Positive Thinking | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Grasp all, lose all : when “liking” is too easy to be true

Either internal or external, social media approaches rely on some well-known principles. Among them are serendipity and wisdom of crowd. Both these principles rely on the emission of social signals that allow, in the one case, people tobe driven from an information they were looking for to one they didn’t know it existed and, in the other case, to collect opinions, votes, ideas from a given community or network in order to make decisions.

At the very beginning of social networks, things were simple : bloggers used to write about what they liked and were driving (unconsciously or lot) both serendipity and wisdom of crowd. Then came twitter. No need to write a long article, to argue, to invest too much time : everything has to fit in 140 chars. Upside : emitting a signal became very easy. Downside : less arguments, explainations. And the “retweet” that makes it easy to forward any third part information to one’s network makes it even easier. That’s the “one-click signal”, without any qualitative contribution by the emitter.

Because of that we can witness an impressive proliferation of signals, what is a good thing because the “base” that drives us, our choices, browsing is wider. But the dark side is not far : the simpler the act of emitting is, the less engaging it is. Guess how many people retweet a link without reading it, for the only reason that the title looks interesting. Or, maybe, just because of a gregarious instinct : “I don’t want to be the one who’ll not RT an information that everyone is retweeting”.

At this point, a first paradoxical observation has to be made : solutions used to widen the base, what is supposed to increase the reliability of signals, makes signals less engaging even though what makes a signal valuable is the fact someones decide to produce it and invests time to do so what is an engagement indicator. Before, publishing something was the consequence of a desire to inform, to share. Today it may only be dictated by a follow-the-crowd attitude. I don’t mean this kind of attitude wasn’t existing before…only that proportion may have changed with time…

I’ll start with a statement that’s nothing new and won’t surprise anyone. We are all different, with our cultures, values, expectations, and even if things may look quite uniform at a local scale, the diversity of our world becomes obvious when we have to work in a globalized context.

In the same way, any idea, trend, concept, carry with it a part of the culture of those who created it. May we talk about jazz, gastronomy, democracy, basketball…they crossed the borders with their creator’s values and, as time went by, managed to become implanted in many countries by embedding a part of the local culture, being revisited by locals to become acceptable according to their own identity.

One of the charasterics of enterprise 2.0 is that it’ s tinged with positive thinking, something that’s very unfamiliar to us and that we can’t really understand before having many interactions with foreign people (even if we’re sometimes made aware of it at business schools…but nothing is like real experience).

Without going too deep into details, let’s say that that a culture that promotes certain values, where people always things they could improve things, make tomorrow better than today, where work and being successful at work are seen as means to improve one’s personal life, carries genes that are not neutral at all. It makes it natural and easy for people to explore new things, to engage with others and that becomes very interesting when a new field has to be explored, most of all with the topics that are ours.

This is clearly explained here:

Successful people act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Successful people often find themselves in situations where risk and uncertainty is hanging over them and if they were to take on a negative mindset then failure would rear its ugly head. Instead high achievers embrace risk and uncertainty in difficult situations and keep a positive outlook. Nine times out of 10 usually end up with the results that they had in mind all along.

Positive attitude is extremely important, as it encourages individuals to approach each day, and each problem, with a bright outlook. In a team environment, a positive attitude encourages a team to work together with individual styles and personalities. Positive attitude is not only about choosing to have a good outlook through good times and bad, but also about learning to love what you do. I have observed that outstanding business people are successful because they deeply love their work.

The french edition of wikipedia tells us that :

• it’s supported by moral qualities such as love and work, courage, compassion, résilence, creativity, curiosity, integrity, knowledge of oneself, moderation, self control, wisdom.

• collective value and ideals are : justice, responsibility, public-spiritedness, parenthood, support, professional ethic, team spirit at work, leadership, project and tolerance.

I can’t prevent myself from thinking that, not only the behavioral logics of enterprise 2.0 can be seen there, but also that everything that deals with deployment, adoption, often leverage these values.

I can’t prevent myself either to notice that, to be direct, our culture is quite the opposite. Not better, not worse, but different. Strict separation between private and work life, work seen as a constraint and not as something that helps self-fullfillment, mistrust toward enterprises and any attempt to “swallow” the individual, to lock him up into the group. I’m exaggerating on purpose but things are very close to that….

Once we acknowledge that, what conclusion should be drawn ?

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