It’s been an interesting week, to say the least.

In a lot of ways, we all just pulled each other up to a new frequency, I think. We’ve been sharing our ideas and perspectives of our personal discoveries for a while now, and all of a sudden all these perspectives assembled into an insight that helped me understand why the human network is so important, and why building a personal ‘trust network’ is critical for moving forward in society. (For anyone new here, check out An Idea Worth Spreading post and comment thread as an orientation to this site and the thinking going on here.)

So the past few days have been spent thinking about what just happened, and how we can keep doing it.

I have realized what’s happening here is that this blog has become a public learning community, where we are all literally learning how to learn. We are learning how to think in this new way. This new way of thinking, this ‘network thinking,’ by default requires a network. We can’t learn how to think in the new way alone. We can only figure it out through experimentation and collaboration. This is the “shift” everyone is talking about, the big thing that individuals and organizations “need” to operate in the 21st Century. We’re revealing it, unfolding it, right now, together.

My takeaway of what this means and how to do it:

1. Create a personal ‘trust network’ for yourself first.

In order to understand the implications of the shift and to internalize it, you need to experience it firsthand. You can’t tell your organization that you’re going to be implementing “social media” and everyone is going to start “collaborating,” and assume that waving a magic wand is going to make this happen. My experience has been that I had to learn what trusting and sharing means on my own.

That really sounds bizarre, and I feel a bit subhuman that it took me so long to relearn how to trust someone and share resources. It’s what we’re taught as children, but apparently society does a good job beating it out of us.

All of us have a trust network already “in real life.” It’s your family and your close friends and colleagues, all those strong ties, and also your extended family, community, and coworkers, your weak ties. These people are crucial, they are your companions day to day. But what about people beyond your real life connections? Is there a way to extend our connections and build trust with strangers who have a diversity of backgrounds, skills, strengths, resources, and knowledge? People who could help us if we needed help? Could we establish a global trust network?

What I discovered through Twitter was that there are people out there who know what community means. Who really, truly know. These people have already internalized what a society could look like based on a cooperative model, and it seems that this is what’s really going on on the web. Beyond all the superficial stuff out there, all the mindless entertainment and porn, at the core (or maybe at the periphery) is a community of….thousands?….millions?….of people who have jobs and careers and passions that they carry out “in the real world,” but have already embraced the vision of a much different way of life that is based in trust.

And they are modeling it online.

What is actually happening on the web is an epic experiment in creating a new society.

When you hear people talk about this online “gift economy,” and “building value and trust,” and “sharing” – this is WAY beyond a new gimmick for your business. Please don’t underestimate what’s going on. This is actually people laying down the foundation and infrastructure for a new global economy. There is a movement that is slowly gaining steam as people are “waking up,” and it has the potential to change the world.

That thing you think about before you go to sleep at night, when you say “sigh, if only the world was a little more like ___” – that thing is actually going on right now. It’s terrifying and magical, because it means that there is hope. It means that we don’t have to stand by and let the economy and education and government all erode and crumble around us as we watch from the sidelines. There’s the opportunity to actually get involved, take charge of our own lives, and join in the experiment and see how to make it a reality. How to make it THE reality.

The beauty of the complexity of it is that in order to really reap the benefits of it, you have to participate in it genuinely, and in order to participate genuinely, you have to do it intentionally, and in order to do it intentionally, you have to understand it, and in order to understand it, you have to understand yourself, and in order to understand yourself, you have to learn how to give, and in order to learn how to give, you have to establish a network to give to.

It’s a complex interrelated web, but it seems that establishing the network is a first step.

2. Share yourself.

This is the part where mindfulness comes in, and where you really have to start exploring the depths of personal Identity.

That’s a lot to ask, and you may not have even asked yourself that question in a while. That’s the point. If you were really going to live in a trust-based society – what would that look like? Who would you be?

There’s a big path of self-discovery and self-reflection that goes on, there’s a lot of confronting your beliefs and your ego, and it’s painful sometimes.

For me, that is kind of the beauty of the web. It can help you to help yourself, if you choose to use it to that end.

And the way that “it” helps you, is that PEOPLE help you. It’s the people. It’s always been about the people.

Why has our society become so jaded, so selfish, so afraid, so arrogant, so egotistical, and so greedy?

I think it’s because our society doesn’t give us many chances to share ourselves with each other. To really let our guards down and just be authentic, good people, who are not out for gain, who are not out to exploit each other in order to get ahead, but who just want to be able to freely exchange gifts and collaborate because it makes us feel good.

Society doesn’t want this. You want to know why?

Because these things are free.

What does society reward? Cheating. Stealing. Exploitation. Fame. Big houses. Fancy cars. Executive titles. Material stuff. All these things are attached to something else. Something has to be sacrificed to get these things. And they often don’t make you happy in the end. They’re not who you really are, or what you really care about, but you do them because that’s how it’s set up, and we’re just operating within the framework that exists.

But, there’s this other way.

In this experimental society in which you can participate, if you want – people are a little more “real.” People will give you advice, pass along a link they think might interest you, offer to collaborate on a real project, or exchange some information with you, for no other reason besides that it’s “how THIS system works.”

The precondition is trust. You can’t buy trust. You can’t force trust.

You earn trust.

You earn it by sharing your gifts. I don’t know how to tell you what yours is. It took me years of exploration to find mine, but I can say from my firsthand experience on the web, that my trust network pulled me forward into the realm where I made the discovery. The search for self-identity that I’ve been on my life was actually aided by real people around the planet who I’ve never actually met.

The process of self-discovery is of course completely personal. I can only tell you that for me, starting this blog was one of my greatest tools. Writing my thoughts was a powerful way for me to practice thinking about what I think, and critically evaluate myself. The even better part is when other people started leaving comments on my posts, challenging the way I think, offering their perspectives, and making me rethink what I thought I knew. These conversations have been evolving for months, but each blog post resulted in people leaving comments that challenged my thinking further and further. Sometimes people disagreed with me, and sometimes I wanted to lash out and defend my thinking.

But instead, I tried to understand that other person’s perspective, see where they’re coming from, and imagine why they might think what they think. I tried to learn empathy. I think empathy is a critical emotion to develop in a trust society, and also a necessary one to help bring about ‘the shift.’

The learning process that takes place during this self-discovery isn’t just a discovery of self, but the discovery of self in relation to others. The thinking process becomes one that can encompass the idea of interdependence. I don’t know how to explain this, but I can only say this “new way of thinking” involves a transcendence of ego. It is a mental model that assumes that problems cannot be solved alone, and that collaboration is not just desirable, but is actually a display of higher intelligence.

When you are able to put your ego aside, and realize that problems can only be solved by many, your mentality shifts from “I know the answer” to one of “How can I contribute to the solution?”

For me, when this started, it felt like a video game. I would send people links, or retweet people’s stuff that seemed useful, and when I got a “thank you,” it caused a little high. People were appreciating my contributions. When people would comment on my blog posts or retweet my posts to their networks, it caused a little high again, because again I was being appreciated.

As you start sharing more of yourself and your ideas, your art, your gifts, your insights, people will start to notice. You don’t have to try to “sell yourself.” You have to try to BE yourself.

There’s a difference. And the difference gets noticed.

And the shift starts to creep into your brain, as this behavior becomes reinforced over and over and over again.

Every time someone shows you some appreciation for being you, even something as small as a retweet, a different kind of synapse starts firing in the brain.

We start getting rewarded for giving and for sharing.

We get rewarded for being our authentic self.

It starts to build self-confidence and self-esteem in a strangely gratifying way, because all you’re doing is kind of having a good time, and just being yourself.

Just keep doing this.

3. Rewire your brain

In order to function in this new society, what it comes down to is that you need to kickstart your brain.

Beyond all the fun and giving and sharing is an actual restructuring of the way the brain works. We have to teach our brains how to process the type of information that now needs to be processed. Digital information. Information that has a place it needs to go in order to be useful. We are problem solvers, but we are also transmitters. We need to build a new brain.

This new brain is intuition based.

I actually think it’s not a new brain at all, but the ‘real’ brain. I think what happens is that we start to unlearn some things, and then rediscover how the optimal brain actually functions.

I have read quite a bit of research on complexity science, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and really so much more, so this isn’t coming from a place of being uninformed, but there’s something different about this brain.

Because it’s intuition based, it defies description. It doesn’t think hierarchically or in a linear way, instead it operates in patterns. It happens seemingly instantaneously. It happens through intention.

Someone gave me the example of reaching out for a glass. Do you think about all the muscles and movements involved in moving your arm, or do you simply have an intention for your hand to grasp the glass?

It’s complex beyond reason, and blows away our current models of description.

It happens because we just “know.”

