Heather Champ, the Director of Community for Flickr, was the subject of Chris Colin’s Sept 29 On the Job blog on SFGate. Ethan Bauley, social networking entrepreneur for the online marketing company, M80, sent me the link, as he often does when business improvisation makes news.
Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene.
This is a monster distinction between business processes of the Industrial Age, and those suited to business in the Networked World.
Industrial age organizations wrote strict policies designed to codify employee behavior, limit the company’s liability from lawsuits, and ensure fair play between management and labor and between the company and its customers. The policies were written by lawyers to cover every conceivable scenario. When anomalies occurred, policies were amended or new policies written by those same lawyers. Conflicts with policy required interpretation by the lawyers. In other words, when it came to policy you couldn’t make a new move without an opinion from a lawyer.
Rigid policies worked for rigid organizations, but the fluid organizations of the Networked World like Flickr, which hosts billions of images posted by millions of users, call for more fluid processes. Context must be taken into account. Entrepreneurial employees have to make quick and frequent decisions outside the bottleneck and without the added overhead of Legal. This means acting within themed concepts instead of abiding by literal rules. This means improvisation.
“Don’t be creepy,” goes one of Flickr’s guiding concepts. ”You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”
For some networked organizations, technical infrastructure—what the technology itself will or won’t allow—has become a new kind of policy for rewarding conformity and punishing edge behaviors. Confining interactions to ‘what the software allows’ is just as bad if not worse than ye olde employee handbook. It’s a kind of control that can hinder the continual innovation called for by a networked brand.
The valuable interactions, those that bring new life and wealth to your brand, are human ones. And because they are human ones, they are unpredictable. The improviser welcomes the unpredictable situation as an opportunity to further define reality. An improviser like Champ understands that every interaction holds the potential for transformation. To interact mechanically or by rote is to disregard this potential.
A sense of ‘Flickr, performing’ guides Champ and her team as they discuss and then take action on barrages of unpredictables like barterers in Brazil, vengeful boyfriends from the Bronx and R-rated artists from Belgrade.
“Imprecision is an art here,” writes Colin of Flickr. (An improviser sees it another way: Art resolves imprecision.) Colin writes of the artfulness required for Champ and her team to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, polarized communities.
“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own,” Champ says. “The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community.”
In other words, not only does Champ’s job call for improvisation, it calls on her and her team to guide and ‘coach’ the ongoing improvisation by the Flickr community.
As I read the article on SFGate, I realized that I know Heather Champ. Her husband, Derek Powazek, founded the pioneering digital storytelling site, Fray in the late 1990s, and he and Heather went on to co-found JPG Magazine. They are among the savviest community builders I’ve met in the young history of the internet. I think the best thing about Heather and Derek is how their work is an expression of what and whom they love, especially each other. Out on the turbulent edge where innovators, explorers and artists play, love is the constant. If you act on love, love will act on you. And that is all the music a human being needs to dance with her destiny.
Tags: Chaos, Chris Colin, Community, Conformity, Derek Powazek, Entrepreneurship, Flickr, Fray, Guidelines, Heather Champ, HR, Innovation, JPG Magazine, Networked World, Policy, Policymaking, SFGate
I loved this article, and liked your take on it. Finding ways to “personalize the company” and let people shine through directly to fans and customers is the biggest challenge and opportunity for traditional companies.
US business regulations and culture seem to be more bound by “letter of the law” rather than the more improv “intent of the law” found in the UK and other business systems. Perhaps non-US companies will be able to take the power of personalization and improv to heart faster than US companies? I’m curious what you think…
I think the potential that non U.S. companies have that many U.S. companies currently do not is their employees’ ability to set aside ego and personal ambition to recognize and champion the essential values upon which the brand is built. The ‘power of personalization’ is only as good as the talent of the people using the tools of personalization. A Disney employee blog about baseball statistics, for example, would not be as in-tune with the brand as a blog about baseball as a family pastime. A personal brand is only as good as its ability to harmonize with another brand. When it comes to business, this often means the brand of one’s employers.
It is simply not enough to toot one’s own horn. One must have a sense of how the toot jibes with the whistle, plunk and boom of other players to make the music that is a company or organizational brand.
We have a star/soloist mentality in the U.S. This can quickly turn into cacophony. Non U.S. companies, in my experience, tend to be more oriented to the ensemble/orchestra. This is a much more effective way of collaborating, creating harmony, and being productive in one’s business scenes.
[...] How are we going to empower people to shine through companies? [...]
I can tell you this, working with Champ means love is definitely not a constant. Not even close. I regard her as a phony hold-over from the dumb days (1999-2005) and I feel the same about Derek. Never have a seen two people so tirelessly self-promote and fiddle with tools to make sure they rank high in searches.