Saturday, March 24, 2012

Social Networks - Part 2, Phases of Collaborative Engagement

Continued from Blog 1...

In my previous blog, I suggested that in my next blog post, I would talk about how collaboration in the new virtual world is different from the more traditional human collaboration. When I started writing about it, I realized that in order to look at how collaboration could be different in the Traditional (Physical World) and New Age (Virtual World) environments, we must first understand the different phases we go through during a collaborative engagement. This is why I changed the title of this post.

People work together to achieve big goals that they could not achieve by working alone. Our social cognition and ability to collaborate separates us from other highly evolved primates like chimpanzees and bonobos. The very foundation of society is formed around the concept that we are not only born collaborators, but enjoy working with one another.

When we work together, we go through different stages of engagement:

1.      Interest or Invitation
This is the phase where the owner/originator of a project invites other people to join that project or where someone’s interest in a project has been generated. This could be the initial brainstorming session by your manager on a new business strategy or a suggestion by your friend to plan a party. It could also be a request for contribution to a cause on a website.
Our decision to collaborate is based on our understanding of the answers to three key questions:
a.       Do we have a common goal?
b.      Do we think this venture will be a success? We must be confident that all team members will do their part and that we will be successful in achieving our goal.
c.       What would we get in return for our contributions? Our perceived value of our share of benefits or outcome must be proportionate or equitable to our efforts. 
In the absence of any one of the above, most of us would not get involved in a collaborative venture unless it is needed for our survival.  

In our physical world, we work in teams where goals are defined, roles are distributed, connections are trusted, and benefits are shared. All this happens within a pre-defined system that we trust; like working for a company. We know that we will advance our careers, we will be compensated for our efforts, and if a team member is not doing their job, they will be disciplined or expelled. The biggest reason for people to leave their job is the absence of that trust.  

When we collaborate outside the trusted systems, we become extra cautious. Our trust level goes down and we demand more information before we get involved. Have you ever been approached by a person that you did not know about something new; an idea, a business, or a cause? 

Our perception of value in a venture gets inflated by our needs, whether based on current parameters or in childhood. For example, if someone is hungry, they are willing to pay more money for food than someone who is not. When people are hungry, they tend to buy more groceries. Try it out yourself and go for food shopping when hungry. Similarly, sharing our passion or belief could be a big motivator because supporting our beliefs is an intangible but high-value reward for us. 

The above mentioned principles are the key for someone to become part of a collaboration effort and there seems to be no difference between the real world collaboration and the virtual world. 

2.      Hesitant Engagement
In some cases, participants may not go through this phase at all if the level of trust in the collaborator or facilitator is high, perception of the reward is very high, or the goal is closer to their core beliefs. In this phase, participants seek to resolve any doubts about the answers to the three basic questions.
3.      Enthusiastic Engagement 
As soon as the participants get satisfactory answers to all three questions they become enthusiastic participants. They will take full ownership of their role.

4.      Disengagement 
At any point in the collaborative effort, when a participant has either achieved his goal or stopped believing in the outcome, he becomes disengaged. Participants may continue switching between the middle three phases, depending on their state of mind.

5.      Closure 
Once the benefits are achieved and the participants believe that they have contributed their fair share, they will leave the engagement. Disengagement without proper closure always reduces trust in the system or in the collaboration partners. A good collaborator should always make sure that the disengaged participants are either re-engaged or reach a proper closure.

We should be able to map which stage we’re at in a collaborative venture, whether that effort is a simple collaboration like buying and selling or something complex and long-term.  

Here is a good video presentation by Dr. Michael Tomasello on the Origins of Human Collaboration. 

I really would like to hear from you if you can or cannot map your collaborative engagements to these stages. Likewise, if you have any comments, questions, or concerns, I would like to hear from you.

Read the next blog...

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Social Networks - Part 1

The social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have lot more meaning and usability than merely being a medium to post funny cat pictures or changing the status line every few minutes. We all seem to acknowledge the fact that these networks can do a lot more but somehow the utilization of these networks is mostly dominated by businesses upselling to their customers or generating leads.