I think what’s happened to us is we have trained our brains to operate like machines for 100 years. We have been working in jobs that have set descriptions, with specific tasks and roles, and they box in our mind. I think our minds have actually struggled to form the linear paths to think in the linear way that typical organizations want us to operate in; following directions, following rules, doing repetitive tasks, regurgitating information.

But the brain doesn’t want to work like that. It wants to work like a network. It wants to send ideas and information all over the place, jumping from synapse to synapse on multiple pathways. It wants to be contextual, relational, adaptive, and non-linear. It wants to imagine things, map new models, and revise itself constantly. I think it WANTS to be a learning machine. As we pick up on new ways of thinking about things and assembling information, new synapses form, helping information reach it’s destination faster and more effectively.

I started to think about the brain this way by watching the way information travels on Twitter. This was a huge help in shifting my thinking. I imagined each person as a node in a network, even imagining the people out there who I wasn’t following. I tried to imagine EVERYONE who’s on Twitter. All the humans around the world. I imagined we each operated as a switch and a filter.

As a switch, we each can decide where to allow information to spread into our network. (Keep toggling this example between how Twitter works and how the brain’s neural nets work)

When we retweet, we expose our entire network of relationships to this particular piece of information. That’s like flipping the switch “on.” It fires the synapse. Or we can take no action, and the tweet just passes through the stream. The switch stayed “off.”

In addition, we can also be a filter. We can add extra data to a tweet, leaving a short comment about it, or cc’ing specific people on it, or just sending it directly to people.

As we become more familiar with who we’re following and who’s within our human network, we individually get better at being a switch and a filter.

We become more discriminatory about what to tweet, what to retweet, and where to send information.

Like the brain that forms new pathways for effectiveness, we also learn to more effectively move information.

I think that the act of doing this in itself trains the brain. It teaches the brain to recognize itself. It’s like you giving your brain permission to operate the way you’re modeling the movement of information in Twitter. Your tweets don’t get seen by the same people after every tweet, and you never know who is going to pick up your tweet and send it to their network. If the person is influential, they can cause a huge number of people to see your tweet, sending along all kinds of new and unexpected pathways. But the travel of a tweet is kind of random – you can’t predict exactly where it will go or who will combine it with some other novel piece of information, it’s just this organic process.

Now the interesting thing is when you stop thinking about tweets, and stop thinking about the screennames that are retweeting tweets.

Instead, think that you are sending an important piece of information. And think that your network isn’t “Twitter”, it’s human beings who need certain information in order for them to be able to solve problems. And then assume that you’ve got a pretty good read on the human beings within your personal network, and you have a pretty good intuition about who you should send that information to in order for it to get to where you think it needs to go and be seen and processed in order for it to have the most impact.

Now you’re operating intelligently.

My little snowcrash was understanding this process of information travel. It’s non-hierarchical, fluid, organic, and unpredictable. But it’s a lot closer to how the brain wants to function than the way we usually use it.

I think that by observing how information moves in Twitter, by literally SEEING it, watching it, observing, we can teach the brain to recognize itself, and jumpstart this shift process.

It’s said that “two neurons that fire together, wire together.”

This is the snowcrash. It’s the moment that a new connection, a new pathway, is forged in the brain. Or maybe many pathways. Maybe a whole new network of pathways. Maybe that ‘lightening bolt’ feeling is really what it looks like, just a ton of new pathways blazing across your brain.

At any rate, once your brain locks in this new set of pathways, you’re in.

Now you’re ready to start doing some reeaaalllllly interesting things.

I think this might be the way innovation works. It might be the way idea generation works. It might be the way creativity works. It’s allowing the hierarchical thinking to loosen it’s grip on your brain, and let it do what it wants to do. I think it will start jumping in these non-lateral patterns and joining up ideas that you would have never thought to join before, because you have a whole new set of pathways to connect them.

And if your individual brain starts acting like that, and then you tune up your whole organization to that frequency and have a network of minds operating in this non-lateral way…….. well……… the combined intelligence of a network like that seems pretty radical.

Conclusion

I wanted this to be an abridged version of the last post, but it seems like it’s gotten pretty lengthy as well. I’m looking forward to your perspectives on the way I’m interpreting what happened, and for those that have had a similar experience, please share your version of how it happened and how you think the process can be accelerated.

I think our capacity to learn and grow is going to skyrocket once we start experimenting with building these new paths in the brain.

So, what I’ve covered here is 3 concepts for boosting our intelligence:

• build a web of relationships, of alliances, with people who will help us to grow and learn
• initiate the process of self-discovery and self-awareness / mindfulness, and learn to share, trust and empathize
• intentionally rewire the brain through watching its behavior modeled in the way information travels on Twitter

The other component that I’m going to cover in the next post is Dialogue.

I’ve thought a lot on this, and the thing that’s missing from this formula is the spoken word.

I’ll get into the concept of orality and generative dialogue, but I think this is the other critical component for us to learn and challenge our minds. We have to engage in spoken “debate,” in a mutually respectful way, to share the way we understand things with others, and then get their perspectives and insights. Some of my greatest growth has happened during conversations that go late into the night, where my mind is stretched to new levels.

I generated what seems like a potentially powerful way to do this publicly online so many can learn at once, which evolved out of my thoughts for starting a Junto.

Sneak preview: Intelligent dialogue –> Chat Roulette format + livestream + Twitter backchannel

I’ll explain more about it soon!

In case you missed it, Facebook surpassed Google last week, according to Hitwise Intelligence.

Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week.

So what?

Watch this short video of Thomas Power of Eacademy.com talking about Facebook becoming a bank. He says Facebook should catch Google in terms of traffic by the end of the year. (looks like it’s happening even sooner than expected?) He then lays out a scenario of some powerhouse acquisitions that could take place, and a possible peer-to-peer lending business model that could wipe out the current banking industry as we know it.

Things are about to get very interesting.

This weekend I experienced a snowcrash; a moment where the seemingly disparate pieces of information floating in my head came together. A synapse fired, a new connection was made, and I was brought to a new level of consciousness, a new way of seeing the world. In reading this over, it almost sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get here. I hope that by sharing with you, it’ll help you “get it” too. So let me take you on my thinking trail.

Insight #1: The Overview

The Future is Networks.

This idea has been buzzing in my head for a long time. The first time I wrote it down was over a year ago, not really understanding what that meant, but it was an “intuition.” As time has gone by, this has seemed more and more probable, but I wasn’t sure how it fit together.

The buzzing has been growing louder, and my mind was saying, ‘The future of Social Business is networks,’ ‘The future of education is networks,’ ‘The future of society is networks.’

What did this mean?

I know everyone is busy. Everyone is looking for some solution to how to make their situation better. If you will just bear with me, I’m going to expose you to what I found to be an incredibly powerful idea.

Insight #2: Where “we’re at” in History

We’re all aware that there’s something going on here. We’re not quite sure what, but it feels like we’re nearing a point where something must change if we’re to move forward.

I’ll be honest with you – I don’t comprehend politics. I find it baffling at the national level and I feel impotent to do anything about it at the local level. (I tried volunteering last year on a committee in my town to promote Zero Waste and green energy. Every meeting was just talking and arguing, instead of devising solutions and implementing them. I got bored and resigned.)

Economics also confuse me. I don’t understand why it’s set up so I paid over $14,000 towards my mortgage in 2009 in interest, and around $6 in principal. I also don’t understand how there was just a multi-billion dollar bailout of our financial industry, and yet Wall Street bonuses rose 17% to $20.3 billion last year. I don’t think of myself as an idiot, but my mind *literally* can’t conceive how those two things could happen at the same time. It seems like the wealth of the entire nation is being funneled right to a couple thousand fortunate people, and all of us are still working pretty damn hard to make ends meet, yet ultimately supporting that model.

Everything seems really bizarre and nonsensical, and it feels like it’s pointing to something. Lester Brown just wrote a really simple, relatively short, easy to digest post that lays out the situation better than I can – give it a read: A Civilizational Tipping Point.

Insight #3: The Underlying Forces At Work

While these things are unfolding at the surface level, something else has been going on underneath. Without really understanding the big picture, I’ve been trying to identify it. I wrote a post a few months ago, called Three Key Trends Shaping the Web and Society, where I tried to put my observation into words. The trends are:

• Accelerating change
• Increasing complexity of information
• Growth of social technology

I explained what each of those means in the post, and added some nice graphics too. If you’re not familiar with those concepts, you can go check it out. For the sake of flow, I’m going to keep moving here, but essentially it means that the world is now more interconnected than it’s ever been because of social technology.

Now, let’s call “social technology” anything that allows us to communicate information on a global level.

And let’s also frame it in these terms: EVERYTHING is information.

