As the Internet matures, so people are proving amazingly willing to collaborate on a large scale. There has been a flood of books advising on this(some even written collaboratively).

In Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006), Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams describe dozens of organizations that have benefited from this phenomenon – from mining and chemical companies to IT-related organizations like Linux and Wikipedia. What do they advise? Take cues from your lead users; build critical mass; supply an infrastructure for collaboration; take your time to get the structures and governance right; abide by community norms; let the process evolve; and, hone your collaborative mind.

In We-Think: Mass Innovation, not Mass Production (2008), Charles Leadbeater comments on the continuing trend to greater openness and decentralization. “Crowds are not necessarily wise and mobs not necessarily smart; it all depends on how they are made up and come together” he observes. “We-Think succeeds by creating self-governing communities who make the most of their diverse knowledge without being overwhelmed by their differences.”

In Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), Clay Shirky demonstrates how new social tools are combining social and technological forces to remove obstacles to public expression and thus anchor the creation of new groups. “New tools give life to new forms of action,” he argues “…the speed of group action increases, and just as more is different, faster is different.”

In Groundswell; Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology (2008), Charlene Li and Joseph Bernoff explain why such a “groundswell” is happening (the coincidence of people, technology and economics), how to ride the groundswell (listen carefully, concentrate on the relationships) and how this will transform your company.

The criticism leveled at all these books is that they are much stronger at telling intriguing success stories than describing practical first steps. Two new entrants to this genre are the sequel to Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams’ Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (published September 28, 2010), and Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: the Natural History of Innovation (published October 5, 2010).  Both claim to offer more useful advice, but just how practical are their recommendations? Do they really tell us what we should do Monday morning to build a collaborative workspace? If not, where can we find detailed guidance on where to start and what to do?

Macrowikinomics

Revisiting the basics of Wikinomics, and their five principles of networked intelligence (Collaboration, Openness, Sharing, Integrity and Interdependence), Tapscott and Williams this time try to tackle the criticism that they do not actually offer any concrete demonstrations of how to use Wikinomics in a short chapter on Ground Rules for Reinvention: Making Wikinomics Happen in Your Organization.  This tells us to:

• Turn our goods or services into a platform that others can use to create new value
• Thoughtfully assess what should be shared versus kept in-house
• Embrace self-organization and empower innovation
• Support the vanguard of enthusiasts
• Use a meritocracy to support collaboration versus hierarchy
• Leverage the Net Generation

That’s about it.  The book turns out to be far more of a manifesto than an operations manual.

It concludes:

“Three hundred years ago Martin Luther called the printing press ‘God’s highest act of grace.’  With today’s communication breakthroughs we have an historic occasion to reboot business and the world using Wikinomics principles as our guide. Because each of us can participate in this new renaissance, it is surely an amazing time to be alive. Hopefully we will have the collective wisdom to seize the time.”

Where Good Ideas Come From

While Macrowikinomics kicks off with the assertion that because of the new Web the old industrial models of business are all being turned on their heads, Where Good Ideas Come From has a very different starting point – an enquiry into how innovation happens.  However, its key observation is similar:  “Chance favors the connected mind”.

Where Good Ideas Come From presents seven key areas that Johnson argues we must understand to maximize our creativity:

1. The adjacent possible - the idea that at any given moment, extraordinary change is possible but that only certain changes can occur (this describes those who create ideas that are ahead of their time and whose ideas reach their ultimate potential years later).
2. Liquid networks - how connections enable ideas to be born, nurtured and blossom, and how these networks are formed and grown. The environment’s ability to circulate ideas plays an incredibly important role.
3. The slow hunch - the acceptance that creativity doesn't guarantee an instant flash of insight but rather, germinates over time before manifesting itself.
4. Serendipity - the notion that while happy accidents help allow creativity to flourish, it is the nature of how our ideas are freely shared, how they connect with other ideas and how we perceive the connection at a specific moment that creates profound results.
5. Error - the realization that some of our greatest ideas didn't come as a result of a flash of insight that followed a number of brilliant successes, rather  that some of those successes come as a result of one or more spectacular failures (penicillin, for example).
6.  Exaptation - finding completely different uses for existing components or ideas (for example, using a GPS unit to find your way to a reunion with a long-lost friend when GPS technology was originally created for the military).
7. Platforms - adapting many layers of existing knowledge, components, delivery mechanisms, and so on which may not be unique in themselves but which can be recombined into something unique or novel.

