A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 1.2

One thing that LIVESTRONG has that Red Treehouse and UCP don’t is its own manifesto. A manifesto is a public declaration. It makes me think, “bold" -- to the point of “in your face.” I also think, “change.” Manifestos are connected with efforts to change the status quo. They're part and parcel of movements of all sorts. 

LIVESTRONG is a movement that was founded on passion, emotional energy, and trust (a blend of hope, faith, and confidence).* It exists to help cancer patients and their families live their days to the fullest, and to help them tackle intensely personal things -- HEADON.

Just an observation: 

In my very limited experience – I've had no exposure, for example, to any of UCP’s affiliates – I can’t say that I feel like UCP and Red Treehouse are trying to build those same sorts of personal and emotional ties between me-and-my-daughter and them. "Life Without Limits" doesn't feel like a movement to me. 

For better or worse, neither of the two organizations is conveying anything so rousing as...

LIVESTRONG Manifesto

We believe in life. 
Your life. 
We believe in living every minute of it with every ounce of your being. 
And that you must not let cancer take control of it. 
We believe in energy: channeled and fierce. 
We believe in focus: getting smart and living strong.
Unity is strength. Knowledge is power. Attitude is everything. 
This is LIVESTRONG. 

We kick in the moment you're diagnosed. 
We help you accept tears. Acknowledge the rage. 
We believe in your right to live without pain. 
We believe in information. Not pity. 
And in straight, open talk about cancer. 
With husbands, wives and partners. With kids, 
friends and neighbors. And the people you live with, work with, cry and laugh with. 
This is no time to pull punches. 
You're in the fight of your life. 

We're about the hard stuff.
Like finding the nerve to ask for a second opinion. 
And a third, or a fourth, if that's what it takes. 
We're about preventing cancer. Finding it early. Getting smart about clinical trials.
And if it comes to it, being in control of how your life ends. 
It's your life. You will have it your way. 

We're about the practical stuff. 
Planning for surviving.  Banking your sperm. Preserving your fertility. Organizing your finances. Dealing with hospitals, specialists, insurance companies and employers. 
It's knowing your rights. 
It's your life. 
Take no prisoners. 

We're about the fight. 
We're your champion on Capitol Hill. Your advocate with the healthcare system. Your sponsor in research labs. 
And we know the fight never ends. 
Cancer may leave your body, but it never leaves your life. 
This is LIVESTRONG. 
Founded and inspired by Lance Armstrong, one of the toughest cancer survivors on the planet. 

*with a nod to David K. Hurst

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.1

UCP has developed a comprehensive, one-stop shop of resources for every U.S. state and territory. Never scour the Web again for bits and pieces of disability information and resources from disparate sources!

That second sentence jumps out at me – it prompts me – every time I see it. Invariably it causes me to think of knowledge stocks and knowledge flows, and the central roles the two play in the meditations of John Seely Brown, et. al. 

One of that bunch's biggest ideas goes like this: 

It used to be that organizations could win by: (1) knowing valuable stuff, and (2) extracting value from -- while simultaneously restricting access to -- what they knew. Nowadays, however, that approach isn’t cutting it. Why not? Mostly because “in a world changing at an increasingly rapid pace, the half-life of these stocks of knowledge is depleting at an equally rapid pace.”

The new way to make it as an organization is to shift the primary focus to flows of new knowledge. 

“It’s no longer about what you know,” they say, “but rather, what relationships you have and what you can learn from these relationships.” 

UCP was founded in 1949, when the older ways had just begun to hold sway. Obviously, the organization has evolved over the years. (Witness its ongoing efforts to keep up with changes in information technologies.) Are its mindsets and practices, however, all the way up to today’s speed? That’s the sort of thing I want to delve into in this sub-section. 

Additionally, I’d like to know: 

• In what ways is UCP organized around the notion that value comes from protecting and capitalizing on existing stocks of knowledge? 

• How and where is it participating in flows of new knowledge? 

• How might it stand to gain by implementing JSB’s ideas? 

