Flying Tapmaster at the Detroit Jazz Festival

People from Detroit call their hometown the “D.” The reason at first appears obvious—Detroit, the letter D—it’s straightforward.  But below the surface, that single letter represents so much more.  Walking around the city center, it’s impossible to miss the Diverse city culture.  Artists and foodies intermingle with suits rushing from one meeting to the next.  White faces intermingle with black.  From Dawn until Dusk, the business district is a melting pot of culture and creed.  But as evening approaches, faces grow darker, not for lack of light, but because 8-5 Detroit has gone home for the day, leaving 24-7 Detroit to its reality.

Harsh Reality
Beyond the gleaming high rises and art-deco sky scrapers, is the real city center.   Detroit, which was home to over 1 million-souls just 20 years ago (and close to 2 million 40 years ago) will be lucky in the next census to reach 800,000.  The aftermath of this Decline includes 30,000 homes that must be raised in just the next few years; 10,000 school children who leave the school district every year in search of a quality education; the collapse of median home values from $50-60,000 just five years ago to $7,500 today; and a population where over 1/3 live in poverty.

Detroit Moxie
Despite this reality, Detroiters are proud, professing their moxie and facing challenge like home-town hero Joe Louis, chin set and fists flying.  Thousands of homes lost? We’ll develop green space and explore urban farming.  School children lost? We’ll build a robust charter school system that outshines the old. Adults left behind? We’ll promote broadband access and help thousands cross the digital divide to promote access to learning and information.  National media reports negative views of our city?  We’ll launch Declare Detroit, Detroit Yes, Model D, and an array of grassroots community and media efforts to organize, provide a balanced view, convey hope, and clean up our act.

Detroit takes punch after punch and keeps on rolling, but if the city is to move forward it must do more than endure. Various transformation efforts underway in the City have become points of pride that drive passion and hope.  A recent Knight Foundation/Gallup study shows that strong passion for community is highly correlated with economic growth.  The question is how to best help these transformation efforts not just stay on track but maximize their capacity to yield a brighter future.

Transformative Engagement
A 2004 MIT book, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, looked to two struggling manufacturing communities in Pennsylvania (Youngstown and Allentown) and found that, despite sharing very similar economic histories, the two took very different transformation paths.  The critical success factor for Allentown over Youngstown was the mobilization of key organizational actors around desired outcomes.

Both communities had prevalent and strong social networks and relationships, but in Youngstown social ties among the community’s leadership tended to reinforce civic relationships among actors who were already well-connected.  In Allentown civic ties tended to bring together more diverse actors who were not traditionally well connected and emphasized idea-sharing and alignment.  The book concludes that, an important element of Allentown’s relative success was its broader, more interactive civic-engagement approach.

Communities that emphasize the development of smart social networks, and that cultivate those networks around a common vision and goals, experience more inward investment, innovative thinking, and ownership and action-taking. It is a positive outcome that numerous stakeholders are organizing to take on Detroit’s many challenges and are harnessing passion to build a new community future.  But understanding how to harness the strength of social networks and to maximize the power of well-conceived civic engagement could accelerate positive momentum and shift efforts to a higher playing field.

Winning Team
Communities are made up of complex webs of systems and networks that emerge and recede depending on the moment’s need.  If those systems and networks fail, communities can fail, regardless of the passion people have toward an alternative outcome.  Detroiters are not willing or ready to admit defeat, despite unprecedented socio-economic and other challenges.  In fact, many Detroiters are struggling against all odds to repurpose and rebuild.  In the midst of the scramble, we can give these efforts a significant boost by helping them align with and engage key players that can help them innovate, connect resources, and succeed in moving their implementation strategies forward.

In these unusual times, we must look beyond the usual suspects to cultivate innovation and commitment that can turn the tides for the city.  Moxie counts, but it’s the people who are in your corner who can help you lose or win the fight.  Being deliberate about engagement and collaboration can make world of Difference in the D.

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A follow-up to Groundswell, Open Leadership is Charlene Li’s latest book (to be released today). While similar in structure – there’s a very practical kind of “roadmap” quality to it – Open Leadership is ultimately a more important contribution to modern organizational thought leadership and to the efforts of millions of people trying to apply open leadership in their own contexts.

