Why our Free School will be a small school
Our Academy will be small with only 420 in the primary school and 420 in the secondary school.
Schools in England are getting bigger. Department for Education data shows that between 1997 and 2005 the number of schools in England with 1,000 to 1,500 students rose by 35%. Secondary schools with between 1,500 and 2,000 students rose by 124%. In contrast, the number of small secondary schools in England, with fewer than 500 students, fell by 43%.
The conventional arguments used to defend this increase in scale are misleading.
The primary argument is that large schools benefit from economies of scale. However, economies of scale in schools are rarely realised. The concept of diseconomies of scale has long been recognised in other sectors. It describes how many of the consequences of getting larger such as high communication and coordination costs, anonymity and extraneous auxiliary processes can undermine savings made elsewhere, such as in procurement. In schools a principle diseconomy cost is the need for large numbers of non-teaching support and admin
staff.
Even more important than cost is the tendency, as diseconomies begin to emerge, for large organisations to find that their size obstructs the delivery of the outcomes they are created to achieve. An argument for large schools based purely on cost fails to consider cost-effectiveness or value for money, i.e. it fails to consider whether schools are actually delivering for students and parents. This is why the second key argument in favour of large schools, that they are necessary in order to provide a broad curriculum, is particularly misleading. A broad curriculum is worthless if students are not succeeding in it, or are unable to access it. This is too often the case.
Large schools tend to adopt rigid, vertical, departmental structures. These structures do not enable or encourage a teacher in one subject to explicitly reinforce the skills a student has learnt in the others. They obstruct the development and implementation of effective remedial interventions and cross-curricular learning strategies. Students are often obliged to effectively start from scratch in each subject they study – with the result that at worst they do not progress, or at best it is difficult for them to gain a sense of overall academic progress or of how the components of their learning interrelate and reinforce one another. The argument for breadth is undermined because in fact many students are unable to develop the mastery of core skills and competencies that would allow them to access a broad curriculum. Whilst it is true that large schools do not have to adopt vertical departmental structures, scale and vertical structure have in practice become synonymous. Where large schools have created different, horizontal structures this is often referred to as creating schools-within-schools or small learning communities. These alternative structures attempt to replicate the benefits of small schools within larger ones. This is complex and there are few examples of success.
There are other arguments in favour of small schools.
Large schools suffer, to varying degrees but consistently, from an absence of accountability. In large schools there is little time for meaningful cross-departmental analysis of students’ progress. In a 2007 survey only 17% of Teach First teachers agreed with the statement “I know who my students’ other teachers are”. Whilst each teacher is responsible for a student’s learning in his or her particular subject area, no teacher is responsible for the student’s overall education. Form tutors and year teams, whose ‘horizontal’ responsibilities for students’ education could counterbalance this, because of the number of students they need to deal with, spend in practice far less time with their designated cohorts than with the students they teach in their subject departments.
Lack of accountability is compounded when teachers constantly interact with students they don’t know. For example as they move between classrooms or take cover lessons, when they are on lunch duty or supporting other members of staff. The way that staff and students are able to move around the school and the manner in which students and staff interact are vital components of a positive educational environment. Large schools, by definition, tend towards depersonalised interactions.
The critical factor is the number of individuals in a community who interact exclusively with one another. In large schools teachers’ time and energy are spread too thinly between too many students. When a small team of teachers are accountable for a small number of students it is possible to ensure that every student is known as an individual, making it harder for students to ‘fall below the radar’. It makes it easier to ensure data for all students, both academic grades and other data such as attendance, is always understood and analysed in context, and it makes response and intervention more rapid and more effective.
It is for these reasons that the Free School I hope to found with a group of mostly Teach First Ambassadors, The Reach Academy: Feltham, has been designed to be, and to remain, a small school with dedicated teams of teachers responsible and accountable for every aspect of students’ development.
We don’t need little changes: why businesses should run Free Schools
Schools should be palaces
We don’t just need more and better teachers; we need more and better school models.
It’s in vogue at the moment to say that the way to improve schools is to have better teachers. I don’t mean to be too dismissive by saying ‘in vogue’; it is more than just the latest, passing education trend. There is solid evidence to support the assertion that effective classroom teaching is the best tool for addressing the intractable problems of educational disadvantage and underachievement.
The danger, however, of such a focus on teachers and classroom practice is that we ignore the importance of school structure – we ignore those things that create the conditions in which classroom teaching occurs: the size of a school, its assessment practices and data tracking, the number and types of staff and their responsibilities, the methods for informing and engaging parents.
These elements of school structure, added to a particular pedagogy, constitute the school model and are the difference between the vision and delivery of education provided by, for example, your local comprehensive, a Steiner school, Eton or the KIPP network of US charter schools.
Different models can be equally successful and some models will work better in some contexts than others, but sustainably successful models will share characteristics. Effective school models don’t fail when inexperienced or temporary teachers enter. Nor do effective models rely on heroes: the exceptional teacher whose influence extends out of their classroom and into the corridors around creating an island of calm until a corner is turned and chaos resumes.
