CHAPTER 10
THE PULL OF PLATFORMS
Achieving More Together
So far, this book has explored the roles of opportunity-based narratives and the passion of the explorer in helping us move from fear to hope and excitement, amplifying our impact and accelerating our learning and performance improvement. Both pillars are powerful on their own, and in combination, they can help us get better even faster. The third pillar, which amplifies our impact even more, is platforms.
Today the word platform appears in many contexts. Platforms are still in their earliest stages of evolution, so as great as their impact has already been, we should be careful not to narrow our horizons. There’s much more to come, but we’re going to need to seek it out. Let’s begin with a definition.
WHAT ARE PLATFORMS?
The word platform is used so loosely that it can mean virtually anything. A platform can be a physical object to stand on, a declaration of principles (as in a political platform), a type of shoe sole, a metaphorical platform representing an opportunity for discourse, or a computer platform combining a variety of technology layers. Here, I am focusing on platforms that help people to come together and interact with each other. For our purposes, it means two things: a governance structure and a set of protocols and standards for interaction. The governance structure specifies who participates, what roles they play, how they interact, and how disputes get resolved. The protocols and standards help facilitate connection, coordination, and collaboration among a growing number of participants. For example, a retail platform specifies what requirements a vendor must meet in order to participate and the requirements that must be met in order for a transaction to occur. It will also specify standards regarding how products are presented and protocols for how prospects can interact with vendors when considering something to purchase.
Too many of us today think of platforms as a subset of technology without looking deeper to discover what makes that technology so helpful. Platform technology can help in scaling platforms (just look at the incredible reach of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit), but it is only an enabler. The key is to focus on what platforms enable.
The power of platforms is their ability to support the interactions among a growing number of participants. We can interact with each other in family units and small groups, but when we want to expand our interactions and impact, the process gets complicated. How do we do that in a way that serves the needs of individual participants and the broader group as a whole?
As discussed earlier, virtually all institutions have evolved a model of scalable efficiency. Think of multinational corporations or the governments of large countries like the United States or China, with their complex organizational charts and vast bureaucracies. Scalable efficiency operates by tightly specifying all activities, assigning them to specific people, and then carefully monitoring those people to make certain the activities are performed reliably and efficiently. Accomplishing this requires a large amount of administrative overhead, which necessarily constricts the scope of what can be done.
Platforms offer a different approach. As mentioned, they provide a governance structure and high-level protocols and standards to facilitate interactions, but they generally leave it up to the participants to determine what kinds of interactions they will have. This requires far less administrative overhead and can be scaled with much less cost and complexity. For example, LinkedIn provides guidelines for people to form groups on its platforms but then leaves it up to the moderator of the group to establish high-level policies on what topics participants can discuss in the group.
DON’T LOSE SIGHT OF THE ECOSYSTEMS
In contrast to institutions, with their chains of command and performance management systems, the platform approach requires us to be much more aware of the needs of the participants and to ensure the platform facilitates interactions that participants will value. Therefore, people who want to use platforms should understand the broader concept of ecosystems, specifically human ecosystems, because they can help us accomplish what we need or want or they can hinder us.
We are all deeply enmeshed in a complex set of human ecosystems. For the purpose of this discussion, let me define a human ecosystem as the set of interactions and relationships that emerge and evolve among independent participants as they come together in communities and organizations. Some ecosystems are intentional—for example, a movement or political system set up to bring people together. In other cases, they are more spontaneous and emergent, like a city that draws people to live there. In actual practice, all ecosystems tend to foster a blend of intentional and spontaneous interactions that evolve over time
Like many other terms that have gained broad usage, ecosystem is used very loosely, so it can create a lot of confusion. Are all ecosystems created equal? What are the differences among them, and why might one choose to participate in one type of ecosystem and not others? At the Center for the Edge, we identified twelve types of intentional ecosystems and explored their differing structures and the relative advantages that each one has in particular contexts. We will focus here on the interactions that bring people together across more than one institution so they can experience and accomplish more than they could within a single institution.
An example of an intentional ecosystem that extends beyond a single institution is the collection of specialized independent providers that large construction firms assemble so they can have the right expertise at the right time to support specific projects. Another example would be the supply chain of a large industrial company—for example, makers of parts, suppliers of raw materials, providers of transportation services, and warehouse operators. Each participant in the supply chain has an assigned task, which it performs on an ongoing basis to support the manufacture, assembly, and distribution of certain products.
