Organization is a process, not a structure
May 6, 2012
The way in which companies organize themselves and define their internal boundaries has essentially been determined by the way in which communication between people is planned and transfer of information is designed. The classic hierarchical structure was based on the assumption that a manager or worker could have rich interaction and exchange of information only with a limited number of predetermined people. A narrowing of interaction always marked operational boundaries. Thus you did not want people to cross functional silos. This was the infamous trade-off between richness and reach.
An increasing number of companies trying to become social businesses are now becoming aware of the technical barriers and structural bottlenecks that hinder or totally prevent cooperation that is not planned in advance.
It is time to rethink. Rather than thinking of organization as an imposed structure, plan or design, organization arises from the interactions of interdependent individuals who need to come together.
The accumulating failures of attempts at organizational agility can be traced to the fundamental but mistaken assumption that organizations are structures that guide and, as a consequence, limit interaction. An organization as a structure is a seventeenth century notion from a time when philosophers began to describe the universe as a giant piece of clockwork. Our beliefs in prediction and organizational design originate from these same ideas.
A different ideal is emerging today. We want to be agile and resilient and we want to learn effectively and fast. The tension of our time is that we want our firms to be flexible and creative but we only know how to treat them as systems of boxes (or network nodes, where the shapes are round instead of square), with a fixed number of lines between them.
It is time to change the way we think about organizations. It is not about hierarchies vs. networks, but about a much deeper change. Organizations are creative, responsive processes and emergent patterns in time. All creative, responsive processes have the capacity to constantly self-organize and re-organize all the time. Change is not a problem or anomaly. Change is the organizing input rather than the typical managerial re-design process. All solutions are always temporary.
Gregory Bateson wrote: “information is a difference which makes a difference”. Information is the energy of organizing. When information is transparent to everybody, people can organize effectively around changes and differences, around customers, new technologies and competitors.
What we have still not understood is that people need to have access to information that no one could predict they would want to know. Even they themselves did not know they needed it – before they needed it. Thus an organization can never be fully planned in advance. When information is transparent, different people see different things and new interdependencies are created, thus changing the organization. The context matters more than ever. The easier the access that people have to one another and to (different) information is, the more possibilities there are.
We seek organization, but organization is a continuous process, not a structure.
.
Thank you Ken Gergen for a great evening and great conversations
More on Gregory Bateson. On social business. Narrative work.
Markets, networks and management
March 18, 2012
The claim is that the best way to understand complicated systems is to investigate the workings of each of the parts. If a car does not start, the mechanic looks for the problem and finds a dead battery. In a similar way a doctor finds a wounded muscle. The idea is that the best way to understand life is to investigate the workings of the parts separately from those of other parts.
In the economic world, the concept of markets is based on the same idea: autonomous sellers and buyers engage in discrete transactions where each agent is independent from the other agents and each transaction is separate from other transactions. The unit of analysis is the individual agent.
Network scientists have recently made very different claims. They say that all human systems are connected and that connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts. The study of isolated parts offers little help in understanding how the parts work in combination and what emerges as the result of network connections. The notion of emergence is central. Their aim is to discover emergent patterns: is it really so that individual greed turns into a pattern that can be called public good, as proponents of free markets have suggested following the rhetoric of Adam Smith?
The suggested unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
This changes many of the beliefs we have taken for granted. The first change deals with the assumption of a knowing individual, the basic idea of Cartesian philosophy. The individual was understood as having a knowing mind. Individuals were thus treated as if they possessed properties such as expert knowledge. On the bases of her personal properties the knowing individual is then understood as the designer and controller of an internal and external world.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created not as stuff of the mind that can be shared and stored by individuals. Knowing is a process of relating. From the network-based, relational perspective knowing is viewed as an ongoing and, never-ending process of making meaning in communication.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties. Leaders are the sources of motivation, control and direction. The manager’s perspective is taken for granted as setting the limits of action and what is thought of as right or wrong.
Management theory is based on the same Cartesian assumptions of the self as subject, the other as object and relationships as influence and manipulation. This is why the present management thinking severely restricts what is thinkable and doable in the world of networks.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective. Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action. Accordingly, the role of management is different, opening up new possibilities: power in networks is about “power to” or “power with”, and not “power over”.
The emergent pattern changes when the local interactions change. Self-interest in the network economy looks different from self-interest in the market economy; individual success is likely to take place through enriching relationships and being part of networked interaction aiming to facilitate both the individual and the collective effort.