To a lesser or greater extent these symptoms are common in many of our schools today, and they indicate a failure of the model. Despite massive investment over the last ten years there has been little innovation in school models. It’s become almost a cliché to say that most of our schools are based on a nineteenth century factory model of how education should be delivered: large numbers of pupils moving from station to station, regulated by bells – education mass produced.
Surely the clearest indication of systemic failure, of failure on a large scale of the current school model, is that half of all 16 year-olds do not achieve at least a grade C in GCSE maths and English. (This CBI report presents some other interesting findings.)
Putting a teacher into a bad school model is hugely inefficient – it both dramatically increases the amount of time a new teacher takes to become effective, and actually caps the value that even a good teacher can add. Even if we could still afford the investment in education of the last decade, throwing more teachers into bad schools would be hugely wasteful. We need new models.
Two types of system redesign are needed.
1. We need new school models that work in the twenty-first century. These models are likely to rethink how cohorts of pupils are organised and how staff are held accountable for them. They’re likely to make far better use of real-time assessment data and to better connect parents with their children’s education. Maybe these models will go further, breaking long held assumptions about how education should be delivered, like Dennis Littky’s Big Picture schools, Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools or the pioneering New York City-As-School.
2. We need to create an environment in which new models are able to emerge. This point is worth making again: despite massive investment in education, despite an intervening explosion in internet technology, despite entering a new century in which the experience of adulthood is dramatically different to the last school models remain largely the same as they were not just ten years ago, but probably 50 years ago.
This is why many of the Coalition’s education reforms are sensible. The supply side revolution, making it easier to establish a new school, is about creating the conditions for new models to emerge.
But the Coalition could go one step further to ensure that the best possible models are amongst those that are launched.
To find the best models let the best providers into the system.
At the moment businesses cannot directly run Free Schools. Instead they’re required to add a layer of cost and bureaucracy by establishing charitable vehicles that then contract school services. This seems absurd. Why is there a hang-up about profit making in education? One intellectually pure argument is to denounce capitalism and the profit motive, but even most on the political left don’t share that view. We currently allow schools to buy all manner of services from profit making businesses even down to the management and running of a school, yet companies are prohibited from operating schools directly.
Enabling private companies to run schools directly brings two things to British education. The first is a proliferation of new school models developed using principles and processes more often found in businesses than schools: a sharper focus on collecting and acting on real time data, for example, or a better alignment of organisational structure with outcomes.
The second is investment and the better allocation of resources. In these financially constrained times, business has the means to fund capital investment. Capital investment in education means new, purpose built schools. Business also understands economies of scale. Crucially the private sector is better placed to understand the difference between the economies of scale that could be achieved by a network of schools sharing well-managed back-room functions such as HR and data management, and the diseconomies of scale that are rife in the current model which is for schools to be large and stand-alone.
Our education system as a whole needs to be more dynamic, characterised by more innovation more often. We need to find the models that will work for the kids that are currently being failed. To achieve this we need to allow the best education providers to enter the field. Any increase in supply may mean that bad schools will close, but the spectre of turmoil that critics present if businesses were to enter the education sector is misplaced. With brands to protect and having signed contracts whose pay-out depends on their long-term delivery, it is a mistake to assume that education businesses do not value stability. And exactly what is the value of stability in a stagnating system that shores up, but does not fix, failing schools? Moreover, the closer we can move to a real-time per-pupil funding method the less disruptive it will be to allow failing schools to close.
What we’re not talking about is some kind of unregulated free for all. There are legitimate fears about the role of business in education and they can be assuaged by creating an appropriate regulatory framework. It is important that government, at local or national level, undertakes effective commissioning, requiring new schools to adhere to the Admissions Code and to be inspected by Ofsted, for example, or even going further and ensuring that schools run for profit adhere to a national curriculum, or minimum pay requirements for teachers.
More radically, the government could set bold strategic objectives for for-profit Free Schools, setting contractual requirements that they narrow the achievement gap of disadvantaged pupils in their care. Market mechanisms like the pupil premium provide an incentive to serve poor communities, but there’s no reason why in addition this couldn’t be explicitly stipulated in an agreement with an education provider. It seems that the critics of for-profit schools lack faith in the ability of government to set strategic objectives, to commission and to hold to account.
Arguing that businesses should be allowed to run schools need not be an anti-state, small government argument. I believe in a strong state that intervenes to look after the most vulnerable. My favourite West Wing speech is this one:
“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense.”
And my second favourite is this:
“We have to say what we feel, that government no matter what it’s failures in the past, and in times to come for that matter…can be a place where people come together and where no one gets left behind…An instrument of good.”
I’m not arguing for the private sector to be involved in education in order to minimise the role of government, or from some free market ideology, but because I think it has the potential to implement new models that are more effective – that can better implement progressive policy objectives. We will need to regulate for-profit education providers, and tax them, and we may want to first run pilots in some of the most deprived parts of the country, but I see no reason why we should prohibit a company from investing in British education on the basis that they may make a profit.
Raincoats & bad schools: organisations in the internet age
What kind of organisations will we need in the internet age?
