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Lifespan of Social Metrics

Unlike metrics of simple systems, the metrics of complex adaptive systems have a life span. They grow in value over time. And then they decay in value as well.

Take twitter. At first it was follower count – and that still matters some. But over time, people found ways to gain followers that didn’t coincide to the value that they provided, so it started to lose usefulness as an indicator of value from the tweeter.

Jane McGonigal, @avantgame, just posted a series of tweets about how Amazon rating system is being gamed.

Interesting, my book seems to have been targeted last year by some conservative group, individuals encouraged to post negative reviews

a cluster of extremely negative reviews with a conservative POV posted at the same time with weird (untrue) criticism of my biography…

here’s a recent NYT article on partisan groups attempting to one-star bomb books on Amazonnytimes.com/2013/01/21/bus… …

“Here’s what I do: I go to Amazon.com + search for ‘liberal book’. I give 1 star, 1 star, 1 star”youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uu…

“Then I search ‘conservative book’ and give 5-star, 5-star, 5-star.” From a tea-party Internet training meetup youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uu…

apparently one trick is to purchase book so your review appears “verified”, then cancel order before books ships

Note: I took out a few tweets in the series which were just about her work, rather than about the gaming the stars method she points to.

Knowing that people are giving a count of stars based on their ideology rather than the quality of the work, I am now less likely to put stock in the star count on a given project, especially when it is politically polemic material. Thus the usefulness of the stars decrease for me (and for others) and then for the whole system.

With twitter, we first looked at “follower” count, and then that was gamed. Then the metrics had to start considering other factors like RT count to demonstrate influence. Now we rely on twittergrader, kred, klout, etc to take a great number of factors into weighted consideration to produce an “influence” or reputation score. This amalgam of factors evolves over time.

You might think this is just the way of social media, since it is a fast feedback loop. But actually, I think that a lot of measures of complex adaptive systems work this way.

What comes to mind is Scott Nelson’s story from Blockage in the Thrivability Sketch.

…It was during the crisis of 1857 that the previously ignored insights of a long-haired mathematician, abolitionist, and utopian socialist named Elizur Wright were finally recognized as critically valuable for economic stability.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Wright had tried to convince the state of Massachusetts that life insurance needed reform. As a mathematician, he had been asked calculate the present value of any given policy based on the premiums paid in, a calculation that British mathematicians had called impossible. He created a rule-of-thumb called “net present value” (NPV) to determine the value of a flow of resources in a single instant (present value) and then to subtract operating costs (net).

But the more Elizur calculated, the more troubled he became. Many companies by his calculations spent so much on advertising that they could never pay off their policies. Others profited by canceling policies for those who missed a single payment. The effect was often to end a policy a year before death, leaving families with nothing. Wright fumed, but in vain. In the go-go 1840s and early 1850s, no one would listen to his criticisms and only a few would accept his principle of valuation. But through the 1850s he returned to the Massachusetts legislature with a blueprint for reform. When the Panic of 1857 hit with the failure of a bank called Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, Elizur was prepared. This blockage of trade and transport, Wright declared, was a result of distrust. Insurance companies needed reliable accounting practices that would allow Massachusetts to calculate net present value, and internal rate of return. When trust returns, Wright assured them, the blockage will be over.

Unconvinced but without options, Massachusetts adopted Wright’s blueprint, preventing any company from selling insurance in Massachusetts that did not provide complete financial information. NPV offers transparency of obligations.  The panic was short-lived, and Elizur Wright’s accounting principles became the basis of what we now call Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, adopted by millions of companies, states, and non-governmental organizations throughout the world. MBAs take credit for it, but a long-haired radical gave us cost accrual accounting.

Wright took advantage of blockage to identify its root cause – a distrust of opacity. Increased financial transparency was the solution; trust collapses without it. Blockage can let us make institutions open up and make them thrivable.

If the metrics we use in our economy are also being created (even at a very slow pace) they may also be declining in usefulness. Elizur’s methods didn’t anticipate the complex financial instruments to come over 100 years later that obscured the “trustworthiness” of the things our measures aim to reveal.

Consider how the measures you use can be gamed, where they may be in their lifespan of adoption and decay, and what other indicators might be emerging to reveal what matters – the territory and not the map.

