How the web changes the organisation of business and the business of organisation

The door the web is opening

How the web changes the business of organisation and the organisation of business

David Cushman, 90:10 Group

@davidcushman [email protected]

• 20+ years in traditional media – 12 of which in digital • Blogging since 1999. • Author of The Power of the Network and the

forthcoming Platform Thinking: How the web changes the business of organisation and the organisation of business.

• Ex Digital Development Director Bauer Media • Ex Director of Social Media at Brando Social • Board Trustee Citizens Online • Co-Founder 90:10 Group – a global business

consultancy focused on inspiring Open Business to deliver effective engagement, insight, innovation and change with the tools and techniques of social media

• Dad, Husband, Father, Brother • www.Ninety10group.com • linkedin.com/in/davidcushman

FasterFuture.blogspot.comThe Power of the Network

lulu.com

What am I talking about?

• I’d like us to think about how and why the web is such a disruptive, unstoppable, force

• How it means so much about the world we know is changing and must change

• How it opens a door to a better way of being a business

• The crucial differences between

social and open business

Why am I talking about this?

• Because you must prepare to change – not simply how you do things, but what you do and WHY you do them.

• The how of implementation should be your last consideration right now – not the tech-solution driven first.

• Why buy a screwdriver if you don’t know what you are building or why?

The future isn’t digital

Not books, but renaissance, end of feudalism, Changes in the way information flowed changed the way society was organised

What’s the next tool?

What’s the next tool?

What’s the next tool?

What’s the next tool?

What’s the next tool?

What’s the next tool? The next device?

What’s the next tool? The next device?

Don’t need to worry about that

• Worry less about what the tech is

• Understand what people are doing, with each other, with the tech

The future is self-organised

• The social technologies we now have bring people together; people who care about the same things.

• They lower the cost of group forming.

• Groups (Communities of Purpose, less of friends) lower the cost of action.

• They find each other, they create their own content, they distribute it to each other.

Keep Aaron Cutting£35k raised and back in business

Not by an age-related charity... But by people who cared. And could.

#Riotcleanup

• #riotcleanup, was started shortly after midnight by Dan Thompson, who runs a social initiative aimed at encouraging people to use empty shops and open spaces.

• By 10am Monday, the tag was the top trending topic in the UK, and the second worldwide.

• Can centrally organised, monolithic hierarchies:

1. Adapt to need as accurately, 2. Allocate resource as

appropriately 3. Act to create change as fast?

How can organisations seek to match this? What is their role in the context of the self-organising future?

Conversation – aggregation - action

The new reality 3D printing (desktop factories) revealsHome factories to have the impact and reach of PCs

• 3D printing is a few short years away from having the impact and reach of the home pc*

• Those who thought the disruption delivered by

the web ends at movies, music and paid-for content, must take a deep breath and imagine this:

“(We) may be heading to a world in which people do not buy consumer goods but download them from the web to print them themselves...

“The ability of a 3D printer to print a copy of itself

suggests the cost of 3D printing may rapidly fall to become a widely-available technology.”

*S Bradshaw, A Bowyer and P Haufe, "The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing", (2010)

What about economies of scale? The future is a more widely distributed, less centrally organised place

• What of economies of scale? That's the howl heard against serving of micro-niches (in which users shape products to their fitness landscape, compared to the often wasteful ill-fit of the lowest-common-denominators of mass production).The future is a more widely distributed, less centrally organised place...

• Economies of scale are not universal: eg laundries vs washing machines; Electricity in power stations vs generated by individual photovoltaics on everyone’s roof. Home printer vs photo-processing factories.

*S Bradshaw, A Bowyer and P Haufe, "The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing", (2010)

Niche and decentralised doesn’t mean alone Our social nature drives our desire to connect

• Our preference, as social beings, is to work with others. We are not silos and we will not produce, customise or replicate in silos.

• The web is not for taking from (ie searching for a product

to download and print out). It is for connecting us, for making with (others).

• Through it we connect with people aiming to solve the same problem as us in real-time.

• Through those relationships our preferences are shaped. • When we find each other we need effective ways of

surfacing our best ways forward - and support in reducing the cost of delivering those solutions/fixes/next steps.

We want to make togetherThe space for the organisation

• Even a world in which we all have a home factory leaves a role for the organisation – provided it is one which takes a supporting – platform approach.

• The very process of making together delivers better results for those with shared purpose (none of us is as clever as all of us, after all...)

• Platform Organisations bring us together and help us discover successful collective solutions.

• The expertise they contribute will be another value-add.

• Their ability to bring us together to source raw materials at a collective price, another.

Where does the means of production reside? 3D printing is the new delivery truck

• 3D printing is one of the ways in which the outcome is delivered. It's the new delivery truck. The web - and the relationships it enables - retains its role as means of production. Means of production = the machinery to produce... but that does not mean the device.In a mass production world the connection between the machinery and the process is clearer.

• A newspaper owner needed to own a printing

press. They also needed to employ writers, photographers, editors etc to produce the content.

• Which was the means of production? The printing press or the producers of the content? The two were so tightly connected it didn't matter.

The org isn’t the maker – it’s the supporter of makers3D printing reveals the need for platform thinking

• On the web the owner of the means of production is the person who creates the content. This was always so. In the past the owner of the means of production of content had no access to the printing press. Now they have the web and everyone is a publisher.