My copy of Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book about risk and uncertainty, was almost destroyed by a freak hurricane (at least it was freaky for a Brit who had then just arrived in the US). Almost, but not destroyed: I was able to use it to write my last post which concluded with Taleb’s advice that instead of investing in trying to predict the problems we may face in the future, we should invest in preparedness.
Don’t pack a raincoat
Being prepared in a very uncertain world is more about being adaptable than it is about being prepared – at least in the sense of “being prepared” that your mum implies when she says, “It might rain today so take a raincoat”. When you’re thinking about the weather the world is quite uncertain. You may not be sure if it’s going to rain or stay dry, but you can fit the kit you might need for either scenario in one rucksack. In a very uncertain world, no rucksack is big enough. If we lived in a world where the range of climatic possibilities could include the ten plagues, purple rain, asteroids, or something altogether inconceivable, you could never pack for every eventuality.
The world we live in today is more than ever very uncertain. In such a world, making predictions is almost impossible and being fully prepared is very difficult. What is possible is to prepare to be adaptable.
Do adopt characteristics of smallness
One survival strategy is to be adaptable by staying small. For businesses, if you can be small and keep costs low you may be able to adapt to disrupting shocks that destroy other less nimble competitors. If you’d been a tiny team of entrepreneurial journalists publishing a niche magazine in the nineties you might have found it easier to move your business online than had you been a multi-title conglomerate with a printing press and a fleet of delivery trucks.
Writing about education, Max Haimendorf and I said that schools need to be smaller, but that being small is not enough. They also need to adopt a series of behaviours and structural changes to give them (in a phrase that I’d like to say we coined) the characteristics of smallness. (For a pretty encouraging evaluation of New York City’s small schools see this paper, which similarly talks of smallness as an enabler of other positive traits.)
I wanted schools to cut out all the peripheral and ruthlessly prioritise outputs (and, in truth, only the final outputs that count: those national exams and, ultimately, getting kids to university); to reorganise teachers around achieving those outputs for a defined cohort of pupils; to eliminate subject silos and many auxiliary roles, forcing all staff to be expert teachers and not administrators or even necessarily subject specialists. I wanted teachers to work exclusively with one cohort of pupils, and within each cohort for every pupil (and every parent) to have one principal teacher, in order to make accountability unavoidable. Instead of being collected infrequently in end-of-term exams, (formative) assessment data would be collected every week at a minimum.
I think there may be some principles in these characteristics that apply to organisations generally, not just to schools. My version of our vision to remedy education was of schools as lean start-ups: small (“human scale”) teams of teachers taking absolute responsibility for achieving an outcome they’ve defined with a simple set of metrics.
Not characteristics of bigness
The characteristics of smallness were, for me, a response to the crippling diseconomies of scale I’d observed in schools (diseconomies that I’d argue far outweigh any positive economies of scale). Big in itself is not bad, but some of the characteristics of bigness are.
One characteristic of bigness is the tendency in the face of complexity to attempt to break down your organisation into ever smaller functional roles. Like many bad strategies this is a strategy that maybe won the last war (or the one before that) but is unlikely to win the next. Obsessive specialisation within your own processes worked for Henry Ford, but I’m not sure it’s right for most organisations today. In business there are scenarios in which requiring your employees to do only one thing very well may be sensible, but it is often the response of a company that is struggling to eke out efficiency in the context of falling margins or a product that is becoming commoditized. If what your people can do is restricted to a very narrow set of tasks, it leaves your organisation vulnerable to unexpected events that change the game and so require something else of them. In some cases businesses are feeling the effects of an approaching, disrupting storm but are betting that they can predict the nature of it instead of preparing for the adaptability that will be required once it has hit (indeed they may be investing in the very things that will make it harder to recover). In Taleb’s extremely uncertain world the characteristics of bigness are especially damaging because they undermine adaptability.
Scaling smallness?
There are other characteristics of bigness (high communication and cooperation costs, anonymity, extraneous auxiliary processes…), some of which can be ameliorated by technology, some of which can’t. I think, though, that if an organisation is going to succeed in this increasingly (exponentially?) uncertain world, it needs to think about how to prepare to be adaptable, and that one way to do this is to adopt characteristics of smallness.
Max and I wanted small schools to adopt the characteristics of smallness because we’d observed what happens when big schools adopt the characteristics of bigness. It’s also possible for small organisations to (disastrously and mistakenly) act like big ones. (One clue that a company may be doing this is when it finds itself investing in the blunt machinery of organisation, like hierarchical structures and formal reporting lines.) But, the exciting (and maybe the obvious) question is, can big organisations act like small ones? Can big organisations adopt the characteristics, but not the actual smallness? Could you – by building highly aligned loosely coupled teams networked together – scale the characteristics of smallness while avoiding some of the worst effects of the characteristics of bigness? The guys at Netflix, who wrote my all time favourite PowerPoint, seem to think so.
What do you think?
Fat people & billionaires
Before the storm that we neither predicted nor prepared for
I started reading Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan in May last year. I took it to the Delfest music festival where we’d been promised bluegrass and sunshine. A hurricane tore down the camp and flooded the fields. The book sank in the swamp, was bravely rescued, and has since dried out. I started reading it again the other day.