This sounds promising, yet once again the anecdotes prove more compelling than the synthesis.

Macrowikinomics and Where Good Ideas Come From are catchy titles that will no doubt help their authors sell a lot of books. But their recommendations are disappointingly shallow. There is nothing wrong with the idea of collaborative innovation but it is neither new nor uniquely web related. The Internet is a tool. It is potentially a rather useful tool, but it is not more than that, and it is no substitute for person-to-person organizing.

What we need is a framework that helps each of us to focus on what we can do where we are, and to be aware of what those around us are doing. The web is not a panacea. Nevertheless all these authors agree on one thing: the web is a platform, a very efficient platform for innovation. In itself, it does not solve anything. Only humans do… sometimes.

The clearest message of all these authors is the need to create a platform.  The Yala – a tool to help manage complex relationships – does just this.

Creating a Platform for Better Communication

“Don't just create, curate,” urge Tapscott and Williams:

“In order to succeed in a wiki world, you cannot just think of yourself as a content provider, or as someone creating an initiative, product or service. Instead, become the curator, someone who creates a context or a platform that allows other people to self-organise and create things that are valuable.”

But what could they mean by such a “platform”?

Netscape were probably the first to describe "the web as platform" in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. This is now called Web 1.0.

In 2004, the term “platform” really began its rise in popularity when John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as Platform" where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that "customers are building your business for you". Wikipedia and Facebook are possibly the most famous Web 2.0 applications.

Think of Web 1.0 as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can't contribute to or change the information in any way. Web 2.0 is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances. You can still use it to receive information, but you also contribute to the conversation and make it a richer experience.

Web 3.0 is going to be like having a personal assistant who knows practically everything about you and can access all the information on the Internet to answer any question. Many compare Web 3.0 to a giant database. While Web 2.0 uses the Internet to make connections between people, Web 3.0 will use the Internet to make connections with information.

The Yala is a platform in the Web 3.0 sense, because high performance in complex relationships needs both the connectivity of the Internet and a structure for self-organization. Computer networks are great tools for making connections. However, networks – when left alone –are poor at creating structure. They tend to anarchy, to chaotic rather than emergent behavior. The architecture of peer-to-peer communication provides the answer. Surprisingly, perhaps, the key to making lateral connections lies in providing a hierarchy - developed from the ground up – that makes such interaction possible.

Web 3.0 is sometimes called “the semantic web” because the dream is that we may someday be able to store and retrieve information by its meaning (not just keywords) by parsing the grammar (semantics) of our texts: subject, verb and object. Yet a famous quip (sometimes attributed to Groucho Marx) –  “Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas.” – serves to remind us of the slipperiness of language and the elusiveness of this goal. The Yala addresses the problem by using a unique (but obvious) hierarchy – interfaces, aims, issues, and views – to capture the content of our discourse in a meaningful way.

To get to the heart of what the Yala is, how it works, and what makes it so unique, we first need to understand just a little more about peer-to-peer communication.

 

Understanding Peer-to-Peer Communication

In IT jargon, “peer-to-peer communication” occurs when those at the edges of a network talk directly to each other.

Peer-to-peer communication allows computers to trade information between one another. In a peer-to-peer network each computer has equal status and control, is both a “client” and a “server”. Each computer has the same capabilities, and either can start to communicate to the other.

Thus independent intelligent devices make their own decisions without the need or delay of using an intermediate, central or “master” controller. Eliminating the master (a single point of failure) improves the system’s reliability and reduces its cost. But this lateral communication still requires some kind of hierarchy to work efficiently.

In theory peer-to-peer networks need no structure at all, but such networks are rare. In an unstructured network each request for information must spread through the network by asking as many peers as possible if they have the data. Popular information is likely to be available in many places but the search for data held by few is unlikely to succeed. There is no relationship between a peer and the information it manages, and there is no guarantee that bombarding the network with queries will work. It merely floods the network with traffic and makes it inefficient.

