Tom Austin
I was thinking about Andrew MacAfee’s “Ties” Model for Enterprise 2.0 over the holidays – and talking with one of my Gartner peers about it. Beyond reading what Andrew had to say, I heard him present this model in September 08 at the Talk the Future conference in Austria. It’s a seductive look at the strength of relationships between people (strong ties, weak ties, potential ties and ‘no ties’) and the business benefits that accrue from focusing on that class of relationship and applying technology to amplify the benefits of those types of ties.
Another way to think about Andrew’s model is to recognize that various attributes emerge as higher order effects from one simple event: two people interacting with each other. Here are a few higher order abstractions:
- Relationship: Collect interactions over time – and a relationship (of some kind) emerges.
- Relative relationship: Compare collections of interactions – and the relative attributes of relationships emerge.
- Distance: Diagram the relationships in a network diagram and, based on distance between nodes, a potential relationship map emerges
Interactions between two people are one basis for building a hierarchy here. There are other “interactions” between people that are anonymous or mediated through other means. As in tagging and sharing a bookmark in del.icio.us. Or multiple parties participating in a predictive market. In either case, people are related not by interpersonal interactions but interactions between an individual and content (or higher order abstractions on that dimension) or by common interests (shared by parties who don’t know each other but, for example, apply the same tag in a bookmark sharing tool).
And all of this seems to be bound by the laws that govern emergence, e.g., number of people involved, activity level, visibility (help people see what others are doing), persistence (allow people to see what others have done) and density (how close people are to one another). (See “Exploit Self-Organizing Systems and Emergence to Take Advantage of Turbulence”)
So one action to consider, as you read through Andrew’s work, is where and when do the laws of emergence apply and what might they mean, if, for example, you want to create more disruptive business innovation.
Happy New Year!
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Anthony Bradley January 5, 2009 at 6:34 pm
In my experience there are a few big flaws in his bullseye model. First, it is an oversimplification (which admittedly fits well in a blog post and easy to digest graphic) of relationships. There should be a mention of unbalanced relationships (which should be a goal of many E2.0 implementations). For example, with my blog I hope to build strong ties between them and me (meaning they feel they know me well) but a very weak tie between me and them (I may not know them at all). This delivers the coveted leverage that E2.0 can deliver. It also doesn’t distiguish between direct and indirect ties and the different behavioral dynamics of interactions (familiarization, handoffs, positioning, shared contribution, transactions, etc.) which have a greater impact on delivering an effective social solution. Third, I have not seen an exclusive relationship between the nature of the technology and the nature of the tie. The relationship is more between the nature of the implementation (purpose) and the tie.
2 Andrew MacAfee’s E2.0 Bullseye Model Misses the Mark January 5, 2009 at 6:49 pm
[...] post in my colleague Tom Austin’s blog caught my attention. It is a quick take on Andrew [...]