Not just these words on a screen, but also the physical objects we exchange; all the goods that keep the world going – food, furniture, clothing, toys, tchatchkis, all the “stuff.” It also includes the virtual objects – the services that we provide each other, the money we exchange, our voices talking to one another over Skype, and every other intangible thing.

Every one of these things is actually a type of communication, a representation for something.

A banana isn’t fruit, it’s nourishment. A couch isn’t furniture, it’s relaxation. A toy isn’t plastic from China, it’s fun. My Toyota isn’t a car, it’s transportation. My husband isn’t a man, he’s support, trust, and love. I could go on forever, but seriously take a look around you, and realize that you’re surrounded by stuff that means something else.

Think of it ALL as a type of information.

Now, if you can truly imagine every “thing” around you as information, and we’re now a globally interconnected world, all trading goods and services and knowledge, that’s A LOT of information.

That’s complexity.

It wasn’t that way when we lived in tribes or even villages or even Empires. It’s literally NEVER been fully globally connected, until now.

It’s so complex, that we literally don’t know how to handle it. When we talk about “information overload,” it doesn’t just refer to all these activity streams on the web – it refers to EVERYTHING.

So what do we do about it?

Luckily, complexity isn’t something that’s never happened before. It may not have happened before for humans as a global civilization, but it happens in Nature all the time.

An ant colony, the biosphere, the brain. All highly complex, yet functional.

Why? How?

If those systems “work,” shouldn’t we be able to imitate them in order for us to “work” too?

Well, actually, yes.

One of two things happens when a process reaches a certain level of complexity, and we can and have observed this. Over. And over. And over.

a. it compresses into simple patterns
b. it expands into chaos

So we’re kind of all struggling with avoiding chaos right now. We all still go about our day, go to work, entertain ourselves, have sex. We’re getting by. But we’re also wondering, somewhere in the back of our heads, how much longer things can go on like this, with all this uncertainty. Hopefully someone figures this out so we can go on with our lives and feel secure again about the future.

Enter accelerating change.

We don’t think about this part, because the idea of it doesn’t fit with the way we experience reality. We only live for so many years, and things feel like they unfold at approximately the same pace they always did.

Let’s use “technology” as an example.

Let’s first talk about technology as if that means just electronic technology.

OK, we went from telegraph to radio to phone to TV to cell phone to computer to smartphone within about a hundred years, but that feels like it happened at a pretty natural pace, because we’ve lived in it as it happened, and we experience time on a linear scale.

BUT, if you plot those changes on a graph, it actually doesn’t move in a slightly tilted line moving upwards at all.

It swoops like the letter J. It gets faster at a faster rate.

Now if you quickly back up, and understand that ‘technology’ isn’t actually just digital, but that technology includes all things that humans have used to simplify things when complexity increases, things begin to make A LOT of sense.

Every tool man has made, from the flint arrows to the wheel to civilization to systems of governance have ALL been in response to complexity.

Tribes got bigger and more complex and needed to hunt down food more effectively to feed more people, and they realized they needed more than a club. They needed an arrow. This worked.

[quickening]

They got bigger still and couldn’t be chasing after food all the time, so they domesticated animals and developed agriculture. This worked.

[quickening]

They got more complex and different people started doing different things, making stuff, and wanted to trade their stuff for other people’s stuff. The developed a barter system. This worked.

[quickening]

They got more complex and this had to be organized into some kind of structure, so systems of governance were implemented. Different versions emerged all over the world, but they all had something in common: There was a scarcity of resources, and so the systems were competition-based. They had to be, because Nation 1 wanted to retain more resources than Nation 2. It wanted to protect or control its own interests, its physical resources, the intellectual capital of its society. This ultimately exploited a ton of people in order to work, but it worked. At least for the folks on top.

[quickening]

Then it got more complex, more interrelated and interdependent. This brings us to the present.

It’s now become so incredibly complex and enmeshed, that each of us now has access to EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET in less than 6 steps. Even with billions of people on the planet, we can reach literally anyone in 6 steps. That means we can access anyone’s resources in 6 steps. Their skills, their knowledge, their capital, their influence. Any resource.

What does this mean?

We’ve transitioned past the point of scarcity.

Take a second to let that soak in.

There is no longer such thing as scarcity.

There are only misallocated resources.

It happened right under our noses while we’ve been trying to solve problems that are not just past the point of fixing, but irrelevant.

The only thing we have left is the scarcity mentality. Any actual problem that needs to be addressed is already possible, right now.

The Final Insight: The Future is Networks

If you’ve made it this far, either this

a.) doesn’t make sense to you,
b.) is something you already knew,
or
c. ) your heart is racing because you’re getting it

Let me share the final pieces that clicked this into place for me:

I never really understood what it meant when people said, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

I never really understood what the point of going to a ‘business mixer event’ and “networking” meant.

It all seemed not only intimidating, but damn near impossible. How do you meet people? How do you make a business connection? How do you build trust with strangers so that you’re not strangers anymore, but might help each other. (And help is anything from lending your neighbor a hammer, to making a referral to help someone maybe land a job, to emailing or tweeting a link online to information you think someone might find useful.) Help comes in all shapes and sizes.

I tried getting a job the old-fashioned way, sending out applications and crossing my fingers, hoping somehow my worth would be reflected on that dreaded piece of paper we call the resume.

(Oh, and by the way, I’m not just a recent college grad with no work experience. I used to have a six-figure income as a corporate executive. I quit because it was soul-deadening.)

My other prerequisite for a job was it had to be interesting and meaningful and fulfilling. Tall order. Nothing panned out.

So I started to experiment online. I had this feeling inside that “I’m worth it, and I want people to know.”

But what is it exactly that I’m worth? What is it that I “do”? Where does the value lie? What am I actually trying to convey?

I realized we all have skills that we learn, expertise that we develop, a trade, a craft, an art. Those things are different for all of us, and they develop and grow over time as we learn through experience. But underneath that we have strengths.

Strengths are something we’re born with, and they get better over time too, just like our skills, but strengths “come naturally.” It’s the stuff that makes us us. Maybe your strength is that you’re super generous and empathetic, or you’re assertive and strategic, or you’re a good storyteller, or a network weaver, or you know what people really mean when they say something, or you can anticipate what people want.

I hope you know what I’m talking about, because we all have these core strengths.

If you have any connection with your strengths, if you have acknowledged and pursued developing them, it’s probably reflected in what you do for a living. For instance, if you’re the generous empathetic type you might work in customer service or a non-profit, if you’re strategic you might be an exec or an entrepreneur, if you’re a storyteller you might be doing video or journalism or painting or music, if you’re a network weaver you might be in sales. If you’re not in touch with your underlying strengths, and therefore not applying them, you’re probably doing a job that’s making you really, really unhappy.

My strength is the ability to see patterns.

It’s what enabled me to write this post. People call me “insightful.” I have the ability to see stuff that other people don’t see, even when it’s staring them right in the face. (I’ve been calling this process “metathinking,” and I’m going to try to explain how it works for me in upcoming posts.)

So I figured out my strength and ventured online to share it, because it clearly wasn’t being appreciated in the “real world.” I had no idea how ’seeing patterns’ would be an asset that would bring me any type of opportunity, because I’d never been appreciated for it before. Well, maybe I’d been appreciated for it in small ways throughout life, but our memories are short, our egos are weak, and we need constant positive reinforcement to feel any kind of worth in this society. And society isn’t really set up to give it to us, so we all feel kind of impotent most of the time.

Feeling impotent isn’t just depressing, it also makes us frustrated, angry, and fearful, because we feel like we have absolutely no control over what’s happening to us in our lives. Kind of like how we feel when we’re sitting in dead-stop traffic and have someplace to be, or when a corporation exploits us and there’s no one who will punish them for it, or when the government isn’t able to provide us adequate education or healthcare, even though we bust our tails and pay our taxes.

We have no trust in any of it anymore, and we’re angry.

But all of that seems really big and overwhelming, so I just ventured online to see what I can do about it for me. I can’t single-handedly change the system, I can only change my own situation. So I started this blog. I started writing about the patterns I was seeing. Explaining trends I was seeing in simple language, distilling down big concepts into words that people could “get.”

(By the way, I made the commitment to try this little experiment in September. It’s March now. It’s been just around six months.)

Along with the blog, I started a Twitter account. I opened the account the week that Twitter Lists was introduced. That was in October. I didn’t use Twitter before that for the same reason I don’t attend ‘networking events’: I had absolutely no idea who I’d want to interact with, or how. No one ever taught me “networking.”

The reason that Lists changed everything is because it allows you to identify who people are following in a way that is contextually meaningful. People organize people into categories that are useful for them; either by geographic location (“NY-friends”), by profession (“design-thinking”, “community-managers”, “social-crm”), by power (“most-influential-in-tech”), by intelligence (“thought-leaders”, “best-mindcasters-i-know”), and any other number of categories that they see fit.

