually tackle those critiques. I was going to post a copy here, but overwrote it by mistake… In the event that McAfee passes it for publication, you can read it there; otherwise a quick summary would be as follows.

The main point that McAfee still refuses to address is that his definition focusses almost exclusively on the software side of the issues, and all but ignoring the social. As McAfee admits, the technology is only an enabler – but he presents it as being the core, which is entirely the wrong way round.

Next, McAfee seems to believe that as the person who coined the term ‘Enterprise 2.0′, this makes both the definition and he himself immune from critique:

I was the first to write extensively on Enterprise 2.0 (the only prior close term I could find was “Enterprise2.0? in a single February 2006 blog post by Stuart Eccles) and the first to define it. I can’t hijack something that I started; the verb in that context is, to use Graves’s phrase, worse than meaningless. It can be hijacked from me, but not by me. I gather that Graves didn’t take the time to familiarize himself with the history of the term.

As it happens, I did indeed “familiarize [my]self with the history of the term” and the terms on which it is based, namely ‘enterprise’ and ‘Web 2.0′. Given the definitions of those latter terms (e.g. FEAF / IEEE-1471, and Tim O’Reilly, respectively), ‘Enterprise 2.0′ is indeed a term-hijack: it places arbitrary and inappropriate constraints upon the context described by each of its parent terms. In that sense, McAfee has indeed hijacked something that he started, by the process of definition itself. Yet he doesn’t seem to be able to understand that point at all – or its implications.

To be blunt, his insistent refusals to face the consequences of that hijack are seriously scary. I wish I could do more about it, but it’s clear he’s not listening, and seems to have no intention of listening, either. So as he himself put it, if in somewhat more dismissive form, probably best not to engage any further.

Underwhelmed indeed: oh well, we tried…

[Addendum: 30 Aug 2009]

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say…

When I posted my reply to Andrew McAfee’s site, I ticked the box asking for email notifications of updates. Just after posting this above, I received an automated-email from the site to say that – perhaps somewhat to my surprise – the reply-post had been accepted there. A short while later I had another auto-email, saying that a comment from Jeannot Muller had also been cleared by Andrew, as the moderator: so I wandered over to take a look. Muller’s comment was indeed there; but mine wasn’t.

So unless something very strange has happened in his website’s workflow – which is unlikely, since it’s a bog-standard WordPress weblog – this suggests that McAfee first approved my comment, and then immediately deleted it so no-one else could see it. Seems likely he’s done the same to others too, as Oscar Berg noted in his comment-post, and later on Twitter:

I get uneasy reading “another term I coined” + only comments with positive critique gets published // applying Web 2.0 in an enterprise context requires an understanding of social media principles, such as openness & dialog // understanding of principles such as openness and dialog need to be reflected in our own behavior

Oscar then suggested that blocking of posts and similar ‘anti-collaboration’ tactics kind of suggests that someone may not be living up to those principles… We might note, though, that one tweet-comment that McAfee did allow through ran as follows:

RT @amcafee New blog post responding to critiques of my E2.0 definition http://bit.ly/1PAySH {don’t mess with a Harvard prof, you will lose}

…and it’s easy to appear to ‘win’, of course, if you actively stifle contradictory critique.

I can understand deleting a comment that contributes nothing: I do so myself, such as to one the other day which in essence said nothing more than “you need psychiatric treatment” and the like. Yet both Oscar and I had genuine concerns that were and are highly material to the ‘Enterprise 2.0′ debate – but seems that McAfee doesn’t want that debate to happen at all. Which is curious behaviour for a professional academic, surely?

Not impressed… underwhelmed indeed…

Every culture has age-old tales about rulers disguising themselves to pass among their subjects, often learning vital lessons about policy and behaviours that otherwise go unreported.

(One key cultural point is that the unwitting providers of those often painful ‘lessons’ must be protected against punishment for their honesty. Much the same theme is echoed by Oscar Berg’s recent post ‘Management by Listening Around‘ on his “The Content Economy” blog, about the processes, practices and ethics of using social software to ‘listen around’ in anonymous fashion for real-world management review.)