Cooperation is the new competition.
.
Thank you Dian Marie Hosking for great conversations
More: Reid Hoffman interview.
Social media and the change from information to formation
February 25, 2012
The change towards the creative economy has major implications for the nature of what we have called assets. In the industrial age, the assets were physical resources, plant and equipment. Most of the resources were traded in markets and could thus be valued. Taking care of the value of an organization could be understood as managing physical assets and resources.
Now knowledge and people are seen as the major assets. But since neither of them are efficiently traded in markets, their value cannot easily be measured. Neither can knowledge be understood as an asset that can be managed like a physical asset. This is what many people within the Knowledge Management community learned the hard way. Knowledge is not a thing! Thus it cannot be stored, measured or shared.
From a more modern point of view, knowledge creation is understood as an active process of communication between people. Knowledge cannot be stored but is constantly constructed and re-constructed in interaction. Knowledge cannot be shared but arises in action. Knowledge is the process of relating.
The assumption was that learning and knowledge management involve processes that transmit content. This notion derived from the information theory/model of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Their theory created a sender-receiver model of communication according to which person A sends a signal (message/content) to person B, who receives it and then perhaps sends a responding feedback signal back to A. From this perspective, learning and knowledge creation are processes that resemble transmission or the sharing of content. This is why schools and other educational institutions still look the way they do.
But Shannon & Weaver’s concept was meant to be purely technical. They were interested in whether a byte sent was a byte received in a technical sense. They said nothing about the meaning of the bytes. For a human being a message can evoke a very wide range of associations and interpretations depending on the experience and emotional state of the individual. One person’s interpretation is never quite the same as another person’s interpretation. There is no linear causality in the world of human beings.
If learning was understood from a more modern relational perspective it would resemble a process of many voices interacting at the same time. In this way, each comes to know the context in which the other makes meaning. The progression of B’s understanding of A’s story also constitutes a change to A’s story – creating new meaning, learning, for both.
Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal.
All stories continue, meaning that learning takes place, as participants create a more shared understanding of what the other means. Knowledge which used to be regarded as existing independently in people and things – becomes viewed as co-constructed in communication.
Communication does not represent things in the world. It brings people and things into being in constantly surprising ways.
Supportive, energizing and enabling patterns of interaction are the most important “assets” of a modern organization. That is what should be nurtured and taken care of. Communication either accelerates and opens up possibilities or slows down and limits what would be possible. Communication either creates value or creates waste. Communication either creates energy and inspiration or demeans and demotivates.
Information theory is not only unhelpful but harmful, when trying to understand communication between human beings. Communication is not about sharing information but a process of formation.
.
Thank you Karl-Erik Sveiby and Doug Griffin. What a great meeting!
A relational view to management
February 19, 2012
Gregory Bateson argued that humankind’s fall from grace began through separations such as separating the self from the other, separating thought from emotion, separating the sacred from the secular and separating the subject from the object.
Today, there is new thinking that is based on the very latest findings in the sciences of complexity and sociology. These new approaches define a participative, relational perspective: we should speak about subjects interacting with others in the co-evolution of a jointly constructed reality.
In mainstream thinking, managers are understood as the prime originators of what happens in their businesses. The central concern is how the manager/subject gets the follower/object to act in ways that reflect the manager’s perspective. Management continues to see relationships in terms of influence and manipulation. The manager’s perspective is taken for granted in terms of what the facts are, and what is true or false. Employees are treated as instruments. They are less active and less knowledgeable although they can be sources of information for the manager.
In identifying management with science, two concepts were imported, which we now take so much for granted that we hardly notice them. There is the assumption of the autonomous, rational individual which corresponds with the atomistic view of society and the objectification of nature. The second concept that is imported into management is that of the objective observer who identifies causality and tests hypotheses like visions and goals based on these identifications. The objective observer is detached from the phenomena being studied. When this idea is imported into theories of organization, the manager is the objective observer who is supposed to act upon rationally formulated hypotheses about organizational success.
These assumptions have created the still prevailing subject-object understanding of organizational relationships. When a person is understood as a knowing individual she is being viewed as a subject, distinct from others, the objects. Relations are considered from the point of view of the subject and are instrumental in nature.
The social media/relational perspective to management views life and knowing from a different point of view: knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge is not stuff accumulated and stored by individuals. Contextual interpretation takes the place of the objective fact. When knowledge and truth are viewed as social and temporary then constructions of what we call understanding or knowledge are always a part of what is going on.