First, it’s focused on leadership. While this might seem obvious from its title, there are thousands of books on leadership (Amazon lists over 61,000) that are really about a particular leader (e.g., Jack Welch), a leadership style, or characteristics of a collection of leaders. Far fewer interrogate the nature of leadership itself. This one does – simply, and in the context of broader social, cultural, economic, and environmental changes. Pointing to the rise of a “culture of sharing” that increased connectivity makes possible, uncomfortable territory for many leaders to be sure, Li states, “At a time when customers and employers are redefining how they make and maintain relationships with social technologies, it’s high time organizations rethink the foundations of business relationships as well.” Open Leadership reflects transformative thinking not just at the level of practice but about how people in organizations and their customers relate to one another.

Second, the book profiles not just private sector firms, but global charities (The Red Cross) and key government agencies (the US Navy and State Department) responsible for some of the world’s most important and dangerous work. This underscores the emphasis on leadership broadly – not just for firms selling products and services, but for all kinds of organizations and institutions.

Third, the “roadmap” chapters (assessments, choices, etc.) offer practical direction not just for CEOs, but for open leadership and social technology advocates at all levels in their organizations. While Li doesn’t quite come out and say it, Open Leadership is a manual for leading openly from wherever you are. I would like to have seen more (and more explicit) emphasis on leadership outside of a firm context (community level government, multiple organizations engaged in humanitarian work, etc.), but these cross-organizational and network-based models could make nice case studies in a future book?

So What is Open Leadership?

“Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.”

There’s an important nuance here – giving up the need to be in control is different than giving up control. The critical point is that social technologies have shifted the landscape so fundamentally that leaders simply cannot exercise the kind of control over information and decision-making they once did. However, they can connect to and collaborate with more customers and partners than ever before, provide a platform for those customers to connect to one another (engaging the collective “we” in problem-solving), and facilitate meaningful relationships along the way.

Li identifies five rules of open leadership:

1. Respect that your customers and employees have power.
2. Share constantly to build trust.
3. Nurture curiosity and humility.
4. Hold openness accountable.
5. Forgive failure.

And then the book delves into roadmap territory (10 elements, assessments, models, checklists, etc.), so you’ll have to pick it up for yourself to make use of them. Importantly, these chapters (more than half the book) frame choices. How open do you want to be? About what issues? What kind of structure supports the kind of openness you want to achieve?

If you are an aspiring open leader, these alone are worth the price of the book as they will prevent you from having to reinvent a wheel or two. [Note: The chapter on structuring openness provides sage advice, and a myriad of examples, but if you need more, a host of social media guidelines or policies is here on the Altimeter Group wiki].

A Closing Note

While many of the examples cited in the book (Best Buy, the Obama campaign, Cisco, Comcast, Ford, etc.) have been the subject of inquiry many times before, Open Leadership presents them as unfinished stories rather than tales of hero/ines. This does a couple of important things.

First, it strengthens the case for open leadership on the grounds that ever more connected markets, communities, firms, and people both accelerate change, and make it less predictable, a condition for which open communications and information-sharing systems are well-suited.

Second, it portrays leaders as learners for whom adapting to the changing technology environment is mission critical – not just “fun.” Whether it means blogging, tweeting, or platform building, these leaders are not only embracing these practices but making them central to their work.

Anyone who has ever stood in front of a room full of skeptics trying to explain what a wiki is must have cheered at Paul Levy’s defense of CEOs blogging. [If you haven't been in such a position, imagine yourself trying to convince someone like Justice Antonin Scalia that Twitter matters.]

Finally, and on a personal note, I don’t know Jeremiah Owyang, but I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time now. I also read his blog and catch one of his webinars or videos now and then. I appreciate the wisdom he’s shared and sense that I would like him. I was surprised by the story in the chapter on failure (now you’ve got to buy the book), and felt at once supportive of his effort to “get back on the horse” and less embarrassed by my own open mistakes. We’re all learners really. And social technologies, used well, help us share experiences so we all move forward faster.

That’s Open Leadership.

Note: This review is cross-posted on Networked Publics.

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Kim Didier is from Newton, Iowa, a little town of 15,000 that rests smack-dab in the middle of the state.   In my imagination she regularly belts out would-be top-40 hits in the shower, but only when she’s not on tour with her entourage and counting the millions she’s made from going platinum.  In reality, Kim’s—well—totally normal.  She’s friendly, inquisitive, entirely approachable, and generally nice to be around.  She has a professional haircut and sports business casual with the best of ‘em.  So, what makes her so undeniably cool?

Regional Economic Crisis
In 2001, Maytag Corporation, which had been headquartered in Newton for 113 years and employed 4,000 people at its peak, announced it would reduce the local labor pool by moving to new facilities in Mexico.  On October 25, 2007, Maytag ceased operations in Newton for good, with closure of both a production facility and corporate offices.  That day, a final 1,800 Maytag employees lost their jobs.

