The City is Experienced on Our Feet - Social Business as the Urban Planning of Enterprise 2.0

If you're lucky, there's sometimes a moment of clarity and fresh thinking to be had in the sweep of the typical business conference, and the panel "What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Social Business Design"  on Wednesday morning at Enterprise 2.0 was a hidden gem.

Gordon Ross and Thomas Vander Wal brought thoughtful insight to a conversation about the metaphors and mindsets of urban planning and what the discipline has to offer when considering the lives that are led inside the social enterprise.

The language and images used to evoke organizations since the industrial age are often mechanical metaphors -- linear, constructed, evoking physical movement and closed systems.

Ross offered that the nature of cities, considered as complex, organic, emergent systems are richer in concept and metaphor than those we've inherited from the industrial revolution.  

Some urban planners have sought to impose mechanistic notions on the life of cities - the over-engineered vision of Robert Moses in the 1950s NYC is a good example.   But urban geographer Jane Jacobs, in her pioneering work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," showed how cities thrive, in fact, because of their messiness, complexity and disorder.  

From Ross' perspective the the lack of this model of planning in social business is a significant blind spot in the industry.  That planning mindset is about designing a social organization that fosters collaboration and communicative and exploratory actions -- afforded by the technology.

Vander Wal took the notion of social scaling in a complex ecosystem a little further and brought in the thinking of David Snowdon and his Cynefin Framework - a model initially developed for the field of knowledge management and organizational strategy.   It's a construct that can support an understanding complex human systems.  

The seminal article on the framework, The new dynamics of strategy:  Sense-making in a complex and complicated world, "challenges the universality of three basic assumptions prevalent in organization decision support and strategy:  assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intent."  

As a model, Cynefin can provide guideposts for organizing, sense-making and interpreting types of interactions.  For instance, in the complex domain, as Vander Wal pointed out, small interactions work best, while in the simple domain, best practices are relevant.

Which brings us back to urban planning and thinking about social business - it's the difference between architecting the sanitized and artificial coziness of Santana Row in San Jose, and relishing the real-life richness of the Haight district in San Francisco - with its own 'micro districts' of unique character  - the Lower Haight, Upper Haight, Twin Peaks and Panhandle neighborhoods.

As Vander Wal said, social communities need to be designed for different social roles - roles that people adopt and experiential places that people inhabit, given the context -- the sharer, lurker, writer, creator, editor, connecter, synthesizer, theorizer, mitigator, negotiator, contextualizer, interloper, infovore, monitor, learner, counselor, gossip, critic, expert, broadcaster, re-broadcaster.

If you're an enterprise community manager, therefore, the work is about embracing a complex systems view and, as Christopher Alexander has said, working to  'pave emergent paths' rather than engineer a uniform 'place' that is hard for humans to inhabit.

 

 

Thanks to Gordon and Thomas for a putting together this rich and insightful conversation*.

 

 

*Off the radar readings to stimulate urban planning thinking

•  The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs - Roberta Brandes, Gratz
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Constructions - Christopher Alexander
• Wicked Problems in Design Thinking - R. Buchanan
• Fourth Order of Design

 

 

Comments

[Mor_trisha]

Thank you for this wonderful write up of one of the conference's most compelling sessions!

[Gordonr]

Thanks for the review Catherine. Glad you enjoyed our session. A few more links:

A summary of my section of the presentation on the ThoughtFarmer blog:
http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/blog/2011/11/17/e2conf-santa-clara-2011-what-urban-planning-can-teach-social-business-design/

Tom Erickson (Watson Research at IBM) on how Jane Jacobs inspired his work (via interaction-design.org's videos)
http://www.youtube.com/user/InteractionDesignOrg#p/u/11/B6DfWCyFiW8
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.182.2307

And a great example of a direct link between Alexander and patterns and social software... Stewart Mader's book WikiPatterns:
http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns