Flow is Social

Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) describes an alternative view of an organisation in “What Would Google Do?”; he proposes that it is drawn as a network diagram rather than a hierarchical chart. This would include all the suppliers, customers, members of the public and so on that interact with it, working out why each relationship existed; goods, services, revenue, knowledge.  It would show that the exponential growth in influence of an organisation lies not with looking inwards, rather growth would be maximised by identifying new network nodes and working with them. Light up lots more nodes, get lots more influence.

That’s why the network is crucial. You could think of Flow as taking social networking principles and applying it to actually doing work. You could say “it’s like Facebook, but you’re actually doing work” and not be too far off; Flow exploits the exponential value of networks (as described by Metcalfe’s Law).

Inter-organisation networks therefore add huge value and Flow can allow an organisation to take advantage of the network effect without a huge implementation or culture change effort; Flow will just take advantage of the communities that already exist unrecognised, as users define working groups.

Flow will bring what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called ‘elegant organisation’ to the way organisations do things already; in terms of an application platform, it’s de-obstructing the process of working with partners – it’s facilitating, then ‘getting out of the way’ as discussed here.

Each organisation is already part of numerous external communities. Flow is unique because it can bring those communities together in one place. Instead of building a bespoke database, engaging a third party to host it and then working out how to update it, we believe it should be a simple case of designing a process and – click – sharing it with those users who share a community.

The key is to give the power to the users by making it easy to form useful cross-functional groups. It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny or big, with a couple of users or a thousand; in fact, in terms of contributing to the community conversation the smaller might well be more productive. Communities are free; create one when you need it. Projects are great examples of short term communities.

There are many places that communities may add value; a supply chain can truly be a chain of partners working together; peer organisations can work together on common problems; suppliers can service or easily gather information from all their customers through a single point. 

Communities are at the heart of Flow and conversations are at the heart of your business - and sharing a widget, or a process, is the start of a conversation. Your organisation is made up of users that already share, discuss and collaborate and Flow will capitalise on that by making conversations easy, then capturing them in a central place where they knowledge they contain can add value to the organisation.

Your organisation is full of conversations right now, none of which is being captured. Those conversations may be about the canteen, the weather, a crucial line of business problem, football, late running projects and so on...Flow makes it easy to discuss elements of your business and every time this happens, someone in your organisation is adding value to that data; they’re turning it into knowledge.