Townsfolk began going through the seven stages of grief, starting with shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, and depression.   People might have gotten stuck there but, rather than wallowing in their sorrow, the common loss brought the community together.  Community leaders, including Kim Didier, pounced on the opportunity to shift negative energy focused on confusion, grief, and anger to more constructive purposes.

Taking Action
Like any good counselor, Kim called on community residents to do a little role playing.  The process started off with something called “The Futures Game.”  An Australian “gent” from rural Australia, David Beurle, led the exercise, which helps people understand how, when faced with tough futures about growth and development, different choices at critical points in time can lead to drastically different community outcomes.  This process led to development of a community vision, steeped in the understanding that if people stray from the decision or don’t make collaborative, mission-driven choices, the community’s future outcomes could be sharply affected.  Salt brines or development

In addition, Kim prodded the community to participate in a process called “network weaving.” This entails understanding how strongly connected community leaders are to one another, where their passions and expertise intertwine, and how they view one another as collaborators, innovators, and trusted partners.  U.S. national intelligence agencies use the process to understand the effectiveness of terrorist networks, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has employed the technique to control deadly infections in hospitals.  Kim Didier and her peers employed the process to understand how to most effectively move their community forward.

Did these hokey processes really make a difference for Newton?  The answer is an irrefutable “yes.”    These processes helped the community establish common desired outcomes and rallied leadership around it—fully leveraging the full strengths of the communities assets and building trust relationships that have allowed the community to move forward.  Today, Newton isn’t “formerly the home of Maytag.” They are at the center of innovation, becoming a manufacturing and design hub for state-of-the art wind turbines and, with just one employer, home to 400 new, related jobs.

Recovery
Slowly but surely, the town is moving through its phases of grief: the upward turn, reconstruction, and acceptance and hope in abundance.   This transition was possible because some folks dared to do the unthinkable—to step back, create a vision, create safe spaces to build trust, and understand how to focus community leaders’ energy at the right places at the right time.

What do you call someone who recognizes the need for this kind of process and gets the buy-in to make it happen? Yep–that’s a “Rock Star” in my book.

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Thanks to NJ.. on Flickr

Last week we were drafting a set of policy recommendations for a project. We’d drafted an introduction that named demographics, technology, and the competitive landscape as among the most significant domains of change in the workplace during the past decade. At that point I realized how many times I’d seen this collection of words and phrases in a bulleted powerpoint list, or similarly glibly treated as if the meaning (and implications) of these change were self-evident.

We decided to say what we meant. Here’s the list we came up with in answer to the question “How is the workforce landscape different today than ten years ago?” We know it’s not complete, but it’s a start. We’d love to know your thoughts.

Key Workforce Trends

“Growth minus Jobs.” While economists debate the causes and implications of the trend, job growth following the last two recessions has been far lower than what was expected. In our current “job-less recovery,” the seven million private sector jobs lost in the 20 months between December 2007 and August 2009 are returning an anemic pace (and many of them do not pay family-sustaining wages), while labor force continues to grow by 1.3 million people per year.

“Millennials and Boomers Sandwich Gen-X.” For the first time in our history, it is commonplace for four or even five generations to occupy the workplace at the same time – challenging tradition hierarchies, management practices, and raising serious equity issues as “baby boomers” delay retirement and firms resist taking on new (younger) full-time employees who are far more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than their more senior colleagues (and peers).

“Wanted: Life-long Learners.” The demands on all workers to develop new and more diverse skills throughout their working lives – as the baseline required for good jobs increases – raises complex challenges for employers and government (who pays?), difficult decisions for workers (“Do I train for two years in hopes I get a job at the new Google facility?”), and disrupts assumptions about what it means to be a student (non-traditionals are the new traditionals).

“Anywhere, anytime, any device connectivity.” We’re only at the beginning of understanding how connecting people to data, information, and each other will change the way we live work and learn, but the implications for workers – who’s talents can be tapped globally, firms – who’s value chains now include customers and competitors, and communities – which will thrive based their uniqueness and desirability, are significant (and mindbending).

“Show me the three Rs (Reduce, Re-Use, Recycle).” Questions about the sustainability of our consumption-based economy and its role in climate change are causing a massive rethink of public policy around energy, water, food systems, and how these and other natural resources are used in industry and commerce. This is already changing what it means for workers, firms, industries, communities, and nations to be competitive in the new new economy.

These shifts show no evidence of slowing. Public policy must also change with the times.

And today, there are few areas of public policy more important to the nation’s economic competitiveness than the skills, ingenuity, and health of its 139-million person workforce.

