“he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.”  - Emerson

This quote is taken from an excellent article on leadership and solitude by William Deresiewicz. The article was particularly  interesting to me as it referenced my favourite book Heart Of Darkness extensively. I agreed with much in the article but the reason I wanted to write about it here is the way Deresiewicz criticises social tools as being mere distractions from real relationships.

I agree that we need to hear Emerson’s warning about drowning in other people’s opinions but I get really frustrated by an increasingly common victim mentality to tools. In fact I just gave up on reading Is This All There Is by Julia Neuberger because of her knee jerk “young folks nowadays” attitude to the web and modern culture. It is almost fashionable to make yourself appear more serious and worthy of attention by claiming to be above the noise on the web.

These folks need to get over themselves. Twitter and Facebook are just tools. If we allow them to be shallow distractions they can be. If we want them to enrich our lives and help us understand the human condition better they can do that too – it is up to us!

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A tweet yesterday prompted me to remember sage advice from Dave Snowden which I took to heart in my work with social tools at the BBC. “You can’t manage knowledge but you can create a knowledge ecology”. I thought it might be useful to others to list the ten most important things I learned about doing this.

1, Have a variety of tools rather than a single system. Not everyone sees the world the same way or has the same needs so mixing up different tools with different strengths allows people to find one that works for them. Avoid single platforms like the plague.

2. Don’t have a clear idea where you are headed. The more fixed you are in your aspirations for your ecology the less likely you are to achieve them. Be prepared to go where people’s use of the tools takes you and enjoy the ride.

3. Follow the energy. Watch where the energy in the system is and try to copy the factors that generated it. Get others interested in why energy emerges and they will want some of it themselves.

4. Be strategically tactical. You can have an overall strategy of behaving in certain ways depending on how your ecology develops. It is possible to sell this as a strategy to those who need strategies.

5. Keep moving, stay in touch, and head for the high ground. Keep doing things, keep talking about what you are doing and why, and have a rough idea of where the high ground is.

6. Build networks of people who care. Don’t try to manage your ecology by committee but cultivate communication and trust between those who care that it works and have the commitment to do something about it – whoever they are and whatever their role.

7. Be obsessively interested. Notice everything that happens and consider why. Tell great stories about what you are observing.

8. Use the tools to manage the tools. Blog about what is going on with your corporate blogging, ask questions in your forum about security, tweet when something is changing in your ecology and ask people why it is interesting.

9. Laugh when things go wrong. If you are pushing limits and exploring new territory things will occasionally blow up in your face. Having a sense of humour and enjoyment of the absurd will help you stay sane.

10. Unleash Trojan Mice. Don’t do big things or spend loads of money. Set small, nimble things running and see where they head.

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They say that when jackals start worrying about the welfare of sheep, you know there’s an election coming. So I guess I was naive to ask a recruitment agent whether he was interested in a joint venture selling my system for accurately identifying the right employee for the job.

The system is simple enough (except for a bit of statistical analysis): you psychometrically test a sample of employees from the role in question. Then you work out which personality traits, competencies and values separate the high from the low performers. New applicants applying for the role then do the same test and you simply select those who look more like your high performers.

This approach gets it right about 70% – 85% of the time which is a hell of a lot better than flipping a coin which is what businesses are effectively doing by using off-the-shelf psychometrics and untrained interviewers. But the proof of the pudding is that clients typically report 15% – 30 performance improvements. Whether this is our system or simply because it makes people pay more attention to new personnel is an interesting debate, but the point is – it gets results!

But perhaps asking a recruiter to partner to sell it was naive. As he pointed out: “Max, your system might reject applicants that I put forward”.

“Well, doh, yes” I said, “Isn’t that the idea? We reject the candidates who look like low performers and progress the ones who look like high performers”.

“But that’s bad business for me because then I need to go back and try to find them a high potential candidate. That’s more work for me”.

“So are you saying you’re happy to take the money from the client even if you aren’t providing them with high performers?”

And that was the end of our conversation.

The bottom line is that good science is effective, but it won’t win the support of intermediaries who make money whether or not they perform.

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North America contains just five per cent of the world’s population, yet we consume 33 per cent of the world’s resources. If every person on the planet consumed as much as us, we would require at least four more planets to feed the demand. At the heart of our unsustainable North [...]

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