10

Social Scalability: Communicating in a Transparent World

BOB ROBERTS SELLS THE PLAN

Did Bob truly understand what was going on? Was a memo the best way to counter viral news? Can the same talking points serve for such different constituencies? Clearly, Bob is out of his depth in the Social Age. The act of drafting a memo and handing it to the HR and communications people to “clean it up” so that it can go out to “everyone in the company” reveals Bob’s mind-set and his approach to a Social Age challenge. He is clearly stuck in a time where communicating to the organization involved the following steps:

1. Decide what others need to hear.
2. Decide the facts that need to be given out.
3. Decide how the news should best be propagated.
4. Give a draft to the experts to make sure the language is right and there are no potential legal troubles.
5. Cascade the information all the way down.

Sound familiar? We’ve all been through this many times in our organizations: the endless meetings to decide what needs to be said, the drafts and redrafts to make sure the language is just right, with lots of obscure words to both tell and not-tell at the same time. Then there’s watching the look on the Bob-like leader’s face, as the committee working on the drafts gives him the final version and wonders if it’s going to fly.

At its extreme, this process is called spin—it is based on the notion that possessing information is tantamount to having power, and therefore giving information away is giving power away. For ages, there has been a diffuse fear that the masses gaining access to information would lead to anarchy. Bob’s fear is no different. Of course, that is not the way he consciously thinks, but his CABs are clearly influenced by some powerful scripts that he executes thoughtlessly. A common line heard at many top management meetings when discussing a communication strategy is, “Do they really need to know all this?”

There is an increasing polarization taking place between two groups in the world of organizations: Bob is part of one group, fearful of transparency and lacking the skills to communicate broadly to multiple constituents simultaneously. This group sees the dialogue of the Social Age as dangerous. The other group has either grown up knowing nothing but transparency or has adapted to it. People in this group are aware of the potential excesses of social media but realize that everything has up- and downsides—as long as the ups outweigh the downs, all is well.

The gap between those who expect a high level of transparency and those who continue to try to control the dissemination of information is not just a generational divide. In past generational transitions, the new cohort brought fresh ideas and their own sensibility while the previous generation controlled dominant technologies and social structures. In the Social Age technologies and structures are being shaped by a wide range of constituencies, including the millennial generation, who bring with them a transparency mind-set.

These realities of the Social Age make this an opportunity for evolution not revolution. We are not suggesting you throw caution to the wind and make everything transparent. There will always be sensitive information that, if given out too freely, causes more damage than good. Instead, make this critical shift: manage crucial, sensitive information but don’t conceal your agenda; expect multi-way rather than one-way communication; and, most important, recognize that everyone has a megaphone.

HOW METAPHORS SHAPE OUR CABS

We’ve said that Bob’s CABs are out of touch with the Social Age. Why? To answer that, we draw on the work of George Lakoff, the linguist who suggested that how we think and feel are shaped by the dominant metaphors we have learned.¹ One common metaphor is “argument is war.” Once we have internalized this metaphor, we get accustomed to such phrases as, “He shot down my point,” “Her criticism is on target,” “He won that argument.” These phrases, in turn, validate the original metaphor “argument is war,” making the metaphors self-fulfilling prophecies. So the metaphors we learn help us create our social reality and become a guide for action.

To use our terminology, our metaphors shape our CABs. That is, metaphors are part of our “source domain,” which contains interlocked memories from our personal experiences that link closely with our values and self-image. Our source domain pushes us to “thought-lessly” activate certain CABs as we interpret a given situation through the lens of these old metaphors. Those of us who have similar life experiences and share similar values employ similar metaphors to understand the world.