Whether the social process is called leadership, management, networking, or communication, knowing is an ongoing process of relating. Social media best produce connectedness and interdependence as processes that construct collective authority and responsibility. Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal. Accordingly, reality in science is no longer viewed as a singular fact of nature but as multiple and socially constructed as David Weinberger writes in his newest book: “Too Big to Know”.
In a relational model identity is constructed from being in relationships, being connected, as contrasted with the mainstream view of identity through separation. Knowledge of self and the other thus becomes viewed as co-constructed.
The relational view sees networking and social media as conversational processes of meaning making. Here, people who network may be regarded as seeking to understand the meanings of the others’ conversational contributions. To do so, they would have to give up the assumption that they and others necessarily mean the same thing by the same terms or expressions. A manager, when networking, would be asking questions that invite others to make explicit what is usually left tacit. In other words, networking is understood as moving around the stories that others are referencing for meaning making. In the end it is a process of movement of thought on the basis of multiple perspectives.
For Bateson and many others, re-engagement is essential for recovering wisdom and long-term vitality. This requires re-connecting with participative ways of knowing, with others as part of the self.
.
Thank you Gregory Bateson, Doug Griffin, Ralph Stacey, Kenneth Gergen, David Weinberger and Katri Saarikivi
Christmas Letter
December 23, 2011
2011 was a year of major breakthroughs. The creative economy is here and looks very different from what we have been used to. I try to sum up some of the most important findings of the year.
The industrial logic was most vividly captured in the idea of the value chain. Value creating activities were sequential, unidirectional and linear. In the model, value was not really created but added step by step. The output of one task was the input of another. The image of work was the assembly line, meaning that work could be fragmented and individual performance goals could be set for each worker. The world was all about people and boxes separated from one another.
Physical tasks can be broken up in a reductionist way. Bigger tasks can be divided by assigning people to different smaller parts of the whole. For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labour. Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex.
Reductionism does not work any more.
Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people. The cognitive opportunity lies in the fact that as we don’t all select the same things, we don’t all miss the same things. If we can pool our insights in a creative, enriching way we can thrive in the complex world we live in. The challenge is that people often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness and conflict rather than as an accurate and needed sign of uncertainty.
Higher performance occurs through the combination of different perspectives and supportive, enriching communication.
Social interactions also play a role in shaping our brain. Repeated experiences sculpt the synaptic connections and rewire the brain. Accordingly, our relationships gradually frame the neural circuitry. Being chronically depressed by others or being emotionally nourished and enriched has lifelong impacts. Our mental life is co-created in an interconnected network. The human mind is not located and stored in an individual. Rather, what we have called the individual mind is something that arises continuously in relationships between people.
Supportive, energizing and enabling patterns of interaction have proven to be the most important explanation behind creativity and business success. The quality of action is always constrained/enabled by the quality of the interaction. The lines between the boxes matter more than the boxes! Communication either accelerates or slows down. Communication either creates value or creates waste. Communication either creates energy and inspiration or demeans and demotivates.
Communication forms much more than informs.
What is now needed is to unlearn the reductionist organizing principles that are still the mainstream. Knowledge used to be understood as the internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be seen as networked communication.
Work is interaction between interdependent people and the network is the amplifier, and at best a supportive and enriching enabler.
.
Networked thoughts and networked emotions
December 5, 2011
Since our individual views are always biased and since we cannot experience everything ourselves, other people become the co-creators of information, experience and meaning. Relationships, connections with others, create a networked way of knowing.
Because of more and more specialized, narrow skill sets, new ways of doing things with new definitions are emerging. Nobody can be successful without supporting contributions. One new role definition coming from Barry Nalebuff and Adam Brandenburger is a “complementor”. A complementor is not the same as a supplier. The connection is based on a non-hierarchic, voluntary network relationship, not the hierarchic value chain.
Complementary contributions may be the most important explanation of business success today. A classic example of complements is computer hardware and computer software. The greatest hardware engineers are in dire straits without the greatest software programmers. Though the idea of complements is most apparent in ICT, the principle is universal: you can never have in-house all the specialized skills you need.
A complement to an offering is another offering that makes it more attractive. People value sausages more when they have mustard. Because work is specialized, it does not pay to try to make both. The new strategic imperative is to identify complementors and to be inviting to them. To be competitive, is to be selfishly collaborative.
