The power of social networks is all the rage.
The headlines promise to “harness the power of networks of people”. One vendor offering “cutting edge social collaboration tools” promotes a next generation wiki in which an issue or problem is sent out to the larger group for everyone to contribute to and try to solve thereby attracting the collective intelligence and input from the larger group.
This is what “Social” solutions are all about – people connect, author, and post – large groups of people sharing ideas and resources in a common forum.
Broadcasting needs and gathering input from the large social group has value, but social networks do a poor job of coordinating work and actually taking (any) action. At some point everyone has to get off the network and into the real world to accomplish something.
Groups, be they composed entirely of internal or mixed with internal and external personnel, can generate enormous power and innovative ideas, but groups can also diffuse responsibility and accountability for acting on those ideas; the larger the group, the more diffuse. Information sharing is much different than taking responsibility or even accountability. The real lever for taking action is not the one-to-many, but rather the one-to-one relationships.
Consider the oft-quoted, but anonymous story about the four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
“There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody would do it but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.”
Taking action comes down to two people – one person delivering an outcome and another receiving and acknowledging the outcome. This one-to-one commitment-building process begins with either a request by a customer or an offer by a provider. The leader makes a request of the team member, the CEO makes a request of a VP, the Marketing Director makes a request of the Engineering Director, a salesperson makes an offer to a client, etc.
It is this universal pattern that gets things done, and the next generation of productivity tools will focus on enhancing these one-on-one conversations for action so the vision of the group is made true by the actions of its members.