ROUND THREE: What CP Parents Are For (Part D.2)

We left off talking about the possibility of breaking work -- even something like a writing assignment -- down into smaller bits and inviting other people to help chip away at it. This'd be an example of using collective intelligence: the pooling of small and incremental contributions into coherent, useful bodies of knowledge. Surely it's an execution approach CP-facing orgs could use to get more stuff done.

Ever hear of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? It enables, in the words of David Weinberger*, "vast numbers of people to work on small, distributed tasks" in exchange for small amounts of money. What kinds of tasks? Getting images labeled, finding duplications in yellow-pages listings, rating the relevancy of search engines' results...

We have tons of communicating to do. Could any of it be run through Mechanical Turk or something similar? What about researching? I think about UCP's close to 100 affiliates and all the data they must generate. Could it somehow be worked on in small increments and parsed?

I really don't know much about this "microwork" business, but it does seem to represent a relatively shallower form of worker engagement. Little or no training or expertise are required. The contributors probably aren't deeply commited or emotionally involved. Much of what they have, potentially, to offer never enters the equation.

It may actually be helpful to look at the use of collective intelligence in terms of how relatively engaged the worker is -- with "fully dis-engaged" at one end and "fully engaged" at the other of a spectrum -- and to ask: What are the next, more-engaged kinds of work (after microwork) on the continuum? More to the heart of our matter: What additional kinds of work could organizations pull from the collective of CP parents out there?

As The Bridgespan Group sees it, the next, slightly deeper form of engagement involves getting constituent -- think CP parent -- input. The more insights an organization has about its constituents or customers, the better it should be able to increase its impact. You accomplish something, in other words, when you're able to engage constituents in doing the work of telling you about themselves. (Who are you? What do you think?) Gathering demographic info. Taking surveys. Conducting focus groups. Employing human-centered design processes. Making real-time and comparative feedback systems available. These are all ways of seeking input, of eliciting constituent voice. 

How many of these approaches are any of our CP orgs taking? Not many, I'm willing to bet.  We could be doing a lot more. Outfits that may be able to help nonprofits in particular in their quests to elicit customer voice? Keystone Accountability. Great Nonprofits.

The quality and quantity of information an organization is able to draw out via surveys, focus groups, and the like depends on how it frames questions and otherwise manages its interactions with constituents. Those things set the limits as they relate to depth of engagement.

The next level of engagement is where the org actually gets its constituents thinking creatively, developing programs and solutions together with your organization. On the same page and fully partnering with you, in other words, in furthering your mission. This is the deepest level, really, because lots of fully engaged people give you: multiple perspectives; ongoing relationships; surprises /unexpected better ways of thinking and acting...

The Net makes this sort of co-creation possible. And it holds out this promise: The more smart people you can deeply engage, the bigger the dent you can make in whatever problem it is you're trying to solve. This is where collaborative communities coming together at forums, wikis, mindmaps, etc. come into play. And where we'll head next.

*author of Too Big To Know (2012)

PRE-FIGHT: Let's Glove Up

Here's how my pea brain's mind's eye sees things:

ON ONE HAND

We have various organizations and institutions, for and not for profit, that are committed to fighting the Cerebral Palsy fight and improving outcomes as they relate to CP. 

To me, they look to be doing bang-up jobs: pounding away at key challenges and opportunities; landing their share of punches. Becoming...thanks largely to advances in fields like genetics and robotics and brain science...encouraged and emboldened -- even to the point of believing that theirs-and-ours is a winnable battle. Even in the previously inconceivable sense that CP will someday be both preventable and curable. 

I'm excited along with them. 

I'd be a lot more excited if I knew that their various visions were about to be realized, say, this week. Even a year from now would be a more than acceptable time frame. 

Unrealistic? Could never happen? 

Maybe. 

Who's really to say? 

At a bare minimum, I don't think it's too overly whacky to suggest that big things could conceivably happen in the CP arena sooner rather than later and that, furthermore, we all ought to open our minds' eyes -- wider than they are now -- to what's possible. 

ON THE OTHER HAND

Over the past few years, I've immersed myself in enough management writing to have at least a feel for who the more influential thinkers are and what they're thinking about. What interests me most is their work on helping organizations get smarter and better, faster. (much of which is intimately tied to disruptive technologies like cloud computing, social media, mobile, and big data)

How're they doing? 

They're figuring things out. They're making discoveries. They're experiencing some wins. 

Many of them are fired up about what's possible, too. 

I'D LIKE TO RECOMMEND

We in the CP sphere should take greater advantage of what those management gurus -- those business brainiacs -- have to offer. 

Why's that?

Because CP has been kicking our butts. 

No offense to any one individual or CP organization, but -- we need help. All the help we can get. Why fight with one hand tied behind our back if we don't have to?