A structured peer-to-peer network overcomes such limitations by making each peer responsible for certain information and maintaining a table of contents. The network uses this table to keep track of who is responsible for what. When someone wants information, the network looks up who is responsible for that data and directs the search to them. Enquiries are far more likely to succeed.

If it seems odd that hierarchy should aid non-hierarchical communication, consider the Internet’s own Domain Name Service (DNS). This is a basic tool of the Internet, though to a user it is invisible. This is how it works. The Internet needs a code–the Internet Protocol (IP)–to tell it where a message comes from and where to send it. The code takes the form of numbers, like 66.206.193.184. The DNS computers give these codes, called IP addresses, other names that are easier to remember. Each DNS “server” then transmits this information to all the other DNS servers around the world. Everyone who uses the Internet depends on the DNS hierarchy.

The same concepts of peer-to-peer communication that have helped experts in information technology to manage the rapidly-changing relationships in distributed computer networks, can help us manage person-to-person communication in complex and dynamic relationships in business and the community.

Where to start? What to do?

The Yala creates a unique hierarchy to help people in complex relationships locate and connect with counterparts in neighboring organizations. Management hierarchy provides that structure in a normal organization. Yala trees fulfill that role in relationships that span organizational boundaries.

The steps in building a Yala are both logical and well defined. We identify interfaces, compile our directory of contributors, and cultivate “trees”. In so doing, we are creating the platform for better communication between people at the edges of a relationship. This structure makes lateral communication far more efficient and our relationship as a whole far more effective.

Interfaces, aims, issues and views relate to one another like the trunk, branches, twigs and leaves of a tree. Just as a trunk can support many branches, a branch many twigs, and a twig many leaves, so an interface may have several aims, an aim raise many issues, and an issue support alternative points of view.

When people come together, for whatever reason, they begin to form a community, name their group, define its aims, share stories and build a common vocabulary.

The Yala focuses this conversation on results by inviting contributors to spell out the aims, issues and views of their interface.
 
Aims are unclear or misunderstood surprisingly often. Each contributor comes with their own agenda and priorities. However if they don't together share one or more aims, the interface will cease to exist - its members can find no common ground.

Issues demand attention. They are the challenges we must surmount to achieve our aims. We find our way by overcoming them. The Yala helps its contributors to elevate concerns safely, discuss them openly, assess them correctly and respond appropriately.
 
Well-chosen views legitimize the frank exchange of dissimilar ideas. They provide a better way to hear and understand the messages that surround us. Such messages include “subjective” perceptions: others’ thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hopes and fears. In an increasingly virtual world where we cannot read body language or pick up non-verbal cues, we may never get to know such things unless people tell us.

Thus “Yala” trees structure dialogue around results: what are the key interfaces in this relationship, what are the aims of each interface, what are the issues that stand in the way of achieving those aims and what is the spectrum of views on those issues?

Defining Yala trees is hard work and demands deliberation. Not a popular idea in an age that craves instant answers. Yet the activity of together creating this artifact aids learning.

The discipline of spelling out interfaces, aims, issues and views builds a framework for dialogue, a process for tackling crises. It helps people raise issues safely, discuss them openly, assess them correctly and respond appropriately. It sets the stage for truly constructive conversations: not about whether we do or do not like each other but about what we want to do together.

For the number of points of view we apply when we consider something is a direct measure of the depth of our understanding. People who only see one side of things engage in quarrels and disputes. Acknowledging just one dimension makes us as discerning as the ass because it leads to false dichotomies:

In matters controversial,
My perception’s rather fine.
I always see both points of view,
The one that’s wrong, and mine.

So which "horn of the dilemma" do you choose?

• To be part of the solution or part of the problem
• Keep smoking or get fat
• Better dead than red
• Be a conservative or a liberal
• South Africa… love it or leave it
• Owls or jobs, the environment or the economy 

In contrast, multiple perspectives help us see more choices. They give us more degrees of freedom. And such options are worth money.

This is how the task of creating a Yala boosts collective intelligence and delivers value.

 

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