The ‘Rogue Worker Theory’ can’t explain this

Source: http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/21/mouse-in-salad-photo-1/

The Mouse in the Salad

The Freakonomics Podcast, The Mouse in the Salad, Stephen Dubner explores crisis management, centering the discussion around an incident at the Pain Quotidien, on the Upper West Side of New York, in which a patron found a dead mouse in her salad.  In this case, Dubner who took the photo above, muses whether the mouse incident is just one of those things, a view rejected by Dubner’s friend, James Altucher, who was eating with him at the time:

“Too many things went wrong. So, each one thing has a low probability. So a mouse gets into an open salad bag that happens to be lying around. That’s inappropriate. The mouse dies there. So, I don’t know, was it there overnight? The guy takes his hand in and puts it in a bowl and didn’t see the mouse. The waitress or waiter brings the mouse over and didn’t notice it. So, four or five things went wrong. Maybe the salad was delivered with the mouse in it to the store to begin with? So, we don’t know where it went wrong.”

While in this case we don’t know with certainty what went wrong, two things are clear:

1. The mouse did not end up in the salad because of a rogue waiter; and
2. The mouse did end up in the salad as a result of a myriad of organizational causes – like, failures of quality assurance to food preparation processes.

The Swiss Cheese Safety Model

Under the Rogue Worker Theory, disasters are the result of the actions of a few or one.  The trouble with this explanation is that it ignores the way that organizations manage risk (well, good ones anyway).

All organizations face risks to the achievement of their objectives.  The army trained us to organize defence in depth, so there was not a single point of failure.  Organizations do the same thing, implementing a series of controls to manage risks.  As depicted in the graphic below – the Swiss Cheese Safety Model – each of these controls comprises a single slice of Swiss cheese.  Disasters occur when the holes in the slices ‘line up’.

You can’t always blame it on a rogue

Source: http://www.nature.com/nrurol/journal/v10/n3/images/nrurol.2013.13-f2.jpg

Under the Swiss Cheese Safety Model, losses result from failures or gaps in organizational controls, such as internal processes, supervision, executive tone, and policy.  Staff providing a service – whether a commodities trader or waiter in a Pain Quotidien – are just the last slice of cheese.

“There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.”

The Rogue Worker Theory is seductive because the problem can be excised: staff can resign or be fired.  Acknowledging the need to address the root causes of failure is a challenging proposition because it means the failure is about ‘us’ not some rogue ‘them’, and that organizational change, at all levels, must come.

With the above quote, Napoleon captures the inconvenient reality that organizational causes offer more powerful explanations for organizational failures and scandals than the Rogue Worker Theory.  Disasters occur because of multiple organizational failure, not just because of the actions of a few (or one).  Remember that the next time you find something unfortunate in your salad.

People want to be engaged, not marketed at.

Reblogged from Esko Kilpi on Interactive Value Creation:

In mainstream thinking, managers are understood as the prime originators of what happens in their businesses. The central concern is how the active manager/subject gets the passive follower/object to act in ways that reflect the manager’s perspective. Management continues to see communication in terms of influence and manipulation.

The social business view sees relations and communication as conversational processes of meaning making.

Read more… 269 more words

81 Ways Humanitarian Aid Has Become Participatory (via @imogenwall)

“Information and communication technologies, and particularly the web, have expanded the range of ways the public can help in times of crisis, even (or especially) if we’re nowhere near said crisis. Or, to be more formal about it, participatory aid is mutual, peer-to-peer aid mediated or powered by information and communication technology.”

Organizations must track & respond to emerging social media narratives:

“Wall Street collided with social media on Tuesday, when a false tweet from a trusted news organization sent the US stock market into freefall.  The 143-point fall in the Dow Jones industrial average came after hackers sent a message from the Twitter feed of the Associated Press, saying the White House had been hit by two explosions and that Barack Obama was injured.”When I realized it was a fake tweet, I was outraged and ashamed that the market was able to be manipulated so easily.”

