Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation

When discussing E2.0, I often hear "Shouldn't we just implement these social tools and simply let business value "emerge"? My answer is NO, not if you want to maximize business value.

I am a strong believer that organizations, should focus and facilitate the use of these tools in order to maximize organizational benefits. To drive value, I've often referred to the engagement factors and in this post I wanted to focus on one of the factors, "Motivation".

How do we address motivation? Do we adopt the "build it and they will come" approach? No. But what about Wikipedia? it seems like complete "self-organization" has made it successful. But consider that only 1% of the people who visit Wikipedia actually contribute content. That's alright with a population set of the world, but 1% of your company may not be enough and if you have specific objectives you may need to motivate others to participate.

So what then? Should we use traditional motivation tactics (i.e. Carrots & Sticks)? For example, should we give bigger monetary bonuses or incentives to those who leverage social computing technologies to solve problems or provide innovative solutions? The answer yet again is surprisingly, NO.

In fact, bigger incentives causes worse results for cognitive tasks. Dan Pink has an excellent video that summarizes why this is, and has references to research by economists from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and sponsored by the US Federal Reserve Bank along with research by the London School of Economics which reviewed 51 studies on pay for performance. The bottom line is that pay for performance has a NEGATIVE impact on even "rudimentary" cognitive tasks.



Ok, so what then? Dan talks about a framework to address motivation but I wanted to remind you about that one motivator which is "fun"! Although it's been several several years since I've actually written code, I have to say that there was something fun about being able to solve tough bugs and problems which would motivate me to keep pushing at the resolution. The folks that update Linux aren't doing it for the money, so what motivates them?

Fun, as a design principle shouldn't be overlooked as it impacts the application design from look and feel, through context, content and process. It also should be addressed when designing events leveraging social computing technologies.

In a previous life, I had the opportunity to build a YouTube like environment to address concerns with recruitment and retention. Employees were allowed to do short snippets of why they loved working at their job. The results were amazing, for in a 2 week period the 3000 employees generated ~100 videos that were watched approximately 15,000 times. That's on average 5 videos watched per employee about why people love their jobs. 5 times employees choose to listen to these messages and engage. It was fun.

The power of fun is often forgotten. Perhaps it's because people still see work and fun as two separate things. After all, isn't the opposite of work, "play"? To illustrate how "fun" can be used to drive a specific outcome, there is a brilliant campaign underway by Volkswagan that does exactly that. Below is just one of their viral videos. So as you're having fun watching this video, just consider how you might be able to apply to this to your social computing endeavours...

Ratings & Enterprise 2.0

Be cautious in rating employee E2.0 contribution.

Andrew McAfee recently questioned the need and value for rating employees and their usage of E2.0 applications. The chart on the left is his example of some of the things he would consider.

Although these metrics may be of interest to those managing or designing various E2.0 programs, these statistics can be quite misleading. Specifically, I caution those that want to use these indicators as 1) the sole measure in determining the success of their E2.0 programs and 2) the sole means of ranking the value of a contributor.


Success of your E2.0 program can not be based only on adoption/usage percentages. The value of E2.0 includes just giving people an opportunity, enabling self-organization of the most relevant participants, identifying valuable conceptual outliers, reinforcing culture, accessibility for future benefit. These don't show up in adoption rates. I discuss these in greater detail in an earlier post, "5 benefits of social computing that adoption rates don't show". Success isn't a simple metric but requires various perspectives well beyond just adoption rates.


Without any ratings, how would you know whether to trust the content? Rating a contributor based on activity levels is intended to provide participants with a gauge to the "quality" or "accuracy" of the content. This is a dangerous and false assumption. Just because someone may post a lot, or interact a lot, doesn't mean that their content is necessarily of high quality. As an analogy, I spend a long time doing house repairs, not because I am good at but for the exact opposite reason!


A heavy focus on individual ratings will also diminish the real value of tapping into the long-tail. Clay Shirky gives a good example on how one can completely miss the point. He points to comments made by Steve Ballmer dismissing the open source concept of Linux as not really being true/valuable since the majority of work is really done by a small group of participants. Steve's flaw is that he's associating "value" with "quantity". The question isn't about how much input you provide. Even if you provide only one single piece of contribution, what if that contribution turns out to be a major breakthrough? Or in the software example Clay suggests, what if that one patch provided a fix for a major security hole in the software? What's that worth?


