Serendipity | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

The death of serendipity ?

September 16, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Serendipity is finding things without knowing they exist and without looking for them. On the web this phenomenon is embodies by the multiple links that makes us browse from an idea to another until we find something we would never have look for. However, the recent evolution of search engines and social networking sites can be seen as a real threat : by proposing results filtered according to people’s social profile, they segment the web and may threaten idea spreading and discovery. By relying on proximity and popularity, these tools are bringing us away from relevance. The problem will even be more critical in an enterprise context. To limit the amount of information on a relevance bases without building invisible social filters and barriers, efforts have to be made on context and correlation.

Serendipity is the ability to find something while ignoring its existence, without looking for it. We all experienced it at least once on the web : searching for something, finding a resultt and then, from one link to another, finding something which existence was unexpected until then. Serendipity relies on both the human factor and trust.

Human factor because these links that make us discover new things are made by people. Trust because depending on what we know of a person we’ll give more or less credit to what he/she says and the sources being suggested. Of course, it’s a long term mechanisms because reputation needs time to form, so does trust. This as also some things in common with curation.

Today,, the way we’re looking for information on the web is evolving. To be more precise, that’s the way information is proposed to us that’s changing. With the masses of information that search engines or social networking platforms like Facebook have about us, our contacts,habits, the results that are pushed to us are filtered to correspond to what we are. Among the masses or information that will match my search, those that come from people that are similar to me, those that will please me will be prioritized. If you wonder why, for the same search, Google gives different results to you and your friends, now you know why. The same logic applies to what appears on your Facebook homepage and what does not.

The more this logic is becoming mainstream, the less one will have any chance to discover things that come from people who don’t think the same way or think of different things. What raises two problems to me

• First one if about being locked up into a trend, ignoring what’s being said elsewhere

• The second is to be unable to access to a wide part of the information available on a given topic.

Google (and the other of its kind), desiring to please me despite of me, are ignoring the difference between what would please me and what I would need to know;

This issue is not neutral at all for internal business purposes too.e.

Should organizations limit collaboration ?

April 12, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary :with the coming of social media in the workplace, organizations began to dream of a spontaneous self-driven collaboration that would get rid of rules and organization frameworks to deliver outstanding results. Today we all have to acknowledge that reality is quite different. Facing an impressive amount of possible options, employees are lost, all the more since the value proposition that’s been made to them made no sense regarding to their daily goals and constraints. Tom Davenport suggests us to limit the scope of collaboration in order to reinforce sense and focus : specific tools for a specific goal for a specific amount of time. But even if this way of doing things was proven successful with average uses, we should not throw the to throw the baby out with the bath water and forget community and serendipity principles : both can work together but are not about the same tasks, the same needs. However, Davenport’s idea may work for most people and, mot of all, directly applies to what’s key for them and impacts value creation.

With the coming of social media in the workplace, came the myth of a global, organic collaboration where everyone would collaborate with others not only to do their job but also to do awesome unexpected extra things, out of organizational silos. Years after, we have to acknowledge that it does not work. Or, at least, not the way we expected to.

The reason is quite simple to get and has been dealt with many times on this blog and many other ones. Everything started with the supposed universal and inevitable nature of networks and communities. But…

- networks shoud not be mistaken for communities…that are not teams either…

- communities are communites…and only exist by the will of people who want to more than their work, go beyond, out of the flow of their work. What is not what organization usually mean by collaboration.

- unlike the web where people using a given tool and sharing the same practices gather to do things together, most of work in the workplace happens in structured teams with known and defined people what implies that practices and tools have to be standardized within these teams There’s a big difference between gathering those who changed and change those have been gathered.

So, the “2.0 paradigmp” is still incomplete in the context of traditional production activities if not slightly improved. What reminds me of two things : [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: alignment, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, focus, Innovation, management, production, project management, sense, serendipity, social business

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

June 11, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

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…

Collaboration may happen by luck : how to provide valuable information without purpose

September 9, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

You must have already heard about serendipity, the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. This is the best way to gout out of the common path instead of recycling the same ideas again and again, which often leads to the same overused solutions. But in order to find something by luck, someone should have made it available without knowing if it would be useful for anybody, and in which purpose, if not we stay in a classic system where people keep information for themselves or only give it to those they think need it. With two consequences : people we don’t know they woudl find the information useful are not informed and people we wrongly think they need it are flooded by unsolicited infomation.