Taleb’s central thesis is that we are much worse at predicting events than we think we are. In fact we massively overestimate our capacity for prediction.
Imagine a thousand people in a stadium. If we measured what percentage of the total the heaviest person weighs it would be a tiny percentage, right? Now imagine this time measuring not weight but net worth. The richest person could be a massive percentage of the total. In the first scenario, a rare event – a very very fat person – is nevertheless tiny in relation to the total. In the second scenario, a rare event – a very very rich person – can be huge in relation to the total.
This has implications for our ability to make predictions. Say you didn’t want to weigh every one of the thousand people but you did want to know their average weight. You could start weighing people and stop when you’d done one hundred and you’d be able to make a pretty safe prediction about the average. Even if person 101, or 999, was exceptionally fat your guess wouldn’t be out by much. But if you wanted to know the average net worth you’d be a fool to stop at person 100, because somewhere amongst the other 900 Bill Gates might be lurking.
Mediocristan vs. Extremistan
Scenario one belongs to a world that Taleb describes as Mediocristan. Number sets in Mediocristan fall on a bell curve and they include things like weight and height or the income of a baker or a small restaurant owner. In Mediocristan things are non-scalable; however hard the baker works the difference between the number of buns he makes on a great day versus a bad day will not be dramatic. One option if he was dissatisfied with that state of affairs would be to create a franchise of his bakery. And here we enter the territory of the second scenario that Taleb calls Extremistan. In Extremistan things are scalable. Extremistan includes things like wealth, book sales or academic citations. The baker – living in Mediocristan – will make about the same number of buns every day for about the same level of effort. A musician, by contrast, lives in Extremistan. He could churn out record after record that nobody listens to and, without a corresponding increase in the effort he expends, one day he could make a hit record that sells ten million copies.
More of the world can be described using the Extremistan label than the Mediocristan label. Almost all social matters, or anything that is informational as opposed to physical, can be described as scalable and so as belonging to Extremistan. Not only is the list of things that we can categorize as belonging to Extremistan longer than the Mediocristan list, but today it is longer than it has ever been. Technology is of course key to this. When we are more connected we can generate more accentuated winner-takes-all effects. The less we are constrained by the physical the more we can scale. Once upon a time musicians weren’t scalable, they had to be in the same room as their audience. Once upon a time bookstores were limited by how many books they could keep on their shelves.
A more uncertain world
Today we are far more likely to encounter scenarios like the net worth calculation than the weight calculation (because today we live in Extremistan). The world is more uncertain and more prone to game changing events than we like to think.
“Measures of uncertainty that are based on the bell curve simply disregard the possibility, and the impact, of sharp jumps of discontinuities and are, therefore, inapplicable in Extremistan. Using them is like focusing on the grass and missing out on the (gigantic) trees. Although large deviations are rare, they cannot be dismissed as outliers because, cumulatively, their impact is so dramatic.”
In a previous post I touched on some of these ideas. I said, pretentiously, that we live in Exponential Times. I’m attracted to the idea that we live in a world of rapid rises and steep declines: a Long Tail world where, yes, blockbusters still happen, but where the ability of an organization, institution, business or politician to take for granted their position at the top is seriously undermined by uncertainty – by the possibility for churn at the head of that long tail. It’s more possible than it has been in the past for rivals to spring from nowhere and steal your crown. Or, more excitingly, to disrupt your entire market by destroying long held assumptions.
Taleb’s advice is that instead of investing in trying to predict the next problem we should invest in preparedness.
Which I think is going to be the topic of my next post. Any thoughts?
These exponential times
Faster innovation. More churn? But no egalitarian paradise.
1. A plummeting Coasean floor means we can do more things outside of traditional organizations like businesses.
Here’s a question that I try not to ask in earshot of my bosses. Instead of employing me on a salary, why don’t my firm put out a tender for every piece of work I deliver? In an open market, with other people competing to perform broken down chunks of my job, my company could end up paying less. Reassuringly for me, Ronald Coase explained why in The Nature of the Firm in 1937. It is because of the additional transaction costs that my firm would incur – in particular of finding a contractor and enforcing a contract for every piece of work I currently undertake. We can describe these kinds of costs as the cost of cooperating. Companies exist in order to manage these cooperation costs. They do things like employ managers and pay for HR departments – and create, for the most part, hierarchical organizational structures – because, for the activities that they’re engaged in, this is a more effective way of directing a workforce than an open market. But of course this management has a cost, much of it fixed. Firms exist, therefore, when the costs of employing and directing staff to undertake a particular activity are less than the potential gain from that activity.
But what if those cooperation costs exceed the potential gain of an activity? Even if it is a valuable activity it won’t happen because the cost of performing it is greater than the gain. When neither firms nor markets can afford to undertake an activity, that activity doesn’t happen. The significance of this is that there’s a bunch of locked up value out there: stuff that would be great if it happened because it would improve our lives, but it’s just not cost effective to make it happen. Unless the conditions change. Coase goes on to say that if cooperation costs fall, for example when new technology makes communication easier, then some activities that were previously not worth doing become viable. In addition, big firms can get bigger and small firms can get more efficient. This has basically been the story of the impact of communication technology in the twentieth century.