Preventing Misinformation from Spreading through Social Media

New platforms for fact-checking and reputation scoring aim to better channel social media’s power in the wake of a disaster: “Researchers from the Masdar Institute of Technology and the Qatar Computing Research Institute plan to launch Verily, a platform that aims to verify social media information, in a beta version this summer. Verily aims to enlist people in collecting and analyzing evidence to confirm or debunk reports. As an incentive, it will award reputation points—or dings—to its contributors.”

Social Media for Emergency Management: Question of Supply and Demand

“New York City’s 911 operators receive over 10 million calls every year that are accidental, false or hoaxes. Does this mean we should abolish the 911 system? Of course not.”

Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis

“This crisis has reminded all of us of the fragility of people’s lives and the importance of our communities, online as well as offline. These communities and lives are now interconnected in an unprecedented way.  One of the greatest strengths of decentralized, self-organizing groups is the ability to quickly incorporate feedback and adapt.  After this week, which showed the best and worst of reddit’s potential, we hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power.”

Related articles

• AP Twitter hack causes panic on Wall Street and sends Dow plunging (guardian.co.uk)
• Social Media Summit 2013 – My Notes (buridansblog.com)

The New York Times and the BBC College of Journalism hosted the Social Media Summit, in New York City, on Saturday, 20 April 2013.  I joined a host of journalists, broadcasters and social media buffs at the event, to look at the use of social media in journalism.  The Boston Marathon Bombing was a constant reference point.

The Summit revealed converging practices to craft influential social media content, and shared common themes with this year’s Social Media Week, about which I wrote here:

1. People want to be engaged, not marketed at –“One-sided conversations for brands are long gone.” @tim_nolan
   
2. Social media engagement helps build trust in your brand, mobilizing action and purchase decisions
3. A là Warby Parker, to capture attention content must authentic and disrupt the conversation.

To do this, organizations must be ready to take advantage of opportunities, like Oreo’s now famous Super Bowl tweet:

Source: http://www.slingshotseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Oreo-Tweet.png

Social Media Content – Stuff to Keep in Mind

Effective social media content will be relevant, targeted, and reflect a tone that is appropriate to a specific audience.  Market testing content, and tracking results, allows campaigns to adjust to maximize impact.  Panelist Shaker Gupta, Strategy Director at @360i, posited that in the realm of social media metrics, “Shares are king.”

To resonate, content must tap into emotions and passions of the audience, and be paired with an outlet for enthusiasm and anger.  Tim Nolan of BBH Labs provided a cautionary tale, when this approach was perhaps too successful.  In an effort to raise awareness, BBH Labs hired local homeless people to wear mobile WiFi devices during the South by Southwest conference in 2012.  The reaction to the campaign easily became the story.

Local homeless man carries a mobile WiFi device

Everyman as Anchorman

Social media give everyone a voice, causing the sources of content to explode.  The public is now an active participant in emergency management; after Hurricane Sandy this phenomenon has transformed from a trend to an expectation.  Tim Nolan reminded the audience, “Now everyone has a news van in their pocket.”  As we saw in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing, the public is broadcasting and will tell their own stories.  Enter video.

The ‘Citizen Journalist’: Everyman as Anchorman

Video

I remember a Heavy Metal story depicted a dystopian future where the populace, armed with cameras, clamour over each other to catch the most sensational footage, and remunerated based on the number of views.  The audience is a passive consumer of content.  Despite the obvious similarity with YouTube, the Heavy Metal future is not our present.  Consumers are active.  Our video is social.

The future of social media is cross-platform collaboration that touches people in multiple ways, a future in which video will prominently feature.  Video must go social because what happened to newspapers will happen to TV: people abandoning the traditional medium to social media, on which they can connect and share experience.  Roy Sekoff, President and co-creator at HuffPostLive and founding editor of the Huffington Post, noted, “Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message.  Now production values are the message, and the message is: authentic engagement.”