This must make us remember that, when talking about information sharing, we must not have any a priori about addressees, knowing that what’s gold for someone may be mud for someone else and vice versa.

Let me explain this by the example, trough a situation I experienced myself last week.

Trust doesn’t preclude control…but which control ?

March 21, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

That’s a key point in enterprise 2.0 discussion : build a base called trust, which has effects on transparency, loosen grip and the command and control world that’s ours. Hence the announced end of “command and control”.

Why the end of command and control ? Regarding “command”, can you imagine an organization where nobody commands ? That’s not because we need more place for serendipity that we have to let luck rule our companies. Command must stay, but people may be allowed to also do what’s not asked. Most of all, command can be about goals definition, not about the means you’ll use to reach it.

And what about control ? According to Maddie Grant, companies can’t adapt to the present context because they can’t live without control. I fully agree with that opinion but I’d like to add something. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: control, management, management-2.0, organization, organizational-learning, self fulfilling prophecies, serendipity, trust

Serendipity doesn’t preclude control : a few rules to manage fate within informal networks

March 10, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Everyone is conscious of informals networks’ power within an organization. But their informal nature causes of lot of (sometimes) legitimate fears because seen uncontrolable. We never know what they will bring. The concept of serendipity is perfect to illustrate this. We all dream of driving a Ferrari, provided we can control accelerator, wheel and brakes. If not, a smaller but more controlable car is a better solution. That’s the same for managers : they are looking or performance but don’t feel like pushing their company off the road..

This squaring of the circle was highlighted by one reader on my french blog on a note about innovation portfolio. I think the equation can be solved provided we forget the “let them do and wait to see what happens” rule. By the way, it’s one of the reason why entreprise 2.0 isn’t like web 2.0. It’s supposed to have the same consequences, with the same tools, the same dynamics, but with different lever and rules : same starting and ending point but different processes.

Some rules that have to be followed….

From repetition to differenciation

February 19, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Companies find hard to adopt the “2.0″ attitude, just because it targets an unexploited field of the organization. Since novelty applies to an unexploited domain, why trying to understand it since we don’t use it. Saying that, the question is more about sensibilizing companies about exploring new performance and knowledge fields in order to face new challenges rather than adopting tools that don’t match current practices.

As I read in Social Media, it’s more important to explore new fields than evaluating it with our present certainties. Entreprise 2.0 discussion can be resumed this way : knowing how to take differenciation into account while we were only focused on repetition.

I say “take into account” because it’s not about replacement but about complementarity. And it applies to many fields.

Value 2.0

January 21, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

At a time when many people are discussing the definition of enterprise 2.0 and its ROI, I think it would be better to go back to the basics : making value. In fact, if only a few people really care about the definition, companies (remember our purpose is to help enterprises, not to build the best definition) only care about making value, whatever the name of the concept is.

Basically there are two ways to create value : by doing something better than the competitors, cheaper, and doing something the competitors don’t.

About the first solution, we have to admit companies don’t really need our help. There are many methods aiming at building optimal process (even if they don’t work as well as expected). Doing more with less ressources, improving scalability is what companies have been doing for decades and there’s nothing new about that.

But, if we consider the second point, facts show companies below expectations. Decreting innovation and continuous improvement is not enough to make it work and it needs a specific way of working (just ask people at 3M…)

The point is companies have been so far in the first way that opportunities are marginally cheaper in the second. The second point is an innovation driven organization is built, there’s a real risk of breaking essential parts of the enterprises structures : innovation is here but the organization can’t produce what innovation brings. Improvements are brought but they imply regression at the periphery.

Building an organisation on innovation, serendipity and only on that is heresy. But keeping doing “the way we’ve always done before” in today’s context is a nonsense too.

So what to do ?

The answer is quite simple : exploit both ways but keep in mind that the first goal is to create value and build a competitive advantge in ordre to avoid negative interactions.

And this is not as complicated is it may sound. The first thing to do is to follow the existing processes and identify when people are left to their own devices and have to interact with others to find an information, some ressources…to make it short, when they have to rely on serendipity. Then set the tools and build the organization context that makes serendipity possible.

That look very simple and in some way it is. There’s only one and only barrier : realize that a part of what’s need in the day to day job isn’t in the traditionnal intranet and there’s no way to automate problem solving that’s to say there’s value outside of the processes provided the organization can take it over.

The barrier is not technical or organizationnal : it’s mental and is caused by the refusal of changing paradigm. And in the economic competition winners will be those who’ll acknowledge value cans be found outside the processes.