Whether they realize they’ve done it or not, they’ve provided you with a free resource. They’re publicly exposing you to their network.

It’s now up to you to determine that person’s credibility and reputation, and how much weight you put in their categories. (If they come across like a moron to you, but have a list called ‘thought-leaders,’ you might not find their opinion of a thought leader useful. Or maybe it’s really useful, and you’re the moron. That’s for you to figure out. )

So what do you need to do?

Well, it takes a little homework. What I did was go to Listorious.com. I looked at all the Top Lists that were interesting to me, and started following every single person who I thought I could learn from. That means I looked through their tweetstream to see if it was filled with potentially useful links to info, and I also clicked through to their personal website.

(On every Twitter bio page the user can link to their website. This is really important. Everyone should have a website. It doesn’t have to be professionally designed, it can be a simple free blog, but you need to have a place where you show off your work, whatever your work may be. And not just a link to your LinkedIn resume. That’s just an assertion of who you are – you telling everyone who you work for and the tasks you do there. That IS NOT who you are. You need to have some kind of site that SHOWS who you really are. Otherwise, it’s a lot harder to get a feel for what you’re all about just by looking at your tweetstream.)

Not everyone will follow you back. It’s ok. You’ll continue to follow them because what they provide you with is a curated source of information. One example that comes to mind, for me, is Maria Popova’s stream, under the username @brainpicker. I follow her, she doesn’t follow me back or engage with me in any way, but her tweets are consistently interesting, so I keep following. You’ll have some of that, and it’s fine, because it provides YOU with cool content to then tweet to the people who follow you. I follow almost 200 people who don’t follow me. No hard feelings.

How many people should I follow?

So now you’re starting to build up a network of interesting people to follow. Everyone has a different suggestion of how many people to follow, so it’ll be your call. But in order to be able to start spotting patterns, I’d recommend a minimum of 150. This will take time if you want to do it right. Just start with the most interesting people first.

Then watch.

See what those people are tweeting about and who they retweet. By seeing who they retweet, you start to understand who’s in their network. An excellent tool to aid in this process is mentionmap. You just enter in a username, and it shows you exactly who that person talks to the most, and who their closest connections are. I’m consistently surprised when I use this tool, because there is ALWAYS at least one person in a stranger’s network that is either also in my network, or I’ve at least seen their name go through my tweetstream. This is a constant reminder that all of us are connected in under 6 steps.

Then start tweeting.

Hopefully you’ve set up your blog or site where you update information about who you are and what you think about. Start tweeting a mix of retweets of interesting information you find from other people, and links to information about you. Oh. And when I say “information about you,” it HAS to be a gift.

What do I mean by ‘gift’?

It means you’re not selling anything or talking about the company you work for or wasting people’s time with something inane. People are busy, and won’t waste their attention on you if you’re not providing value.

This gift is something you give for free. That could mean a blog post you wrote that is filled with information someone might find useful, like a ‘how-to’, or an insight into something in your industry, or a tip that’s helped you be more productive, or a link that shows something you made if you’re an artist or artisan, or anything that shows off one of those inherent natural strengths of yours.

As you observe the people in your network more, and start talking to them, you realize that these are JUST PEOPLE on the other end.

This is going to be very bizarre and mindblowing at first, because we’re not really used to the idea that strangers could be potential allies that would help us. But it’ll get more comfortable over time. And you’ll start to get a feel for their personalities and their interests, and if you pay attention to who they are paying attention to, you get a feel for who they know. And again you’ll notice how closely we’re all connected.

But, there are always holes in networks, and spots where you can make an introduction that could lead to a discovery. You don’t even have to “know” the person you’re introducing. You might be following a person who tweets stuff similar to @brainpicker, but you notice they don’t follow her. So you just tweet to this person: “hey, you should check out @brainpicker, you might enjoy her tweets.” That’s all. That was a gift, a free offer of a connection.

You just earned a brownie point.

As you get better at this, you’ll start noticing that some people are working on similar projects or ideas, but they don’t know about each other. You realize that they could probably mutually benefit if they exchanged information. So you introduce them. (Again, you don’t have to “know” either party, all you have to know is that there’s a connection there to be made). I might notice a couple scattered people interested in social change, but realizing they could be more effective if they worked together, instead of repeating the same work in different locations, so I say “hey @CDEgger @HildyGottlieb meet @openworld @kengillgren @toughloveforX“. I’ve never met any of these people in real life, but I think they could benefit from knowing each other.

This takes effort and time. It’s work. And it’s unpaid.

So why on Earth would you waste your time doing this?

Because something interesting happens when you start sending people links to information that they can turn around and apply in the real world, and when you introduce people to each other which allows them to collaborate on projects or ideas in the real world.

It builds trust.

This was literally a revelation for me.

As I started interacting more with these real life humans in an online space, I couldn’t understand why people were being so nice to me and sharing information with me and providing me with resources.

It’s because I’m earning their trust.

This is the most fundamental, essential, critical thing we need in order to get ourselves out of this whole mess.

I now have a network of people, none of who I’ve ever met in real life (yet), with whom I exchange value with on a daily basis and build trust. In under six steps, I have access to anyone on the planet, and if I have access to the person, I have access to their resources. Resources like their expertise, their social connections, and their influence.

Do you know how this makes me feel?

Empowered.

Not powerful. Empowered.

Let me give you the book definition of empowerment:

“To equip or supply with an ability; enable.”

This hit me like an absolute ton of bricks.

All of this free giving and sharing actually does something tremendously valuable.

It enables us.

It gives us the capacity to access the resources we need to take an action in the world.

I went for a walk through NYC this weekend thinking about this, and I passed by a homeless man sitting on the street begging for change.

At that moment, I realized that I was looking at a man without a network.

I don’t know what happened to him along the way or how he got there, but at some point he lost access to the resources that would empower and enable him to act. He possessed strengths, somewhere inside, but he had absolutely no way to leverage them, develop them, or use them in a beneficial way. He was a lone node, or at the most, a node within a network that possessed no resources that they knew how to use to their benefit.

It’s networks.

The answer is networks.

Networks solve the problem of complexity.

Since my blog/Twitter experiment started in September, the effort I’ve put in has helped me to begin forming a network of strong and weak ties. At first, I got a few retweets of my tweets; then more comments on my blog; then some people of greater influence started tweeting my posts, giving me more exposure; then a few people asked if I would do guest posts on their blogs; then I was asked to speak at a business conference here in NYC coming up in April; then I was hired by Duke University to teach a Futures course this July; and I literally am just waiting to see what happens next.

It feels like magic, but the process has been completely practical, and actually kind of felt like a game.

It turns out, life is EXACTLY like a game. If you can access the right resources, you can win.

Now here’s the kicker.

Everyone can win.

By definition, a complex system can only function with independently acting agents who collaborate. That means you still have your own personal interests that you’re serving, but in order to serve your interests, your actions have to indirectly serve the whole.

And this is not just theory, there’s proof.

You may not know the name Elinor Ostrom, but she just won the Nobel Prize for her work on cooperation in economics. Turns out she did research that showed that the “Tragedy of the Commons” wouldn’t be the necessary effect of a globally cooperative society, as we’ve assumed. She showed, in practice, that this could actually work.

So what does all this mean?

I’ve tried my best to take some incredibly complex topics and distill them down to something that makes sense. I hope the examples are painting the picture of what’s going on.

This whole online thing is essentially a simulation – it mimics the actual world. The relationships you build online and the networks you build online aren’t just made between screennames and avatars, they’re with real life people.

Turns out, we’re all actually in this together, all trying to figure out a way that we can all utilize our strengths, connect, collaborate, and survive. If helping each other and building trust is the way to make it work, let’s make it work.

All this time, I was thinking way too big, trying to understand how to change the world. I kept asking myself, “but how do we leverage networks?”

We don’t.

We ARE the network. Networks self-organize. We only have to leverage ourselves, and the infrastructure gets built.

Each one of us has to create our own ecosystem of relationships that will be beneficial to us personally. We’ll all have some relationships that overlap, but none of us will have the exact same set. The point is that we want to build trust so that when we need help we know who we can access to help us.

Now imagine, if you’re a entrepreneur, or an organization, or a non-profit, or a corporation, and you understand this message and spread it to each and every one of your employees. What happens when your entire organization of people, as a unit, is a network in itself, but each person also has their personal networks of relationships to draw on, which extend beyond the organization?

You then have an INCREDIBLE competitive advantage. (Yeah, there can still be ‘competition’ in a collaborative society, it’s just different, because it’s based on trust.)

Your organization becomes agile. It becomes a learning network, where every person has access to information that can be shared, interpreted, and implemented. You’ll be able to identify weak signals faster, come up with solutions faster, and adapt to change faster.