What Bob doesn’t realize is that his source domain is not able to connect with all of the “target domains,” the collective experiences and metaphors of the constituencies he is trying to influence. They employ different metaphors and even a different grammar. It is almost as though Bob wants to control the flow of information as though he were communicating through stained glass—letting only a predetermined shade of light through—while his constituents expect to be looking through clear glass. Let’s do a short exercise analyzing some of Bob’s ideas about communication:

• People should know what is useful for them to know
• It is the leader’s job to set the strategy and channel it to his people
• Too little knowledge is dangerous, but so is too much
• The leader decides, the troops execute: that’s the secret of a successful company
• You have to be careful that your message doesn’t get lost in the process
• Communication is important to get us all on the same page; we have to be aligned around one goal
• Social media is like washing and hanging out your dirty linen for anyone to see

Looking at these statements, it is evident that there is one core communication metaphor Bob carries with him: stained glass. The stained glass metaphor describes communication as an instrument for reaching particular objectives by coloring the way information is transmitted. It’s all about control. One implication of the stained glass metaphor to which Bob unconsciously adheres is that there is the “controller” and “the controlled.” The transmitter of the information (the leader) is the controller while the recipients are the controlled. In other words, the leader proceeds as if he is the only one who knows what to say, how to say it, and why it must be said.

The stained glass metaphor—very much a part of leading like a general—shapes Bob’s CABs in the IKU story. The Bob character is not a rare one; we meet Bobs regularly in numerous organizations around the world. They are good, honest people who are trying to do what they think is best for their companies, not realizing that their source domain is out of sync with their constituencies’ target domains.

Unless Bob and the rest of us begin leading like mayors and start building an understanding of our constituents’ domains, we will fail to generate the Social Energy necessary to create influence. The problem Bob has is a complex one. He sees the world and the task of communication through the stained glass metaphor. Some of his constituents, likely those closest to him, share this metaphor, however, many of his other constituents do not. This means that they do not understand or trust the way he is communicating. This lack of trust immediately calls the message into question. And the metaphors that the more socially connected cohort carry in their domains—clear glass, crowd-sourced wisdom, living life out loud—cause them to respond to this misunderstanding quickly and publicly. How widespread is this disconnect in domains? Let’s look at a few recent public examples.

THE END OF THE RECEIVED WORD

You’ve probably heard the infamous Domino’s story repeated every time the topic of using (or even allowing) social media in your organization has come up in a meeting. In 2009 a couple of Domino’s employees posted a revolting YouTube video of what they were up to in the kitchen.² The video went viral, and five years later the debate continues to rage about how to “manage” social media at work, with some companies invoking a “zero attachment” policy that forbids employees to post anything about their employer.

The real issue is a deeper one: as leaders, we have grown used to what we refer to as the “received word” syndrome, in which leaders propagate information and the rest just receive it. This notion of the organization’s rank and file being passive receptors fits easily into the military paradigm. The logic stretches further: the notion of the received word rests on the assumption that there is only one story and it is one the generals know.

The Domino’s employees who posted the video were not in the received word category, and clearly felt they were producers of information rather than receptors. Employees, of course, are not the only ones who can grab the megaphone.

When United Airlines broke a passenger’s guitar and refused to compensate him, the irate passenger recorded a song about United and posted it on YouTube, where four million potential customers saw it.³ The passenger didn’t see himself as a recipient of the received word from United; he was a producer of social information, a prosumer. Take another example: after the British Petroleum oil spill story spawned the infamous line, “Well, it was only a small spill in a very large ocean,” the Upright Citizens Brigade—a comedy theater and performers’ training ground—produced a farcical video portraying BP executives around a table dealing with spilled coffee.⁴ Almost thirteen million people saw the video online, and clips were shown on many news outlets. It’s not likely that dealing with the Upright Citizens Brigade was part of any strategic communications plan at BP.

The question is, in an age of ubiquitous access to information and tools to produce it socially, can we prevent someone from speaking about a manager or a company? Today, every employee is potentially two clicks away from having his point of view go viral. But that’s not all.

