Being Helpful is the New Black: Building a collaborative culture and accelerating organisational learning and strategic renewal

Annalie Killian (aka @maverickwoman)
Catalyst for Magic
22 April 2010

Thursday, 22 April 2010 1

Source: Edgar H Schein, Book called “Helping” http://www.bkconnection.com/ProdDetails.asp?ID=9781576758632

Relationships have 2 parts: 1. The first we can call social economics. Its about an exchange, a reciprocity, its about fairness and its about equity. The second is
about theatre- the scripted roles we play out and behaviours deemed appropriate given specific situations

Therefore: If all cultures are governed by the rules of equity and reciprocation that define how we value each other in our relationships, then what are the social
currencies that are exchanged?

They are love, attention, acknowledgment, acceptance, praise, and help. Help in the broadest sense is, in fact, one of the most important currencies that
flow between members of society because help is one of the main ways of expressing love and other caring emotions.


So what is the new idea and what is the old world view that its replacing?

The New World is the Digital Networked economy and its replacing the physical world of centralised production and proprietary IP. But while its
strictly speaking not really new......the full implications of how disruptive this is to all 20th century business models are only now beginning to
become understood- a classic hype curve where long term implications were hopelessly underestimated or misunderstood

The digital world is not an extension of the old, its a flip. It’s a flip from what used to be scarce and making that abundant. - Its not only a flip from a physical good
to a virtual good, its also a flip of the distribution from physical to distribution via networks.

It’s a flip from means of production in the hands of those with capital to means of production in the hands of anyone (with a network connection and
tools as basic as a phone- a few hundred dollars! )

Its location independent- it lives in the cloud and you can buy and pay as you go. Physical production assets cheap, affordable, non-specialised, in
hands of end users

And what used to be abundant, is now scarce. These things are trust, and attention.
Suggested reading:
Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Miscellaneous-Power-Digital-Disorder/dp/0805080430

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/

The cognitive surplus from an era where only a few could produce and the rest of us passively consumed (wasting our cognitive talents) ended thanks to the
decentralisation of production and distribution of information, culture and knowledge and means of production being affordable, non-specialised, in hands
of end users. Even access to capital is going micro through the likes of emergent microlending financial institutions like KIVA
is now being applied to create and participate man’s search for meaning has found an answer. Quote by Philipe Starcke. There is no requirement for genius but
everyone must participate.

From passive consumers to prosumers...Both Producer AND consumer

Suggested further reading on ths subject: Clay Shirky, “Here comes Everybody” http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/

Marginal cost of production is zero. Speed and agility and benefit to consumers enormous. But a massive drag for organisations still locked into physical assets,
long-term pricing contracts, licenses

Example: Lonely Planet free apps for people trapped in strange cities die to Iceland Vulcano’s ash grounding planes: The ability to be helpful, and create customer
value in real time, is only limited by ingenuity and imagination, not cost of production or distribution.


You want proof of the gift economy?

185000 iphone apps built in 2 years with no centralised production facility, structure or order and without salary

500 million blogs since 2004

1 billion clips created by amateurs/ non-broadcast media companies and distributed without intermediaries between 2005 and March 2010

Search is built by every one of us every time we search. Our labour providing the value that becoms Google. Do we complain? No! Because in terurn, Google
gives us free value and free search. And those who are competing for our attention are the ones who pay.

Countless exaples, eg 10 000 updates to correct and update Google maps every hour of every day by consumers

The Cluetrain Manifesto roared into the Webʼs consciousness in 1999, declaring “the end of business as usual”. The authors, 4 internet experts, led leaders
through the new reality of the networked marketplace with their 95 theses, starting with “All markets are conversations” and people are at the heart of it all.

Some listened, and went on to builds some of the wealthiest businesses the world has ever experienced. But many never took delivery of the messages delivered
by that train- and to this day, the train still pulls in daily with evidence that business models, leadership styles, workplace organisation, job structure, training
practices, rewards and cultures of the past are being flipped by the renaissance that the internet age has ushered in.

