Instant Karma

You’re in a shuttle orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles an hour. With the sun appearing every 90 minutes or so, and zero gravity to speak of, you try to sleep with a mask over your eyes while being tethered to a stationary object. When you wake it’s to the strains of something ironic and often schmaltzy, perhaps Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly or Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon. Your location in space and your failed attempt at slumber notwithstanding, today you’ll speak with grade school students from a small town in Iowa, be the subject of an IMAX film, and repair a 25,000 pound telescope worth billions in taxpayer dollars.

All those years of academic dedication, all those accusations of being a pocket-protector wearing geek, all the risk…totally worth it.

Because let’s face it. You’ve become the epitome of achievement.

Today you’re a total rock star.

And your fans know it.

∞

NASA’s personality is based on the marriage between exploration and the celebration of human achievement.

Achievement serves as the currency of the NASA economy. When you are part of a team that launches a billion dollar piece of equipment into space,  you don’t have the luxury of slacking off. The mission and your part in it is patently clear.

This is not just the right stuff. This is incredibly serious stuff.

But NASA has wake-up music. Playful morning music. And it has always been that way.

Even in the Apollo-era, NASA crewmembers were not waxen, dispassionate, mission-driven astrophysicists. On the contrary, as Wally, Neil, and Buzz were eminently real and personable. They were often photographed smiling, cajoling each other before getting into a tiny – super tiny – capsule, fixed atop a giant exploding tube.

Sending a manned rocket into space is complex. So complex that the “it’s not rocket science” colloquialism does not apply. You simply don’t get this many expensive, moving parts to launch – complete with happy morning music – without a culture of achievement. NASA’s personality is not permeated by top-down dictates, but on it’s highly professional structure that understands the relationship between individual achievement and group success.

∞

NASA’s reward ecosystem involves the formal recognition of those who support the agency, and NASA has no shortage of enthusiastic fans. So to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission, they gave back to their supporters. At NASA headquarters in Washington DC they hosted a “Tweetup,” complete with astronauts recently returned from the STS-125 mission to service the Hubble telescope. With a participation cap of 150 pre-registered guests, only those closely following NASA (or their lucky friends) would get a reserved seat.

When we signed up for the Tweetup we envisioned a traditionally hosted, cocktail party-style event, where we’d mingle with other attendees and if lucky, steal a brief moment to shake the hand of a featured guest. Instead, NASA’s event resembled a 2.0 styled press conference.  At first we were confused, thinking perhaps NASA didn’t “get it.” Pre-registration? Limiting the number of attendees? No food?! What was with all this formal stuff?

It soon became apparent that this was the perfect Tweetup for NASA culture. The audience was afforded ample interaction with the panel of astronauts, who were affable as well as informative. The Tweetup was exactly what NASA and its fans wanted it to be.   NASA managed to take the Tweetup and approach it from its culture of friendly professionalism.  This yielded mutual rewards.  NASA’s fans rewarded the achievements of the astronauts by knowing in detail what the STS-125 entailed, while the astronauts and NASA returned the favor by rewarding the loyalty of their fans through conversation and validation.

If you can’t find it, it hurts.

People in your organization can’t find others with immediately needed information? That is waste. If they can’t find the information or the resource they need, that too is waste.

Simply saving information in large databases isn’t enough.  Depending on context, people relate to different types of information differently. Knowledge management systems are only as good as their flexibility. Will they let you find the information in a wide array of contexts?

The closer you get to it, findability becomes a more daunting mandate.

Social systems and social search help this by specifically not trying to immediately make sense of or categorize information. Social networks can take a question written in context and translate to other contexts quickly. Your company’s ability to have internal findability directly relates to the strength of its social networks.

Amazing photo by Clavon Clavito

Context is central to how we understand our lives. Social, political, geographic, cultural, artistic, business, … ever way we relate has its own contexts and those contexts are interwoven.

Context is never as simple as we make it out to be.

It moves, it shifts, it changes shape.

Why, then, do we think that products or services we create will be used in a few limited contexts? Why does business use rigid business plans, use cases, and typical customers? Your customers will more often tell you how they use their product.  And their answers may surprise you, but to them the uses are perfectly in context.

Photo by Tonianne

People are imperfect. Rules always have exceptions. When an exception is identified, people create a new rule for the exception. And for the exceptions that spurs. And on and on until we are awash with rules.

