Ethical Collaboration: The Vacuum Effect

In a former post, I talked about the beginnings of a moral framework for collaborative behaviors. The question of what rights an individual inherits in such an environment was the next area to explore.

Contextualizing

Image Credit: Marvel Comics, Inc.

When we were building D.Wiki, we committed a lot of thought to what policies, guidelines, and procedures should govern the environment. At Deloitte, a heavily regulated business, we have a lot of policies around data disclosure, access permissions, and appropriate content. We talked about how those policies applied to the wiki and what gaps needed to be filled. Ultimately, we decided that there were no gaps in policy, just gaps in understanding how the policies applied to the space. We came up with a very simple concept to express all those policies; The Spiderman Principle. “With great power comes great responsibility.” This principle very succinctly captured the notion that this new environment was not immune from our rubric of governance, but at the same time made clear that the wiki was distinct from sending point-to-point messages in chat or through e-mail.

Rights Entail Responsibilities

This may sound strange, but the Principle reinforces a common understanding about the environment. It articulates the expectation that people should behave professionally while having fun and delivering enhanced client service. It also allows the end user to “opt in” or “opt out” of the conditions governing the space. The user is given the choice to accept the benefits and subscribe to the responsibilities being levied upon her/him. Acceptance of these responsibilities becomes a social contract between the individual and the collective corporation. In reality, by already being an employee they have already signed-up to our high standards of ethics and individual responsibility. So in the example of D.Wiki, when a user elects to become a member of the space, they accept the power and responsibility of contributing valuable, meaningful content.

Responsibilities to a Collaborative Space

A behavior I commonly observe in collaborative environments is the “vacuum effect.” This is the user practice of consuming information, but never contributing back into the space. They may also pump the system/people for information, but can’t be found when others are in need. Worse still, the person does not volunteer information that may be of value to others. These are examples of someone leveraging their right to access information, but not taking-on the responsibility to build on the knowledge base. My colleague Justin Franks wrote brilliantly about this topic sometime ago.

The Business and Ethical Implications

There is both a business and ethical impact if this behavior is allowed to continue. On the business side of the equation, the vacuum effect will literally suck the oxygen out of the environment. Trust evaporates. No one will wish to contribute to a space when they discover that their content is being shared and used, but that no one is willing to reciprocate. The stovepipes you sought to demolish will resurface. The cost efficiencies you sought to create will not materialize. And the capital invested into your collaborative environment will be lost when people stop contributing.

On the ethical side, the relationship between the sharer and the consumer is not balanced. It is still true that information is power. Continuing that power imbalance ensures that valuable pieces of knowledge are not shared and denies other participants an opportunity to grow. More to the point, the vacuum marginalizes those who have the best ideas. In an organization with a “vacuum effect”, the information extractors now get credit for the ideas of others. This is intellectually and professionally dishonest because the extractors did not do the cognitive work and will be rewarded for staking claim to it.

It’s just like it was in grade school: No one wants to be the kid that everyone cheats off of.

It All Comes Back to Responsibility

The extension of credit to originators is a fundamental ethical responsibility in a collaborative environment. Extending that credit can occur by tracking the digital exhaust of contributors and consumers, linking to content that is relevant to your idea/work, or by explicitly citing their work. Finally, pushing that such metadata forward in a transparent and easily accessible manner ensures that knowledge theft is pulled into check. Ultimately, regardless of the technical platform, there is always the risk that others will steal your work without you knowing it. In a transparent environment it is aggravating to know people are actively acting against your personal interests. If you find yourself victimized by a knowledge thief, remember to take the high road. Changing a culture of information hording occurs one user at a time. If you believe in the value of collaboration, don’t compromise your own sense of ethics in favor of short-term rewards.

Stupidity Is Invincible

My father gave me this gem over the weekend. I decided that a blog post about it would be appropriate. Putting a little context around the quote . . . there are times when there is someone or some entity that is deadset on moving in a particular direction. No matter what stands in his/her/its way, the decision has been made (no matter how dumb) and we are “going forward.” (The funny thing about “going forward” is that you need to actually stop going backward.) There can be many reasons for this state of affairs . . . politics . . . religion . . . laziness . . . or whatever . . .

My favorite reason is, “We’ve just always done it that way.”

The definition of stupidity is pursuing a previous course of action and expecting a different result. In an organizational context, the pursuit of stupidity can be an art and a science. So one day you may find yourself being impacted by stupid decisions and organizational directions. So what do you do? There are many strategies to employ. We’re just going to talk about one today.

