Hack:
Social Architecture (a manifesto)

Here is the thing: it is a common mistake of managers to think they need to start the communities. This is wasted effort because most communities already exist and do not require additional inventor. What they do need instead is support. The first step is to discover the places in your organization where communities have formed around an initiative, an issue or problem. Then you offer them a platform, for example the administrative support of a company-wide program. Another example is a communication platform or a forum to gain recognition within your organization.

You will soon discover the tribal mechanism that underpins the rules and rituals of these communities. The job of a social architect is to discover local tribes, build alliances with tribal leaders and develop influence without authority.

Social Validation

Once you have created a social architecture you need to maintain and develop it even further - NOT by the classic control-based rewards, benefits and allowances but by something that works far better. It is called social validation.

Social validation is the way to value ambassadors and heroes who work hard for a goal. Social validation is done from several directions at the same time: employees, supervisors, colleagues and even competitors. Most important, it happens in real time and according to the dynamics of the new literacy of collaboration.

Until now there was no way to record appreciation in a formal way; but recently the Facebook generation has made us familiar with the "I like" button. Platforms like Yammer and Rypple are well equipped to support social validation with thanks, objectives, medals and formal feedback. But first you will need to provide some structure. This happens in several steps:

1. start looking for communities, ambassadors and heroes;
2. Among the ambassadors, designate a specific roles in function of the program;
3. Honor these ambassadors by asking for their input;
4. Expose the ambassadors to their engagement;
5. Go back to step 3 and continuously perform the loop 3-4-5.

Pimp your Employee Data

From my experience it is very easy to build a system that visualizes the social architecture of your organization. I have been doing this by means of databases for every major ERP roll-out I have been involved in the past 10 years. In short, here are some essential things to remember:

1. The personnel list of the organization is the backbone of such a system
2. Build a list of contexts and roles that people can have in your social architecture and attach employees to the right roles
3. The fun part: as you go people start learning and performing on these roles and thus their status of these roles starts to change from beginner to expert and so on
4. Finally: link it back to what matters to the hierarchy: security and authorizations management and the learning management system of the company.
5. Surprise, surprise… thanks to the rise of social media there is a fifth step! With a little technical support you can chart by any membership of any social network in the same way as you chart a role within a project or a workgroup. These can be both internal and external networks. Next, you can display the "membership" status: is this a light, medium or advanced member?

It gets even more interesting once you integrate the social feedback:

• did this person receive a lot of 'likes' on this particular project?
• is this person a good contributor of that particular community?
• did this person gain enough experience points or endorsements in that community?

The Disclaimer

Before you start inventing badges or a Foursquare-like system to promote or motivate people to be less controlling and more co-creating, consider the following insights of Nilofer Merchant. In a recent article she lists eight reasons why ‘collaboration’ is dangerous. Like it or not, collaboration means that the result of your work is no longer within your immediate control.

While you are raising the bar with relationship management and social architecture, expect some new types of resistance to surface. For example, the free flow of information may be threatening to some, conflicting priorities may come to the surface and the perception may occur that it all comes on top of the daily work.

Merchant concludes: “we can’t manage collaboration well until we acknowledge that it’s fundamentally dangerous.” This sheds a light on the new types of resistance we can expect when implementing collaboration models such as Social Architecture and reminds us that it is always better to start small (for example with a pilot project).

Creating Momentum

So the final question becomes: how will we deal with these new types of resistance? There are five domino blocks that need to fall over before you can kick-off a large-scale organizational change program. What's more: there is a specific order and distance that works best.

1. Sponsorship: Being a fan of the program is not enough. You need someone with the sanctioning power to drive the change all the way through the implementation, i.e.: not only propelling the program out of the harbor, but navigating it all the way to the destination. Sponsorship is about providing the required level of commitment and support to deliver on the promise. This can only be done by someone who has the ultimate control over the resources of your program. (I strongly recommend Daryl Conner's blog for in-depth knowledge on sponsorship)
2. Identity: When the journey is long and the destination is far, people will need something to connect to. This is why program branding is important. Mind you: I did not say 'advertising'. When I say 'identity', I refer to the level of community-building that is needed for people to place their trust upon an uncertain future. The 'brand' or 'identity' of a program works like an emotional bank account: people make deposits and do withdrawals to the same extent as you stick to the promises of your brand. (I have borrowed the concept of an emotional bank account from Stephen Covey's 'Seven Habits')
3. Ownership: When the program is big you will need a team to make it happen. But that's not all: you will also need a team to own it and to maintain it AFTER the program arrived at its destination. People need a social architecture that helps them to connect and share their knowledge. Building such a community is not easy because it is not done with the pressure of authority. Rather, it is done with the gradual and consistent work of going local, being there, and connecting.
4. Urgency: This is the 'now' when a change is needed. It all comes down to defining what 'now' is. Therefore the sponsor needs to have a vision that is broad enough to communicate the destination, and narrow enough to communicate that there is no alternative. (This is where John Kotter's work on the different types of Urgency comes in handy)
5. Parallel Projects: I sometimes nickname them as 'killer whales'; i.e.: social animals who can kill your program. At the start of a program it is very unpopular to start listing all the parallel projects that may possibly hinder the program. It is very uncomfortable to state that other projects will either need to stop or redirect even before your program has delivered any tangible result. Yet I recommend to start this conversation as soon as possible, because killer whales will socially swim along your boat as long as your speed and power is not a threat to them. After that, ... well..., that's a different episode of Free Willy.

The Order Matters

There is a logical order these domino blocks should be placed in. This is the order in which the first domino block will push against the second. The third block will be pushed by the combined energy of the first and the second, and so on.

The Distance Matters

In order to create momentum for your program, these domino blocks need to stand close to one another. This means that the distance between each block should be a maximum of weeks, not months! Else a domino block will fall over and create no effect on the next one. Timing does matter: compression will generate energy from one block to the next.