A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.5

Practically speaking, will it matter much if UCP and Red Treehouse don’t get a handle on social media? If they never master community collaboration? If they decide not to take all the steps Gartner would have ‘em take to reach the FUSING – or even the FORGING – stage? That takes a lot of work…

Why not just take a pass? 

To Ronald McDonald House of Cleveland: Red Treehouse is just one of your several initiatives and you only have a small staff to support it. Even still, I'd venture to guess you’ve had success growing your network of families, professionals, and organizations this calendar year. Social media's played no role. Why bother even dipping a toe in at this point ? 

UCP: You’re one of the larger health nonprofits, but you’re not some Fortune 500 giant in some crazy-competitive industry. Your reputation's secure. I’m sure donations are steady. Besides, your top priority is your network of affiliates: their work is mostly hands-on, face-to-face, and local. 

   

Either or both of you could opt out gracefully. You could “blame the tools, conclude that social media lacks business value, or assume your organizations simply aren’t ready.” In UCP's case it’d be simple as pie to say that it’s given Twitter (and the like) the old college try but decided to pull back the reins.

Maybe the wizzes at Gartner don’t know what they’re talking about. 
Maybe social media isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. 

In fact... 

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JOHN KOTTER -- Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, author of 18 books, co-founder of Kotter International – THE GREAT JOHN KOTTER DOESN'T SAY A SINGLE WORD ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA in his piece about staying competitive “amid constant turbulence and disruption” in last month's Harvard Business Review. 

What he does say, instead, is that the organizational structures we’ve used in the past “are no longer up to the task of identifying hazards and opportunities soon enough, formulating creative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and implementing them fast enough.” And, organizations need to come up with better ways of continually assessing their operating environments and reacting “with greater agility, speed, and creativity.”

His general solution, or antidote? Involve “more people than ever before in the strategic change game.” Do it in a way that’s economically realistic, i.e., that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. 

Specifically, Mr. Kotter introduces in the article his concept of the DUAL OPERATING SYSTEM: two separate operating systems running in concert, with the second one – a.k.a. the network – employing an agile structure "and a very different set of processes to design and implement strategy.” The job of the network...is to use volunteers (employees and others) to “liberate information from its silos and hierarchical layers and enable it to flow with far greater freedom and accelerated speed.”

Although he doesn't explicitly say it, I take it as a given that he’d be OK with using social media as a means to those ends. Social-media-enabled collaboration is inferred.

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I find the similarities between Kotter’s dual operating system and Gartner’s COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITIES (“a communal structure within the enterprise”) to be remarkable. Both start with the proposition that organizations are being forced to “evolve toward a fundamentally new form.” Both stress the importance of getting smarter faster…

Even their pitches and promises are alike. Namely: Those organizations that get their acts together now (i.e., the ones that take the consultants' advice) will see immediate and long-term success. They’ll be more profitable. They’ll produce better goods and services. They’ll be more competitive. 

They'll win. 

Hmm. 

I wonder how those sorts of messages /promises would be received by the respective management teams at UCP and Red Treehouse. Would they resonate? Inspire? Excite? Would they compel either or both org. to keep exploring social media? To keep learning through trial and error?

I could see where they might miss the mark. Where they might be too removed, too abstract, and too much in the P&L language of business as we've known it --

It's partly because of that that I now want to move away from Gartner (and Kotter) and head in the direction of a trio of thought leaders who make similar and complementary recommendations, who offer their own unique twists, and who in many ways, IMHO, do a better job of getting to the simple essence of things.
 

The guys I have in mind -- John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison -- are big-time business consultants in their own rights. Surprisingly, though, they talk less in terms of "beating back threats" and "outracing the competition" and more in terms of using social media to: DO more. HELP more. ACCOMPLISH more. Success, to them, boils down to the choices and passions of each and every individual with a stake in a given organization.

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It's a personal thing.

Our "new digital infrastructure," as they say, gives us unprecedented opportunities to live up to our potential. Individually and institutionally. If we passionately want to improve and get better faster at what we’re doing, i.e., if we care, we’ll explore and master the new tools and techniques. We’ll move outside our comfort zones. We’ll connect and join forces with talented others who have similar interests.

What advice would they give UCP and Red Treehouse? Being all you can be does depend on your getting a handle on social media. It does matter. Lip service isn’t enough. Dipping one toe in isn’t the answer. Real human commitment is. 

To me it's even more personal. MY DAUGHTER AND OTHER KIDS LIKE HER ARE COUNTING ON YOU to make the smartest possible uses of the resources (you're privileged to have) at your disposal. That's what this social media thrust is about. 

