Learning Alliances

Last week at the SAO session on Online Social Networking I kept suggesting that to think about social networking and organizations, you should start by thinking about your teen-agers. Mind you there were not many teen agers in the audience that morning — its was mostly digital immigrants who are parents of teen-agers. My assumption was that everyone was starting from a question like, “How can I add social networking technologies to my website — or bolt them on to what my company offers?”

I thought a more useful question would be, “What kinds of relationships between an organization and a network can social networking technologies enable?” Most of the conversation shifted to talking about communities, not social networks, emphasizing the programmer communities that Intel supports rather than the looser networks of Classmates.com.

So here’s the pitch: instead of thinking about how to bolt technology onto your website, think about your relationship to your teen-ager — and then about how your teenager uses technology. Communities of practice are much like teenagers in that they are inventive, but uncannily conservative; independent but also needing support; open but also smart about spotting the fake.

Just like it’s a waste of time to think about teen-agers in general because they come in so many different sizes and shapes, so are communities different and you should think about the community you have or want before wondering what technologies they might want. Consider how different teen-agers are, depending on their family context (nuclear vs. extended families, big vs. little ones, blended ones, etc.). Consider teen stereotypes, such as “jocks,” “soces,” and “geeks.” Different teen-agers will want to use different technologies in their daily lives and so will different communities.

Finally, consider how teen-agers themselves relate to the technologies in their lives. Providing technology for them with a, “Here… use this!” kind of message is not the most auspicious beginning for a new relationship. Consider how teen-agers are able to straddle two or more technologies at a time, or how they leap from one to another. Communities are the same. Consider how teen-agers are able to re-purpose technologies for new uses; again, communities are just as creative.

Bottom line: respecting a young person goes a long way. Some support is helpful, but a flush and splendid free ride may create some bad habits. Some jointly negotiated performance expectations are useful, but too many goals and deliverables can take the fun out of growing up. All those things apply to communities of practice, too.

Tuesday morning I was on a panel for a breakfast session on Online Social Networking. Breakfast is a pretty nice thing at the The Governor Hotel, so the bottles of red wine that I saw out the corner of my eye seemed really odd. It turned out that the panelists were given a nice bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir at the end of the event. A nice touch.

Justin Garrity, the moderator of the session, set us all up by sending us a list of attributes of great panels at the SXSW Conference in Austin:

1. Relaxed and comfortable
2. Interested in the topic
3. Not hung-over
4. Sense of humor
5. Engaged in a conversation with each other and the audience
6. Puts in the extra effort to try and transform odd audience questions into great audience questions
7. Hang around after the panel is over to answer one-on-one conversations from the audience

It was really remarkable how, during the panel, Justin asked us questions that were surprising and yet played to each speaker’s strengths. Wow. I’d like to be able to do that, too.

I had proposed that we gather session notes and the real-time notes from our phone conference in a Google Docs page. From that we produced a list of tools and tagged some resources that we talked about. I’ll blog about what I had to say shortly.

Yesterday I was talking with a graduate student who’s studying e-coaching — a subject that seemed broad enough that I wanted to define more precisely what kind of coaching interests me:

Coaching a community leader happens through a sustained conversation that is focused on the ongoing leadership practice of one partner (the coachee), drawing upon the experience and background of the other (the coach).

There are several reasons that the definition matters and several points follow from it:

• The “sustained conversation” part is necessary because all of the
  community leader’s practice isn’t visible at once, much less at the beginning. Neither is the context within which
  that practice takes place, partly because leadership always changes the context.
• Ideally, community leaders are expert in the domain of the community they are leading, not in community leadership as such. In fact it’s rare that they want to become expert in the subtleties of community development. So at the beginning of the coaching relationship the most important contribution that a coach can make is to help with “noise reduction” — suggesting which of a myriad of issues can be ignored for the time being. A sense of “the practice of community leadership” may emerge gradually and only over time.
• The topic (or the curriculum) of the conversation is concrete and time-bound — the issues that the coachee is facing at that moment. Therefore coaching needs to be focused on a “live practice” — where the community leader is working with a community that responds to leadership moves, leading to further learning and development.
• Technology comes into the coaching conversation for two reasons. First, because technology plays a part in how we collaborate and have conversations; from that perspective technology is part of the practice. Second, because most communities use technology in one way or another and all of us are learning how to make technology serve our communities rather than allowing technology to swamp or hobble them; from that perspective technology is part of the domain.