• Is there a systematic way to go about doing that?

You may have noticed that I haven’t been mentioning Red Treehouse. Reason being? At some point herein I want to zero in specifically on UCP’s Public Education & Outreach (PE&O) offerings. In my opinion, those are similar enough to (all of) Red Treehouse’s offerings that, if anything useful comes of the zeroing in, both organizations will be served.

*what we know at any particular time

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 11.0

If Red Treehouse and UCP are puzzles, then my main interest really is in how all the pieces – new information technologies and their uses included – come together. 

For the past few years I’ve been learning about various comprehensive management approaches. The holy grail, as far as these things go? A foolproof set of steps even a fool like me could follow to steer an organization to success. A reliable road map. A “framework for frameworks” capable of subsuming any of the myriad of mental-models modern-managers use to address challenges and opportunities.* 

There’s a relatively new approach that has my attention now. I think it has a lot going for it, i.e., it makes sense to me. Even though it’s not prescriptive in a “do these specific things and you’ll win” way, its recommendations are right in line with those expressed in The Power or Pull (section 9) and Too Big To Know (section 10). So it also makes at least some sense to transition to it at this point. 

What I want to do is take it for a spin. Apply it as best I can to UCP and Red Treehouse. Not just for kicks, though. I want to help make both organizations better. Maybe this approach could be beneficial. Becoming a hope machine implies having a formula, after all. Maybe this is the one? 

Let’s explore.

*Gartner’s formula for becoming a social organization, for example, would fit within.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.0

The Power of Pull, initially published in 2010, just now out in paperback, is one of my favorite books of the last few years. In this section, I'd first like to overview it broadly-shallowly-quickly and then relate two of its big ideas narrowly-deeply-deliberately to Red Treehouse and UCP. 

Here’s how I see things unfolding:

9.1: OVERVIEW /KEY CONCEPTS

Thesis. “To get better faster at whatever it is you do, you’ve got to be supported by a broad array of complementary people and resources from which you can pull what you need to raise your rate of performance improvement.” 

Three levels of pull. Pulling is about accessing (searching), attracting (making serendipitous connections), and achieving (collaborating). The last set of practices entails participating in what the authors call creation spaces -- which are akin to Gartner’s collaborative communities. 

Success formula. Use pull techniques to: (1) define compelling trajectories for change, (2) provide leverage to the passionate individuals who are attracted to these trajectories, and (3) amplify the impact of these individuals. 

9.2: SHAPING STRATEGIES

"By grasping how pull works we can build institutions that can act as platforms to catapult change, and maybe even transform the world in necessary and far-reaching ways." 

Should UCP pursue a shaping strategy, i.e., should it attempt to reshape the CP arena on a global scale? Based on the BIG SKY PROJECT vision of the future for people with disabilitiles, is UCP already moving in this direction?  

Inquiring minds want to know. 

9.3: KNOWLEDGE STOCKS AND FLOWS

The authors contend that the sources of economic value are moving from "stocks" of knowledge to "flows" of new knowledge, and that we must "accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key enabler." 

What are the implications for UCP and Red Treehouse?

I can say already that the implications are huge. Our new ways of knowing impact everything these organizations do. In posts 9.3+, I'd like to look closely at UCP's Public Education & Outreach (PEO) efforts -- and then use that as a springboard for exploring David Weinberger's new book about "networked knowledge" (Too Big To Know) in section ten.

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... 

*  *  *  *  *

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.

*  *  *  *  *

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.

*  *  *  *  *

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.

*  *  *  *  *

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, 8.3

Redtreehouse.org was created to provide a welcoming and vibrant online community for exploring resources to help children and young adults, prenatal through age 25. To call it an online community, though, may be a little misleading. 

When Gartner and others who are hipper than I am to social media think “online community,” they’re thinking collaborative community; they’re thinking mass collaboration. And in order for mass collaboration to be, three things are indispensable: Social Media. Purpose. Community. 

