The business of social media engagement comes down ultimately to what we think, do and feel. For social business practitioners in the business of doing things better, it’s easy to see the world as one big data problem. If we had complete and open data running through the corridors of corporations, including information about how we think, informed decision-making would be arguably so much easier.
Equally important to social business is how we feel and this is where the lines of engagement are being drawn. One of the best definitions of social business came from Chris Brogan a few years back when he said ‘social business is human business’. That one line captures something fundamental about the nature of social business, and the business strategies needed to adjust to it.
Working on developing quantified organisations means placing stock, as well as taking comfort, in the numbers. But what makes social business truly matter is how it can deliver more business health and performance than conventional methodologies.
Chiefly this comes down to the way social business can develop generative and organic value through people working collectively together. This post is about how social business does that and how, in doing so, it can help renew the fabric of torn and fragmented society. It’s a post, in particular, about the ‘healing mesh’. The mesh can be a distributed network, as Lisa Gansky’s described it. The healing mesh can be spun around a hashtag, or a virtual experience that people gather around like a digital maypole. It can be the wired and connected infrastructure that’s increasingly housing shared value and enabling collaborative consumption business models.
The healing mesh is an evolved step on from an industrialized scale focus on consumption at all costs to a focus on empowerment and on human relationships as an alternative source of value generation. As a means to driving business opportunity it’s hitting the mainstream, as signaled this week with the news that GM has signaled a commitment to car sharing as a part of its business model.
At a visceral level, the healing mesh is the product of interaction that’s stimulated to heal because of a neurological sympathetic response to conditions around it, whether business or personal. It’s a response to the dysfunctional workplaces that 30% of all US workers are now describing as psychologically unsafe and is created from the synapses of people calling out what can be better as a result of social business.
Discussing the healing mesh with Anne-Marie McEwan (@smartco) recently, we reflected on how social business can weave, repair and create a lucrative social fabric by recognizing, as Yves Michaud’s suggests, that creativity emerges in the context of dereliction and decline. In so doing, the synaptic responses that arise out of that awareness can create the action potential to produce fibrinogens as the mesh that form the healing wound of a grazed knee at an individual level, or a broken society at a collective one.
A key element of sustainable businesses in the future, including the nature of the networked organisation and quality of life in the workplace, is going to be whether there is a shared point of intention. Intention will run like a thread through social organization. The battle currently is for people’s minds, but the opportunity can also be about connecting with people’s hearts and by creating choice as part of a lucrative gestalt.
Anne-Marie and I had lunch recently at Petersham Nurseries, tucked away by the river near Richmond.
It’s a modern Avalon, a restaurant within a gardening centre and nursery with the glorious combination of a Michelin star and a hard dirt floor. Full of beautiful things, good food and rusty tables, it is a place with good husbandry and a love of nature at its heart, where decay and growth run comfortably hand in hand.
It was the perfect setting for a conversation about the nature of the networked organisation today and social fabric in the 21st century and this concept of the ‘healing mesh’.
During lunch our attention turned to the health of networks, what organic beauty and value is in them at a systemic level, what makes them attractive, genuine, raw, appealing, and capable of fostering cultures that can flourish.
In social business the net worth, as we say, is the network. What that suggests is it’s very much the act of coming together and the connectivity between individuals, as much as the individuals themselves, that makes a difference to the health, vitality and performance of distributed organisations. Organisations can benefit a great deal today by relearning and redefining how they ‘do interaction’ and it is curious how much of this act of choosing to come together marketing effort actually focuses on side-stepping.
Letting things happen is so often not a marketing objective. The battleground for business and marketing power is often intent on developing brokerage as a means of cultivating dependency and seeking control over people’s minds, using direct or indirect commands to ‘like us!’ and the ease and convenience of zombification strategies designed to nudge and dilute free will. Decode marketing speak and very often consumer choice often is the elephant in the room, the thing that technology applied to marketing and advertising can obliterate because it’s too random. With so much invested in the way we do things, marketers often assume it’s easier to change the nature of the consumer than the nature of the business model.
