Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Strategic planning for group spaces

February 15, 2008 – 2:59 pm

Here are some high level thoughts outlining things you might do when planning for a new community or ‘common purpose networking tool’ (thanks Ben), or group space, or network enabler, and how you might go about doing it in such a way as to get the most benefit for all actors in the system.

I show the pictures about facilitation and moderation below to all clients (and anyone else who will listen) as the older I get, the more importance I associate with planning where neccesary. This post is largely based on the top of the triangles in the diagrams below; the strategy stuff. I chose a triangle to try to explain it because it seemed the most suitable. Possibly a spiral; whatever is the best visualisation technique, the most important thing is that strategy must come first.

Each client sees different things which I find fascinating; however, the core elements remain the same, which I hope I’ve captured here. As usual, I’m not saying this is the whole and secret truth delivered from a cloudy mountain top in stone tablets to a chap with a big beard in sandals - things like that are contextually tied, date instantly, break easily and are prone to hording by those who horde things and want power. And the elements continue to evolve every day.

Why do you do it?

Without a clear strategy you have no shared understanding, identity or language, no goals, nor purpose, no research questions, no desirable outcomes or KPIs, etc. etc. and all manner of excitment can ensue. Most problems I have had facilitating can probably be traced back to mis-understandings or mis-communications around the core point of the gig.

Whether you are preparing for a highly formal CoP environment or a wild-west bandy-legged open innnovation network, put time into the strategy bit. Plan where you can plan - even (perhaps especially) where you have your fingers crossed for that all hallowed ’serendipitous emergence’.

What do you do and how do you do it?

It’s all about groundwork and foundations at the beginning. Start with your questions. What are you up to? What is it that you want? What does the sponsor organisation want? What will the participants want?

Why not start the immortal Kipling “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.”?

What do you do diagram

There are many ways to go about identifitying and agreeing your strategy, from top down management-led ‘build and they will come’ processes all the way to a new set of engagement strategies centred around involving as broad a range of participants as possible. These two approaches are at opposite ends of the spectrum and have different stages associated with them.

Know where you are on this spectrum and be true to yourselves. Set the expectations, boundaries and purpose. People like to know what sort of relationship they are in, and if participants feel hoodwinked or let down further down the line, they will speak loudly or vote with their feet (both entirely understandable in my opinion). This can lead to ‘moderation’ actions which rarely boost’s a system’s confidence.

This is just as true for consulting and designing physical events as it is for birthing new online spaces; think about it - it’s humans we are dealing with here.

Whether you can produce a formula for strategic community modelling is up for debate; there are certainly common elements and decisions in the planning process which need to be discussed (and regular actions like newsletters later on).

Each group will have its own dynamics, context, routines, totems and behaviours. Many of these will emerge over time. Attempts at producing and promoting fake behaviours may work, but are more likely to be millstones around the facilitators’ neck later on because people don’t like doing silly things that they are told to do, and the facilitator will become increasingly desparate and isolated as the owner of the silly things and the distance grows between the system’s actors.

A quick diversion via Serendipity:

Don’t look longingly at a serendiptiously formed movement, or an anonymous anarchic one, and pretend that is what you are doing. That is what witless marketeers do and people can smell it from miles away. There is nothing wrong with planning.

Serendipity is a joyous thing; humans need to connect in ways they could never have imagined and the web affords that generously and beautifully. You can see patterns in retrospect and learn from them, but it isn’t possible to be them in this disguise - by the very nature of your planning.

Serendipity-wise, you have four choices:

1. Pretend your movement is serendipitious
2. Chase serendipity
3. Surf it when its wave breaks
4. Plan for a space which affords it

The third option is beautiful. I admire those spotters who see the crests and curls of rising emotio-energetic waves breaking in cyberspace, grab their virtual surfboards and lead a movement from the fore into the unknown with gall and daring. This is crazy brand and campaigning and sudden stuff. They opt for a distributed model.

Here is a gratuitous picture of ‘Serendipity’ extracted drunkenly from the notorious Matt Webb at Thayer Chinwag’s mega-bash last year when this Serendipity angle was going to be a whole blog post.

For planning purposes, I suggest the fourth is the only way to go.

And a cautious toe in the water of ‘emergence’:

Find out about David Snowden’s teenager party analogy if you fancy. It was big on the Knowledge Management circuit a few years ago and has left many of us with a feeling that you can over-manage un-plannable things.