A few words about each: 

• Social Media: where people collaborate. Redtreehouse.org isn’t technically a social media environment. It doesn’t use mass collaboration-enabling tools such as wikis, blogs, social networking, tagging, etc.

• Community: the people who collaborate. Red Treehouse is essentially a collection of individuals, so you could say it’s a community.

• Purpose: why people collaborate. The organization itself has a purpose, but there’s not a purpose around which user contributions are directed, e.g., other parents like me don’t come to the site to contribute their knowledge, experience, and ideas to address specific challenges or opportunities. 

This isn't to suggest that Red Treehouse doesn’t value collaboration. Or that it isn't successfully facilitating the formation of communities. (maybe even vibrant ones) (maybe even massive ones) What I am saying is that any and all collaboration that may be happening is happening offline*. People are Making Connections, Discovering Answers, and Finding Hope someplace else. Face-to-face. Again, collaborative communities in the Gartner sense use social media to join people together online to address challenges or opportunities.

Thus begging the question: If redtreehouse.org isn’t an online community, what is it? A directory, maybe? One that’s updated regularly. One that allows you to refine your search…

*  *  *  *  *

Like an entertainment directory? 

Hmm. Now that I think of it, I wonder if Red Treehouse is really all that different in its scope than, say, Cleveland Scene, which highlights Cleveland-area arts, music, dining, films, and which brings together the same “three sources for information and support.” Visitors there can search for and find: organizations (restaurants, arts and entertainment venues, shops, etc.) and events. Pickings under the resources category may be a little lean, but they’re there, too.

At least two things set the online Scene apart for me. One: it incorporates social media (blogs, Twitter and Facebook feeds) – including for purposes of community collaboration. For example, you’re able to review events and venues. Two: it looks like a Web 2.0 site. If "vibrant and welcoming" is Red Treehouse’s goal, its management should have a look: www.clevescene.com. 

 *  *  *  *  *

There’s nothing wrong with being more like a directory. Tools for Today and Tomorrow, the precursor to the current project, won awards. It made possible the bringing together of “more than 14,000 parents, guardians, professionals, and organizations together through workshops, conferences and the toolsfortoday.org website to inform, learn from, support and inspire one another in order to help children, families and caregivers live for today and plan for tomorrow.” Then in 2011 Ronald McDonald House (RMH) of Cleveland and Ohio Families and Children First (OFCF) pooled their resources so that they might propel a broader, stronger online tool.  

What was tried and true got new and improved.

For me, the questions now become:

Could adding online collaborative communities to the mix make what’s already good even better? Could what Gartner has to offer help Red Treehouse live up to its potential as a hope machine? And, if “yes” to both, how would the former go about helping the latter develop the superior capabilities it’d need?

Gartner actually has a step-by-step plan for building those managerial capabilities. A few of the steps I imagine they’d emphasize with regard to Red Treehouse:

• They’d help it get a better grip, in general, on what the power of using social media to tap into the skills and know-how of lots and lots of people around a common purpose can do. 

• They’d ask management at Red Treehouse about the most important goals or challenges it’s identified as standing between where the organization is and where it wants to be. This is the first place they’d look at applying community collaboration as a way of delivering value. 

• Based on how other organizations are successfully employing social media collaboratively, they’d help Red Treehouse brainstorm: "these are the audiences community collaboration efforts most commonly target; these are the categories of business value (e.g., customer responsiveness, product /service development) most commonly addressed; these are the leading reasons organizations use mass collaboration to gain value; these are the dominant types of mass collaboration being used" -- all in an effort to generate ideas about where community collaboration efforts could help the organization reach its goals. 

• They’d help Red Treehouse develop an organizational strategy for community collaboration. 

• They’d focus on helping Red Treehouse succeed with one or two community collaboration efforts and create momentum around early successes.

This represents, broadly, what Gartner would do and what I also would recommend. I hope to be able to drill down and offer more specific recommendations in time. 


*I’d bet that other parents like me would appreciate hearing about successful connections, discoveries, pursuits, etc.