Enter, Clay Shirky. He says in Here Comes Everybody that Coase’s explanation is limited to describing what happens when cooperation costs fall moderately. What happens if these costs collapse? What happens if revolutionary technologies come along – like the internet and the web and those related innovations that have exploded since – that dramatically reduce the cost of cooperating? If cooperation costs collapse then something new occurs. There are still activities that have value but can’t be undertaken by a firm because their value is not greater than that firm’s cooperation costs, but, crucially, some of these activities can be undertake outside of the structures of formal organizations. These activities ‘which were previously out of reach for any other organisational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor’ can now be undertaken not by a firm (with their fixed cooperation costs) but by ‘loosely coordinated groups’. These groups do not have the same, and in some instances any, fixed cooperation costs. Shirky provides many examples of this, from the aggregating of amateur documentation of the London transit bombings to the collection and collation of thousands of photos of public events on Flickr.
As cooperation costs plummet this opens up the possibility for productive activity to occur outside of formal organizations. As Clay Shirky tells us, it enables organizing without organizations. I think this leads to more experimentation and faster innovation, throwing down a massive, existential, challenge to traditional forms of organization – including the familiar business models of the last century.
2. This doesn’t mean we’re in an egalitarian paradise. In these exponential times we still have big businesses that rise rapidly. But are they also more likely to decline rapidly?
This social, technological and economic shift means that it is easier than it has ever been to engage a large audience and undertake some kind of group effort; and it means that you don’t necessarily need the hierarchical structure of a firm to do it. This does not mean, however, that we have been immediately thrust into some kind of egalitarian paradise. We still have businesses, and we still have big businesses. How do we explain that?
It is the effect of the internet and the web on communication that has most radically lowered cooperation costs. One of the effects of the web has been the emergence of a link economy – one where you are more powerful if more people link to you. In this link economy Michael’s Matthew’s Law exists: “For everyone who has will be given more”, i.e. links beget links; the more you have the more you’ll get, the quicker you can grow and the more powerful you can become. (Check this post out and the further reading at the bottom of it.) This is the other side of the story of the Long Tail, as many have pointed out. Whilst the internet has enabled millions of tiny niche interests to be fulfilled and niche markets to be created, there remain major blockbusting companies, products and services. Although, of course, not just products and services created by companies; loosely coordinated groups can emerge from below the Coasean floor to generate huge value and to challenge traditional organizations. The point is that once you start growing you can grow quickly in the internet age. In these exponential times that much is evident.
The question for anyone looking for an egalitarian, or at least meritocratic, paradise is how much churn are we expecting to see over time in the head of this Long Tail? Are we simply solidifying a small, new-ish, comparably static elite as has been the norm in politics and economics throughout most of history, or is the internet dramatically altering how secure those at the top should feel? Might it be the case that the internet facilitates meteoric rises and rapid declines?
In this last year in America the political fortunes of the Democratic party might seem to suggest so. Or rather, as I wrote in this blog post, because the communication tools of the internet are powerful and ubiquitous, and because it is so much easier to exercise an (informed) choice as a voter or a consumer, anybody seeking our loyalty cannot let up and take us for granted for even a moment. I hope it won’t end up being the permanent tactical revolution that Obama in his State of the Union decried, but I do think political parties need to adopt a philosophy of permanent strategic, or persuasive, revolution (I’m not sure of the phrase yet, I want to develop this idea). And the same is true of companies. Stop fighting for my custom for a second, get a bit sloppy with your delivery, and the massive information availability and tiny switching costs of the internet age mean I can leave you in an instant. Losing my custom to a competitor has a greater potential to snowball, pitching you into a steep decline, than ever before.
Stolen from the greatest HR policy PowerPoint ever made
Yearning for the vast and endless sea.
Any company should by now have learnt that its customers can talk about them, to massive effect, without their permission. (As the HuffPo says here, it is kind of a leap of logic to think that United Breaks Guitars lost the company 10% of its market capitalisation, but it certainly wasn’t good for them.) But today we can also pretty effectively organise without their permission. We can use functionality like Facebook groups to mobilise many people quickly. So far the manifestation of this has mostly been in the form of ‘stop energy’; most efforts have essentially threatened boycotts, often in an attempt to prevent the introduction of some new initiative. (For example 2007’s “Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-off” campaign, as recorded here by the Times and in this book by Clay Shirky.)
And, of course, firms are learning to combat this: Sometimes by actually doing stuff differently and treating their customers better – there’s greater pressure now to behave yourself because you never know when your short term plan to save a buck will be turned into a YouTube sensation and hammer your reputation; but mostly by applying traditional PR in a new context. Firms are re-learning for the internet age the need to be proactive and seek out dissatisfaction (dissent?) before it spreads. This involves getting out there on the web beyond their own customer feedback surveys.
One lesson for companies in the Facebook-Twitter age is that it’s probably not sensible to try to replicate a social media phenomenon on your own website. Don’t build a snazzy platform – a massively interactive website, a customer service forum – and try to bring consumers to your site in order to find out what they think. Instead go to where they already hang out, listen to what they’re saying in those places, and respond to them there. I think Twitter is the easiest of the new media to do this with. By setting up a few simple searches you can see whenever anyone mentions you and respond directly and immediately. The Wi-Fi hotspots guys Boingo once replied to me when I slated them on Twitter and I’ve loved them ever since.