THE ROLE OF PLATFORMS IN ECOSYSTEMS
For ecosystems to scale, they need governance structures, standards, and protocols to facilitate interactions among their participants. This is what platforms can deliver. The governance structure specifies the procedures people must follow to resolve disagreements, for example, and, for extreme cases, the offenses that merit expulsion from the ecosystem and the procedures that might be necessary to expel someone.
Standards and protocols help the participants communicate with each other and support specific forms of interactions. For a transaction like purchasing a product, how do we ensure proper recordkeeping and accurate billing? For giving access to a database, how do we identify users and protect their private information? Answering these questions requires an ability to anticipate the kinds of interactions that are likely to emerge within the ecosystem. Will the platform just support conversations, or will exchanges of goods and services occur? New kinds of interactions may emerge, so healthy ecosystems support the ability to evolve their governance structures, standards, and protocols as participants gain insight into what their changing needs might be.
For example, eBay initially addressed the interests and needs of hobbyists and collectors who were excited to generate some income from their activities; it helped them connect with customers. Over time, it emerged that some vendors were challenged by their lack of business experience. In response, eBay evolved the ecosystem to allow members to support each other in providing advice and coaching on what is required to build a profitable and sustainable business.
Platforms provide support for ecosystems to scale and evolve, but they do not need to be supported by digital technology. In fact, until the last few decades, they were not. For millennia, the basic elements of platforms were not even written down. They were expressed as shared beliefs or norms about how people should interact with each other, passed down verbally from generation to generation and evolving as the needs of the participants evolved. If the norms didn’t evolve, they often withered and died as they became less useful.
Today, of course, digital technology platforms are increasingly important for allowing ecosystems to grow. With the internet and more and more affordable digital technology, platforms have the potential to reach anyone. Anytime and anywhere, the members can interact in any number of ways and carry out complex transactions. By saying technology isn’t necessary, I mean to emphasize the importance of not getting so distracted by the technology that you fail to focus on the reason the platform exists, which is to support the ecosystem and the interactions that fuel it. Without those, the platforms are hollow shells, as MySpace became when Facebook stole its thunder.
Platforms’ ability to scale ecosystems is especially important when we consider one of the most powerful attributes of ecosystems: network effects. The concept of network effects is relatively new but familiar to many of us. It says that the more participants who join an ecosystem, the more valuable it becomes to each participant. For example, if there’s a marketplace with only one product for sale, it is of minimal value, but the value rapidly grows as more and more products become available and as more and more customers join the ecosystem. The value created by network effects often increases exponentially, not just linearly. The bigger and faster a platform can scale an ecosystem, the greater its exponentially increased value, and the sooner that value can be reaped.
A lot of the value in ecosystems and platforms comes from the power of pull. Pull can involve greater ability to draw in people and resources. Certainly, the ability to access talent and material resources when you need them is very powerful. Two other, often neglected forms of pull are the ability to attract (pulling in people we didn’t even know existed) and the ability to pull more and more of our potential out of us as we interact with a larger number of people.
A TAXONOMY OF PLATFORMS
To understand the untapped potential of platforms, let’s start by comparing four distinct types: aggregation, social, mobilization, and learning platforms. I’ll briefly describe all four. In the next chapter, we’ll do a deeper dive into the category I believe is the most significant untapped opportunity in the platform world: learning platforms.
Aggregation Platforms
The platforms familiar to most people today are aggregation platforms. These platforms bring together a broad array of resources and help their users connect with those resources. They tend to be focused on transactions or tasks, such as buying shoes or looking up research articles. The key is to express a need, get a response, do the deal, and move on. Aggregation platforms also tend to operate on a hub-and-spoke model, meaning that all the transactions are brokered by the platform owner and organizer.
Within the category of aggregation platforms are three subcategories:
• Information aggregation platforms. These include stock performance databases for investors and scientific databases for researchers.
• Marketplace and broker platforms. These provide an environment in which vendors can connect with customers, usually anytime and anyplace. Popular examples are eBay, Amazon, and the iPhone App Store. In a growing number of cases, these platforms draw out resources that were previously not available. For example, by encouraging people to make spare rooms in their homes available to travelers, Airbnb has created a platform that grew more than tenfold, from 50,000 to 550,000 listings in less than four years, creating a market that rivals the traditional hospitality industry. In fact, it was strong enough to have a successful initial public offering in late 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when tourism was at its nadir.
