Leslie Pratch on Business, Culture, and the Economy

Posted by Leslie Pratch; written by David Friedman, a guest blogger who writes on Positive Structures.

David asks if conversations scale-and what the implications are for networks. He writes:

There is a very interesting post about this topic from Wired magazine here.  It suggests that there is an optimal size for an online conversation, where people feel that they are in fact contributing to a conversation. When the community around a topic (e.g., a blog and a specific post) is small, conversation is fairly slow. As the community grows (say the blog grows so now more people are reading each post), the pace of the conversation picks up.  But at a certain size, the conversation flags, as people begin to feel anonymous and unknown in the community.

I wonder if it’s that people feel anonymous and disempowered to make a difference, or is it:

1. Too many comments going in too many directions — so people can no longer really follow what’s happening
2. A decrease in the frequency with which a person’s comments are responded to by one of the people whose opinions they actually value (which might include the person who started the blog or network)
3. No more interest in actually knowing any more people — because the human capacity for managing relationships is allegedly limited (see Dunbar’s number).

I don’t fully understand the causes of the phenomenon, but it does suggest that groups that actually want to achieve something need to limit their numbers. There appears a real trade-off based on interpersonal factors; scale brings diversity and breadth of experience and insight and connection to other networks, but it also brings (at some point) a decrease in engagement.

Organizations have of course wrestled with scale before, because scale brings an increase in complexity. Some organizations get bureaucratic. Others define a maximum size of their organization and then split the organization when it gets too big.  Examples of this are W.L. Gore (the Gore-Tex people) and at one time in the past, Dell Computers. Gore splits business units when they grow to 150-200 people working together. In this article, the current CEO of Gore quotes the founder’s idea that it was necessary “to divide so that you can multiply.”

Dell would split existing units of its salesforce into pieces.It would giving each of the new “child” units a portion of the target markets that the “parent” had had, and told the leaders of the “children” units to each fill out their teams and then achieve the revenue (in just a few years) of the former “parent”. As I was told, this splitting process could be repeated over and over again.

Maybe as collaborative networks grow they reach a point where they need to split in order to remain effective. Something to think about.

What’s your own personal experience with this in networks?  What have you seen? How do you feel as a network grows? Does your behavior match what you say/think you believe in or are trying to do?

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.

David Friedman is a consultant who thinks about creating positive social structures and building trust. He founded Bridgewell Partners,a learning and consulting company that helps organizations prosper by creating and strengthening valuable business relationships – with prospects, customers and employees. David also blogs about these ideas on Positive Structures.

Posted  by Leslie Pratch; written by David Friedman

David Friedman is a consultant who thinks about collaboration, trust, and social networks as part of making the world a better place. In February 2010, he began writing about these ideas on Positive Structures. One of his first entries is about how social networks can support innovation. He writes:

There’s a lot of good discussion going on right now about how social networks and social interactions can support innovation. The challenge is both getting the right people together and having them interact in the right ways.  Crowdsourcing lets individuals generate ideas, but better innovation can come from the interaction of people with a diverse set of skills and interests. How can such a group of strangers, be assembled, and how can it function well together and be productive in a minimal amount of time?

In my view, the quality of the results in collaboration problem-solving or collaborative innovation is a function of the diversity of input and the quality of the interactions among the people.  So if someone could bring together many diverse people and use outstanding group problem-solving methods, they’d get better results than a relatively small group that works well together (e.g., a good team) or a diverse set of people who don’t work together (e.g., Innocentive). Some examples of interesting collaborations that have brought together larger groups than a team and also used methods that enabled people to actually work together (in team-like or quasi-team-like ways) are shown on this chart, with a view of their effectiveness.

Here’s an explanation of each of the methods on the chart.

Innocentive is well-known platform for solving problems. Individuals who think they have the answer can submit and be paid if their answer is selected. My understanding from the popular press (correct me if I am wrong) is that many (maybe most) Innocentive problems that are solved are solved by an individual who sees fairly quickly that he or she has some knowledge that can be applied to the problem. There’s not much teamwork.