Mr. Popularity

It is a very exciting time to be an Enterprise 2.0 evangelist. With the economy in dire straights and likely to see more troubles, the need to find cheap collaborative solutions is only getting stronger. If you are a social software evangelist, then that means now is a good time to be talking about these solutions for your business. You’ll be a pretty popular gal/guy if you have the right solution that fits a pressing business need. With that popularity now comes responsibility.

Deploying a social software solution is a lot of work. There will be elements of your organization that want you to fail. Others will want you to succeed. There will be others that will wait-and-see what happens. Expect to be alone and expect people to never understand your worldview. Some will actively and openly fight your efforts. This is somewhat expected, but what is not often expected in the converse. Well-intentioned people can also do you damage. The advice I can offer is be aware of who is supporting you and what they are doing. Personal integrity and making your vision known are your best defenses. That’s a topic for another post . . .

Pick Your Battles

Let’s suppose that your solution has been adopted by your organization and that others are using it. You are Mr. Popular. So with this new found popularity and the wave of your triumph, you have been given some political capital. The judicious use of your political capital will become important in the days ahead.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hold on Drake . . . I won. I proved all the detractors wrong. I’m done.”

You just think that you are done. Stupidity is indeed invincible and it will continue to attack your defenses again and again. Distraction techniques and time burglars will surface. Their primary objective will be to defend the tried and true ways of the past and fit your social software solution into their existing business processes. Most of the time this is unnecessary noise which distracts you from your objectives. The effect will be a reduced level of adoption on your social software platform because you are spending your time fending off time bandits. At an early point, you must quickly identify who are the people you wish to persuade, champion, “bribe,” or ignore. Keeping in mind that some of these folks will shift over time, you must keep ties with all players to assure your initiative’s success. Take the time to build your alliances in peace, not in war.

The Strategy of Stupidity – A Warning

One of the most successful defeat strategies an organization can employ is co-option. This is the invitation to join the budgeting committee, the unusual promotion, or your sudden involvement in board-level decisions. These are all means to separate you from the crowd which put you in that place of reverence. My advice? Dance with the girl who brought you. Under no circumstances should you ditch the crowd that supported your ascendancy. The crowd will keep you grounded and check your assumptions (and your ego). Power is an alluring prospect, don’t let it go to your head. Keep in mind, the smaller the circle of deciders, the higher likelihood that you will cater to those localized interests.

Change is best affected from the inside and in the trenches. If the circle of power is closed, work to open it. This invites more heads, more buy-in, and improves the enterprise above all else.

Think community, not self.

Facts Are Stubborn Things

My wife and I have been watching and re-watching the John Adams HBO series on DVD. Somewhere in the bowels of Netflix, a video jockey continues to wonder why the Drake household pays $25 a month for a set of DVDs that can be purchased for $30. The series has been incredibly inspirational to me for a variety of reasons, but principally among them is contained in the first disk of the series. John Adams is called upon to defend a collection of British soldiers who fire into a crowd. This became known as the “Boston Massacre.” Adams successfully defends the soldiers based on eye-witness accounts, evidence collected at the scene, and other indisputable facets of the situation. In his closing statement, Adams speaks frankly to what is likely a highly biased jury stating,

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

What struck me was the notion that facts and evidence are indisputable, immutable conditions that construct our interpretation of the world.

Facts are stubborn things. When faced with facts and evidence it becomes difficult for others to argue biased points of view. There may be disagreements about particular modes of evidence such as unrecorded conversations, but the existence of activity (or the meta-data) may be proof enough.

The Power of Honest Collaboration

At Deloitte, we leverage an internal wiki called D-Wiki. When our deployment team was developing the rules that would govern the environment, one of the pillars I lobbied heavily for was the principle of “honesty.” At the time, this was strange to many of my colleagues for me to feel so strongly about. Drawing my past client experience, I knew that people lie for lots of reasons and not all of them bad. Some people do not want to be brutal with their feedback, some people want to protect the equities of their project, and others are not informed of the full facts so they insert their own. Well, facts are stubborn things. The exposure of the truth in highly complex situations requires a deliberate focus on participant honesty and integrity. We crowd source our knowledge creation because it brings facts, data, and evidence to bear on a problem and improves our service delivery to our clients.

But People Still Lie . . .

One interesting thing about crowd-sourcing as a integrity/honesty building technique is that we still see participants “spin” information. The traditional crowd-sourcing theory is that people care about what they write or say and try to protect their digital reputations. This is largely true and has been proven in actual case studies. What is interesting to me is that there are still people that think they can be deceptive or tell half-truths in a transparent environment. The beauty of crowd-sourcing is its self-correcting nature. Lies or inaccuracies are exposed quickly and can be redressed with equal measures of speed.

Even in a digital age with mountains of data and mixed motives it seems that Adams’ got it right way back in 1772.