Glassdoor, an online site launched in 2008, has transformed the very notion of employee opinion surveys. On Glassdoor, employees rate their managers, the CEO, the workplace, the culture, and whatever else they choose to comment on; the information is available to anyone and everyone who has access to the Internet. The Associated Press referred to it as a “job and career site where employees anonymously dish on the pros and cons of their companies and bosses.”⁵

Let’s change the lens through which we are looking at social information. Social networks are a reality. Can we look at the opportunities here? The value of social networks has gone far beyond being marketing opportunities for companies; they have become rich spaces for collaboration and innovation that can engage entire communities. The techies call this phenomenon “social translucence,” an evocative term for “digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another.”⁶ We love this term, especially as it is such an apt way of describing the technical side to generating Social Energy! Clearly, the metaphors that exist in the domains of those who live in the Social Age are not the same as those who came before. As we immigrate to this new world, we are well served to expand our domains and adopt new metaphors.

CHANGING COMMUNICATION

As a Social Leader, the way you must communicate to be effective with the various constituents you are expected to lead and influence is far more complex than ever before. Whenever you communicate with one person or a team of people, you are potentially talking to the entire community. When you communicate with the entire community, each person will see it as a communication just for her and expect to be able to respond and engage in the conversation. Transparency is the norm and everyone carries a megaphone.

The core principle of communication has not changed: communication is not so much about what you say but about what others hear. While that principle hasn’t changed, the “others” were once easier to define. They represented a relatively fixed unit of communication: the person across from you, your immediate team, the larger organization, and so on. Now that “unit” has become porous. Your constituents are actively trying to influence one another on a very broad scale, and they have the means to do so. Information travels very quickly through social media, and in the blink of an eye what was said in one office can spark conversation around the world.

Our constituents’ newfound willingness to “live life out loud” poses a direct challenge to communicating like a general. Fortunately, it also creates unprecedented opportunities for those willing to lead like mayors. We have to learn to change the lenses that were more in tune with the linear world. A mayor must learn and communicate through the metaphors that resonate with his varied constituents.

From Sound to Light

In the Social Age, the shift in communication is analogous to moving from sound waves to light waves. Sound is made of waves that travel through a medium, such as air. Light is both a wave and a particle; it can travel without a medium, even in a vacuum. Sound waves depend on the medium to produce sound. This, of course, is the underlying metaphor that led to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “the medium is the message.” Light waves travel independent of the medium. When they meet barriers, sound waves become disrupted and stop moving; light waves scatter and become refracted—changing colors—but continue and even expand.

In the linear world, the sound wave metaphor worked well. If a leader wanted to communicate to the organization, her team put a message together and the leader propagated that message to the organization under the following assumptions:

• Communication best happens top-down
• There need to be channels of communication (a medium)
• The recipients of the message are static and passive while the message is being propagated (recipients are part of the medium)

Gossip and water cooler conversations notwithstanding (seen as minor ripples to be managed), the production and dissemination of the message was controlled by the leader and directed through the organization.

Today, a leader’s constituents are not passive receivers of information. Those in your community not only possess the same tools for producing and sharing information that you do, they feel empowered to share, comment, and add to the message. Constituents are no longer the medium through which the message passes; they are points of refraction, changing the color and scattering the message in unpredictable directions.

Moving away from the metaphor of the sound wave brings the cliché of “cascading information” into serious question. Here is a quick story that illustrates this change. One of us worked for a water company in Britain in the mid-nineties. The company was going through a massive transformation from a utility to a private company. One earnest manager who had bought into the consultant-speak of cascading information started off his meeting with the pronouncement, “I am here to cascade information to you that I received from the senior team last week, and at the end of this session, I want to see all of you cascading to the next level below.”

Many in the audience had never heard the term cascade in this context. One of them dared to put up his hand and ask the inevitable question, to which he got this answer: “It’s like a waterfall.” The fact that the company maintained waterworks made that answer even more hilarious. In the cascade model, leaders let the water of communication cascade down to the less-fortunate masses who in turn cascaded to the ones below. The assumption was that, after all the cascading had been done, everyone in the organization would know the same message, and there’d be a lot of wet people.