The world will keep moving. It’s accelerating at an accelerating rate. The ONLY WAY to deal with it is not to cling to the old hierarchies and silos and pride and egos. We have to understand that we can only deal with this as a fully connected system.

And the really crazy part is: we already have everything we need to make this happen. It’s already in place.

All that needs to change is the mindset.

Let me repeat:

All that needs to change is the mindset.

So how are we going to fix everything?

I have absolutely no idea. That’s kind of the point. None of us do, individually, or even as groups. The system needs to be interwoven first, and then we’ll collectively know how to figure it out. We’ll be flexible, adaptive, and intelligent, because we’ll be able to quickly and freely allocate resources where they’re needed in order to make change.

The first step is to build our networks.

This all hit me like a bolt of lightening, a pattern that emerged out of all the complex information.

It’s an option that seems not only possible, but preferable, and comes with a plan that’s implementable immediately.

I thought that made this an idea worth spreading.

If you think so too, pass it on.

Good morning, Infosphere!

Over the past few months, I’ve been wanting to set up “Metathink Mondays.” Essentially, once a week, post an insight or a question that we can all ponder and reflect upon, in the service of making us smarter. Then, I’ll collect all the feedback, assemble it into another post or ebook that would be like an ‘insight report’ for all of us. We’ve done this once before, but I know we’ve all grown since then, so I’d like to revisit the topic.

What’s Metathinking?

So, if you haven’t been following along here, I’ve been working on this concept I’ve dubbed “metathinking,” or “a way of figuring out what the hell is going on.” We’re surrounded by all these streams of information, complexity, and accelerating change, and just trying to find a way to keep up. Well, there’s no way of “keeping up” – it’s flowing and it’s only getting faster. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel that will keep us from drowning. As Clay Shirky put it, “It’s not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” While the programmers and engineers improve the quality of search, we need to be doing the same – but not with code, with people.

The way I define metathinking is “employing critical thinking through a multitude of frameworks in order to identify weak signals, make connections, and solve problems.” It’s a working definition, but for anyone out there doing ‘knowledge work,’ this is the final frontier folks – not outer space, but the 6 inches God gave us from ear to ear. If we want to be competitive today, we need to spend focused time learning how to unleash the power of our minds.

I think a huge part of this process is in learning how to harness the power of networks, and that’s the purpose of today’s post. Though I called it ‘The Power of Twitter,’ it’s not really about Twitter at all. Twitter is a platform, a communication tool for information exchange. What makes it useful is the people that are pumping info through it, but I didn’t think titling the post ‘The Power of Humans’ would travel as well. What I have found as I’ve experimented over the months is that when used with intention, when assembling our human network in an intelligent way – looking for people to learn from, for strategic alliances, and for insights – Twitter becomes a learning powerhouse. The people with whom you interact end up doing the filtering for you, not only making your tweetstream useful in general, but they’ll even directly send you information that they think you can use to grow. This is the way I’ve been using the platform, trying to provide the best quality, most useful information that I come across, and in turn my peers are returning the favor.

So today’s question is this: How have you benefitted from your Twitter network?

For me, I’m following around 900 people, about 200 who don’t follow me back, but they’re smart or tweet great stuff and I’m interested in what they have to say. There are around 150 that I keep up with in a broad sense – I don’t always speak with them, but I’m ambiently aware of what they’re tweeting and who they’re talking to. And then there are around 30 or so that I communicate with regularly. It happens in open exchange with @replies, via DM, or via conversations that unfold in the comments section here. When there’s a particularly interesting idea still in gestation, we’ll hash it out privately via email. I don’t even know what most of these people directly do for a living, but I know they’re thinkers, change agents, and linchpins. And they make me smarter every day.

As you may know, I’m in grad school right now, researching how technology is impacting society and culture, how it is changing our behavior and the way we think. So ‘thinking about thinking’ is kind of what I do. I clearly find this to be important, and I put in the time and effort to write things here because I want us all to be smarter and better. Unfortunately, the very situation I’m in that gives me the ability to do so much research also puts me on the other side of the wall of practical implementation. My outlet for all of this is here, my insights just feed back into the infosphere, hopefully returning me more insights. What I’d love is some feedback of your experience.

How have the networks and connections you’ve made directly helped you at work? What are specific examples of how information that was shared with you via Twitter (or any social media, really) allowed you to DO something new – create a better experience for a customer, client, student, child, or friend. What are you doing to amplify the social capital within your web of connections?

If you can, take some time to reflect on this, then write a post and share the link in the comments section or just leave the comment here. You might have something in mind already, or maybe you haven’t really thought about this before, in which case – just observe your behavior today. See who is providing you with the links that you click through. Who are these people? Are there certain people that consistently tweet stuff that helps you? Have you helped them back? (I think ‘thanks for RT’ is nice, but even better is when you can show your appreciation for their link by trying to send them one that you think they’d benefit from too). See if by being very observant of how you interact with the people and information, your behavior changes a bit. Maybe you get a little more discriminatory about what you tweet? Maybe you raise the bar on yourself? Maybe you think about who would benefit most from info you come across? (I’m calling this “targeted sharing.”) Maybe you realize that certain people could benefit not just from a link to great information, but by introducing them to great people. (The term being used for this is “network weaving,” [thanks @juneholley] – I try to do it as often as I can, using the hashtag #networkweaving).

I think we can ALL become tremendously more effective in what we’re doing if we think about it and do it with intention. I’m really excited to hear what you come up with, and if you do have an insight, but don’t want to leave a comment or write a post, feel free to tweet your thought with the hashtag #metathink and I’ll aggregate those tweets here as I see them.

Looking forward, and thanks to everyone who’s participating in this amazing learning and growth.

____

From the Twittersphere:

@lindahollier – shared this great piece she wrote on Filtering

@jschmeling #metathink – I use Twitter as Miemis does – follow lists, people, with topics of interest. The network brings new (or new to me) info. in addition to new info, allows me to think across boundaries, disciplines, new topics, techniques can be applied to my work. twitter allows infusion of my work into the dialog, maybe others pick up, add disability, other topics to their work or thought

@der_cisco The comment I usually hear everywhere by people into Twitter is usually that their quality of reading has increased dramatically. #metathink

The world as we know it is in disruption. Maybe it’s always been in disruption, pushing us through cycles of apparent chaos so that evolution can continue and new paradigms emerge. Thanks to social technologies, we’re growing into a globally connected communication system, and seem to be heading towards a tipping point. But what is it that we’re transitioning to?

Maybe we’ve forgotten the bigger picture. The Web was never intended to be about marketing, banner ads, and spam; it was intended to be about learning, sharing resources, and attaining a deeper level of understanding of each other and the world around us. The latter is happening, albeit slowly. I wonder if reframing the experience might help us accelerate the process.

I’ve been thinking about what that would look like, and what it is we’re really trying to achieve. I just read a piece on Edge by David Gelertner, titled ‘Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously.’ In it, he provides an overview of “where we’re at” with the Web – a world of information, activity streams, and NOW; flooded and drowned by immediacy:

The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.

I think he grazed over an incredibly important idea, but never went further to develop it. Earlier in the piece, he said something that also hints at this “big idea”:

It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them.

So the information is only half the battle. Now we need people to filter and understand it.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time on the web; reading, learning, watching. Only in the past six months have I decided to experiment with intentionally growing a personal learning network. I’ve written before about how I’ve been using Twitter for personal growth (How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence), and now I’m focusing on how to build the social capital within my network through “network weaving” and what could probably be referred to as “targeted sharing.”

I’m becoming convinced that this is the purpose of the web: to use it as a tool to enhance both ourselves and the network.

I think the web, in it’s nowness, has tricked us into a constant state of reaction. The information is streaming all around us, and without a focused mindset of intentional purpose in place, we are not in control. Even as we’re posting (which we often confuse with ‘creating’), what we post is usually in reaction to something else, or worse, an echo of it. In our social networks, we’re weaving intricate representations of our identities, posting our interests, photos, and status updates – but these are not ‘creating’ either, but rather asserting. “THIS is who I am. THIS is what I’ve done.” None of these things are creating.

I think, as a society, we have lost ourselves.

The Internet didn’t cause the degradation – we’ve been slowly breaking down for decades – but the Web may be pushing us in the wrong direction because of how the experience is framed. Everything is about the information “out there,” how to search it, filter it, and tag it. But where does that leave US?

I’ve danced around this subject for months, not knowing quite how to bring it forward. But perhaps what’s needed is to be blunt. Before we can hope to advance forward as a species, I think we should turn the focus away from what exists out there, and instead turn inwards and look at ourselves.