In a nutshell, he said that you wouldn’t organise a teenager’s party with milestones, deliverables, flip charts and whiteboards; you would chuck a few ‘attractors’ in (balls, bats, games etc.), set clear boundaries and offer great fear of over-stepping them, and then let it rip (and go and drink real ale while watching rugby probably). Other approaches will stifle any ’serendipitous outcomes’ in their obssession with order and control (which is essentially some form of Utopia, which is a worry, but let’s not start on that).

Using this analogy, once you have the core stuff sorted (more on that further down), set the boundaries and attractors, step back and light the fuse. But don’t then walk away to the real ale pub and watch rugby; watch, observe, engage, be involved, learn. See the patterns with your facilitator’s third eye, understand them and build on them. If participants don’t like particular bits of your community model, change them; if they find cool things they use without your planning, promote them. It’s their space.

The point of the Serendipity divergence is: at the strategy stage, you need to build in effective facilitation pattern to take this into account.

Back to: How do you do it?

Tools exist to help core teams assess and build their strategies. Dan Dixon and I run strategic workshops using pattern languages (more on them soon), David Wilcox has some great ‘games’ (simulation exercises), Nancy White does amazing graphic facilitation, Beth Kanter has loads on strategy thinking for the NGO sector, people build and use personas, psychological touchpoint analyses, content assessments, taxonomies, then stick to user-centred-design principles and there are much much more; the most important point is to build a common understanding of the model, shared language and socio-technical direction.

How do you do it diagram

There will always be a core team whether you are highly centralised or totally distributed; someone somewhere has to make some decisions, so identify this group for starters.

Get a clear understanding of your community model, patterns, purpose and related language. Use that language to express the community’s emerging identity to all stakeholders as the stakeholder landscape expands. The language can change, but make sure that when you say ‘community’, or ‘forum’, or ‘reccommendation’ or ‘banana’ that everyone knows exactly what you mean. Many mis-understandings have come from different interpretations of a word.

Having got the core team aboard, start thinking like a team. They usually weren’t a team before (see CILIP case study). Understand what you are up to.

If you are in an organisation, advocate within the organisation to recognise the team’s work, reward the team, and identify this practice and knowledge as a new and valuable practice. Miguel Cornejo Castro’s latest excellent paper on ‘the knowledge wave‘ has a lot on this which I highly reccommend. Then you can expand your stakeholder horizons.

Ann Holmes and David Wilcox’s consideration of engagement with my arrows expressing the process

Once you have your core understandings and processes, you have two choices:

1. If your technology is already decided:

Proceed directly to launch and run an inclusive discursive pilot phase (not forgetting the Serendipity bit) to help a representative group of participants charactise the space for themselves, discuss the rules, the processes etc. You are likely to need support in this activity so identify some champions to help you out.

Do this publicly, but maintain it as a pilot - everyone is learning and there is nothing wrong with that. Collect findings and opinions and buildthem into a new model more closely suited to the participants. This may involve changing the technology later, so have some resource for that outcome. Try to organise at least one open event for people to network, learn and share their opinions. As you progress down this path, keep a log for your organisation so that it can learn, and all your work can be shared if another group needs to be set up elsewhere.

2. If your technology is still unspecified:

Get real people into a physical space before you even say the word ‘technology’. Don’t even mention a computer; consider with your people, who they are and what they want and need. Educate them about the principles of networking with an easy and fun workshop. Help them express their activities and hopes in the physical world and map these to technical affordances.

This will give everyone a clear view and say, and thus ownership of the network/community/group model to co-design, understand and discuss.

This can be done with graphic facilitation, group mind-maps, open space led emergence etc. This is tricky and not as sleek as option 1; nor does it give the host organisation the control that option 1 has (which, when you are considering a community tool neccesarily linked to multiple membership databases is a significant issue).

It puts the decisions firmly in the hands of the people and is a thoroughly engagement-focused method most suited to pretty adventurous organisations. Things they want may not be possible which you may only find out later.

Be honest with people.

If for no other reason, do this because otherwise you will create aggravation later. Whichever process you chose, your decisions at this stage will have significant implications when you are facilitating and moderating.

Understand your ‘community’ as a being that will change over time - establish an effective organisational interface to handle this and take your engagement processes seriously.

An organisation who hosts an online community and mentions the word ‘engagement’ but is not actively involved in the space is not actively engaging. This may be fine for some models, but if your members expect engagement with the organisation, and are investing their time in the community space, you should make sure that your organisation will respond suitably as and when required.

This may make people who prefer to run things behind closed doors feel queasy, so if you don’t mean it, don’t do it.