Companies can combine this traditional PR end – go to where your critics are and counter them quickly – with new means for achieving it when they recognise the web 2.0 truism that, whether they like it or not, their own staff are already blogging and chatting and interacting with customers and potential customers all over the web. 11 years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto told companies how to capitalize on this emerging fact. Firstly companies should recognise that markets are conversations and that people like talking to people, not ‘brands’ talking to ‘demographics’. Secondly they should empower their own staff to get out there and join the conversation.
This does of course mean ordinary staff talking directly to customers, with all of the human imperfections that that entails, i.e. all of the things that would be avoided if a company attempted to strictly ‘manage their image’ and only let the CEO and a handful of spokesmen talk to the real world. But it should also mean – if as a company you’re doing your job right – that your staff are talking to more people, with more passion and more authenticity than any press spokesman could ever muster. The Cluetrain’s point was that in the internet age, that’s better business.
This has further implications for any company thinking about their presence on the web. For most companies (and especially those whose actual sales take place somewhere other than their own website, for example on a third party platform or actually face-to-face) the purpose of their website should be very straightforward. There’s often no reason that a company’s site should be anything more than a place for customers to get a bit more information about what’s being sold and to be reassured that the company is legitimate. It should contain a list of product information and a list of references. The real action – reaching out and connecting with potential customers, listening to them, helping them find the other information they need so they’ll buy from you, building community and making them want to buy from you repeatedly – takes place elsewhere.
One of the really significant things, then, about the social revolution that all this new technology is driving is that companies need to think differently about their employees. Every employee faces every customer. The key, I’d say, for a company that really wants to embrace the digital century is to align the interests (and personal brands) of their staff with the objectives of the company. In terms of their presence on the web, rather than directing the energies of its staff to maintain this company blog or that company Facebook account, a 21st century company might do better to help its people build their individual skills and reputations, set a big vision and a big goal, and then let its people go after that goal in emergent not determined ways. In a phrase stolen from the greatest HR policy PowerPoint ever made (it’s not a high bar but this is genuinely a great read), staff should be highly aligned but loosely coupled.
The reason that this is not woolly hippy talk that we’ve all heard before, since the sixties at least, is that previous arrivals of new technology have only slightly lowered the transaction cost of organization. The internet and social media have dramatically lowered this cost (this observation attributed to – who else? – Clay Shirky. Man, I should read some other books once in a while). It’s now more possible than ever before to coordinate a group’s objectives, without controlling the means by which it achieves them.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Author of The Little Prince
…to be continued.
latte drinking cont’d
Actually this isn't anything like how it happened. Kind of odd picture given that!
Following this post I had this IM discussion which I’m copying here because I think it provides some additional clarity and context. They asked to be anonymous.
Them: disagree
not with the general idea, but i think it misses a really big point
…for now i’ll say this: the argument about respecting the will of the massachusetts voters is a MASSIVE red herring
because their will is respected
scott brown will be a senator
but the link from that to any political action is about like the underpants gnome from south park
1. scott brown is elected
2. ???????
3. legislation can’t be passed
me: yeah, I agree
I suppose when I say ‘respect the voters’ what I really mean to point out
is how little I think Coakley respected the voters
Not
that ‘respecting the voters’ somehow means that what happened in MA should prevent healthcare from passing
Them: ok but respecting the voters in that way is not a good end goal either
it’s not an absolute good
me: well, it’s kind of like the free speech argument isn’t it?
I mean, I may disagree vehmently with the will of the voters, but I have absolute faith that the best way to govern is democratically via the will of the people
/voters
no?
Them: OK…except i’m not sure what the point you’re making then is
what if martha coakley had been contemptuous of the voters and own
*won
you’re arguing something different than what people mean when they say we should respect the MA voters
me: I think you’re right to alert me to that
The talk of respecting the voters is all bound up with healthcare
Them: right
it’s not actually that anyone is saying that scott brown won’t be seated
they’re trying to argue that this was a national referendum election
me: What I’m really trying to say is that Coakley lost because she fundamentaly failed to understand the chnaged dynamic if this century
*changed*of
and that changed dynamic is actually quite exciting
and in keeping with Obama’s philosophy I think
he just needs to start extending it to its logical conclusion
(which I should write in a next blog post)
which is almost a permanent campaign
Them: maybe…
me: *the need for a permanent campaign
Them: but i think she lost because of (a) a terrible economy (b) voters impatience and general incoherence (c) the special circumstances of a special election that leads to lower turnout, particularly among core D voters
me: yes, BUT
I believe she could have won
ok, maybe not her
but Democratic ideas
which is really what we were upset about losing
not her as a senator
So, how should she have approached the campaign in order to win it?
She should have started as if every voter was out there waiting to be convinced
Them: at a micro scale yes
fair enough
me: Hey, can I anonymize this discussion and put it on my blog?