I'd like for you both -- I think it'd behoove management at UCP and Red Treehouse -- to hang in there and learn what the authors of The Power of Pull have to teach: how small moves, smartly made, can set really big things in motion.

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Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don't.*

*from seth godin's BLOG, dateline November 30, 2012: "Non-profits have a charter to be innovators"

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.4.B

My understanding is that the My Child Without Limits forum is actually managed by Inspire, an outfit that builds online health and wellness communities and offers them free to advocacy organizations like UCP. It’s responsible for moderation, technical support, back-end communications, and other day-to-day obligations.

‘Z’at mean that UCP doesn’t know its collaborative stuff?

Nope. It means that UCP chose to outsource in this case. The only thing that counts, anyhow, is the value people do or don't derive. The forum at My Child seems active. Participants seem to like it...

What I can't tell by browsing is if and how UCP benefits. Or if its managers have the know-how and know-what to pull off something like it on their own. And, can they use social media to collaborate communally for other purposes? The foundation for becoming a social organization is in place. But what about the other stuff that sits on top?

To attempt an answer, we still have two wholly home-grown community collaboration efforts we can look at: Life Labs and (one I left out of the discussion in part A) Brave Kids.

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Like My Child, Brave Kids is an issue-specific campaign with its own site: www.bravekids.org. Brave Kids' mission is to serve “children and youth with disabilities and chronic /life-threatening illnesses by providing a support community, information and resources on numerous medical conditions like genetic diseases, autism, cancer, cerebral palsy, ADD, etc.” 

One of the primary goals at Brave Kids is to help kids build connections with other kids based on their similar experiences. Looking to its online community for signs, however -- that hoped-for connection building isn't happening. Participation is anemic. (the flip-side o' what you see at My Child) To date there have been “3 Posts in 2 Topics by 2 Members,” the most recent coming over six months ago.

I could make more or less the same observation with regard to the participation levels at Life Labs. (re: its Google Group and wiki, for examples)

SOCIAL MEDIA, PURPOSE, and COMMUNITY are the three indispensables of community collaboration. I don't see participants in these cases being mobilized to contribute. I don't see collaboration being generated on a meaningful scale, i.e., there's no tapping into the full knowledge, talent, innovation, and energy of large groups of people. The COMMUNITY component is MIA.

One might argue that both sites, both communities, are still relatively young -- to which Gartner would counter: “Social media environments do not grow slowly over time.” 

The harsh reality is that most social media initiatives either fail to attract interest or deliver real value to the organization. Participation doesn’t usually just happen. Keep in mind a key Gartner insight: Community collaboration isn’t primarily a technology implementation. It’s a management challenge. “Let us be clear: if IT alone leads the effort," the authors of The Social Organization say, "you have already stepped off the path to success. Business leadership is crucial." 

Life Labs’ Director is UCP’s IT Director…

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If it is the case that both would-be communities are struggling, what would Gartner do? How would it go about trying to help? Methodically -- it'd start with a complete medical history, so to speak. Performed on macroscopic and microscopic levels:

MACROSCOPIC 

At the level of the WHOLE ORGANIZATION, Gartner would want to look at all the visioning and strategizing activities that lead to okaying the two projects in the first place. It would help UCP assess whether or not community collaboration was an appropriate choice, and help establish (on closer inspection) that both projects were worth pursuing. This'd entail: 

• Making sure the purposes were well formed, and that they clearly articulated the benefits to community members and the value to the organization;

• Doing "grow" assessments to systematically determine if and how the community collaboration efforts should have moved forward;

• Looking at the projects as parts of a coherent portfolio of purposeful communities -- and making decisions about them accordingly.

MICROSCOPIC

At the INDIVIDUAL COMMUNITY level, Gartner would want to focus on all the following steps required to cultivate -- prepare and launch -- a successful community: 

Prepare. A green light (indicating "Yes, we think we're going to want to invest in Life Labs and /or Brave Kids") at the macroscopic level still requires more focused and vigorous efforts to decide if and how to proceed. For each proposed purpose and community, those efforts should have resulted in:

• a purpose roadmap; a malleable plan for its evolution (how the community can evolve to deliver sustained value over time);

• a more formal business justification, one that describes the concrete sources of expected value.

"This combination provides solid footing to progress to the launch phase, where a desired community becomes a reality.”

Launch. A successful launch entails: 

• Exploring and defining the participant experience;

• Creating the right environment (addressing structure, ease of use, choosing the right social media technologies, and more);

• Engaging the community, i.e., grabbing and holding participants’ attention (setting critical mass targets and rapidly driving participation).

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Gartner's overriding objective would be to help UCP build the capabilities to achieve meaningful, repeatable, and significant organizational value with social media technologies -- 

To help UCP hoist itself, in other words, securely onto the FORGING rung.