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“We’re All Doing It”

Last month the US Department of Labor (DOL) launched a Facebook page. Other federal agencies maintain them too, but DOL hasn’t really been out-front in implementing the Administration’s early commitment to communication, transparency, and participation. While Facebook is just one means of demonstrating this commitment (the Department, and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis also tweet), it is an important one for which the department deserves kudos.

Concern About Jobs

It goes without saying (but I’m going to say it anyway) that the “jobs agenda” has reached fever pitch across the country. During the past several months, jobs – the lack of them, the low pay associated with them, the fear of losing them, the benefits associated (or not associated) with them, even guilt on the part of people who still have them – have dominated the public discourse. Many times I’ve felt helpless in trying to refer people with questions to the right agency, department, workforce board or one-stop (and I’m familiar with the workforce system). But within moments of the Department launching its Facebook page, people inside and outside the agency were getting their questions answered—in public.

People Meeting (and Learning from) People

Here are my favorite examples* to date:

1. Sonya Schurr Taylor (GA)

Last Thursday evening Sonya asked USDOL why the Georgia Department of Labor’s website had no information about extended unemployment insurance. By 7:30 the next morning, this information was posted on the Georgia DOL site. Sonya shared this with USDOL, and USDOL reponded, letting her know the agency was “glad to hear it”, and providing a link to additional services.

What happened here?

Did someone at USDOL contact someone at the Georgia State DOL? Did someone at Georgia DOL catch the mention because they were scanning for social intelligence? Did a previous inquiry by Sonya prompt the change? Was it a coincidence? We don’t know. But by simply allowing such problems to appear in public, the likelihood that they will be noticed and resolved quickly dramatically increases. And positive resolutions to citizen problems generate trust between citizens and their government.

2. Daliah Holmes, USDOL

Daliah’s question – posted on November 16 – was intended for DOL insiders with knowledge about recent policy changes having to do with building security. The November 18 response answered her question, and was right there for everyone else to see.

What’s going on here?

Facebook is helping DOL employees respond to their colleagues’ questions. We outsiders can see this, and assess for ourselves whether this kind of conduct inspires confidence. For me, the answer is an unqualified yes.

3. Jordana Cohen, (NY)

Jordana, clearly agitated about the lack of information provided to her about extended benefits by the State of New York, posted an article about it, along with a question and plea for clarity on November 18. Hours later, Karin Gehn Barrett responded, indicating what she knew (and confirming what Jordana feared). Jordana, outraged, posted instructions for contacting New York’s Congressional delegation to insist on a change.

What do we make of this?

In this case, two strangers from New York are using Facebook to share information about issues of concern to both of them (and certainly to others). There is no DOL response here, probably because the interaction raises tricky questions for the agency. Joanna is asking for political action using the DOL Facebook page.

Transparency Brings Challenges and Opportunities to DOL

Transparency brings new challenges that DOL attorneys and others will undoubtedly fret over, but efforts like these bring welcome opportunities for citizens and residents to interact with their government and with each other—across geographies, time zones, and demographic groups – in ways that help all of us get smarter, faster.

* At posting time, all three examples were accessible from the Department’s front page here. By the time you see this, you may have to scroll back a few pages. I hope so.

Kristin Wolff
@kristinwolff

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What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott

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Networks and Social Change

We love and have been following the Working Wikily blog for some time now, but authors Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, and Heather McLeod Grant have outdone themselves on this one. We agree that a networked mindset is evolving – and it changes assumptions about how the world works. And without shared assumptions, it can be very easy to get stuck in the trees when working with colleagues or partners, and just plain miss the forest.

Easier Said than Understood?

It’s easy to talk about social networks – we’ve always had them. It’s also easy to experiment with new tools that make those networks visible. But it’s worth stopping to consider the profound changes that working in a networked way – across organizational, institutional, cultural and other boundaries – imply for how we advance social change, economic prosperity, and community resilience in a new age.

We’ve got many examples bookmarked here. And we find inspiration (everywhere, but for today) here.

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“The Beatles did not invent teenagers.”

You don’t need everyone. You need the ones who care – the true believers. And the web connects you to them.

Leading Change

If you are in the change business, ask three questions:

• Who are you upsetting?
• Who are you connecting?
• Who are you leading?

Then start a movement.

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People want to learn what’s significant.

Michael Wesch creates significance for the University of Manitoba, and for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between the new media ecosystem and the kind of learning we need now. It’s a bit long, but engaging enough to entertain, and instructive enough to make you feel like you just participated in a great class. Which is the point. You did.

More.

Click here to investigate Michael Wesch’s other remarkably insightful videos.

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