Them: sure, as long as it stay anonymized
Latte drinking, Guardian reading liberal
I tweeted on Friday that I was profoundly dismayed with democracy in America. I was called out on this by one of my friends, who accused me of being a latte drinking, Guardian reading liberal and, I suspect his point was, of not respecting the will of the people in Massachusetts. He’s got at least three points right there, but he’s not right about the last one. And it’s an important point to respond to because actually I’m excited by the lessons that the will of the people taught us in Massachusetts. I think they’ve confirmed our exit from the twentieth century.
The Massachusetts result is upsetting for its disproportionate consequences and for the sense of missed opportunities it brings to those who support what Obama wants to do. But it shouldn’t be described as an upset in the sense of being surprising. It’s only surprising if you had an expectation that even though the Democrats ran a worse candidate, working less hard, making worse gaffs they should still have won because, well, Massachusetts is Democrat, it just is.
If we’ve learnt anything from the impact of the internet age on people’s behaviour it’s that loyalty can’t be taken for granted. That’s a good thing. We have more choice because of the internet, are more able to exercise that choice, and are more able to change our minds. This is most evident in our behaviour as consumers (look at what’s happening with newspapers) but is equally true in our considerations of who we want to hang out with, the groups we want to associate with or the causes we want to support. In the last century we mostly made the most meaningful of those decisions, which enable individuals to organise and identify with other individuals, via top-down institutions like religions or political parties. And as a result we became pretty well locked in to those decisions. Not any more. As Clay Shirky says (and I will never get tired of quoting) we have the possibility now of “organising without organisations”.
That’s not to say that Scott Brown’s campaign, or the Republican Party, had nothing to do with their win. (And I should disclose now that I was there for three days before the vote volunteering for the Coakley campaign. Having said that I should also say I was mostly knocking on doors and so have no privileged view of what went on there.) Rather that Coakley’s mistake was to assume that there’s such a thing as a Blue State any more; one that’s made up of voters who will turn out for you whatever.
I was surprised when Hillary was battling Obama in the primaries that she forgot Bill Clinton’s lesson that hope is such a strong electoral message (listen up Cameron). And I was surprised in Massachusetts that the Democrats forgot Obama’s lesson. Didn’t he tell us that there is not one Red America and one Blue America? Didn’t he adopt a 50 state strategy because he believed people could be persuaded to vote for him despite who they had voted for in the past? The Massachusetts loss is not a victory for Karl Rove’s 50% + 1 strategy (mobilise your base and get just that one more vote you need to win), although it promotes some of his other more horrible tactics. It’s a victory for Obama’s belief that the whole of America is to play for.
But what that means is that you have to play. You have to properly engage. You have to argue. You have to convince. And you have to do all of the things that politics is all about in order to do that convincing: fundraising, advertising, handshaking, tramping the streets, finding and motivating volunteers to tramp the streets with you, creating a compelling message, attacking your opponent’s ideas…You can’t rely on voters to mindlessly follow what they’ve always done. In short you’ve got to campaign like you believe what you say is important and that it might change people’s minds. The lesson for the politicians is that the new social structures of the internet age mean Obama was right, you can win in any corner of America, but you have to fight for it.
Liberals shouldn’t slam Facebook
TV rots your brain
Every Christmas I like to have an argument with my mum, usually about technology, and usually conducted like an irregular serial – picked up several times over the course of the holiday. In previous years my Christmas technology arguments have been about kitchen appliances; can you believe we still don’t have a microwave or a dishwasher? Next Christmas it has got to finally be about the pitiful size of our TV, a debate that was this time sidelined by 2009’s topic: social networking.
In a car ride to visit grandma, mum passes this article by Julia Neuberger over to the back seat. (Her producing articles from the Guardian, often snipped out and left on my bed, is a feature of our arguments.) Essentially Baroness Neuberger had summarised what my mum thinks: that social networking is making us less social by wrapping us in a virtual world and isolating us from ‘real’ relationships.
This is of course bunk.
One problem with this criticism of social networking is that it is just such a tired old refrain – one that has so often proved to be inconsistent and alarmist; its intellectual heritage is millennia old: that new technology is rotting the brains of our children and threatening civilisation as we know it. Yawn. (Let’s not even start with Baroness Greenfield.)
Baroness Neuberger says that an email is “not as good as hearing a human voice” which is not as good as meeting face-to-face. I’d probably agree with her sentiment. But then she says, “If you can have an enormous circle of acquaintances on the net, why would you – unless very determined – go out and make real friends?” Unless you have a very low opinion of human beings, your argument can’t be both that being online is so compelling it offers a Soma-type existential threat and that it’s a lesser form of interaction.
But the other problem with her criticism is that it fundamentally misunderstands how quickly technology and our relationship to it has moved in even the last ten years.
There may once have been a time when “virtual worlds” existed; when teenagers withdrew to their bedrooms and entered closed fantasy worlds divorced from real life, but the more that the connectivity of our computers has increased, the less that that has been true.