I see the web as a tool for evolving our consciousness. Not just to be more present or mindful, or more empathetic, but to actually develop to be more fully human. We must understand the implications of our human agency, and learn to cultivate the forces inherent within us that enable us to impact the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging, and folksonomies, and shared language, and found it interesting that in our obsessive desire to label literally every thing around us, we haven’t yet thought about how we define ourselves. (And I don’t count a Twitter bio of ’social media expert’ as self-defintion).

I’m talking about really reflecting on our Strengths, the combination of things that make each of us both unique and united. There is currently no tool or app out there of which I’m aware that would allow us to describe ourselves and each other in a way that puts a focus on self-development and social capital amplification.

If we shifted the way we talked about ourselves, would there be a shift in our ability to grow? And further, would it help us to assemble dynamic teams and find the kinds of people we need in order to launch initiatives and take action?

As we become more interconnected and accessible, we need to be able to search for each other not only by topic of interest, but by the types of people with whom we’d like to collaborate. I imagine an index that would travel with us around the web, comprised of our strengths, our skills, and our social connections. As networks take precedence in the way we orient ourselves on the web, it will be useful to have visual maps of how we’re connected. Our personal skill sets, knowledge, and expertise will become our virtual resumes, constantly updated and vetted in real time. And our strengths are our underlying ‘human factors’ that act as the foundation for our personal operating systems. This might emerge as a visualization, or possibly as a series of tag clouds. Here’s a few examples of the types of words I think would be used in a “social tagging system.”

[Update: A tag cloud is just one example of what it could look like. It's hard to put things that may boil down to 'tacit knowledge' into words. Another way this could go is via images, like archetypes or badges.]

I think we’ve suffered too long in fitting ourselves into roles and job descriptions instead of choosing to operate in accordance with our strengths. If we define ourselves by a job title, we attach ourselves to prestige, influence, and power. We compete for limited positions, and discard our true selves in place of fitting a mold.

But what happens now that we live in an era where our knowledge, creativity, and ingenuity are being acknowledged as the source of our wealth? What happens when we exchange value as a result of the limitless potential of our strengths? If we shifted the focus, we could each be allowed to develop and excel in the ways we’re naturally inclined to do. If we know what those strengths are and how to harness them, we’ll be able to use the Web more effectively as a tool for learning and for collaboration.

It will take a combination of self-awareness, self-assessment, and some soul-searching, but I think this is a key element in honing ourselves so we can benefit from our collective intelligence. I think it starts with developing a shared language of how we want to define ourselves, and which strengths and values we want to cultivate as we push society to the next level.

There is no longer a scarcity of information. We’re saturated by it. What we need to know now is how to combine the people together who will know how to use it.

#

From the Twittersphere

@ehooge: recommended The Oxford Muse

The Change Journey

research: You Are Who You Know: Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks

We’ve been having a robust discussion around the idea of social capital over the past few days, and as the thread now contains over 100 great, thorough comments, I just want to create the opportunity to keep the thoughts flowing. For anyone just jumping in, if you’d like to get the background context, grab a coffee and read through Social Capital is not the same as Whuffie. If you’re short on time, here’s a brief summary:

Social capital is a term to describe the embedded value within a network. Some can be misled to assume it has a direct exchange-value because of our current association with what “capital” means. In fact, it cannot be the property of a single individual, but rather the property of a network, a commons, or a community – however you’d like to think of it. So what is it? Think of it as the foundation upon which a healthy, collaborative society is built. It’s comprised of trust, connectedness, interdependence, reciprocity, and social norms. (For instance, If you think of the current lack of trust society has in our financial institutions, you’ll see the correlation with the stability of our economic system.) Individuals contribute to the strength and depth of a society’s social capital through their actions and behaviors, but cannot individually possess it.

So if we hit the reset button, wipe away our assumptions, and think about a truly new economy – what is the mechanism for us to exchange value?

Some food for thought: Here is a recent clip of Douglas Rushkoff speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, where he gives a brief history of currency and explains why we need a new system:

Essentially, he says that the operating system for money is obsolete in a hyperconnected world, and we need alternative models for directly exchanging value with each other. (peer-to-peer exchange) He says cash is artificially scarce, and has lost its utility value as it’s been ’sucked out into investment capital and into the speculative marketplace.’ What we need now are new modes of currency based in abundance rather than scarcity. He gives a few examples of alternative currencies currently in experimental phases, which I’ll list here:

Time Banking – Creating Social Change by Weaving Community: This is an alternative currency system to be used in local communities. On their site, it’s described as follows:

At its most basic level, Time banking is simply about spending an hour doing something for somebody in your community. That hour goes into the Time Bank as a Time Dollar. Then you have a Time dollar to spend on having someone doing something for you. It’s a simple idea, but it has powerful ripple effects in building community connections.

ITEX Payment Systems – a small business community and barter network: This is intended to be a marketplace for cashless transactions between small business owners.

Superfluid: The Liquid Economy: This is another model experimenting with a virtual currency system, called ‘Quids’:

superfluid.biz is a b2b barter environment consisting of diverse business entities coming together to exchange services and products for fair value

Another site that was just brought to my attention via Twitter (thanks @matttrichards), The Metacurrency Project, is a great resource center for understanding the requirements of an Open Source Economy. Some great questions have been asked there so far, and I wonder how much more we can flesh out here.

This post is really just a primer for us to keep the ball rolling, so let’s discuss.

#

Update: Resources from the Twittersphere:

@openmoney: recommended Community Way – Open Money in the Comox Valley

@VTExchange: recommended VBSR Marketplace

@ethnobot: recommended The Idea of a Local Economy by Wendell Barry

Regenerosity: Generosity Recognition System

I recently read a post by Brian Solis titled Social Capital: The Currency of the Social Economy, which served as the catalyst for one of the most entertaining Twitter conversations I’ve had so far. I personally had a problem with the way the term “social capital” was used in the piece, which was inspired by the definition given to it by Tara Hunt in The Whuffie Factor. The reason I had a problem was that “social capital” already exists as a sociological concept that’s been in development for many years, and to now boil it down to an equivalent to “reputation” didn’t seem appropriate. And so I tweeted the sentiment. A lively discussion ensued with all kinds of people chiming in, including Brian Solis and Tara Hunt themselves. (Even Umair Haque from the Harvard Business Review made a cameo appearance. fun!)

Below I’m going to “unpack” Brian’s post a bit, and inject some thoughts that came to mind when reading it. The reason for this is to foster dialogue. We’re in the middle of a transformational age, and in order for us to effectively co-create new models of operating, we need to have a shared language. It’s not about who’s right or wrong – it would be incredibly small-minded to put an individual down. Instead, I want to show that different perspectives on these ideas/terminologies exist, and we should acknowledge and talk about what we’re actually trying to say and where we’re trying to go. It’s important if we want to make progress, so here we go.

The piece starts with:

The convention for creating financial opportunities is evolving and changing the way we seed prospects, promote our expertise and prowess, and connect with those who can help us learn and advance through the facilitation of strategic and mutually beneficial alliances.

translation: There are emerging methods for exploiting connections in order to make money, promote ourselves, and get ahead. ok so far…..

Digital capitalization is laying a foundation for expanding the need to cultivate and participate, not only in the real world, but also in the online networks and communities that can benefit us personally and professionally.

translation: Participation in social networks is required in order to capture potential market value. ok….

In an era of democratized publishing and equalized influence, it can be said that engagement and participation are a new, powerful and effective form of “un” marketing. At the very least, this is an epoch of empathy.

Maybe I’m just being picky here, but we don’t have universal access to the internet (yet), so I disagree with the statement of democratized publishing. And even if there was, for the sake of argument, we don’t have universal “digital literacy,” or understanding of how to effectively use the tools at our disposal, therefore we do not have access to equalized influence. But anyway, up until this point I was following the argument, and understood what he was trying to say. But then:

Social capital is a strong ally, an elite catalyst for lucrative relationships, and now a metric for qualification, consideration and ultimately success (however you define it). This is a state of human economics that is thoroughly discussed in Tara Hunt’s book, The Whuffie Factor. Our “Whuffie” or social capital and intellectual assets are defined by both online and real world conduct and its “balance sheet” is available for anyone with a web browser to review, assess, and analyze.

This is where things started to break down for me. Maybe this whole post is moot, because ultimately we’re talking about two different definitions here, but I want to address the discrepancy. In this paragraph Solis does 2 things that trouble me:

1. he equates social capital with “whuffie”
2. he uses the words “metric” “assets” and “balance sheet”

First point: He references the book The Whuffie Factor as his source for this definition. The author, Tara Hunt, describes whuffie as social capital here, saying you earn it by being “nice, networked, and notable.”