Innocentive (Chinese style) is a reference to something I read (maybe from John Hagel) that in China groups of Innocentive participants collaborate to decide on which problems to attack. So they get the variety of problems from Innocentive and can combine their skills to solve them. In Good to Great, Collins and Porras talk about “getting the right people on the bus” and then figuring out what strategy to pursue. Taking advantage of the stream of Innocentive problems, the Chinese groups have assembled the “right people” and can look for the problems that this group of people is well-positioned to solve. My estimate is that this method will yield greater fruits than what individual Innocentive participants can do.

The Netflix Prize challenge. This well-known contest produced every larger groups of collaborators as it neared its end. As the teams grew, they were able to use both traditional improved problem-solving from larger groups as well as collaboration that in some ways was unique to the problem – they were able to mathematically combine algorithms (their solutions to the problem) to get better results.

Open Space methods – These methods bring people with a stake in the problem together and then let them work together on what they believe are the important elements. They yield results that cannot be easily predicted but are very powerful.

Polymath. This was a high-level mathematical collaboration. It yielded outstanding results through open collaboration of many people. Polymath was conducted on a blog and guided by a set of rules that encouraged people to share ideas that were not complete but that others could build on (or refute early, before too much energy was devoted to them.

The the interesting challenge is figuring out ways of bringing the right people together and structuring their interactions in the best way.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.

David Friedman can be reached at www.bridgewellpartners.com. His blog is called Positive Structures.

Posted by Leslie Pratch, written by David Friedman

Today’s post is by David Friedman (a graduate of the Yale School of Management and former a partner at McKinsey & Company). He writes:

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who trained at Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.

David Friedman is a consultant, educator and thinker who cares deeply about people and what happens to us. He is dedicated to creating high integrity individuals beginning with early childhood. He can be reached at www.bridgewellpartners.com or at  (312) 863-3489

Posted by Leslie Pratch; written by David Friedman

Today we have a guest blogger, David Friedman, a consultant who founded Bridgewell Partners and started the blog Positive Structures. He writes:

If strangers want to collaborate together, they need to know something about each other and how to work together. It would be great if each person would make available the critical information that others need to see, in advance, whether a collaboration is likely to be useful and possible. And to see how best to get started.  Here’s a start on what could be critical:

1. My skills

2. My values

3. Things I am willing to take questions about

4. How best to contact me on different subjects, if you are a known acquaintance (or come referred by a close contact of mine)

5. How best to contact me on different subjects, if you are a stranger to me

6. The time frame in which you can expect a response from me

7. What I am pursuing right now – in case you’d like to try to help me first on something I’m doing (which for most people would be a good way of getting me interested in helping you)

8. How much time and availability I usually make for new inquiries and projects, and whether now is a “usual time”

9. Key members of my social network (perhaps for business people something like my first circle of “LinkedIn” connections) – in case you know any of them. Then, if you happen to know any of them, you can contact them for an introduction (and raise your odds) or else contact them and find out what’s the best way to approach me and what to expect when you do (e.g., “If you send him an email and haven’t heard in two days, try again. He doesn’t mind being re-emailed”)

10. My style of working — perhaps using something like a Meyers-Briggs Type Index, or some other system that many people are familiar with

In fact, if these could be put into a standardized form like something like the Vcard, then they would be searchable. In his blog, Taylor Davidson has coined the phrase “Personal API”; he means something different than I do, but I think the phrase captures well “a machine-readable publicly available version of how best to interact with me.”

Real life examples are hard to find. Here’s a non-machine readable example. It’s wonderful, although it might not encourage you to contact the owner of it, who is a professor of mathematics at UCLA.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who trained at Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.

David Friedman is a friend who describes himself as a consultant, educator and thinker who cares a lot about people and what happens to us. He is dedicated to creating high integrity individuals beginning with early childhood. He can be reached at  (312) 863-3489 or at Bridgewell Partners.