Life is filled with exceptions. Therefore, when people are presented with a new rule, they quickly spout all the ways in which that rule doesn’t make sense to them. We immediately see the exceptions.

This leads people to discount the need for strict rules. When confronted with a strict rule, people ask two questions: (1) How long do I have to do this? and (2) How can I avoid doing this?

When we are building a corporate culture, an on-line community, or setting up any group of people, we need to understand the positive and negative roles that rules play.

Photo of Spiral Stairwell at the Vatican by Christopher Chan

Top-down management has become synonymous with business. A rigid, hierarchical structure used to make sense when the cost of information creation, storage, discovery, and distribution was still relatively high. Modern technology has since made vast stores of information immediately accessible and discoverable, dramatically impacting the way people carry out their work.

Quality decisions often result from having the information with which to make them. If the information is accessible, the ability to make decisions is then dispersed throughout the organization. More decision makers means faster decision making. Faster decisions means faster value creation, which ultimately boils down to increased effectiveness and a higher profit margin for the organization.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson

Everything we do, everything we learn, everything we sell requires communication.  People communicating with people. The corporate body’s bloodstream carries information to the individuals who work within it. As information travels, it nourishes and purifies.  If information is held in one place too long, it putrefies.

Outside the organization, information bloodstreams between your company and your clients, your prospective clients, and your peers feed those relationships as well. Increasingly, people are understanding this relationship and are becoming less and less tolerant of interruptions in the flow of information.

Is your company allowing for healthy and ubiquitous information flow? Or have you placed a tourniquet around vital arteries?

Photo by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

When people are on a mission, interruptions dampen their spirits, and create tension. Too many interruptions make people unwilling to act. When people recount fulfilling experiences, they rarely talk about the wonderful delay they encountered.

Is your company actively delaying action on the parts of your best workers?  If they have a goal, is policy or poor record keeping standing in their way? Each of these delays is waste.  Each of these delays compounds those before them.

The healthy and innovative organization understands the balance between the immediate need for information and the legitimate legal, ethical, and political needs for slowing some information. It does not allow the real need for information protection to become an excuse for sluggishness.

Photo by Zoonabar

Information is the lifeblood of business. As it relates to information, “free” is not synonymous with valueless.  Free here means unrestricted movement. Information wants to move around your company. It wants to educate your staff, your customers, and your potential customers. It wants to be shared to generate more value.  The more information you share, the more you increase your mind share … which directly leads to marketshare.

Inside your organization, employees need instant access to all the institutional knowledge their coworkers have created. They need instant access to the knowledge available on the Internet. They need instant access to information generated by social tools like blogs and Twitter. And if you want to demonstrate your commitment to quality and excellence, your customers and potential customers need instant access to information about your products.

Information wants to be free. It needs to circulate for you to reap its rewards.

Photo by Ampamuka

Economies Have Currencies

Groups form to achieve a common goal – to affect change, to create something. It might be a car, it might be a report, it might simply be creating a good time. In order to create, people provide input. As input occurs, the members of the group build “social capital” – the currency of a social relationship.

Business is social at heart.  It therefore finds itself in a dizzying set of social economies, trading in different types of social capital, managing these economies. A successful business must develop an appreciation of what groups value, how to best facilitate value creation, and how to broadcast that value.

Photo by Tonianne

When we find ourselves in need of  things, we often turn to others. Prior to the age of social computing, we had very few tools in our social arsenal to manage large, personal networks. Loose associations – people you know of, but have little contact with – were nearly impossible to track. It’s not just the people that are important, it’s what those people are doing, what they can do, and who they might know. Little contact = little information = little usefulness.

To compensate for this, we turned to institutions for information, recommendations, and inspiration. Newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, and books were the primary channels for vital information. Leveraging directories, compilations, and slowly culled advice from immediate and credible contacts was how work was conducted. Old-boy networks and cronyism naturally developed from this low-bandwidth, social structure.

Today, through social media, we can easily keep tabs on the actions of an unprecedented number of people.  In both our personal and professional lives, we now have access to thousands of people in our network.

Increasingly, our social networks are comprised of networks of weak ties; networks of thousands to which you can present a need and have a very small percentage of people reply to provide a great deal of value.

For business, networks mean rapid solutions to problems, rapid access to markets, quickly discoverable resources, better human resources, improved outsourcing, and reductions in cost and waste.  Understanding the inherent value of associations and rewarding them is a primary step in becoming a 21st century business.

Photo by oddsock