The thing is, to me this sounds like describing reputation, not social capital. I believe the idea of social capital was first proposed by Marx back in 1867, but I’m not even going to pretend to be able to speak to his writings. Socioeconomic theory is not my forte. Instead, I’ll skip ahead to three modern social capital theorists – Coleman, Putnam, and Fukuyama – and their definitions.

James Coleman: a sociological theorist, described social capital in an educational context:

“social capital is the set of resources that inhere in family relations and in community social organization and that are useful for the cognitive or social development of a child or young person” (Coleman 1994: 300)

Robert Putnam: a political scientist at Harvard University, described social capital in terms of civic participation:

“by social capital I mean features of social life – networks, norms, and trust – that enable participants to act ogether ore effectively to pursue shared objectives” (Putnam 1996: 56)

Francis Fukuyama: political economist and author, who links trust, social capital, and national economic success, describes it as:

“shared norms or values that promote social cooperation, instantiated in actual social relationships” (Fukuyama, 27)

I’ll build this out a bit more, but based on these quick definitions, it becomes apparent that social capital and reputation are not equivalent things. Social capital is something embedded within networks, not something directly tied to an individual’s status. Moving on.

Second point: Using those quantitative words (metrics, balance sheet) leads the reader to the conclusion that this is something that we will want to measure. Let’s put aside the term social capital for a moment (since social capital is immeasurable) and look instead at what they’re talking about – reputation.

If we decide that reputation is the new “currency” of the social economy, and decide to attach a number to it, I’m going to suggest that that would undermine the entire premise itself, instead resulting in commodity fetishism. (Neither Solis nor Hunt directly suggests attaching a number to it, but I’m just pointing out that if we talk about this using economic words, people will be led to develop it accordingly.) I’m just trying to think ahead here. What Hunt is trying to promote is a return to human-centric practices in business and leading from underlying human values. (One of the tweets she sent me was a link to this post of hers, which indicates as much) I think that’s what we’re all trying to do – I’m just cautioning that people may abuse this premise if it’s meaning is cloaked in economic metaphor.

Skipping ahead a few paragraphs:

Like any form of capital, Social capital rises and falls with the market and the individual to which it’s governed by the state of the industry and affected by the state of corresponding affairs. As it escalates, however, it unlocks opportunities that are commensurate with the community’s assessment of its value. In the same regard, the community will not support or reward lackluster, opportunistic, also-ran, or hollow engagement in the long term.

Again, social capital is measured by individual value and collective perception.

I have to disagree with this. One of the characteristics of social capital is that it does NOT deplete with usage, and so I don’t connect how it “rises and falls with the market and the individual.” Then the last sentence, “social capital is measured by individual value” is also incongruous, because by definition social capital is not an attribute of individuals but a function of the relationships between agents.

I don’t want to spend any more time dissecting this. My main objective was to caution against equating social capital with reputation, because I think we’d lose a big opportunity. Social capital is a complex, amorphous concept, which to me makes it an entry point for conversation. These are the oft agreed upon characteristics:

- it’s a circular concept: social capital is both a characteristic of a flourishing society and a means of achieving it
- it’s embedded within networks, not individuals: comprised of trust, social norms, value-sharing, common objectives
- it’s not formed from rules and regulations, but from a set of ethical habits and reciprocal moral obligations

In the end, I think reputations are built on the foundations of social capital, but they are not equivalents. Social capital can be thought of as the fabric of society. You could even say that the psychological health of a nation is dependent upon it. That feels pretty important, so I feel an obligation to raise the level of discourse about it. The idea of whuffie points to the bigger picture, to a shift in thinking about how we want to behave as humans in business. As Tara herself pointed out, the message can quickly get misconstrued, the conversation shifts to ROI, and the question becomes “how do we make and leverage whuffie to make more money!!?”

That’s a lost opportunity for *actual* growth and change.

Talking about social capital is about having some pretty deep philosophical debates about the underpinnings of how we want to operate as a society, and the values we seek to emulate. How do we up the ante, engage in some plain talk, and push this conversation forward?

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Further Reading:

What is Social Capital?

Building a Network Theory of Social Capital

Wikipedia: Social Capital

Bowling Alone

Making Democracy Work

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building out the idea of how to facilitate innovation within organizations. My proposal includes a revealing of the social network structure of an organization, breaking down silos between departments, sharing knowledge and information, and amplifying people’s natural strengths and talents.

I’ve been thinking about the sharing aspect the past few days, and why it shouldn’t be so hard to create an environment that encourages it.

As is usually the case, the topics I’m focused on suddenly appear all around me and bring me new perspectives and insights. In the past few days, there’s been a new meme – the Social Learning Snake Oil Salesman. The first post I noticed, Social snake oil, came from Harold Jarche, a practitioner in creating collaborative learning environments in the enterprise. He talked about how the field of Knowledge Management was “hijacked” by software vendors trying to sell it as an IT solution, and social learning is on the path to the same fate.

As soon as the software vendors and marketers get hold of a good idea, they pretty well destroy it.

Now social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set.

Since then, I’ve seen several others within the field echoing these sentiments, leading me to think about this a little more deeply.

[As a quick aside, here are a few people worth checking out if the concept of social or informal learning is new:

Harold Jarche - Learning and working on the web (@hjarche)

Jay Cross - Internet Time Wiki (@jaycross)

Jane Hart - Social Media in Learning & Center for Learning & Performance Technologies (@c4lpt)

Jon Husband - Wirearchy (@jonhusband)

Dave Snowden - Cognitive Edge (@snowded)

Charles Jennings - performance.learning.productivity (@charlesjennings)

Clark Quinn - Quinnovation (@quinnovator)

John Seely Brown John Seely Brown (@jseelybrown)

Also, check out the #km hashtag on Twitter for links to more useful content on knowledge management and learning.]

So, why the attack on social learning? I feel like I’m seeing this same pattern emerging with Design Thinking Snake Oil, and it’s frustrating to see a good thing so badly abused. Companies seem to want to implement a quick and easy solution that will solve their organizational issues, not realizing that what’s needed is not a patch for a faulty system, but rather a new system. Banking on the power of buzzwords only puts money into the pockets of consultants and marketers. At the end of the day, you’re out a couple grand, and your organization is still in trouble. These words are just the packaging – the underlying solution is a shift in culture and thinking.

Facilitating collaborative learning doesn’t have to be overcomplicated. Trying to formalize informal learning misses the point. When it comes down to it, we want to create environments that allow people to grow. There has been plenty of research linking learning with improvements in workplace performance, productivity, loyalty, and happiness.

Why?

I was reminded of the premise Daniel Pink put forward in his new book, Drive. Based on several decades of scientific research, he identifies three elements of human motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Not surprisingly, these things are all tied to learning – from learning how to make informed decisions, to honing skills and working towards expertise, to discovering and developing inherent strengths and talents. People want to grow. People want to feel remarkable. And people want to participate in behavior that both enhance themselves and their networks. We like to share.

I decided to do some ethnographic research on this topic and asked you on Twitter: “Why do you share?” The responses are below, and show how very human we are.

Pay attention, Enterprise. Social learning isn’t something you have to gnash your teeth over and figure out how to “enforce.” Learning literally makes the soul rejoice. Set up the environment, encourage the culture, and watch what will happen.

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@jeff_dickey Why share? So people learn, and other people learn that not everybody is happy to go along with the status quo.

@SemiraSK “shared joy doubles joy” as the Germans say )

@KathyHerrmann Sharing = Connecting, companionship, discovery, extending, excitement, richer experience.

@jankoch The short answer is love

@petertwo I share because … others may obtain value … it is a natural act (aka @WestPeter)

@Cekent I share in order to receive what others share. For me it is reciprocity, not sharing.

@cole_tucker i #share because it connects me with others and brings forth more from each of us

@AndreaMeyer it’s fun &rewarding 2 share info that’s useful 2 others; engage w/ new folks worldwide, learn new things, laugh, build future

@fadereu “We’ll transmit in order to receive.” – Nikola Tesla

@renatalemos there´s such a joy in discovering, that sharing this joy becomes part of its excitement

@ScottLeamon Sharing is almost instinctual. What I find is more curious why some do not share.

@Tomgibbonstms It is an expression of identity which I think is the purpose of all behaviour…

@jwolfworks Share? to: expand the commons, connect others to valued ideas, become acquainted, inspire, help cream rise, reveal my thinking- then receive

@MarkTamis to hone my ideas thru exchange

@sanchezjb A belief that the information shared may help or benefit someone and in turn, may help make a difference somewhere, someway.

@chris23 All psychological speculation aside, I am simply compelled to share. This, to me, is a deep & natural instinct.