The good news is that the products of those folks' energies and efforts are more widely and readily available than ever before. They're there for the taking. So, too, are the opportunities for making personal connections. Accessing them, and attracting them to us and our "defeat CP" cause, should be straightforward.

We'll have to strive as a group, however, to become more:

1. OPEN

At the risk of exposing my own biases and nincompoopery, I am (via this post and this blog) putting myself out there in hopes that someone will come along and help me become a better / smarter CP fighter. Our orgs need to follow suit. To "get back," we need to give. We need to offer up our challenges and opportunities, our responses and results -- the whole of it -- to critical thought and commentary. 

May be worth taking under advisement:

• We should resist believing we're on the right track and therefore in no need of new and different ways of thinking or acting. The truth is, our mental models, e.g., our strategies and roadmaps and visions, are laughably small relative to the enormousness of our challenges. 

• Like CP itself, the problems we face are complex. In the words of David K. Hurst, "good questions are (often) better than good answers." Wisdom begins with an admission of ignorance. 

• A lack of funding doesn't have to slow us down. Money's just one of many resources we may acquire, mobilize, leverage, etc. 

• Keep this in mind: “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.”* The staff at SUBWAY this month is wearing t-shirts that read "Make Us Better / Take Our Survey." If the biggest corporations are looking every which way for better ideas, we should probably be doing the same.

2. FINDABLE/ LOCATABLE 

I hope to be able to use this blogspace to make our leading CP organizations more visible to leading management thinkers -- and vice versa. My little mission is to facilitate connections. Very-best-case outcomes, to my way of thinking, would involve collaborative problem solving and co-creation activities between both sides. (both "hands") To that end, I invite participation. 

So, for example, to:

• Cynthia @ Reaching for the Stars: If you want to share your views here about what you believe it'll take to build "a foundation of hope for children with cerebral palsy"; if you want to name your pains; if you want to go public with your lengthy "things to do" list -- either directly or indirectly through me -- you're more than welcome to!! 

• John Seely Brown and John Hagel @ Deloitte Center for the Edge: You wrote in The Power of Pull (2008) about "Harnessing Pull to Change the World," and specifically about mastering pull "at the individual and institutional level to achieve much broader impact in economic and social arenas." I welcome either or both of you to use this forum to teach us how to beat CP. Feel free, in other words, to stop by and solve our problems for us!!

There's also a Twitter component to this. It'll be devoted to more of the same (as above) but revolve around a particular, pick-up-the-pace goal. 

I want things to move faster. Way, way faster than we're generally envisioning now. Using a (crude?) boxing analogy, I hope to be able to look at the next year as if it were a 12-round fight -- with an intention of knocking CP on its duff by the end. As Chief Inciter, I'll report on how the fight's progressing and do whatever I can to influence things in our favor. My tweets and interactions will be directed at the level of the organization, but anyone's more than welcome to follow along @KnockOutCP.

CLOSING

`A la Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Weinberger writes in Too Big To Know (2012): 

We thus do not yet have any good idea of what cannot be done by connected humans when working at the scale of the Net. 

We truly don't know what can or can't be accomplished. 

So...

Why not get ready to rumble?

Round one's set to start on June first.

*quote attributed to Silicon Valley icon Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems)

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 7.0

I believe the best way to get from here to there -- where “there” is sound, social media related recommendations UCP and Red Treehouse can use to deliver the social goods -- is to do it methodically. To follow a framework that's logically consistent and proven effective, and that meaningfully addresses the key drivers of organizational success.

BRING ON THE EXPERTS.

Here are a few big thinkers whose frameworks fit the bill, along with a sentence or so about how they frame the challenges all organizations today face:

• John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison: authors of The Power of Pull. How do you systematically draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges? 

• David Weinberger: author of The Cluetrain Manifesto  and  (released in January of this year) Too Big To Know. How do you build networks that make people smarter? 

• The Social Business Bunch ('cept that there is no such bunch, ‘s’far as I know; this is just my shorthand for management consultants with social business* offerings -- a few at the front of the pack being): 

• IBM: IBM. How do you become an agile, transparent, and engaged organization? 

• Dachis Group: the social marketing optimization software solutions leader. How do businesses re-envision their inherent architecture to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities brought by changes in technology, society, and work? 

• Gartner, Inc: the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. How do you use social media to identify, catalyze, empower, and derive value from a community and their mass collaboration? 

IN THE NET THESE PEOPLE TRUST.

It's their belief that those who know how to take advantage of the digital infrastructure have opportunities to create disproportionate impact and do great work.

My daughter and I have a stake in UCP’s and Red Treehouse’s great or not-so-great work to come. I want to be sure both organizations are at least considering -- 'cause I’ve been drinking more or less the same Kool-Aid -- what these experts are serving up. 