• The same is true of factories where the production line is

the equivalent of the printing press. In a world in which everyone has access to their own production line (a home 3D printer) the real means of production is revealed as those coming up with the ideas, process and required designs.

• 3D printing throws into sharp relief the

need for organisations to think of themselves far less as the makers of, and far more the supporters of the makers of, 'their' products.

A platform organisation uses its available resources to find, connect and support those who share its Purpose.

Understand and express your Purpose

Discover and introduce those who share your Purpose

Surface what the group

wants to fixAct to fix it

Value innovation Better-fit solutions Efficient

marketing

The role of the organisation – a platform for ‘making with’ Purpose drives the ‘why’ someone would choose to make with you.

Platforms lower the cost of relevant action

• They bring together people who believe in a cause – in a purpose.

• When they gather they may find

they have more than cash to give; skills, ideas, suggestions for improvements

• They may find they care enough

about those ideas that they are prepared not only to give but to act to make things better.

Making use of what we have in abundance – the desire to connect

The journey

• Traditional orgs are not best adapted to accessing the riches of the networked world.

• To win you must become

more like an Open Business – built on the principles of platform thinking.

Three Steps

OperationalOperationalLearning | Processes | Guides

Operational

Principles | Rules Strategic

Open | Platform Organisational

Step 1: Operational

A self-sustaining model for delivering direct insights, best-fit products and services and efficient social media marketing. Typical platform deliverables include: • Process for understanding online conversation and deriving insight from it, • A toolkit selected for monitoring online conversation, (learning faster) • Improved internal information flows and workflows (speeding response). • Bespoke training, guidelines and governance (with documentation), • Support for internal evangelists • An org-specific way of co-creation designed to deliver best-fit social media tactics with relevant communities (building relevance).

Step 2: Strategic - rules of success

1.    Have something to believe in. What else have you got? 2.    Don’t do stuff to people. Make stuff with people. That way it’ll be a better fit and matter more.3.    We don’t connect to be marketed to. No one forms groups or resides in communities to be marketed to. Ask yourself why groups DO form.4.    We do what the other monkeys around us do. Then post rationalise. This matters.5.    There are powerful connections between circumstances and behaviour. Do not ignore them.

A platform organisation uses its available resources to find, connect and support those who share its Purpose.

Step 3: Organisational: Become an Open Business – a platform to achieve - with people

Not just a marketing solution It’s a way of making better business

• It’s about much more than message delivery, more even than changing behaviour.

• It is the future of the business of business;

• For the way things get made and made better, for how services get created and how ideas get shared

• It is the new way the world gets changed

• Instead of using digital to ‘channel manage’ use it to create value.

• 1m-plus jobs lost in the UK • We can manage their

relationship with welfare more efficiently

OR • We can support them to find

others who share their ambitions and need each others’ skills to build new businesses they all believe in

Don’t manage channels, create valueEven governments can play...

A fundamental 21st century choice: To join the new - or make the old more efficiently. One has a future.

The revolution will not be automated Look beyond tools

• The revolution will not be automated.

• It will not be delivered as a turn-key solution or As A Service.

• There will be no button to hit, switch to throw or command centre from which to run it.

• The revolution will be hard, human, challenging, changing work.

Prepare to change what you do and WHY you do itHow you do it should be the last consideration, not the first

• Without the will to undergo cultural change all the tech will do is smear a little make up on the corpse of the past and prop it up in a chair. That won't fool anyone for long.

• Treat me like a customer and I will buy your stuff. Treat me like a partner and I will help you make it.

• No console has a 'treat me like a partner', button. • No console has an 'understand behavioural change'

function. • Show me the console with 'make better messages' on it -

let alone 'make better products and services'.

Why Open, not ‘Social’ business3 key distinctions focus on making with, not doing to

1. It's not about the tools - it is about behaviours: Often social business conversations focus on implementing software. Open Business urges you to think Behaviours first. What are people doing, what can and will they do? Start with tools and you’ll start in the wrong place - giving the old ways a little more life

2. Think less about messages and more about products: Open Business makes things with the people for whom they are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an outcome of this - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads will lead you back to messages.

3. Ditch the customer (love your partner)No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people you do things to. Open Business urges you to think about partners to work with instead, to join with and be supported by the org in delivering the things all parties want - all partners want.

Tools vs Behaviours Messages vs Products Customers vs Partners

Scaling your resources

• The people who can make the biggest difference to your company or organisation don’t work for it.

• Adapting to the connected world means that they can

It’s why we’re called 90:10

Summary

• The future isn’t digital, it is self-organised. • When people can self-organise, the role of

the organisation has to change. • Your role is to become a supporting, open

business platform to make change with those who believe as you do.

• Your first step is to understand WHY you are building something, then what that something is.

• Only then should you consider how you will do it.

David Cushman Co-Founder 90:10 Group Managing Director 90:10 UK 46-47 Britton St, London EC1 M5UJ T. +44 (0)207 253 0354 M. +44 (0)7736 353590 [email protected]

Contact

Thank you

Twitter: @davidcushman Linkedin.com/in/davidcushman FasterFuture.blogspot.com