• Contest or crowdsourcing platforms. On these, someone can post a problem or challenge and offer a reward or payment to the participant who comes up with the best solution. Two examples are InnoCentive or Kaggle.
Aggregation platforms can help people pursue their passion and their opportunity-based narratives by giving them greater ability to access helpful services. With the right features, aggregation platforms can allow participants to attract resources they weren’t even aware of.
Social Platforms
Social platforms, which are the second most common form of platform available today, resemble aggregation platforms in that they aggregate a lot of people. Think of all the broad-based social platforms we’ve come to know and love: Facebook and Twitter are leading examples. The pull of these platforms is irresistible to many. US adult users spend an average of 42.1 minutes per day on Facebook and 17.1 minutes on Twitter; some spend much more.
Social platforms differ from aggregation platforms on some key dimensions. First, they build and reinforce long-term relationships across participants on the platform; it’s not just about doing a transaction or a task but getting to know people around areas of common interest. Second, they tend to foster mesh networks of relationships, rather than hub-and-spoke interactions. In other words, people connect with each other over time in more diverse ways, and these interactions usually do not involve the platform organizer or owner.
As we have seen, pursuing your passion of the explorer and your personal narrative motivates you to connect with others, which helps you overcome fear and builds your excitement and hope. Social platforms can help in this quest, but the next two types of platforms can have much greater impact.
Mobilization Platforms
A mobilization platform takes common interests to the level of action. Users don’t just have conversations about common interests on these platforms; they focus on moving people to act together to achieve a shared outcome beyond the capabilities of any individual participant. Because of the need for collaborative action over time, they tend to foster longer-term relationships, but the key focus is not social but results oriented. The aim is to connect with a group of people and put them into motion.
Many different kinds of mobilization platforms exist. In a business context, the most common is a “process network” platform, which brings together participants in extended business processes like supply networks or distribution operations. A prime example is Li & Fung, the global sourcing company in the apparel business; many others span a wide variety of industries, including motorcycles, diesel motors, financial services, and consumer electronics. A little further afield—because they are not profit-making enterprises—are Wikipedia and open-source software platforms like Linux or Apache. Even further afield are mobilization platforms that support social movements, such as in the Arab Spring movement.
A mobilization platform is especially useful to those pursuing their passion and personal narrative, because it is explicitly designed to help people come together to achieve some common outcome. But the next category we will consider is even more powerful for supporting us in our journey beyond fear.
Learning Platforms
Learning platforms help their users learn through action by giving them a forum for sharing their initiatives and publicly reflecting on what went right and what didn’t. These platforms aren’t just aggregation platforms to support learning. An aggregation platform can support learning by bringing together resources like online video courses or by providing access to information in databases or catalogs. Those aggregation platforms certainly can help participants learn, but the effort is largely an individual one. In contrast, learning platforms as I describe them are built on the belief that we can learn faster by acting together than we can by simply reading or listening to a lecture by ourselves. Learning platforms enable us to solve problems and discover best practices via the power of crowdsourcing.
Very few examples of learning platforms exist in business, but we can find large-scale learning platforms in arenas as diverse as online war games (for example, World of Warcraft) and online platforms to help musicians develop and refine their remixing skills (for example, ccMixter). They have also emerged in a broad array of extreme-sports arenas, including big-wave surfing and extreme skiing.
Ultimately, learning platforms can have the greatest impact in supporting us as we craft our narratives and nurture our passion. An important driver of our fear is our sense that the world is changing in ways that require us to learn faster. Learning platforms can help us reduce this fear while equipping us to have more and more impact in the domains that excite us.
THE BUSINESS MODELS THAT SUPPORT PLATFORMS
In a world where more and more of our interactions are shaped by large-scale commercial platforms, we have to ask an important question: Who pays? Creating and maintaining a platform requires resources, which means a viable platform needs a business model, such as funding the platform with advertising or charging people a fee to participate.
While platforms are designed to support the needs of the participants, the practical reality is that the needs of some participants often outweigh the needs of others. Typically, the needs of the participants who are paying the bills will get priority over the needs of the rest who are using the platform but not helping to cover its costs. Many of the largest and best-known platforms today are supported by advertising revenues, so the needs and interests of the advertisers often get more attention than the users’ needs and interests.
It’s ironic that advertising, a key component of the push-based mindset and practices, has become the dominant business model for commercial platforms whose focus is on helping participants pull rather than push. In the push-based marketing model, advertisers intercept us wherever they can and push their messages at us, trying to motivate us to buy their products. In the pull-based marketing model, vendors try to be so helpful to their customers and users that word will spread and more and more people will seek them out.