In the world of complementary competences, information becomes a process of continuous iteration and networked negotiation. Information networks are the architecture of work and a valuable, shared resource making the interactive movement of thought possible. These networks are the new commons.
Sociologists call such shared resources public goods. A private good is one that the owners can exclude others from using. Private has been valuable and public without much value during the era of scarcity economics. This is now changing in a dramatic way. On the new commons people with many ties and many complementors are better informed and have more signaling power, while those outside the commons and with few ties may be left behind. This may even be the new digital divide.
Network inequality creates and reinforces inequality of opportunity.
Emotional contagion is a fact of life. It means that not only information but our moods and even physical health are created in interaction with other people. We tilt either to the positive or tilt to the negative as a result of our relations, and the further relations, the people that we relate with have. It is a chain of contagion that goes far beyond the horizon.
We could, in theory, make an inventory that evaluates the “richness” of our relationships. My friend Marcial Losada has made breakthrough findings on interaction. The thought-provoking model he has created, which is based on decades of research, has three variables and three parameters. The variables are inquiry-advocacy, positivity-negativity, and other-self or external-internal orientation. The three parameters are connectivity, which is the critical control parameter, negativity bias and resistance to change.
According to Marcial, people are most successful when they are well connected, positive, and are able to balance external vs. internal orientation as well as inquiry vs. advocacy. John Gottman on the other hand, has found that in an enduring, happy relationship, a couple experience five times more positivity than negativity in interaction. If we take the work of Nalebuff/Brandenburger, Losada and Gottman seriously, as we should, it would mean that there is a golden mean for any ongoing relationship in our lives.
Organizations are patterns of relating between people. The critical success factor for a social business is to understand that we share feelings much more than we share information.
.
Thank you Barry Nalebuff, Adam Brandenburger, Marcial Losada, John Gottman and Kenneth Gergen
It is not uncommon to think that knowing is something that goes on in the brain. Yet the evidence that it is really so is not quite clear. Some scientists have expressed doubts. The mind, they have argued, is not a thing to which a place can be allocated. Intellectual life is essentially social and interactive, they say. Life is carried on through communication between people. These researchers claim that interactions are not secondary by-products of thinking. They are the primary sites of that activity.
Industrial manufacturing was a fairly straightforward transformation process from physical raw materials to physical goods. Economic growth today is still about value added. The difference is that the generic, homogeneous raw materials and mass products of the industrial era are today different ideas and contextual, co-created solutions. The transformation process is also very different. In creative work, it is an iterative, unpredictable, non-linear movement, rather than a linear, sequential chain of predictable acts.
Knowledge-based value added is a movement of thought.
Individuals should take part in the onward movement of thinking. People should know what the live, future-creating ideas are and how to take part in the conversation in a value-adding way. This is independent of what people do, or the organizational unit they belong to.
The management task is to understand (1) what is being discussed, (2) the quality of that conversation, and (3) whether there is movement forward or people are running in circles. Are people stuck?
Thinking does not take place inside independent people but in continuous interaction between individuals. The richer the interaction, the more economic value added is created. The poorer the interaction, the more value is destroyed and waste created.
Knowledge used to be seen as the internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be understood as networked communication. This requires us to learn new ways of talking about learning, education, competencies and work itself. What is also needed is to unlearn the reductionist organizing principles that are still the mainstream. Work is communication and the network is the amplifier. The age of the (lone) expert is over. The process of communication is the process of knowing.
If we want to influence the process of knowing we need to develop new habits of participation and new habits of communication. This is what the new interaction technologies allow us to do. This is also where agile practices impact on knowledge work in a similar way to that in which lean practices impacted on manufacturing.
.
Thank you Doug Griffin and Kenneth Gergen
What it takes to get a job done
April 25, 2011
Physical tasks can normally be broken up in a reductionist way. Bigger tasks can be divided by assigning people to different smaller parts of the whole. For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labour. Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex. Reductionism does not work.
The machine metaphor led to the belief that if we only can arrange the parts in the right way, we optimize efficiency. When the image of work was the assembly line, work could be fragmented and individual performance goals could be set for each worker. The world was all about little boxes separated from one another.
The demands of work are different now: how efficient an organization is reflects the links people have with one another and the links they have to the contexts of value. How many handshakes separates them from one another and from the things that matter? We are beginning to see the world as relations.
