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"