5 Changes I Want to See in Philanthopy

1. Big Lever Funding

I am currently participating in the Illinois Task Force for Social Innovation. And working on ci2iglobal, and transitioning Inspired Legacies. Having worked in or around nonprofits and philanthropy for a decade, I have seen the field changing. I remember the first budding of Mission Related Investing, when there were basically 3 foundations championing it. Then I discovered people were doing Program Related Investing, and we started to see a broader spectrum of how money was being used in the philanthropic sector. We were collectively working to optimize how much money was creating purpose-filled value.

Last year I toyed around with some friends on mapping the financial spectrum. We are doing it again with the task force. It is exciting to see the hybridity between for-profit and for-purpose work and the financial innovation to support it.

However, concurrently there has been an increasing demand for nonprofits and social purpose organizations in general to quantify what they do. When I look at what I consider charity (aka bandaids on existing issues), these metrics really help tell the story about what an organization is doing to deliver that bandaid.

And… my struggle all along, even before I joined the social change effort, was to find the big levers that shifted how things are. What would it take to remove the need for these bandaids? I keep looking for the big levers.

But big levers don’t get funded until they pay off. Usually.

I never bothered to even look for foundation funding or grants for my work on shifting culture to be more thrivable. Who gives grants for core culture change? I think it ought to be funded. It may actually catalyze more transformation in the system, by aligning people and projects along a story. But how do you measure that? How would you even track the spread of the idea, all the people making hundreds of choices differently because they started to see the world differently? At the end of the journey, you can find your way back. But where is the end of the journey? Can you find where it ends and hear back? Do people even come back to you 2-5 years later and tell you a story of how “thrivability” led them to do something different. (Usually only when they know you.) If five years from now, scientists working on environmental science shift their view to look at the world from a thrivable perspective and it unlocks something that allows a cascade of action to follow that make the world more livable, can I claim that as my impact? Could I possible ask for money for the hope that this happens?

 

2. Be more like an investor and less like middle management

In startup land, this isn’t unreasonable. A startup can develop a product or an idea, pitch it to investors, get some funding…and if their idea works, the funder gets payback. If it doesn’t…well, losses all around. Investors know that most of what they fund will fail. It is an art of finding enough that succeeds with big enough returns to keep going. Where is this attitude in philanthropy? Both transformational change and startups live in complex adaptive systems… they can’t be predicted and causality is challenging if not impossible. And yet, there is a vital part of the startup world funded by people willing to put big dollars into unpredictable possibilities for the small opportunity of making a big return.

Philanthropy, in adopting more practices from the business world, took on a middle management mindset in far too many cases. Instead of optimizing for what might make the biggest change in the area to address, the optimization has tended toward who can show impact in the funding cycle. It tends toward projects that have strong “predictability” in them. I know how many people will be fed, clothed, housed, cared for if the project is funded.

Let’s be careful here. There are some foundations and philanthropists that are willing to be risky with their giving. They give to a collection of efforts knowing that some won’t turn out as hoped. They may even fund across the spectrum from highly predictable charity efforts to systemic change efforts. But the general vibe of the field is one of mitigating risk of money being used ineffectively by having the metrics to back it up.

 

3. I want to see a Venture Capital Philanthropy company. 

adVenturePhilanthropy or something. They share the risk of some of the projects not achieving desired results…but have smart portfolios of giving capital. Think of it like a high end giving circle where you pay sophisticated philanthropic advisors to fund a portfolio of efforts on causes that you and others care about. The advisor or firm then shares with all the donors the report on value created through giving.

 

4. And, like a business, ROI can be based on value created instead of “impact” made.

Impact. Benchmark. Difference from before. What is the impact? I want to see what is the value. Can we switch from impact assessment to tracking the value created? By doing so we open up more options for tracking the transformational work we want to do in really evolutionary giving. (We are working on this in the book Christelle Van Ham and I are writing called, for now, Action Spectrum).