Leaders are bewildered as they do not understand that the future is no longer a linear extension of the present….you cannot just add another assembly line or
country to your global portfolio to grow….or throw more bodies, training or money at people to get the optimal workforce.

And what they understand least of all, is that there are no longer boundaries around a company. We are both inside and outside them and connected 24/7 by
devices and by hyperlinks. To each other, and to our customers, competitors, suppliers, governments.

Its time to find a cure for Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder - its time to imagine entirely new roles , new reasons, new worlds.

The Cluetrainʼs 5 main things:

Itʼs a philosophy- a set of values, a mindset in which people rediscover their humanity

It is about the way people engage with customers
It is about the way people engage with their colleagues
It is about the way people engage with people
It is about the changes that take place as people begin to engage with people again.

Itʼs about the return to social economics and the social currency we exchange in our human relationships, love, attention, acknowledgment,
acceptance, praise, and help.

So, hence my argument that being HELPFUL is the new currency. And...it has a name. Its called WHUFFIE (Not to be
confused with Buffy)

term coined by Cory Doctorow, creator of popular Boing Boing Blog to describe Social Capital in his futuristic science fiction novel" Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" . In this future,
Whuffie is the only currency used. All other currencies: gold, dollars, euros, renminbi- will disappear.

The rise of Social Capital. Whuffie is the residual outcome- the currency- of your personal reputation. Its lost or gained based on positive or negative actions, your contribution to the
community, and what people think of you.

The measurement of your Whuffie is weighted according to your interactions in specific settings. So, in your local neighbourhood where yu have a known reputation for being helpful, your
Whuffie is higher than when you travel to another neghbourhood where no-one knows you. But, the members of that community can "ping" my Whuffie to find out whether I can be trusted,
but I have to earn my Whuffie in that neighbourhood by being helpful there too. This is done in 3 ways, according to the story: By being nice, by being networked and by being notable.

If you need anything in this futuristic world- you pay for it with your Whuffie. You dont carry it with you in a wallet, its stored in your person and anyone can ping your internal computer to
figure out how much whuffie you are worth.

This may be a science fiction story, but in every online community where the bias of connection is trust, Whuffie is more valuable than money and cannot be bought or acquired without being
helpful or nice.

Whuffie is the currency of the gift economy. Like creativity, ideas and passion are discretionary gifts. In the gift economy, the more you give away, the more Whuffie you gain. Its also not easy
to hoard Whuffie for a rainy day- it has to keep circulating to remain current. IF I use my Whuffie to raise yours, there is a net increase in Whuffie for both of us and as it circulates in this
manner, it inherently connects people. This is the key to creating wealth online.

Recommended reading: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow ( Free download here: http://craphound.com/down/?page_id=1625)
The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt http://www.thewhuffiefactor.com/

http://ww.klout.comInsert Annalie personal experience of Whuffie when booking
holiday in NY at

http://www.klout.com
http://www.thewhuffiebank.org

My personal story of Bryant Park Hotel

Websites that measure social capital/ Social influence:

http://www.klout.com and http://www.thewhuffiebank.org/


But, is this what we experience in organisations?

Peter Drucker said:
Most of what we call management consists of making it difﬁcult for people to get their work done. In fact, its the opposite of being HELPFUL.

Enterprise 2.0 adoption (or shall we say the socialisation of the enterprise through the freeing of information ﬂows, distributed decisionmaking and social
networking) has seen a spectacular lag. Why is this? Lets pause and consider for a moment the rise and fall of empires.

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of
remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich
traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving
little but archeological sites as evidence. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it.

Although radically abbreviated, Tainter’s story goes like this: Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too
inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest
one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change.—
Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society unable to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last
remaining method of simplification.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different
ways than they used to.