An open question is whether this advertising-supported business model will prevail as new platforms emerge and existing platforms grow and evolve to serve a broader range of needs. I suspect that, as we evolve beyond today’s aggregation and social platforms to focus more on emerging needs around mobilization and learning, we may begin to see more direct-payment models, in which all the participants help to fund the platform’s operation.
While subscription models are an easy default, the platforms most likely to succeed in the future will be more flexible. A relatively easy first step would be to charge based on usage. An even better model might be one where participants pay based on value received. Of course, the challenge is to be able to measure and monitor the value received, but it would be a catalyst for the platform owner and the participants to reflect on what is the most meaningful value the platform can deliver.
Also relevant to business models is that, as platforms seek to address our mobilization and learning needs, trust will increase in importance. Before we will share the kinds of feelings and needs these initiatives require, we’ll need to be convinced that the platform owner is really committed to serving our interests. Convincing us becomes much more challenging when advertisers are paying the bill. Trust in many of the best-known platforms is already eroding as we learn how much of the information we share about ourselves is being sold to third parties—a very different form of learning than is provided to the platforms’ users. Ultimately, the platforms’ success will depend on how well their owners can align their own interests with those of all the participants on their platform.
If the platforms’ business models erode trust and promote conflicting interests, we will use them only in very limited ways—say, to do quick transactions or to share family photographs with networks of “friends.” If we are convinced that our interests and the interests of the platform owner are aligned, we’ll use them to build the deep relationships that will help us in our quest to address opportunities.
CONNECTING PLATFORMS WITH NARRATIVES AND PASSION
How do platforms tie into opportunity-based narratives? Aggregation platforms support opportunity-based initiatives with information and resources, and social platforms can be helpful for finding and connecting with potential participants. But platforms will get really interesting when they are specifically designed to mobilize participants to learn faster as they work toward a common goal, doing things that have never been done before. As we will see in the next chapter, mobilization and learning platforms have not yet been widely deployed, even though the need for them is growing and they offer almost limitless potential for making the journey beyond fear.
While we wait and prepare for learning platforms, even aggregation and social platforms can help to harness a second level of pull: attraction. As I suggested earlier, when most of us use these platforms, we focus on the first level of pull, which is access. When we are looking for specific information, products, or people, we use the platforms’ search mechanisms to find what we need.
However, those of us who are pursuing the passion of the explorer are much more likely to see the benefits that platforms can provide from attraction—that is, pulling in people who you didn’t even know existed but who can be extremely helpful. That requires you to ask for help, which is hard to do when you’re trapped in a world of scalable efficiency, in which you need to project as much strength as possible. To show your vulnerability is to reveal your weakness to people who might exploit it, so you talk about your accomplishments instead. People who have embraced an opportunity-based narrative know they can’t pursue their quest without help. But without that narrative and that passion to motivate us, we’re much less likely to tap into that second level of pull.
Of course, there are ways to use existing platforms to drive attraction, but it’s a very different kind of attraction and one with much more limited value. I call it the attraction of the insecure, and in our world of mounting performance pressure, more and more of us are likely to feel it. We post cute pictures of our pets or amazing vistas from the latest trip we made. We’re not really interested in attracting people to us who understand our needs and are motivated to help us. We just want to be reassured that we’re worthy of attention. But that attention is fleeting and distracting; it’s not an enduring and effective response. If anything, it makes us even more vulnerable over time as we realize how fleeting and meaningless it is.
To harness the third level of pull—achieving more of our potential by drawing out capabilities within us—we gain strength and direction from combining platforms with opportunity-based narratives and the passion of the explorer. The most helpful platforms for this are learning platforms, and we will learn more about them in the next chapter.
BOTTOM LINE
As powerful as opportunity-based narratives and the passion of the explorer are, their impact can be significantly enhanced by platforms. The platforms that exist today can be helpful, but the ones that could help most—learning platforms—have yet to achieve their full potential.
Even with the platforms that are available now, you can begin to tap into the power of platforms. To help you determine how, here are some questions you might want to reflect on:
• On which platforms do you spend most of your time?
• Which platforms have helped you achieve more of your potential?
• How have you gotten the most value from using these platforms?
• How could you use those platforms to further enhance your network of personal relationships and achieve even more of your potential?