To make video social, it must break down the complex to the simple.  Video that allows the viewer to share what the subject is feeling, in the moment, a shared social experience, will produce the most echoes.  In this way, Sekoff explains, “HuffpostLive is not a video experience.  It is a platform for engagement.”

Keys to social media content

To summarize, here are the keys to effective social media content:

• Talk like a human being
• Meet your audience where they are
• Immerse your messages in pop culture
• Engage your audience as equals
• Write about a community as an insider, not an observer
• Strategy, strategy, strategy: “As a content strategist, everything should be part of a series because you are trying to build an audience.” @kmonson

Final thoughts – Crisis Communications Must-Do’s

The role of social media in the aftermath of the tragic bombing of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013 – both good and bad – formed the context for much of the event discussion.  On the subject of social media for emergency management, a number of ‘crisis communications must-dos’ emerged:

• Take down your pay wall during an event
• Disable all scheduled social media posts
• Marketers: don’t compromise your brand; journalists: don’t compromise your objectivity

Related articles

• Social Media Week 2013: My Take Aways (buridansblog.com)
• Why Your Crisis Communications Plan Needs to be SOCIAL (melissaagnescrisismanagement.com)
• Roy Sekoff Speaks At Social Media Week Panel: The Shift From Presentation To Participation (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

My post The Three ‘E’s to High Performance Teams: Energy, Engagement and Exploration featured on Jostle.me blog.

“The biggest social network is the ‘People Who Are Bored at Work’ network.” – @kzaleski

“Twitter does its best work in the first five minutes after a disaster, and its worst in the twelve hours after that.” - @rolldiggity

“Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message.  Now production values are the message, and the message is: authentic engagement.” – @RoySekoff

“Twitter is a reporter’s dream, while Facebook is like the Features section” in a newspaper. – @janinegibson

Four ways the media failed in covering the Boston bombings, and one reason why

1. The media get a lot of things wrong
2. The media lose all sense of proportion
3. The media show things they really shouldn’t
4. The media aren’t very good at two of their most important jobs – Answering the questions: “What is happening now?” and “Is such-an-such true?”

The root cause?  The battle for attention.

How the Decline of the Traditional Workplace Is Changing Our Cities (via @nilofer)

“We may look back on the 9-to-5 workplace not as the norm, but as a relic of the last century.  It’s interesting to think not just about the implications for how we use our time and how we define the idea of “work,” but also for what all of this might mean for cities.  In the future, Stoltz asks, “If you’re planning a city, should there actually be places where there is no WiFi?”

Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers (via NY Times)

“New research calls into question other beliefs. Employers often avoid hiring candidates with a history of job-hopping or those who have been unemployed for a while. The past is prologue, companies assume. There’s one problem, though: the data show that it isn’t so. An applicant’s work history is not a good predictor of future results.

These are some of the startling findings of an emerging field called work-force science. It adds a large dose of data analysis, a k a Big Data, to the field of human resource management, which has traditionally relied heavily on gut feel and established practice to guide hiring, promotion and career planning.”

Related articles

• SMARMIE: Weird Name, Great Conference – My Notes (buridansblog.com)
• Nilofer Merchant Talks At Google (webpronews.com)

Screenshot of the Boston Police Department Twitter Feed – 19 April 2013 at 9:04 p.m.

Source: http://irevolution.net/2013/04/16/bostonmarathon-attack/

A number of members of the #SMEM network have begun to catalogue observations of the way social media supported the crisis response to the bombings at the Boston Marathon yesterday.  Although the experience remains raw, I wanted to contribute my thoughts.  Our hearts and thoughts are certainly with those affected by this senseless act.

Like Patrick Meier’s contribution to this subject, I will keep this blog post technical.  Here are my observations:

Mythbusting

Owing the experience of the myriad of hoaxes spread over social media during Hurricane Sandy, after the bombing there were a significant number of Tweets reminding everyone to only post confirmed information.  Of then the Tweets included a reminder of the cost of spreading rumours, noting that misinformation is worse than no information.  This marks a significant shift in collective behaviour from the Hurricane Sandy response.  Personally, I applied the Trust and Verify approach before reposting on any platform, applying David Carr’s advice to, “Hover over the retweet button.”