My suggestion for those looking at designing E2.0 programs is that ratings are valuable, but they should be at the content level. Individual ratings could be derived (aggregates or averages) from the various ratings of the individual contributions. There is sometimes a desire to use ratings as a means to motivate employees to contribute. If you focus on "quantity" you are incenting the wrong behaviour, focus instead on "value".


One final point. SIMPLICITY. Just because we can measure something, doesn't mean we should. From my perspective, having 6 metrics can be confusing and intimidating to participants. I prefer to get it down to a single metric which has intrinsic value. For example, in a recent application we've designed, we allow (and encourage) participant rating on the content by asking, "Did this content help you?". This means the rating is the total number of people helped by the content. It provides meaning to both readers and authors. Do we track other metrics that we don't display? Absolutely. Is this method perfect? No, but it is simple and in my opinion worth the trade-off.

Video Games + Social Computing?

I admit, one reason I've written fewer posts recently is because I am the new owner of a Wii. Each time I turn it on, I feel a "pang" of guilt, knowing full well, that there is always house stuff to do, great articles to read, blog posts to complete....

But thanks to an interesting article in Discover Magazine titled, "This is Your Brain on Video Games: Gaming sharpens thinking, social skills, and perception", I have been able to partially justify my addiction. It turns out that the hours spent playing these games is really an intellectual investment in myself. Yay!

"they now recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging."

"The findings contradict nearly all the preconceived ideas about the impact of games. The gaming population turned out to be consistently more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively. They also showed no evidence of reduced attention spans compared with nongamers. "

The article is full of interesting references to various scientific studies, and examples of the application of video games into the real-world. I can't do it justice in this post, so suggest you take a read.

I do want to highlight a couple points that have implications in the world of social computing and Enterprise 2.0

1. Focus

You've likely read articles that talk about the lack of focus in today's youth. For example, they are unable to read a whole article, never mind an entire book. That they are constantly in the need for "multi-tasking" but is that really just another way of saying they can't focus? Well have you ever tried to pull them away from a video game?

The article provides examples of how several subjects were able to withstand high-levels of discomfort and distraction for hours playing a video game simulation. Now think about an E2.0 work environment where we ask for collective input from our employees. Perhaps we ask a sales person to update the sales manual, or a service rep to provide their thoughts on how to provide awesome customer experience through a blog.

Unless you are one of a very few companies that actually provides time for employees and have changed your compensation model to allow for this activity, it is likely, these requests are additional "volunteer" work that people just can't find the time to do because they are too busy or become distracted by the barrage of e-mails, phone calls, etc...

In a world of Blackberrys, it's pretty easy to get distracted. Using game design may help ensure focus on the social applications we build, or simply how we work. Have you been to a presentation that you just couldn't focus on and perhaps once or twice you peaked at your Blackberry? The next two points can provide some clues as to how to do this.

2. Optimal Learning and the "Regime of Competence"

This concept talks about finding the sweet spot to learning. Basically, the challenge can't be too hard where it's frustrating nor should it be too easy where it is dismissed. If you create a packaged application that is designed for the masses, you will undoubtedly have some people that will dismiss/ignore the application and others that will be frustrated by it.

Video Games however, stagger difficulty on a progressive basis, that finds the "sweet spot" (or as psychologists refer to it, a regime of competence). Similarly in any social application you deploy consider offering a basic "level" which anyone can get started, but then increasing the challenge level after they successfully master a level.

The concept of raising the challenge progressively ensures that people develop and enhance skills always in the sweet spot. If it's too easy, people dismiss it and if it's too hard people give up.

"In October 2006 the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) endorsed video games as a potential means for teaching 'higher-order thinking skills, such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.'"

3. Reinforcement & Motivation Theory

That which gets rewarded gets repeated. Video game designers knows this really well. So much is written on motivation theory, so let me just provide a couple of "video game" concepts that work.