When we talk about relations, we often take examples from nature: murmuration and bird flocks. The V shape of a bird flock does not result from one bird being selected as the leader, and the other birds lining up behind the leader. Instead, each bird’s behaviour is based on its position relative to nearby birds. Ornithologists say that the V shape is not planned or centrally determined; it emerges out of simple, and relatively few, rules of interaction. The bird flock demonstrates a striking feature of emergent phenomena. But the birds do not need to figure out the rules of flight that guide how they organize themselves. These rules are genetically hardwired. Nature provides this for the birds.
Birds then are not “free like birds”.
When it comes to people it is a different story. Mother nature does not provide deterministic rules for collaboration. We are free to choose, or not to choose, our own ways of doing things together. Accordingly we are ourselves responsible for formulating the principles we use to organize our life. Social systems are thus fundamentally different from natural mechanisms.
New architectures of work
We have examples of social architectures that redefine some basic beliefs about social systems.
The wiki is at the moment the best departure from division of labor and workflows. Wikis let people work digitally together the very same way they would work face-to-face. In a physical meeting, there are always more or less the wrong people present and the transaction costs are very high. Unlike email, which pushes copies of the same information to people to work or edit separately, a wiki pulls non co-located people together to work collaboratively, and with very low transaction costs. Email and physical meetings are excluding ways of doing things. They leave people out. A wiki (depending on the topic, the context) is always inviting and including. The goal is to enable groups to form around shared contexts without preset organizational walls, or rules of engagement.
Ward Cunningham described his invention in 1995 as the simplest online database that could possibly work. An important principle of the wiki is the conscious emphasis on using as little structure as possible to get the job done. A wiki does not force hierarchy on the people. In this case, less structure and less hierarchy mean less transaction costs. A wiki always starts out flat, with all the pages on the same level. This allows people to dynamically create the organization and hierarchy that makes most sense in the situation at hand to get the job done.
People work together to reach a balance of different viewpoints through interaction as they iterate the content of work. The wiki way of working is essentially the digital and more advanced version of a meeting or a workshop. It enables multiple people to inhabit the same space, see the same thing and participate freely. Some might just listen, some make comments or a small edits, while others might make more significant contributions and conclusions.
New work is about responsive, free and voluntary participation by people who contribute as little, or as much as they like, and who are motivated by something much more elusive than only money. The society has moved away from the era of boxes to the time of networks and linked individualism. Being connected to people – from elsewhere – is a cultural necessity and links, not boxes, are the new texture of value creation.
Organizations are their communicative performance.
.
Thank you R. Keith Sawyer, Stewart Mader, Robert Cummings, Rod Collins, Doug Griffin, Kim Weckström, Richard Harper and Yochai Benkler
More on the subject: Center for Network Culture. The Agile Manifesto. About Ushahidis. Zen habits. Examples of wikis.
What does the “social” in social business really mean?
February 19, 2011
We have assumed that if we each looked after our own interests, an “invisible hand” would arrange things so that everything worked out for the best for everyone. Game theory has also made it clear to us that in the short run, those who take an I win – you lose approach, will always win out over those who try to employ an I win – you win strategy.
Before Adam Smith wrote “The wealth of nations” and came out with the idea of the invisible hand, he had already written something perhaps even more interesting for our time. In “The theory of moral sentiments” he argued that a stable society was based on sympathy. He underlined the importance of a moral duty – to have regard for your fellow human beings. Those who developed a win – win culture would always do better in the long run.
What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent but connected and systemic. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what he believes the right answer is, but also about what other people think the right answers might be. Following the rhetoric of game theory: what each person does affects and depends on what everyone else will do and vice versa.
When it comes to understanding the organizations in which we work, most of us best understand our own jobs and the work groups of which we are part, our strong ties. When problems arise, this disconnectedness and unawareness of how things work in the larger system often leads to shortsighted and suboptimal solutions. A person or a group is essentially looking after their own interests. As a result, problems are solved in a way that easily leads to more problems. These behaviors often mean that I count and you don’t, resulting in people being pushed away from one another instead of coming together.
The word communication means to make something common. To make things common, we shared ideas and information. But a social business is not about senders and receivers of information. It is not about content that is conveyed from one person who acts as an authority to the others who act as instruments of this authority.
A social business arises as a result of self-organizing interaction within the always developing, jointly constructed reality.
Our experience is that when one person says something, the other person does not respond to exactly the same meaning. Thus when the second person responds, the first sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other understood. On considering this difference, he may be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and those of the other person. Thus people coming together in conversation are always creating something new.