I’ll be methodically snooping around for signs that they are, and reporting back in the posts to follow. 

*One definition of a social business: An organization that has put in place the strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value.

It's Knowledge Work You're Doing

In the opinion of David Weinberger, author of Too Big To Know and “one of the most important thinkers of the digital age*,” we ain’t there yet. The networking of knowledge is not yet the blessing it might someday be, and we'll need to do more, he says, to help the Net live up to its potential. (as the place for people to go to get smarter faster and to [in turn] get more productive) As it relates to what I'm most concerned about: There's no reason the Net couldn't be a much better place for empowering and enabling the disabled.

Here are some actions people of all stripes can take...while online, starting now...to become better knowledge workers and help bring about a smarter Net. These represent three of Mr. Weinberger's five parting suggestions.

LINK

“More links, more links.” Links encourage and help others to chase their interests. Links enable us to be transparent about how we reached a conclusion. Links increase the authority of a work. Links promote independent thinking.

LABEL

(I get a kick out of this:) In Weinberger’s words, “Most of what’s posted will be crap. So, we need ways to evaluate and filter, which can be especially difficult since what is crap for one effort may be gold for another.”

Ironically enough, the antidote to the crappy-information overload problem is to provide information about the information we contribute. Metadata (think "labels", like the ones that appear at the bottom of this post) enables your information to be found more easily, i.e., it makes your information reusable. If and when we can get to the point where we’re labeling all of our information using standardized formats, we’ll be on our way to realizing the vision of the semantic web. Computers would then be able to do more of our filtering for us and the Net would spit out a lot more knowledge than was put into it. We'd have ourselves a truly smart network.

LEARN

For the Net to be all it can be, we'll all need to learn how to: 

Operate the dang thing. (the Net and its component parts, that is) Really just a matter of clicking buttons. Simple as ABC. 

Evaluate knowledge claims. The ones others make, and the ones we make ourselves. Critical thinking skills to shore up? Being able to "distinguish lying crap from well-documented conclusions." Becoming more open to new ideas. Learning how to participate in multi-way, multi-cultural conversations. 

Learn to love difference. We need to "push past our urge to stick with people like us." Easier said than done, but the author sees in the Net both an opportunity ("to encounter and interact with that which is different") and a model ("we can understand ourselves as a Web page interpenetrated with links, connected to a world that takes us up and makes us interesting.”).

All o' this is applicable when we blog, leave comments, contribute to Wikipedia, rate  products…

*per Daniel Pink

Getting Smarter Faster

We thus do not yet have any good idea 

of what cannot be done by connected humans 

when working at the scale of the Net.*

Sure would be nice to be able to broadcast to the world “Here’s a description of my precious little girl. She wants to live a life without limits.** We’re looking for knowledge and related resources we can use.” -- and to have what she needs come streamin’ in: automatically, continuously, and right on target.

What kinds of knowledge and resources? Well, answers to all the questions I have in mind to ask; ideas and information that hadn't previously occurred to me to look for; opportunities to collaborate with others to create new knowledge...

I want my daughter to be an epicenter for these heady things. 

I’ve read enough books filled with enough accounts of effective, real-world "pulling" to believe she could be. Here's a wee bit about three (3) such books worth noting as they relate to our discussion:

• Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business [2009] by David Siegel. The so-called semantic web is “a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable.” It represents a vision (at this point) of what the Net could become, i.e., an extremely powerful tool for getting what we need when we need it.

• Too Big To Know [2011] by David Weinberger. Everything you ever wanted to know about knowledge in our new networked world. Among many other things pull-related, Mr. Weinberger writes thoughtfully about strategies for filtering knowledge (forward) in order to successfully keep on keepin’ on. 

• The Power of Pull [2010] by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. About ways individuals, teams and other groups are using pull techniques to their advantage. I’m most interested in what they have to say about "shaping strategies," which have to do with motivating big groups of people and institutions to work together to solve problems.

The notion that we can use the Net to perform better -- i.e., be more efficient, learn faster, and have greater impact -- runs through each book. Hagel, Brown and Davison, in particular, talk in terms of “increasing the rate at which we can improve performance.”

How might "performance" enter in when we're talking about CP? In countless ways, I'm sure, but what matters most is how well our kids are performing.

I wonder: 

• Can we use the Net to help more kids with CP achieve more than anyone's ever dreamed possible?

• How quickly can we get to the point where we’re laughing at the very things that are limiting our kids today? 

• Could it be that what holds our kids back the most are our limited capacities as adults to learn and imagine better ways of doing things?

*from Too Big To Know
** "For people with a spectrum of disabilities, life should be without limits" comes from United Cerebral Palsy (UCP).