Seeking Common Ground in Conversations Can Stifle Innovation and Reward the Wrong People : Research: Stanford GSB

The best baseball players don't always get elected All-Stars. And the Nobel Prize doesn't always go to the most deserving member of the scientific community. This, according to a pair of recent studies, is because such recognition can depend upon how well known an individual is rather than on merit alone. Moreover, because it's human nature for people to try to find common ground when talking to others, simple everyday conversations could have the unfortunate side effect of blocking many of the best and most innovative ideas from the collective social consciousness. "In our research, we found that people are most likely to talk about things they think they have in common with others, rather than topics or ideas that are more unusual or striking," said Nathanael J. Fast, a PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Fast is one of three authors of the paper "Common Ground and Cultural Prominence: How Conversation Reinforces Culture," with Chip Heath of the Stanford Business School, and George Wu of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. "This has the effect of reinforcing—or even institutionalizing—the prominence of familiar cultural elements over ones that are perhaps more deserving."

Click to read more ...

The Case for Customer Communities

You're probably familiar with the concept of Dunbar's number. The Wikipedia entry defines it as a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.

This number is set at 150 connections. Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained."

Not every company caps the number of customers at 150, however. Which means that if they indeed intend to have relationships with their customers (beyond the sales person closing the deal) they need to scale up the number of people who support customers. Each of those people counts personal relationships - family, friends, past colleagues, peers, etc. - in their Dunbar number.

Theoretically, there is a correlation between the customer relationships a company hopes to have, and the number of people dedicated to cultivating those relationships. However, as Doc Searls said so well a few years back, companies are not doing that. Because "Customer Relationship Management" is about management more than customers.

This is one data point.

Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says: “People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle.’”

Which means that since many more people are online these days, there are many more chances they will broadcast their experiences to others. People who are online can also be your customers. When people are introduced to a system where everyone has amplifiers, there may be less relationships, not more.

However, the weak ties in our network have a role and function.

As author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi explains in Linked: “Weak ties play a crucial role in our ability to communicate with the outside world ... [our friends] move in the same circles we do and are inevitably exposed to the same information. To get new information we have to activate our weak ties. The weak ties ... obtain their information from different sources than our immediate friends.”

This is a second data point.

Where is all this leading you? Perhaps you should organize your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system around social. Today at Fast Company Expert blog we explore the question can you just add a "stay in touch" function to your customer relationships management (CRM) to make it social? Will that make it more about customers, thus social, than management?

While we consider and explore the possibility that technology could give us the ability to keep up with it all, I think there is a good alternative for companies that wish to be in service of their customers. It's called community. It takes care of Dunbar's number, and it comes with its own challenges.

First of which is the community size. You need to have critical mass in order to have enough member diversity - some will engage actively, some will watch on the sidelines, some will be somewhere in between.

From my on work with groups in school, I can tell you that between 5-7 per group is a good number. Conversations that help bridge across groups, or even help groups rotate should help with expanding relationships and broadening the trust base within the community.

For a community to sustain itself you want also to have good participation among members. That's why it's often smart to have a community facilitator. Because customers are the lifeblood of your business, this is potentially a c-role, as Connie Bensen explains.

Community shouldn't be just for the brand. It should be in service of its customers.

I used to create the content for the speaking tracks at a yearly Rendez-vous we organized at a boutique consulting firm where I worked. I just came back from a customer conference - 300 were in attendance. I had the good fortune of meeting many for the first time in person, which still makes a tremendous difference in relationships.

The event was aptly named, the future is now. There has never been a better time to make the case for customer community. And yes, your company or business should have a Chief Customer Advocate. I'd go so far as saying that this position should be in the marketing group. Which may be interesting for companies that have sales and marketing reporting into the same person.

There's plenty to think about when it comes to community. Have you built or facilitated a community or a social network? Do you consider them the same thing? Why/why not?

[a graphical representation of the Dunbar's number. A group photo from The Future is Now] 

Source: Conversation Agent

The IT Leader's Hero Quest

Rising star Jim Barton has decidedly mixed feelings after being selected as the new chief information officer at the fictional IVK Corporation. On the one hand, he lacks an IT background; on the other, he's ambitious and up for a challenge. And a challenge it is: When Barton takes over as CIO, his company badly needs a jolt of energy and expertise to grow and to resuscitate its declining stock price. The chief executive who promoted Barton is hopeful but hard-nosed; and Barton's IT group—while talented and tech-savvy—is impatient, even borderline dysfunctional. So begins Barton's wild ride and ultimately an excellent journey to learning effective leadership skills in The Adventures of an IT Leader (Harvard Business Press). According to the novel's creators, a fictional approach allowed them to blend real-life incidents they had encountered as managers, consultants, and educators working with a diverse set of companies. "In this way, we could pool all this knowledge and distill it down to the essential principles that CIOs can generally apply, regardless of industry or size of firm, while describing 'realistic' and

Click to read more ...

Why some leaders inspire action while others are mostly forgettable: the vital role of business storytelling

Leaders can tell stories to paint a vision or strategic direction, share a lesson, convey values or

illustrate desired behaviours. Stories also have an ability to forge deeper connections between

people, so inspiring them to focus their attention and take action. As Terrence Gargiulo said,

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

Stories work for leaders as a successful communication and engagement technique for several

reasons.

Firstly, stories convey emotion effectively, and emotion united with a strong idea is persuasive.

We remember what we feel. And our emotions inspire us to take action.

Secondly, stories are concrete and have the ability to transport us imaginatively to a place

where we can visualise the events being recounted.

Thirdly, stories are memorable: we are up to 22 times more likely to remember a story than a

set of disconnected facts (such as presentation dot-points).iii

Lastly, stories represent a pull strategy, unlike the push strategy used when we argue in a more

traditional way. Stories engage the listener, pulling them into the story to participate in the

conversation, rather than telling them what to think.

View the full story here

Ideo Redesigns the Icebreaker

One of my least favorite activities of all time is the icebreaker. You know how it goes: Throw together a bunch of people--six, eight, more than two is too many--and force them to tell each other something silly, secret, anything that will publicly humiliate in front of total strangers. Cue nervous laughter and clammy palms. But barely has the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship begun and Ideo is already telling us: We have a better way. We're going to use design.

Click to read more ...