Value Creation

When we consultants have conversations about organizational development, our services and the like, are we shaping material value or symbolic value? or both? What nudges people to want it?

If social media can create value for mundane human activities, what then is the medium for OD that will create value? What is the interface for how OD is done.

There are a few useful distinctions to make in regard to value. These are perception and reality. Given there are a multiplicity of subjective realities in every situation, what is the topography of value?

Advertising man, Rory Sutherland spoke on TED talks recently about value. With the OD Network Conference in Seattle (Oct. 18-21) this week I am in "mashup" mode. Sutherland's ideas of perceived value and interface design have me thinking about organizational development and value creation.


I am going to rest for the night thinking about behavioral economics and intangible value creation.

Chambers using Asset Mapping Tools to bring Value to their Networks

That is the vision that is alive in me now. Chambers of Commerce using Asset Mapping Tools to bring Value to their Networks, and contracting me to deliver that value.

Last night, I attended a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Falmouth, ME hosted by the Maine State Ballet. The event had me thinking about asset based community development which is an approach to community-based development, based on the principles of:

(1) Appreciating and mobilizing individual and community talents, skills and assets (rather than focusing on problems and needs) and
(2) Community-driven development rather than development driven by external agencies

It builds on:

• Appreciative inquiry which identifies and analyzes the community's past successes. This strengthens people's confidence in their own capacities and inspires them to take action
• The recognition of social capital and its importance as an asset. This is why ABCD focuses on the power of associations and informal linkages within the community, and the relationships built over time between community associations and external institutions
• Participatory approaches to development, which are based on principles of empowerment and ownership of the development process
• Community economic development models that place priority on collaborative efforts for economic development that makes best use of its own resource base
• Efforts to strengthen civil society. These efforts have focused on how to engage people as citizens (rather than clients) in development, and how to make local governance more effective and responsive.

Of all the virtues of of ABCD, it is the community economic development model and participatory approach that I am jazzed about. I am interested in tools that will help enable adaptive change and a capacity for innovation that our social structures (businesses, non-profits and governments) need right now.

So, this is a shout out to all membership driven organizations, like the Falmouth Chamber, that want to serve up a new, highly focused and interactive program for it's members in the form of an asset map and great community wide conversation. I also see a graphic facilitator playing in this space.

Tweets begin

Today, I was excited today to see a member of the OD Network community providing leadership from the margins by inviting a Twitter conversation about the conference, on both Twitter and Linked In . Perfect timing Digittante!

See the conversation unfolding at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23odconf2009

Flocking to Seattle

Tomorrow, I am kicking off a project with the OD Network to study Twitter at and around their national conference: Now is Our Time. In preparation, developing an online community of practice, I started a wiki. The address is http://flockingtoseattle.pbworks.com/. I've also been reviewing a few articles.

Steven Johnson wrote a piece in Time Magazine in June titled "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" in which he states that there are three key capabilities of Twitter that make it unique and useful. He says they are: social networks, live searching, and link-sharing.

Social networks are the "following" and "friends" structures that form in social media.

Live searching is very much like searching on google.com but your search results are another thing entirely. Twitter search retrieves real-time information. It is what Johnson refers to as, "super-fresh web".

Link sharing is basically pointing capability. You can point to other content on the web that you want to share with your followers and it help drive attention. That is exciting to me because attention is creativity.

Some of my favorite features of Twitter are the self organizing behaviors that have shaped it. The use of #hashtags, and re-tweets are two great innovations created by users of the service.

Here is link (pointing) to a bit of interesting applied data collection about hashtags. http://hashtags.org/That is fun.

Here is link to pile of good information about retweets. http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/retweets-slideshow/

Reflecting on collaboration today.

Cooperative Infrastructures

"We mind as well get good at them." Clay Shirky said this on TED in 2007, as I was finishing up thesis project with a cooperative day care. I could not agree more with what Clay said about these structures tapping the value the whole system, something, he said, intitutions can not do solely because of the cost of organizing. I like what he said about nature of support groups being "value neutral" too.

These two ideas seem to validiate what community conversation project is doing. We are building cooperative structures that are adaptable, and cultivate capability for ingenuity and adaptation.

Check this out.

"No project is too small for big ideas."

These are the words of an architect who was laid off from a frim in Seattle. He built a lemonade stand and showed up at the Fremont market (Sundays in Seattle) with a sign that said, "Architecture 5¢"! That man is John Morefield. He has a successful firm of his own now and has hired on staff (people he met through BizNik) to support the demand for his work.

Brilliant. Practical. Innovative.