The cascade model fits the linear age of top-down communication in which the executive level controlled the messages. The water company did something else that seemed natural to its executives but which is out of touch with the Social Age. Using the same cascade model, they had put together spreadsheets that detailed how much information was to be communicated at what stage, on a need-to-know basis. The drivers of the Social Age include transparency and socially created information in a continually flattening, highly connected community. The idea of compartmentalized information doled out as and when the leader sees fit is foreign in this world. Many of your constituents are digital natives who will not just see such information control as wrong, they will find it incomprehensible.

Communication as a Light Wave

Let’s recall the properties of light. It is both a particle and a wave, it moves independent of the medium, even in a vacuum, and when it comes into contact with opposition it can scatter and change its color. Communication in the Social Age is like that. The medium is no longer the message. The message is the message and the media (multiple) are media. They interact in a complex way—independent, intertwined, and emergent—to create Social Energy.

What does this really mean? Let’s start with media. Suppose you have something to say to a colleague. The medium can be one-to-one conversation. That colleague can then share that conversation (directly or indirectly) via e-mail, text, Twitter, social media, a blog post, etc., with the rest of the team, the rest of the organization, or the rest of the world. And every recipient has the same opportunity. The message spreads easily through a vast array of media.

Now let’s take the content of the message, the particle. This particle is carried through the various media as the message propagates, but it changes substantially along the way. But it is no longer like the old game of telephone, where the message got slightly corrupted at each point of propagation. Rather, each reflection point—each constituent in the network who cares to—adds to, comments on, or even redirects the message, creating new meaning. In this new world, the Social Leader needs to focus on CABs that allow her to flex to different scales and types of constituents, no matter the original target of the communication.

IN SUMMARY: PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNICATION FOR THE SOCIAL AGE

What Bob referred to as noise in the IKU story was his attempt to put a frame around what had really happened: the story had gone viral because everyone had a megaphone. What does Bob need to do?

For Bob, and for those of us like him, there are certain key principles that outline what it means to communicate in the Social Age.

• Every individual who comes into contact with you is carrying a megaphone and has the tools to share his version of your message
• Everything that you communicate to an individual or to the members of the team has the potential of going viral
• Transparency, crowd-sourced wisdom, and living life out loud form key words in new metaphors within the domains of many of your constituencies. Communication is not one way and it’s not two-way; it’s a network that operates in real time

Together, these three principles suggest that the appropriate metaphor for communication is not control but rather the town hall. In a way, we are getting back to where we started this book: the communication metaphor of the town hall reflects the larger metaphor of the organization as a community. In a community, the controller and the controlled become obsolete divisions as control becomes self-organizing based upon principles of trust, authenticity, and collaboration.

By now these principles are familiar, and we have discussed in previous chapters approaches to developing or expanding CABs in each of these areas. When we think about these principles in the context of communication we see the underlying driver of successful communication CABs as agility. Agility here refers to the capability:

• To move across different scales of audiences in ways that build trust, collaboration, and authenticity
• To bring a community-wide conversation down to a meaningful dialogue with one person
• To be able to address the community-wide propagation of a conversation you have with one person

When you have a message you wish to convey, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Will the message I am sending make sense in whichever medium it is conveyed?
2. How will the constituents I care about most—even though they are not the “targets” of this message—receive this message?
3. What will the reaction be to the things I am not planning on saying when they become public (and they will become public)?
4. What would members of the constituencies I care most about say if they were in the room right now as we are discussing (or I am thinking about) how to convey my message?
5. How will I join the conversation once it gets started in the community to continue to influence and shape the message?
6. How open am I to other voices weighing in on what I have to say?
7. Once other voices weigh in, what will I do to refocus the message for my intended target?

If this sounds like you need to act like a politician whose conversations, actions, and behaviors will be covered and commented on by the media—well, that is the price of being a mayor. As a leader, you are no longer the general. You are the mayor.