This communication takes the form of spoken words, behaviours, gestures and also of absence, silence and looking away. Thus leaders communicate the way that it is acceptable to be within that organisation.

Ethics are hard to define – often they are easier to detect by their absence rather than by their manifestation in the daily life of an organisation.

When I used to work in government we talked about ethical behaviour as doing the right thing even when nobody was watching.

Interestingly, in that government context we discussed (and sometimes vigorously debated) things like probity quite a lot. Perhaps one of the features of an ethical organisation is that an ongoing discourse exists about what ethics means at a practical level for people within that organisation?

Another thing that supports an ethical organisation is a refutation of incompetence. Where incompetence is tolerated, accepted or covered up within an organisation it can override ethical considerations and breed bad outcomes.

At best, toleration of incompetence can lead to dispirited staff and unhappy customers. At worst incompetence can segue into breaches of statutory and regulatory requirements unless leaders and managers take vigorous steps to prevent it.

Incompetence tolerated also breeds passivity. If incompetence is accepted, and people are unable to stop it, then they cease to care. That giving up caring about quality means that the organisation is starting down a slippery slope that can lead to poor delivery initially and, ultimately, to ethical issues.

It is a pretty safe bet that an organisation that tolerates incompetence is not simultaneously facilitating discussions about ethical behaviour or probity. It is not likely to be focused on high quality outcomes for stakeholders such as shareholders, customers or staff.

The next step beyond this is conspiracy. This situation is neatly outlined by Michael Krigsman in his recent article, Dell lawsuit: Pattern of deceit.

As Michael summarised it:

Dell shipped approximately 12 million computers containing faulty components and then tried to hide the problems from buyers.

For Dell this appears to have played out, with staff members actively conspiring to do the wrong thing by customers, as a failure of ethics.

This kind of situation makes me wonder just what communication (taking the form of spoken words, behaviours, gestures and also of absence, silence and looking away) that the Dell leaders and managers were demonstrating to their people?

I wonder too, how many other organisations suffer in similar ways? And, if you are a leader or manager, what signals are you sending to your people about acceptable ways of being in your organisation?

This struck me as:

(a) one very cute cat;
(b) one very important issue; and
(c) one of the age old problems of business.

On all counts, there is good reason for making this more than a cute picture to share on Caturday.

Findability is one of the biggest problems we suffer from regarding information, in particular digital information.

How often have we tried to find that thing we saw yesterday on the intranet but now cannot locate it for love nor money? How often have we tried to find that report on the shared drive that we know we wrote last year? How much enterprise disk space is wasted on storing data nobody ever uses because nobody knows what’s there?

None of these issues is new. To my knowledge we have been discussing them since the arrival of word processing and server based storage. Yet we seem no closer to an effective solution than ever. There are entire departments now devoted to knowledge management, yet our knowledge (let alone information) is still (for the most part) a semi-chaotic mess.

As Nick noted:

Your knowledge assets MUST be findable. They must be ambiently findable (which means that by their very nature, they pop up when you start looking). As knowledge managers, sometimes we spend far too much time creating usable knowledge assets, without thinking about creating findable knowledge assets (actually, we often spend too much time on capture, and ignore both usability and findability).

The interesting question is how can we make this happen? From past experience we know that asking people to add metadata to content is a hit and miss approach.

From my perspective, the most interesting candidate to help solve this problem at the moment is enterprise search technology. Sure this technology works on the findability issue and does not take care of the usability factor.

But I reckon findability is more useful at a business level. Realistically, if we could find stuff, we could improve its usability later. However, at the moment we can’t find stuff at all.

In the meantime, that’s one cute cat

The article author, Don Bulmer, notes:

Social media is no longer just a destination or a set of tools and features. It has evolved into a very power extension and dimension of life and work…a new way of thinking about how business is done.

Asking the question (today) ‘who owns social media?’ in business is like asking the question ‘who owns email?’ Everyone does.

Seeing it put like this made me realise that what we’ve been talking about is really just communication.

Nobody actually owns communication in general. But what people and business entities do own is many of the communication channels and platforms. They also own certain kinds of protected content – like copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.

What we are seeing is a democratisation of corporate communication. In the past special departments of ‘communications’ were created to craft corporate communications. The platforms and channels of communication were unwieldly and required specialist skills and training. Communications were split between internal and external. External communications were often outsourced to professionals like advertising agencies.

You don’t just let gifted amateurs loose on your multi-million dollar television communications program. After all they would not know how to buy the media space to get the advertisements run as and when required.

But the internet has changed all of that. Any person with broadband and a webcam can create video content and have it up on YouTube in a few minutes. The gap between the professionals and amateurs has suddenly narrowed.

Then I watched the Jeff Jarvis talk on Privacy, publicness & penises, where I picked up the insight that it might be better to think of the internet as ‘place’ rather than as ‘medium’.

If the internet is a place, and a place where humans congregate, then it is implicitly social. To keep nattering on about ‘social’ this that or the other is a bit mad. We don’t continually reference the social nature of places like bars, restaurants, football games.

So is it time to finally retire the words ‘social’ and ‘media’ from our lexicon and simply start thinking about the internet as a place?

In his post, From oratory to the soundbite, he discusses the changes in how our politicians engage with us.  Noting the change from the days of Lloyd George, who would speak for an hour without notes and engage with hecklers in the audience, to that of the manicured and controlled soundbites of modern politicians.

It also got me thinking how we have become conditioned to manicured and carefully prepared speeches and presentations in many areas of our lives nowadays.  And this shift is all about risk control.

This shift to carefully manufactured communications can likely be attributed to the way you can sound easily sound stupid or ill-informed if speaking off the cuff (cf. Barnaby Joyce).  Then that comment can be amplified endlessly (and often mercilessly) via social media.

