Lifting the Network, Developing community

Most of my clients are divisions or locations with 100 to 200 people with a much larger organisation and company. What they are generally trying to do is increase efficiency and my role is to help them find and develop the people to do it. Yesterday I wrote a post about developing community nodes and thought I would give a little more information based on this.

In large companies, it is a network of divisions and skills that work together to develop growth, increase profits, decrease wastage and a whole lot of other value adding activities. They of course have various roles within each to get the tasks done and people to manage them but, it is not always the manager that leads the group.

Often, there are people at all levels of the hierarchy who influence group behaviours in many different ways. Some of them are bad apples who slow down work, create resistance or support a toxic environment, but there are those who work hard, life morale, motivate, train and help others even if not part of their paid responsibilities.

It is this second group that needs support and the space to continue to operate as they are invaluable to the health of the organisation. If they can be collected and guided to pull toward the same direction, the entire network shifts much faster.

Previously, organisations used to rally around an owner or CEO who would make decisions that would flow top down and attempt to lift the network from a centralised point. This is largely no longer the case as even within the one company, the people are more decentralised and focused on their department only.

If you imagine a small, round, casting net spread out on the ground and your job is to lift it all off of the ground, what is the best way to do it. If you grab one edge point, you will need to lift it the height of the diameter to get it all off the ground. If you grab the centre point, you will have to lift it the height of the radius upward, but, if you grab several points, across the entire net, it can be entirely lifted off the ground without needing to lift it very high.

If we imagine that Steemit is the net and each knot is an account, the fastest way to get the entire network off the ground is to lift all accounts equally. But, this is of course impossible as it is insensitive to the type of account and some accounts hold more value or deserve more value added based upon their content and value they provide the community.

For the health of the entire network, rather than just pushing negative behaviours down, positive behaviours should be driven upward. I don't mean the motivational speaker type of content, I mean the value adding providers who become the nodes and meeting points for information and inspire others to create their own networks by finding people further afield to support.

If these long-term providers and leaders are supported, they will in turn have the capabilities to support others around them on the network and this behaviour spirals out, lifting more points until eventually everyone is covered by one or more noded regions, as there will eventually be overlaps. These overlaps mean that one person who only gets a little support from one node, may be able to get a little support from surrounding points also.

In an organisation, this is very important as all of these points compound against each other and raise the value of any actions as the facilitate speed of implementation and decrease resistance to change.

At Steemit, there are many people trying many different things to attempt to lift in areas that they think are valuable which is great but, many are pulling against each other as there is a lack of network direction. This confusion means that there are many large gaps in the lifting points and many people who are being heavily rewarded even though they are not doing any of the lifting work.

These points that should be encouraged and supported are the ones that will bring people in, get them started, help their growth and then help them set up their own node to build more growth from. It will create a support network of long-term actors that behave in ways that grow the community and spend more time encouraging and rewarding good performance rather than having to punish poor.

This is one way in my perspective to develop and lift the platform while creating a widening variety of supported topics and areas so the network grows upwards and outwards with the lowest to the highest getting benefits.

It isn't too hard to begin and everyone can play a role if they are not already doing so. One of the most basic pieces of advice a minnow is given is, vote on content you like as this is what supports the provider. That should be for nearly everyone but, for those with high SP invested, I also say, spread votes for those who add value to the platform consistently and inspire more value adding activity from others.

The network needs to have more points, more people, more inspired thinking supported to lift wide and high. This might cut a few peaks off for some of the heavily rewarded in the short-term, but a more diverse support base and stronger community means it becomes more and more attractive to both new users and investors and this means healthy growth long-term.

And no matter your current position, long-term growth benefits everyone.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]

Apologies for the dodgy graphics.