Many other traditional contexts have an explicit role to provide that ‘alien view’ function: the court jester, for example, or the formal appointment of an ecclesiastical lawyer as ‘Devil’s Advocate’ in reviewing the life and works of a proposed candidate for Catholic sainthood. In both those cases, though in different ways, one function of the role is to disrupt the groupthink and the ‘yes-men’ mentality, and, if possible, provide a palatable way to break through wishful thinking and face the more subtle complexities of reality. In short, to be an anarchist in the midst of the wishful groupthink-’rules’ and regulations of the realm. Enterprise alien as business anarchist.

Which leads to another theme: the roles of analyst and anarchist within enterprise architecture, and within business in general. To use the mediaeval court metaphor, most of the king’s advisers and elders are analysts: they assess best practice from the past, and extrapolate those lessons to the future. The jester’s job is to think sideways, to parody, critique, disrupt – in short, to be an anarchist – and we might note that whilst there may be dozens of elders all jockeying for the prime positions, there’s usually just the one jester. Sure, there’s humour in the act, but often it’s there only to make the critique more palatable, to use self-deprecation to deflect attack: it’s a serious role with serious responsibilities.

The analyst as ‘insider’; the anarchist as ‘outsider’, alien, Other. For each analyst role in business, there’s a matching anarchist whose role is to bring the analysis down to the ground and get real. Compare the the opposing emphases of the roles:

• causality model
  • business analyst: linear – analysis in terms of assumed rules of derivation
  • business anarchist: non-linear – causal relationships either not identifiable or identifiable only retrospectively (“small pieces loosely joined … always a little bit broken”)
• temporal focus
  • business analyst: before action (plan) or after action (assessment / analysis)
  • business anarchist: during action (‘the Now’)
• management model
  • business analyst: top-down, controls for predictability – emphasis on machines or IT
  • business anarchist: bottom-up, direction for inherent uncertainty – emphasis on people
• scientific analogue
  • business analyst: Newtonian physics as metaphor – mass-markets, large-scale statistics, Taylorist ‘scientific management’
  • business anarchist: chaos-physics as metaphor – ‘market of one’, quantum effects, self-organisation, enterprise as ecosystem
• systems-development approach
  • business analyst: ‘engineering the enterprise’, Waterfall development
  • business anarchist: emergent systems, Agile development

Perhaps the simplest way to summarise is that the analyst relishes taking things apart, but purports to put them together; whilst the anarchist puts things together to work with the real context in real-time, but is blamed for taking things apart in ways that the analysts don’t expect.

That clash is also clear if we merge those summaries above in Cynefin terms:

• business analyst: rule-based + abstract time = ‘complicated’ or ‘knowable’ domain
• business anarchist: non-linear + real-time = ‘chaotic’ domain

…which, in practice, are almost diametric opposites – no wonder there’s a clash.

Yet a key aim of the enterprise architecture must be to provide a framework in which these inherent differences can be resolved. Too often, for example, I’ve seen examples where every nominal business-process is beautifully documented, but what they describe is not how the work is actually done in practice. Management relies on its analysts, but have no grasp at all of what the foreman or equivalent does to keep things moving along as smoothly as possible in the chaos of real-world practice. Anyone can analyse supermarket checkout queues en-masse – the statistics are easy enough to follow, to give average service-times, mean, standard-deviation and the rest – giving rise to the nice illusion of predictability, control. But in the chaos of real queue-flows, the ‘quick-service’ line can easily end up slower than the main checkouts – which hits hard on customer (dis-)satisfaction, for a start. And when it takes longer to get out of the store than it does to select purchases – as seems to occur more often than not in one of this town’s supermarkets – potential customers soon learn to stay out in droves, whether the prices are good or not: price is not the only measure of perceived value here… But the sources of such business issues are all but invisible in statistical analysis: to see them, and to resolve them in business practice, we need the eye of the Outsider, the alien, the anarchist.

Seems an idea worth exploring further, anyway.