In the days of Lloyd George his engaging speeches were not recorded for posterity.  They were ephemeral.  Nobody pored over the transcript and excerpted poor phrasing to regurgitate for weeks afterwards in media releases and media interviews.

Our ability to document every happening is changing how free we are to express ideas and opinions.  No longer can we have an amusing interplay with a heckler at a speech that is heard by only those present.  That interplay can now be taken out of context and used as a weapon against you by people of ill-will.

This is one of the reasons I believe we are seeing the growth of the politics of NO. In the past oppositions and governments could make bipartisan stands and it was hardly known by the populace. But now a new transparency means that it is easier and simpler for oppositions to stand against things than to work together for the common good on issues.

Perhaps once people understand how transparent things are becoming we can evolve new ways to communicate in less manufactured ways?  But for that to work we do need to accept imperfection.

Some of the recent fracas rebounding across Twitter are a good example of this – covered well by various people including @kimota and @mUmBRELLA.

The basic skills for building relationships include reciprocity, negotiation ability and sharing. Also critical are the skills of walking away gracefully from an issue or staying to fight with dignity.

For many people these are skills that were learned in the playground. But what happens when people have missed these important lessons?

What happens if the person who’s been asked to run your firm’s social media activities never developed those skills in the playground? And what are the essential skills required for effective social interaction?

It seems to me that we’ve been putting up with a paucity of social skills in the workplace for a long time and it is only now that there is traceable evidence we’ve noticed that it’s a problem. Social media merely provides us with documentary evidence of the kinds of human social interactions that have been happening for aeons. The problem is that this documentary evidence now gives these unfortunate social interactions a much longer lifespan than a cranky comment in passing conversation.

Evidently on a quick shot medium like Twitter it is easy for a grumpy day or lack of coffee combined with quick fingers to lead to an explosive incident for your brand. Then the Streisand Effect can amplify the incident so that it resonates for days or weeks afterward. And, as an added benefit, the whole thing will get indexed by search engines and be findable for ages.

Social media is now providing us with tangible evidence of how many people lack (or fail to demonstrate) the basic skills required to get along well in the playground. And these are the same skills we need to work successfully with other grown-ups, both online and offline.

Goleman, one of the gurus of emotional intelligence, offers twelve questions to assess emotional intelligence. Answer ‘yes’ to half or more, (and if others who know you agree with the self-rating) then you are apparently doing okay.

The real question is how can we apply this to social media and learn how to channel the best of ourselves rather than the worst?

Goleman’s 12 Questions

1. Do you understand both your strengths and weaknesses?
2. Can you be depended on to take care of every detail? Do you hate to let things slide?
3. Are you comfortable with change and open to novel ideas?
4. Are you motivated by the satisfaction of meeting your own standards of excellence?
5. Can you stay optimistic when things go wrong?
6. Can you see things from another person’s point of view and sense what matters most to that person?
7. Do you let customers’ needs determine how you serve them?
8. Do you enjoy helping co-workers develop their skills?
9. Can you read office politics accurately?
10. Are you able to find “win-win” solutions in negotiations and conflicts?
11. Are you the kind of person other people want on a team? Do you enjoy collaborating with others?
12. Are you usually persuasive?

[Source: Goleman, Daniel. "Working Smart." USA Weekend, October 2-4, 1998, pp. 4-5.]

Most conversation is not important for the words we speak. Instead it is the act of being present to the other person and giving attention that gives most conversations their true value. Some experts term this social grooming.

It also enables the growth of social bonds by means of the time spent in relatively trivial communications.  These seemingly unimportant communications are what makes dealing with bigger issues between individuals and groups easier.

How much easier is it to ask for help from someone you’ve known socially for a while than a stranger? How much easier is it to know the best way to phrase a suggestion or request to someone if you’ve chatted with them before?

The important thing that social networking tools like Twitter or Facebook  (or newer tools like Google’s Buzz) enable is non-localised proximity. No longer do you need to run into a person in the office kitchen each day to build up informal social ties.  Now we can do it from half a world away in real-time.

It’s also worth checking out Dunbar on this kind of thing.

Look at issues like slavery, women’s rights, democracy. Changes in each of these were fueled by anger channeled towards action that led to change. I like to call this productive anger. It’s not about rage, rather it’s about what some might call ‘righteous anger’.

Productive anger that generates positive action has led to great changes in world.

I suppose it’s what you do with the positive thoughts that matters more than merely thinking them. One of my old school mottos was:

In deed not word
1 John 3:18

And a famous slogan of the Suffragette movement was:

“‘Deeds, not words’, was to be our permanent motto,”
Pankhurst

Think about how you would react in certain situations (e.g. Abu Ghraib) – how easy it is to act in ways you might regret later? Hero or villain it all comes down to choices.

The other interesting thing to consider is how the growth in communications devices and information sharing technologies makes hiding evil acts so much harder nowadays. The revelations from Abu Ghraib are an excellent example.

The food – by Stefano Manfredi (a.k.a. @manfredistefano) – was wonderful as usual. The wines selected by Michael Trembath were lovely, the cheeses selected by Will Studd were a delight, the venue charming, and our hosts Brian & Karina Barry welcoming.

But, while each of these was admirable, the thing that pulled it all together was the amazing professionalism and teamwork by the staff at Bells.

The staff were the people who executed and brought together all the elements into a seamless and wonderful evening.

This is the kind of thing that you see with great companies.  They have similar kinds of raw materials to their competitors but understand how to execute with excellence.  And execution always come down to the staff.

The smooth teamwork and gracious service at Bells is what made the evening.  The same fundamental elements without the service would not have been so great.

It got me thinking about how true this is for business, even for social media – it is the quality of the execution that makes all the difference.