 

5. Power Adjustments

Additionally, as someone who has managed to avoid having any big donors to yank me around, we have got to get better as a collective about the co-creation of strategy. Grantees are so beholden by the power of the money a donor offers that they can’t say, “what you want me to do doesn’t work.” Instead they all too often feel like they must say whatever pleases the money master. This isn’t really their fault. Nor is it the fault of the givers of money. Both sides need to work on creating agency for everyone involved, which takes a lot of conscious practice and communication clarity.

Collectively, we need to truly and deeply believe that everyone at the table working on transformation has some value to contribute. That value may come in different forms: it may be time or ideas, or network or skill, and of course money or influence. When we cater to the one with the money we make small or even invalidate the other forms of capital at the table – the experience capital or intellectual capital etc. And that will undermine our shared goals. It gives us less assets to work with instead of more! We all have power. It can come in many forms. It doesn’t make us equal… it just allows us each to have something to offer. And thus everyone at the table of social transformation is valuable.

Give it away now!

I get asked a lot to do many things for free. All the time. And I find I sit in a tension between advocacy for the content of the work – give that away to promote the work – AND that my work is a service process that I earn a living from.

So people ask for me to help put together events, curate things, or advise on their projects. But I also make a living facilitating events, curating and managing projects, and consulting. So when do I say yes to the free services they ask me for and when do I say, “yes, and that costs money.”

I can sense by gut when the opportunity doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. But describing that sense of reciprocal benefit in terms that can become principles for consistent action…that seems more tricky. How do you manage it?

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Creative Commons License photo credit: askingdave

Is it worth it to do for free?

Events:

  • A major conference in one of my fields has historically given me a free pass to be an energizing presence in the space. They aren’t asking me to run the event. I get to do my thing. And they get the benefit of my more subtle forms of facilitating – network weaving, curiosity infusions, etc.
    That exchange seemed worth it to me. This year the benefits are not clear or pressing enough to them.
  • A conference in one of my fields – but directed more toward specialists – asks me to be on an organizing committee for 9 months. To even attend the event I will spend a thousand dollars on airfare – not to mention numerous hours of pre-event meetings. I might increase visibility of my work, but not to a broad audience. That didn’t seem worth it. They aren’t offering money and the visibility gained isn’t ideal. I might learn some, and I already have enough social contacts in that arena for my needs.
  • An innovation event raising money to do the event via crowdfunding asks me about curating some of the event. Hmmm, the right kind of audience. And, if this was not my content audience, I would be charging at least $3000 for design, coordination, and production. I will have to think about this. It would have to make my organization visible to the tune of a $4000 sponsorship in lieu of fees, I think. At least for my effort at this time and not living in the location of the event.

Consulting:

  • Someone designing a values-driven community asks to pick my brain for an hour. It actually takes about 3 hours between the email and follow up, the scanning of documents to offer useful feedback, and then the actual conversation. They are not likely to be paying for consulting later. Benefits: continue building reputation as someone who can think through the complexity of a social ecosystem and flow dynamics. Yes. Good. And costs: my time and energy aren’t being valued with anything but gratitude. I am not getting visibility, social contacts, nor learning. I have historically just done this sort of thing for the sector. Over and over. I am starting to feel like setting the limit at 1 hour is not enough. I should restrict these freebies to 30 minutes or just publish a guide of questions for a reasonable fee. Anything of my time over that needs to be an hourly rate through the Agency.
  •  Someone calls needing to make a decision on a potential partnership or collaboration. We talk for 45 minutes. I ask questions. We clarify. A decision is made. We could call this social capital building. And you might say that if the person had to pay they would simply skip the counseling. However, I am failing to use the social capital I built with them before it starts depleting (passage of time – these things don’t hold value indefinitely). I need to start making it clear that I charge for this. That will show up over at the Agency in the next month too.
  • I am on the board for a project and the collaborators on that project have a massive meltdown. I mediate over the course of two weeks to get them to a clear outcome, agreed process, and personal development for all sides toward positive feelings and “ownership” aka responsibility all around.  Of course this is free – I might not be on the board to serve that purpose expressly, but I am happy to give my time to them. However, I ought to also be more clear about providing this kind of mediation as a service. That is definitely invisible to the market. Again, that will be showing up in the Agency in the next month.

How do you decide what to give away? When is it worth it? How do you do your cross-capital forms accounting?