• Relative ranking: With online gaming, you can see how good you really are relative to other players in the world. You can also see it based on various other dimensions (i.e. Geography, Level, etc.). Vroom's infamous Expectancy Theory talks to the valence concept which is the value held to the reward. The value to an extent is relative (i.e. If I achieve a score of 10,000 I might be pretty happy, but if I find out that score is in the bottom 5% I am not going to be as thrilled). Competition helps ensure we don't become satisfied with a certain level of performance but strive to do better and better with a known achievable benchmark.


• Badges: After achieving a special feat you are awarded badges. This is an emblem to show others or for personal fulfillment of accomplishment. What makes this effective is knowing they you have achieved a certain level of distinction which can be proudly shown to others.


• Progression levels: If you have completed 37/40 levels, the desire to just complete it after you've spent so much effort is there. In fact, smart design may actually skew the level so it is non-linear. In other words, level 1-30 may really have been very easy but 31-38 hard and 39-40 extremely hard. Gamers only see that they are "so close" when really the design was intentionally done to get them to that level.

• Unlocking Surprises: Often games will provide a "surprise" that you can accidentally find. This seemingly "random" reward is a powerful motivating factor. Think of the power of slot machines as an example. Several studies have examined various reinforcement schedules and have found the the most "addictive" of these is Variable Ratio. Variable ratio has the highest rate of responding and the greatest resistance to extinction compared to other reinforcement schedules.

I can now go back to my parents and explain that I really wasn't wasting my life away playing all those video games. If James Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin is correct, we can expect the video game generation well prepared for a 2.0 world

"They’re going to think well about systems; they’re going to be good at exploring; they’re going to be good at reconceptualizing their goals based on their experience; they’re not going to judge people’s intelligence just by how fast and efficient they are; and they’re going to think nonlaterally. In our current world with its complex systems that are quite dangerous, those are damn good ways to think.”

Now if you don't mind.... "Scuse me while I kiss the Sky" on Guitar Hero III

Enterprise 2.0 Organizational Structure: Importing more than just technology from Web 2.0

There's much more to web 2.0 than just the technology. For those looking to replicate the success of web 2.0 into their enterprise 2.0 initiative they should consider organizational structure for the the self-organizing community.


Long before Web 2.0, I was inspired by Jim Collin's work in Good to Great. Of the many observations made, he talked about the role of leadership. That the role of leadership is NOT to motivate people. That if you had the right people first, and provided the right opportunity, people are self-motivated. The role of leadership is to not let them get de-motivated!


I've personally experienced this and am sure many of you have as well. Where you have been a part of something you were quite passionate about. The thrill wasn't about the money, but making your mark and driving 'the right thing'.

Unfortunately, the traditional hierarchical organizational model is a bit of a hit-or-miss. Sure we may get some activities cascaded through the chain-of-command and we can get passionate about them but there are so many opportunities that don't cascade to the individual through this model. What if somewhere else in the organization there is a team doing something I know I could help them with and that I was extremely passionate about? I don't get the opportunity and the organization misses the opportunity.


Web 2.0 has some advice for us. It has proven the potential of a more heterarchical model. One where the individual self-selects the activities that best fit his/her skills & passions. Being Saint Patrick's day and all, here is a visual (The Clover) that represents the self-organized hierarchy and which happens to look a bit like a 4-leaf clover. Others have also referred to this as the Hollywood model.

This org chart should look a lot different to the standard one we see. Does it completely replace the traditional org structure? In my opinion... No... It actually co-exists. For this to work, a couple of things are missing from the visual.

First, there needs to be co-ordination of the activities within the self-organized communities. A co-ordinator allows people to know when opportunities exists, manages the set of activities holistically. Note this does not mean the co-ordinator is the "leader" of the activities.

Secondly, there will be tasks that nobody may volunteer for. For those tasks, leadership will still have to request individuals to perform the tasks and try to best match skills with the task.

Thirdly, people are still people. They need mentoring, coaching, feedback, compensation. In a fluid model like "The Clover", this can be quite difficult. My proposal here is to retain stability of a coach/boss. They may or may-not actually report into these coaches.

Way back in school I recall an economics class on "perfect discrimination". The ability to perfectly match price to the individual to maximize profit. In a way, this self-organization friendly org structure allows us to much better match that value an individual brings to the table with the work that needs to be done.