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

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.