Tracking the people you care about

The first challenge in any crisis event is determining, “Where is everyone and what is their status?”  This effort is particularly difficult in crisis situations because the mobile telephone networks soon become overloaded, making voice calling intermittent or impossible (as was the case yesterday).  In addition to people posting that they were okay on a number of social networks, Google.org set up their person finder portal,

and the American Red Cross encouraged the use of their Safe & Well portal.

New tools

Within an hour of the event, Geofeedia created a Map and Collage geofeed, which allows users to view geo-tagged social media feeds by place, either on a map or as a collection of posts in a tile format.

Geofeedia – Map View

Geofeedia – Collage View

The Geofeedia team also set up a dedicated Streamer that, “Allows you to monitor a live feed of social media posts from any location in the world.”  This feature is still in beta, and will, according to the site, be launched later in 2013.

At the recent S.M.A.R.M.I.E. conference, held in New York City in late February, participants indicated that, “Instagram could well be the next big contributor to the crisis data set.”  Watching the Geofeedia streams, and admittedly this is wholly unscientific, I did not see any evidence to support that view.  Instead, Vine was the application that found its purpose, embedding compelling, looping footage in Tweets and Facebook posts.

This reminds us again of the power of images, particularly when matched with insight (even if it is 140 characters or less).

Social media are now part of crisis communications strategies

As a last observation, the reach of social media from its inherent ‘virality’ is leveraged to mobilize action.  This approach is now an essential crisis communications strategy.  One example is extracted below, and you can find a chronological sample in this Storify, Boston Marathon Official Tweets by Kim Stephens.

Final thoughts

As I watched yesterday’s tragic event unfold, I was struck at the difference in the role that social media played in the response from Hurricane Sandy in late 2012.  It seemed to me that social media’s often discussed self-correcting mechanism, was not only at work in identifying and eliminating misinformation, but invisibly organizing the distributed network.

I welcome comments on these observations and suggestions on practices that we should apply in every case.

Related articles

• SMARMIE: Weird Name, Great Conference – My Notes (buridansblog.com)
• Monitoring Social Media by Location – Do tools like GeoFeedia invade privacy? (idisaster.wordpress.com)
• GeoFeedia: Ready for Digital Disaster Response (irevolution.net)
• Self-Organized Crisis Response to #BostonMarathon Attack (irevolution.net)
• 3 Observations: Social Media and the Boston PD #BostonMarathon (idisaster.wordpress.com)
• GeoFeedia: Ready for Digital Disaster Response (buridansblog.com)

Intranet Strategy: Understanding the Impacts of Networks, Power, and Politics (via @euan)

Barriers to change: “One word: us.  The way we work.  The way we communicate.  The way we collaborate.  The way we lead, manage, and recognize.  The way we are.

In the unthinking age, seeing is believing

“Writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance – the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.”

Social business and the changing theory of management

“Work as interaction is complex, situational, communication between loosely connected, modular, nodes of the network!  As organizations want to be more creative and social, the focus of management theory should shift towards understanding participative, self-organizing responsibility and equality of peers.”

Engineering Serendipity

“Employees who ate at cafeteria tables designed for 12 were more productive than those at tables for four, thanks to more chance conversations and larger social networks. That, along with things like companywide lunch hours and the cafes Google is so fond of, can boost individual productivity by as much as 25 percent.”

We need more sandboxes (via @hjarche)

“Behaviour change comes through small, but consistent, changes in practice. So how do you move from responsibility, to creativity, and potentially to innovation? Play, explore and converse.”

Related articles

• What Google’s Cafeterias Can Teach Us About School Lunches (fastcodesign.com)
• Social networks and engineering serendipity in the workplace (rossdawsonblog.com)

* NB: I am borrowing the idea of curating content in this way from Harold Jarche.