Yet the skill and the insight involved in letting things happen is like that of a good sailor with their hand on the tiller, and the metaphor for social businesses as a means of cocreated and generative value can be a boat where people are in it together. Social businesses where people connect because they want to are essentially an odyssey towards value created out of a common purpose, need or desire. It puts problem solving, not profiteering, at the heart of the corporate intention. That kind of interaction between people is the warp and the weft of healthy social fabric for a distributed, networked age.
Contrast that with what we are seeing revealed as ‘wounded people and wounded organisations’, as Anne-Marie put it over lunch. We’re seeing networked opportunities blocked by obedient gatekeepers only trying to do their job and organisations stuck in vicious repeat loops confined by their own protocols. When the risk of breaking out of ‘the way we do things around here’ is regarded as culturally and operationally too disruptive, what happens it that emergence becomes emergency and business models become calcified.
We say at Visceral Business that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’ because the accessible connectivity of the web enables people to do the things they want to, not just what they have to do. But what we have in the here and now as reality at many levels is a failure of the systems of leadership to enable that.
The healing mesh of social business is what happens when you put skin into the game. A fantastic advantage of the social web is that people can reach out to one another, and do, which creates the opportunity for a new kind of social fabric, woven together out of connected intention. That kind of co-operation can be the fabric for an emergent civilization.
The intangible values that bind us also drive the tangible benefits that can be experienced as part of an open access economy. As Anne-Marie put it, ‘People are eager to go above and beyond what is expected in their work – but leaders are failing to provide systems and performance environments that let people find meaning in their work. People find meaning in their relationships with work and with each other. They need to be given opportunities to learn, to contribute, to be listened to, to be appreciated, trusted, to be socially included and to feel safe. In fact, to be treated as human beings.’
Social organizations can be the conduit for that kind of activity and effective high tech and high touch strategies can enable new kinds of interaction across social, mobile and local touchpoints, on and offline. As a terrific article by Mary Joyce put it recently, the more we understand about innovation, the more we understand that it is a social process.
So the healing mesh is essentially the intention of people coming together in a certain way with specific value beliefs attached to that way.
Out of that thought, myself and Anne-Marie have come up with a project we’re calling ‘the Petersham project’ as a homage to the source of the thought and a line of enquiry to explore the question, what’s the kind of cultural code needed to enable a healing mesh, and how can it be realized?
There are several people we’ve thought about inviting into this project, and if you’re interested in becoming part of it please find either me or Anne-Marie on Twitter. We’re looking to manifest this healing mesh by creating a forum for people who share the fact that they are all sympathetic and attuned the potential of the social web. We’re aiming to develop an exciting piece of learning, helping organisations, groups and communities to determine for themselves how they can perpetuate a healing mesh culture, in the same way as our understanding of ‘flow’ is so powerful as a set of insights.
Anne-Marie characterized the need by saying ‘there are too many dysfunctional workplaces and there is no excuse for that. We know what healthy workplaces can look like and there is an opportunity for us to conceive of them, driven by values that can now come together in a powerful way. Some of us see the opportunity beginning to be squandered. The Petersham Project, as we see it, is a way of declaring specific values and beliefs.’
We both think by opening up our sense to this question the fun will be in seeing how these emerge. We think the healing mesh is here already. It is emerging, area by area, city by city, and hashtag by hashtag, as a mesh of the committed. It is a mesh of those who seek to heal by leaning in to the questions looking for answers, the issues that need solving and the needs that are being asked to be met.
Social business ask questions about how open access, interactive organization and sustainable business can be most lucrative and how people can commune together to meet needs and solve problems. As organisations become more dispersed, there’s a paradox in this development. The social fabric and cultures of connected enterprises are increasingly going be dependent on the ties of the healing mesh and the way in which the committed bind together as a social fabric, with the ability to drive the strength and viability of a vibrant networked economy that can be taken forward. We would love to hear your thoughts on it.