@Strng_Dichotomy we share w others 2 provide level of confidence that our work will b treated w respect. sharing and relationship are coupled

@jazzmann91 I share so that I don’t become completely invisible…

@DanielStocker for feedback and to give back

@bioZhena Trying to connect with those who need what we have, and with those we need to get our tech to market

@AmandaClay I share because I can’t help it. I need to distribute good information to people who might want it. I’m a librarian.

@HowToMakeMyBlog it just feels good to share good and educating material to other people, why keep it secret?

@ehooge A first question should be: what do I share? As I like to share things that sharing increases ie: knowledge, love, happiness

What do our online personas do to our physical-world identities? As we invest more time into developing our digital selves, is something taken away from who we are? Or something added? If you’re reading this, you spend some portion of your life online, and probably maintain an online identity or two across the various social networks. How does the creation and maintenance of those identities change your physical experience of self?

I’m curious if our participation in social networks, and specifically in creating our online identities, is creating an opportunity for us to lose our agency. We seem to relish the ability to carve out of online personalities and post an unlimited amount of information about ourselves, thinking that it is in some way a declaration of our existence and importance. I wonder if it has the opposite effect. Companies are profiting off of selling the data that we so willingly produce for free, reducing us down to not much more than commodities. And we are quick to defend our personas as legitimate extensions of ourselves, engaged in meaningful interactions that take up an increasingly greater portion of our time, energy and attention. Are we drinking our own Kool-Aid?

Digital Tribes & Cybervillages

What’s driving us to develop online identities? Maybe we’ve gotten more and more disconnected from ourselves and each other; lost in the noise and experiencing a crisis of identity. We try to reclaim ourselves, assert ourselves, and declare ourselves by shaping online personas. We supplement them with information about our interests, hobbies, preferences, and favorites. We reinforce the life of the persona with photographs, quizzes, games and status updates. We send and accept friend requests to expand the size of our digital tribes and entrench ourselves into the global cybervillage.

There is a value to this. We have a mix of real friends, people pulled up from the past, and new connections. Many fall into the category of ‘weak ties,’ becoming part of your ambient awareness, monitored somewhere at the periphery of your consciousness. We form digital social bonds through our behaviors and interactions, and there’s a feeling of being part of something substantial. It seems to fulfill some basic human needs of inclusion and validation.

The act of interacting is one thing though; the fabrication and maintenance of these identities is another.

Categories and Identity-Fixing

Are you greater than the sum of your parts? Or can you be summed up by your Facebook profile? Many hours are spent in developing the online presence – from the basic information (birthday, hometown, religious views, etc) to the various preferences (activities, favorites movies, TV shows, music, books, group affiliations, etc) to the status updates. Some would say that their Facebook profile is a fairly accurate representation of their real personalities.

My question is……”Really?”

Has our technology become that advanced, or are we dumbing down and selling ourselves a little short? Are we really ready to say that what can be expressed online represents the extent to what we can express? And are we ready to lock ourselves into a set identity, where the physical and virtual versions begin to mirror each other closer and closer?

For me, the depth of humanity runs much, much deeper than what can be expressed online. And part of being human is having fluidity, plasticity, and an ability for pure potentiality. That means that tomorrow I can choose to be different from today, to make an unexpected decision, or to change my mind completely. I am not one thing. I am not one identity. I am a system in flux. And so I’m frightened when someone is so quick to say that who they are online is who they are. Reduced to bits.

My Doppleganger (or Which One is the Puppetmaster?)

What are you willing to sacrifice in the physical world in order to maintain your virtual self? How often during your typical day do you see/hear/experience something and think to yourself, “I need to put this on Facebook” or “I’m going to tweet this.” I place value on interacting and sharing, but at what point do we become so intertwined with the upkeep of the persona that we forget how to be fully engaged in the experiences of our physical lives? How strong is the itch to update? Are you in control of your online self? Or is it in control of you?

Could you walk away?

Be An Agent, Not a Slave

I don’t know that the early visionaries of the Internet thought much about the development of virtual selves. Most of the literature I’ve read addresses the potential of developing systems to transfer and share information, not to create identities. There was an idea that a hyperconnected world would allow us to organize, filter, and gather the pieces that would allow us to make breakthroughs and solve real problems. The work of Vannevar Bush and Norbert Weiner and Douglas Engelbart suggested the possibilities for extending human intelligence, and via technology to somehow become more fully human. Perhaps we’ve been sidetracked.

We thought the Internet would provide a path to liberation, but maybe instead we’re allowing ourselves to become slaves again, just in a new medium. Perhaps it would serve us better to step back and observe what we’re doing, and ask ourselves why. Creating an online self is fine – it’s fun, it’s collaborative, it’s entertaining, it’s potentially enhancing. But identifying too deeply with the online self might be a trap. In our info-saturated world, one of our most precious resources is our attention. Attention as in where our eyeballs go, but also attention in what we think about. The ability to express yourself online does not equate Freedom if you become impotent in your ability to take action in the physical world. Think about what you’re doing and why. Think about the time spent thinking about Twitter and Facebook, and the resulting portion of time that it takes away from expressing your human agency in your life.

Use it as a tool. Use it as a means. But don’t lose sight of the big picture. At the end of the day, your true power lies in your ability to act – and that happens in the world, not in Farmville.

In the last post, we talked about a visualization tool that would allow us to tag ourselves and each other, and how that could be helpful for locating talent and sparking innovation. There have been great comments and ideas, and I want to continue that conversation in the next post. In the meantime, the concept of ‘expert‘ has been on my mind.

As I thought about the potential pitfalls of self-tagging, I couldn’t help but remember that article on mashable from December – There are 15,740 Social Media Experts on Twitter and wondered how we’ll get around this problem in the future.

Calling yourself an expert doesn’t make you one.

I looked at how the collective has defined expert on Wikipedia, and it starts with:

An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.

This kind of interested (frightened?) me, in that the status of expert can be deemed so by ‘the public.’

It does go on to qualify that an expert has “extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study” and that the knowledge comes “by virtue of credential, training, education, profession, publication or experience.”

Unfortunately, many of the self-proclaimed experts out there do not have knowledge based on any of those criteria, but ‘the public’ can be easily (mis)led. There’s a difference between being popular and being an expert. What happens when the public begins throwing around the label ‘expert’ without a proper vetting process? Are we going to create yet another layer of noise that needs to be filtered through in order to find actual value?

{Leaving the definition of expert to the “Wisdom of Crowds” is not a decent answer. I’ve been doing a bit of research on the wisdom of crowds theory, and there are actually more criteria involved for it to be accurate than just saying ‘many people’s opinions are smarter than one person’s.’ That logic may actually lead to the creation of a mob mentality, not a collective intelligence.}

So what do you think? How we define merit when anyone can have an opinion? Does open access to information and people change our criteria for gaining expertise? At what point do we decide we’re all experts……which is the same as saying that no one is…

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From the Twitterverse: Yesterday I asked you, “In 140 characters or less, what is an expert?” (responses are below)

@nedkumar Expert-Someone who understands the context of your existence, constraints of your problem, and the limitations of a solution

@T_C_P maybe an individual who has acquired substantive knowledge in a specific domain and is therefore able 2 reach peak insights?

@RitaJKing An “expert” is someone who knows they can study and work all their lives on a subject and still have so much more to learn.

@michelemclellan Expert: Someone who knows a topic and knows the limits of that knowledge

@faustshausuk Someone who has more to teach than they have to learn, but still plenty to learn.

@plevy an expert is someone who knows personally what she speaks about

@jsnovel expert: someone who can express exactly what they know.

@valdiskrebs Expert understands your problem, the context, and is willing to help you work thru it. No magic all-purpose answers provided.

@Hugimo impeccable ability to critically discern and demonstrate solutions in a narrow sphere challenge set

@aurelielb Someone who knows better!

@vanbael expert = someone with in-depth knowlegde & the skills to use this knowledge to face new challenges / solve new problems.

@clemwork Expert owns a subject. Has deep knowledge acquired through education, experience, reflection and (hopefully) communication .

@tdebaillon Expert has deep ‘knowledge’ of his field, and is able to analyze content and context each in regard with each other. ['knowledge' being taken in the French 'connaissance' sense, not 'savoir'.]

@BFchirpy Accountable, situated, history of failure and success, eclecticism tests boundaries of domain, self-critical OR confident.

@jeremyriel an expert = someone who recognizes there’s always more to learn, even after it’s all been learned

@pancheee Expert: vast experience and vast training on something

@andrewmsmyth Expert: one who has mastered their passions

@adeliyannis An expert is a person who knows what questions to ask.

@toppundit An expert is somebody who deeply understands, respects, and can work with something complicated.

@SemiraSK s.o. you trust to know what there is to know and what not

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Further Reading:

Collecting Expert Opinion about High-Ipact Nonprofits: Review of Philanthropedia’s Methodology [PDF]