But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure
out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Source: Clay Shirky, http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/

Flawed thinking that future is an extension of the past
• 2oth century management models
• Dominant culture business schools
• The drag of successful but outdated mental models, eg Dell, Toyota

•Dearth of Strategic options, No portfolio of strategic plays, emphasis on incremental and product innovation, not business model innovation. Arithmetic of
innovation : 100:1 to get a success. Lack of a disciplined experimentation process/ pipeline
•Leadership mindset as Chief of Answers
•Time poor, fighting fires, not experimenting with personal social networks, creation of digital assets. Immersed in discovering the rules that have shifted the world
from scarcity to abundance

Denial:
• Dismissal of fringe ideas as implausible, inconsequential
• Freemium: can’t compete on free- clinging to old business models
• Stranded cost of capital
• Rationalisation as aberrant or irremediable
• Rush to Defensive action to mitigate
• Finally: Honest confrontation, but often catch-up mode eg Microsoft who originally dismissed the internet
•

Complex modern corporations still organised around the industrial model of production driven by

1. huge investment in capital and production assets
2. reliability thinking- the formula for replicability with absolute consistency the “assembly line” – division of labour, specialization of tasks and reduction of variation-
a hamburger reduced to 57 repeatable steps, and then produce it the same all over the world in less than 20 years
•The economics of scarcity and proprietary - value comes from limiting/ limited supply not giving it away for free - artificially created-scarcity if necessary to ensure
profits

Allocational rigidity and lack of flexibility in resource allocation
• Overfunding status quo, new initiatives begging
• ROI disease does not allow for emergent business models

Motivation - Three core motivators, each with two sides

My Behavior Model highlights three Core Motivators: Sensation, Anticipation, and Social Cohesion. Each of these has two sides: pleasure/pain, hope/fear,
acceptance/rejection.

The Core Motivators apply to everyone; they are central to the human experience.To illustrate my concept of Motivation, I took the photographs below in Oslo’s
Vigeland Sculpture Park.

Recommended reading: http://www.behaviormodel.org/

What Causes Behavior Change? Story of Dr BJ Fogg and Stanford Persuasive Technologies Lab at AMPLIFY2009

My Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior
does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.

In order to perform a target behavior, a person must have the ability to do so. We often assume people have more ability than they really do and we MUST test
these assumptions.

There are two paths to increasing ability. You can train people, giving them more skills, more ability to do the target behavior. That’s the hard path. Humans are
lazy, stick with beaten path.

The better path is to make the target behavior easier to do. This is to create Simplicity. By focusing on Simplicity of the target behavior you increase Ability.

Key insight: Simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource (remember attention is a new scarcity in the digital economy?) Think about time as a
resource, If you don’t have 10 minutes to spend, and the target behavior requires 10 minutes, then it’s not simple.

The third element of the Fogg Behavior Model is Triggers. Triggers are about getting people to act in the moment, do it NOW! Without a Trigger, the
target behavior will not happen. Sometimes a Trigger can be external, like an alarm sounding. Other times, the Trigger can come from our daily
routine: Walking through the kitchen may trigger us to open the fridge. The concept of Trigger has different names: cue, prompt, call to action,
request, and so on.

sensation
is a core motivator

Pain and Fear are more powerful motivators to action, but they don’t serve you in a collaborative culture. To build a collaborative culture, the leadership
interactions should be designed around pleasure. The seduction of the princess rather than slaying the dragon!

Its that all saying....people can forget and forgive what was said, but how it made them feel, never. Feelings are visceral and linger much longer in our memory

anticipation
is a core motivator

Hope is what distinguish us from animals...the ability to imagine a better tomorrow so that we can avoid being paralysed by the awfulness of a current situation.

Appeal to a higher order purpose whenever you can and paint vivid pictures that pull people to that scenario. It typically works best with highly engaged, curious
people and experimental learners. Find them and focus early adoption on them.

Social collaboration tools give you a voice, enables you to craft an argument and you can be the CEO of your own media company and influence outcomes or
change the world if you want! .
Career progression - people’s ability to influence and build relationships are the distinguishing leadership characteristics for progression in any organisation-
including a wireacrchy- especially a wirearchy

social cohesion
is a core motivator

Growing your social capital and making this visible plays to this motivator. At AMP, we make visible number of views on all content created as well as star ratings
and without any prompt on our behalf, people start adjusting the quality of their contributions to increase their scores.