Although, it so much fun to see all the status updates from 100s of your real friends, family members and some “claimed to be friends”, but for the most part parents and grown-ups see these as a waste of time for kids and younger generation. I have friends who are proud to be “Facebook-free” and they, all the time, preach how beautiful life is without Facebook and LinkedIn. I am sure moderation is the safest bet and excess of anything could cause problems.

Change brings challenges as well as opportunities. Internet-based social networks brings about enormous amount of change in how we interact with each other and thus new opportunities are created that have never before been imagined.  Smart are those who can see this change and ride the wave of opportunity to do good things.

One area where social networks have brought about an enormous change is the way to organize people on a common platform both in terms of volume and speed. Luis von Ahn, professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, talked about the limitations in organizing human efforts beyond 100,000 people. In a TED talk last year, he presented the opportunity of translating the web for free while teaching people new languages. He asked the question; what can we do with hundred million people?

In this series of blogs, I will share my thoughts and observations on how people are taking advantage of new social networks and what are the potential new ways in which we can benefit from this change.

Before we start thinking about collaboration ideas involving 100 million people, we must look at how the virtual world social interactions are different from social interactions in the physical world. The topic of this blog post is the difference between this new way of socializing in the virtual world and our aeons-old social practices taking place in a physical world.

Here are three key areas that I think are the most critical:

1.  Non-verbal communications

Social interactions in human life invoke feelings and emotions that are caused by the instinctive learning over millions of years. Hugging, kissing, shaking hands, smiling, frowning, making sad faces, smirking, blushing, and other expressions, are all physical manifestations of our mental states. Our brains are trained to recognize these emotions through small changes in our behaviours. We can mostly distinguish between a real smile and a fake one. We can feel the warmth of emotions in a hug or recognize the difference between a smile and a smirk.

In the virtual world, we are dependent on the emoticons or expression of emotions in words. This is a handicap because everyone’s smile appears to be the same and it is hard to tell the difference. I think that the Generation Z has already adapted to react to words and pictures upon a screen just as they would in real life but we- the Generation X and older, cannot comprehend it. I think they have already developed neural connections to feel the smile through an emoticon in a similar manner as they would feel if someone was with them in-person. One of my colleagues pointed out that re-tweeting or re-posting could be a way of mirroring for Generation-Net. It will be interesting to study the evolution of this new form of communication in 10-15 years’ time.

2.  Number of active interactions

In the physical world, we are able to keep track of and be engaged in only one conversation at a time.  More than that is unwieldy or seen as being inattentive.  As a result, when thinking about conversations, most individuals think in very small groups.

The virtual world offers a different landscape and a different set of parameters. In this environment, large number of people can get involved in multiple conversations at the same time. Just because the response from other party is not expected to be instantaneous, people can engage in multiple conversations easily and simultaneously.

If you belong to an older generation (X or older), you can feel this difference in form of frustration when chatting online, with a member of Generation-Net (both Y and Z), and receiving slower responses. You expect them to send a quicker response because you think that this is the only conversation they are having, while they are chatting with three other people at the same time. I am using this Generation-Net term for the people who grew-up with the Internet and it is synonymous to Net Generation.

3.  Establishing a connection

It is very common to meet a new person from some place and immediately ask them if they knew your other friend from the same place. We look for the common factors and links between us and a new person right away. These introductions establish a baseline knowledge about each other which forms the basis of how far your conversation or relationship is going to last.

In the virtual world, most of these connections are already established and we are well informed on what common grounds we have with anyone in our social network.

When working with sites like LinkedIn, you can see the generational difference very easily. Generation X normally initiates a connection request when they have physically met the other party, while Generation-Net (Y and Z) is actively looking for links and establishing them without any need for in-person meeting or introduction.

Due to the differences in these three key areas, there are lots of behavioural differences between the generations that grew-up with the Net and older generations. These behavioural differences are acknowledged widely. Here are two interesting reads for you:



Please share your thoughts on how you think virtual social networks are different from the physical world.

In my next blog, I will talk about how collaboration in this new environment is different from traditional collaboration.

Read the next blog...

http://www.linkedin.com/in/hassansyed
https://twitter.com/#!/hassansyed66
http://hassansyed.brandyourself.com