Connected people are able to create value and solve problems together on a totally new scale and with unprecedented ease. The challenge, however, is still the same as it was in the time of Adam Smith. We need to have regard for fellow human beings beyond our strong ties. We need to value how they think!
Perhaps stable social businesses are based on social value and sympathy?
.
More on the subject: Mark S Granovetter on The Strength of Weak Ties. The Washington Post on the Economics of Cooperation. Luis Suarez blogging about Louis Richardson “A Copernican revolution to become a social business “
Communication as crowdsourcing
October 6, 2010
Communication constitutes reality. Communication is said to be the primary process by which human life is experienced: how we communicate creates and forms our experiences. Accordingly social life consists of dynamic interaction processes rather than stable structures. Therefore the way we communicate is of great interest. Where then do our communication-related habits come from?
We saw communication as a process of senders and receivers. The mass audience was seen as passive receivers and easily influenced by the media. The audience today is very different. Individuals have access to modes of communication that, just a few years ago, were available only for people working inside media channels. Most importantly the mathematical theory of communication, the concept of senders and receivers is not only unhelpful, but has been proven to be plain wrong in human communication!
Private and public modes of communication
Two distinct modes of communication have emerged and spread since the invention of the telegraph. The first mode was private point-to-point communication that was meant to connect people. The original telegraph was the classic example. It’s more developed form, the telephone, made synchronous communication between individuals on a global scale one of the defining technologies of the modern society.
The second mode was the public broadcasting of content. These two approaches to communication were advanced significantly by a series of innovations resulting in media technologies being perhaps the most socially disruptive developments of the past century, but the basic division into the two modes of private point-to-point and public broadcasting has remained essentially the same until now.
Thomas Edison filed a patent claim in the autumn of 1888 for a device, which, according to him “does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” The kinetoscope as it was called, carried a long spiral of tiny images that could be viewed in a moving sequence by turning a crank and peering through a magnifying glass. Edison’s vision of this new technology was quite quickly taken over by people who saw motion pictures not as a personal experience but as a publicly broadcasted mass media.
In the US the primary financing for radio and TV broadcast stations came very quickly from airtime used for advertising. In other countries, different models emerged. In Europe radio/TV was funded largely through license fees paid by radio/TV set owners. This model was grounded in the belief that radio/TV is a political voice that should serve the interest of the “people” and not the interest of making a profit.
The broadcasting model of communication was now turned into the property of either advertisers or politicians.
This was because of the inherited way of thinking about people’s actions. We have two major ways of understanding why people behave the way they do. On the one hand, there is the causal explanation. People change because of external forces. People can be influenced, educated, motivated or even forced to change their behaviour. This is the causal thinking of mainstream management theory: I send you a message and you act. I steer you and your use of time.
Complex responsiveness
On the other hand, there is the assumption of agency based on response-ability and responsiveness. Instead of seeing the audience as an undifferentiated, passive mass, we understand the audience as a network of people, forming small groups and larger communities. The commercial and political interest to broadcasting was a result from the belief that the media can mold masses. In contrast to earlier thinking, the society is today seen to consist of numerous differentiated communities, each with own values and interests. All media content is interpreted within the community according to social sense making within the group. The individuals are influenced more by their peers than by media. Meaning is not in the message, but is produced in interaction. Different people will understand what they view and read in very different ways.
Private broadcasting that connects people
A new, third form of communication in the digital, networked world combines broadcasting and point-to-point. The means of broadcasting are today available for individual people. They are not only the property of institutions. The audience for this new form of private broadcasting is not a passive mass, but the emerging, active communities that the individual wants to reach and connect with.
In it’s most basic form, responsive communication involves a three-part relationship: an initial broadcasted gesture from one individual, leaving it free who in the audience acts on the gesture, a voluntary response to that gesture by another, and resulting crowdsourced activity. Meaning here does not reside solely in any one of these parts but in the relationship of all three.
The passive audience view suggested that people are easily influenced by the media. The active audience view thinks that people make active decisions about how to aggregate, and how to respond. The mass society theories subscribed to the passive conception of the audience and public broadcasting. It is time now to subscribe to an active, responsive notion of the audience and the possibility of private broadcasting.
A transformative, third mode of communication is here.
.
Thank you Robert Friedel, Kenneth Gergen, Stephen Littlejohn, Stowe Boyd, Doug Griffin, Clay Shirky, Kim Weckström and Jeff Jarvis
More on this: confused of calcutta and Using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” (The New York Times). Changing communication patterns.