David Snowden/ Mary Boone:Leading in a complex system: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2007/09/leadership_complexity.php
Style: Probe, sense and respond

Increase levels of interaction/ communication & rate of information flow

Open up large group discussions - online, in Barcamps, in values jams like IBM and let the new culture emerge, or Ideas Jams and let “Smarter Planet” strategy
emerge

Encourage dissent/ diversity of opinions and tolerate ambiguity

Dissent and formal debate are valuable communication assets in complex contexts because they encourage the
emergence of well-forged patterns and ideas.

Audience question: How much dissent flourishes in your organisations or are dissenters regarded as anarchists like this bloke?

Quote study by Detert and Treviño: Speaking to Higher ups: How Supervisors and Skip-Level Leaders Influence Employee Voice, Organization Science 21(1), pp.
249–270, © 2010 INFORMS
structures that limit honest communication across ranks (Fuller 2003, Leavitt 2005). Link http://orgsci.journal.informs.org:80/cgi/reprint/21/1/249

Employees carry “Scripts” just like leaders, and the scripts of authority and risk of challenging authority run deep into our childhood experiences, and are
carried forward from organisation to organisation. It takes EXTRAORDINARY leadership effort to create dissent.

Tips: 1. If you are a dissenter, bring in an expert to say it on the turf of the leaders. One may not be enough, you may have to create a movement!
2. If you area leader, go to the employee’s turf- don’t let them come to yours. Open door policies reinforce hierarchy and open plan offices go no further in
erasing these “scripts”
3. Be careful about too much management presence in your early social media experiments and your moderaration of “inappropriate” stuff. Let the
community self-regulate. Trust that it will...and IT WILL!

Create experiments + environments that do not require a strict ROI

• Stimulate attractors.
Attractors are phenomena that arise when small stimuli and probes (whether from leaders or others) resonate with people. As attractors gain momentum, they
provide structure and coherence. EBay again provides an illustrative example. In
1995, founder Pierre Omidyar launched an offering called Auction Web on his personal website. His probe, the first
item for sale, quickly morphed into eBay, a remarkable attractor for people who want to buy and sell things. Today,
sellers on eBay continue to provide experimental probes that create attractors of various types. One such probe, selling
a car on the site, resonated with buyers, and soon automobile sales became a popular attractor.

Set boundaries, don't define processes

Example: Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have always done it their own way.

Nowhere is this attitude reflected more vividly than the opening letter included in Google's regulatory filing for its initial public offering in 2004. Dubbed "'An Owner's
Manual' for Google's Shareholders," the seven-page letter is an organizational manifesto crafted by the co-founders to map out Google's credo as a public
company that goes against most principles for operating a public company.

Authored by Page, the letter outlines everything from the triumvirate leadership between the co-founders and CEO Eric Schmidt to its promise to do no e "evil" by
sacrificing its ideals for short-term financial gains. It promises more spending on employee perks such as free meals, a separate voting structure for executives,
and avoidance of making financial predictions for Wall Street. Instead, the company will focus on long-term priorities that do not have an immediate effect on
earnings.

Manage starting conditions + remove inhibitors

Give staff unfettered staff access at work to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and equip them with appropriate work tools like....iPhones, Smartphones, laptops, Flip
cameras - the stuff your customers are already using and expect you to be delivering services via these devices for them.

How can you expect staff to innovate if you make it impossible to learn and experiment through personal immersion? And one more thing....employ GEEKS- they
love to hack things...what can I make this do as opposed to...what can this do?

Audience question: How many of your e-learning models exist as an iphone App or in short form video stories that can be played on an ipod or iphone? How many
of you are already working on a Kindle or iPad version for your training modules? How many of you are still buying and shipping books in via Amazon? Could you
rather have a team Kindle account ?