It was probably most defensible to make the virtual worlds argument before the internet, when to play a computer game was in many cases not a social experience (unless you played it with mates in your room, or went to an arcade, which, um, I think were quite common experiences). And the critique may still have had some weight in the first days of internet message boards, when early adopters were sufficiently few that, so I understand, the internet did feel like a new realm. But the whole point about the success of Facebook, the defining social network, is that it bust open that closed world. Most people’s experience of the internet has become mostly about interacting with real people that they really know in the real world.
What’s important to understand, I think, is that the interplay of technology with new social behaviours has not brought us to a place that many predicted: ever more realistic fantasy worlds that we spend ever more time in at the expense of time in the real world. Rather, the exciting thing about technology today is that it is connecting us with more people more of the time.
And not just connecting us to them online. Look at what’s hot right now: mobile connectivity and geolocation. Look at just a few of the services that are already yesterday’s news: Meetup, Foursquare, the Obama campaign’s social network. These are about using online technology to help us meet and do things offline.
The technology of the new decade is about augmented reality not virtual reality. (See this Tech Crunch article.)
As the best sociologists of the internet age have said (including the mighty Clay Shirky) modern technology is not diminishing our stock of human capital. If Bowling Alone (which kind of said just that) ever had a point, it was because it was written in 2000 before the full effects of what I believe to be the start of a social revolution were evident. In fact the turn of the millennium may be seen by future generations as the cusp between the end of an old social order (which included the hierarchical reassurances of Church and class) and something new. And I for one am optimistic that this society, powered by internet age technologies, will be more connected, more democratic, more decentralised, more open and better.
Which brings me back to Dame Neuberger. Now, I like her – at least the little I know about her. The world needs liberals, and religions need liberals more than most institutions, so she doesn’t deserve to have the full Dawkins/AC Grayling secularist barrage. But I can’t help feeling that an attack on social networks from the direction of religion is less about regretting that young people are “less able to make conversation face to face, less likely to eat together and share a sense of fellowship with others in the real world” and more about regretting that they’re less and less choosing to do those things in the church, mosque or synagogue.
The internet loosens the grip of centralisers and monopolisers everywhere.
Baroness Neuberger does make a compelling point, which I wish she’d spent more time on, when she hints at the existence of a digital divide – the fact that the old and the poor risk being left behind without access to the internet. Martha Lane Fox in January 5th’s FT I think said that 10 million people in Britain have never touched a computer do not have the internet at home. (Can that be right? I would check it but the article is hidden behind a pay wall – you can get to it here. UPDATE: And here’s another source, ‘Digital Divide in the UK?‘)
This is what progressives should really be concerned about.
Because when they aren’t, and instead worry that the internet is destroying the fabric of society, they’re not just misunderstanding the technology. They’re bolstering an essentially conservative argument against a set of tools that, perhaps more than any before them, have the power to further the progressive cause and put the interests of the many on an equal footing with the special interests of the few.
I’m a better person because of Facebook (we all are)
Pretty much anybody I meet I try to friend on Facebook. I’m friends with my dad, I’m friends with some kids I used to teach, my colleagues, my uni friends, school friends, some people I’ve only ever met once, and I’m sure I’m friends with some people I don’t actually like.
Let me quickly say this is not a post about how you should use Facebook. There are legitimate conversations to be had about how we should interact with each other online. But you miss the point if you debate things like how many friends you ‘should’ have on Facebook (what portion of your social graph you should friend). The internet is almost defined by the fact that we are able to use the tools that emerge in – often unexpected – ways that most suit us.
My point about who I friend on Facebook is that whilst I can still manage my image (I’ve never changed that profile photo of me in Africa because I think it makes me look rugged and adventurous but caring) I do have to be less hypocritical.
This is maybe only notable because I have been known to be sensitive to context. This is another way of saying – no, not that I’m hypocritical, that is too strong – that I’ve acted with one group of people or in one situation in a way that I might be embarrassed for other people, in another situation, to have observed. I, like Tony Blair, sometimes drop my aitches when I talk to taxi drivers. I’ve pretended to know what I’m talking about when discussing football. I haven’t quite done this, but I’ve exaggerated stories. But on Facebook the updates I post, the photos I share, are available to everyone. I am less and less able, and less and less inclined, to pretend to be a different kind of person to different groups of friends.
What’s my point? Barriers between contexts are breaking down as a result of social media. This has implications for everybody but particularly for anybody in the public eye, like politicians.
My generation (just, but definitely the one following) have grown up with our youth documented on Facebook. It’s a little bit as if, in preparation for standing for parliament or congress or President, we have already begun publishing a pretty-much-tell-all Dreams from My Father.
And my reading of how my generation are using Facebook is not that we are desperately conscious of this and so desperately inhibited as a result.
If, because of the new ways we are using the internet, we are living a bit more in Bentham’s Panopticon prison, then for the moment this is ok. It is a good thing. Critically, we are in a better situation than at other times when technologies have been used to enforce self-discipline and self policing, because this technology is democratic and decentralized. We are as much able to hold to account as we are held to account.
I think we’re entering a period when we all (politicians, but also companies and organizations) are going to have to get used to greater transparency, necessarily greater authenticity and I’d like to hope, as Bernie Hogan in a great lecture for the Oxford Internet Institute on iTunesU says, as a result greater liberty and tolerance.