Monitor for emergence, then reward

Examples at AMP : Internal whuffie Factor, Webbies, Performance agreements

Recommended reading: Gary Hamel: Future of Management http://www.garyhamel.com/

Dramatically accelerate the pace of strategic renewal & learning (example AMPLIFY FESTIVAL see http://www.amplify.amp.com.au)
Increase rate of information flow
Poke holes in the fire-wall, bring outside in
Open up large group discussions
Diversity - gender, culture, experience, discipline, style

http://www.amplify.amp.com.au

Full details at http://www.amplify.amp.com.au

Another example is AMP’s monthly Social Media Cafes and Infobites

Make innovation everyone's job, in every function, every day ( IDEA FRONTIER)
•End creative Apartheid
•Capacity and ability
•Audience questions: Ask entry-level employees randomly the following questions. If the answers are not what you believe it ought to be, DO SOMETHING
ABOUT IT.
1. How are you equipped to be a business innovator? What training have you received? What tools do you have access to?
2. Do you have access to a coach/ mentor if you have an innovation idea? Is there an innovation expert that you can g to for help in developing a breakout idea?
3. How easy is it to get access to experimental funding? How long would it take you to get approval to spend a $5000 on seed funding? How many layers of
bureaucracy will you have to go through?
4. Is innovation formally included in your job description? Does you compensation depend in part on your innovation performance?
5. Do your company processes - budgeting, planning, stafﬁng and reward and recognition processes support or hinder your ability to innovate?

Yammer (Internal Twitter) Increased connectivity and free flow of information. Unfettered access, free flow and random, serendipitous discovery and new
connections form. (Refer Metcalfe’s law)

Less management, more freedom
Less hierarchy, more community
Less rah-rah and exhortation, more higher order purpose and self-actualization
More spirituality, less bureaucracy
Examples: Blossomatwork, Film Festival, IT Makes a difference, Creativity Tapas/ Cupcake Camp, Music Jamming
sessions, Story Slams. Experimental unstructured environments for serendipity eg Yammer . Rypple


Experiments at AMP: Blossom at work

This is not a weekly
newsletter- its a blog
round-up of a range of
interesting links to all
sorts of news and social
media content on our
intranet


Experiments at AMP: blogs not newsletters

#Twaste-up- a Live Twitter experiment to prove how Twitter works - First wine tasting integrated with Twitter as part of our Social Media Cafe. Partner with
Hungerford Hill Wines and had 2 Twitter volunteers assisting us - Whuffie factor only, no remuneration asked. The exchange/ equity is implicit in the situation and
culture of collaboration.

All change starts within us....not someone out there.....so, building a collaborative work culture is no different.

Build your own Whuffie- and here’s how to give and receive help

Live in a state of
Discovery

•Learn to listen
•Learn to probe.
•As open-ended questions that cant have yes/ no answers
•Resist being the Chief of Answers or the smartest guy in the room
•Switch instead to Chief of Exploration mode
•Set aside judgement on data, opinions, and evidence that don’t fit your assumptions

Embrace
Contradiction

•Strategic creation for complex problems is wrought with open conflict and contradiction
•Difficult problems emerge when you break new ground. There is often no evidence, just intuition, and this may differ from the intuition of others
•The process of discovery can be transformative - when we can live with and explore opposing ideas, and cultivate an opposable mind, we create the space to
generate more possibility
•Tips: Notice your discomfort and how you value certainty over uncertainty so that you become familiar with your set point and can push your tolerance level
•Ask yourself what if both the opposing things were correct and true? What if you were wrong? How would you be stifling progress?
•

Sit forward
ENGAGE

Sitting forward is a state of high engagement and involvement. Of readiness to listen, receive learm assist, advance options, create and help make something
meaningful happen.
Its engaging fully, not witnessing, observing or critique

When you sit forward, your energy will signal collaboration and drive many people to exhibit great leadership, brilliant thinking and decisive action

what’s
YOUR
Whuffie?


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