Creating The Captology Information System
Virtually all of the product ideas in Google come from the 20 per cent of the time employees work on their own projects,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt says.
—‘Us’ power; Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Information used to be power …until IT professionals got through with it. Now we have books wondering whether IT matters anymore, or attempting to describe the latest information paradox. There is no paradox. Merely the remains of a concept stripped of the social dimension which made it worth something in the human world.
Data processing technology was never supposed to matter. Confusing data processing technology with information technology is the crux of the problem. Information technology will stop mattering when human factors like persuasion stop mattering.
Captology is a fundamental shift from adapting humans to computer systems to designing computers to function within human social systems.
There are alternatives to persuasive design with captology. A Fast Company article details the alternate toolset in the at–will employment contract. The mission statement says respect for the individual, dignity, and teamwork. All the legally binding document you signed says is “we fire at will.”
Corporate IT is highly structured, with one individual or a small group controlling the nodes in a network and their relationships to one another. The shadow IT department, on the other hand, has no central authority and at best an ill-defined hierarchy; nodes join on their own and develop their own relationships. Marty Anderson, a professor at the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, calls corporate IT a command architecture and shadow IT an emergent architecture. Command architectures are set up to make them easy to manage and, as a result, they respond to top-down orders. Emergent architectures contain no dominant node and therefore provide no lever by which to manage them.
— Users Who Know Too Much (And the CIOs Who Fear Them)
Command–and–control system design tools manipulate the factors of production where the central metaphor is the machine. CIO.com explains a shift “Dangerous delays will follow if you do not resolve the inherent conflict between democracy of information and communications, and autocracy of command and control. The conflict has to be resolved in favor of democracy. Major competitive advantage is at stake.”
Using “Energy” To Make Information Technology Matter Again
…the greatest gift you can give an employee or even a loved one is not the one with the greatest monetary value, but the one that gives that person the greatest control over the intersection of time and stress: the gift, that is, of energy. (p233)
— The 500–Year Delta by Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker
If information is power, information technology is about power relationships. Watts Wacker suggests as an alternative to pay raises you give employees time off. A 10% pay raise can then be offset by giving the employee control over a block of time instead. This time can be spent redesigning systems, prototypes, or pursuing the energy given other employees with proposals. Energy isn’t just time, but money, and can be converted to provide any combination of time and money a project requires.
Whether knowingly or not, Wacker hints at something interaction designers know as social currency. Consider it a social accounting and asset allocation system fundamental to online community construction.
In the business context, social currencies are the programmable infrastructure for implementing agile enterprise concepts like coordinating users in collaborative environments. Since employees can always take all their account as time off; the type and quality of the projects change. Command and control gives way to influence and persuasion.
Metrics As The Persuasion Designer’s Toolkit
It’s amazing how many high–level executives will complain about their employees’ lack of motivation when the poor worker in the trenches doesn’t have a clue what the boss wants or how he intends to measure it. As a result, the staff spins its wheels, racing from crisis to crisis. They wind up feeling that they were treated unfairly because praise, raises, bonuses, and perks seem to be handed out capriciously.
—Managing In The Winter Of Our Discontent; InformationWeek
A captology based information system makes you aware of the persuasive influence of your metrics. Unintended behaviors are a consequence of not appreciating the value of persuasive design. Yet just like software interaction design, user testing reveals hidden captology flaws. Employees find gaming the sytem more desirable than performing to metrics when persuasion design principles are violated. Measuring individuals moves focus off the systemic influencers driving individual results. This is not an insight from captology but is basic to Demming and system dynamics.
Too often an analysis of the influencers driving results shows a system of risks, rewards and penalties, responsibility and scope of authority …seemingly distributed at random. Usability problems cause users to abandon or misuse software. Captology problems cause employees to quit the company, and misuse influence.
Captology provides the tools for turning the computer system from an archive of history to a progressive tool for change management. If you view change as a constant, it makes no sense to hardwire the status quo, only to change in fits and starts when the pain becomes excessive. Without persuasive tools like energy available to management, technology doesn’t equal power.
Where information is anything and everything except power, books like “Does IT Matter” hit a nerve. It is pretty simple. If questions arise whether IT matters anymore, you’re designing information to be a meaningless platitude.
Resources
- This comment from an ex–Google employee bodes ill for the famed Google innovation. Man companies keep data, few actually translate analytics into action.
- A cure for e–mail attention disorder? explains how to use social currency to prevent technology–induced attention deficit disorder.
- How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT explains the problem of commodity data processing technology masquerading as information technology — where IT doesn't matter. One solution is the shadow IT department.
- Compliance professional Frank Luntz in Be All That You Can Be: The Company Persona and Language Alignment explains how ideas fail when departments don’t speak the same language.
- Survey misuse is one of the prime sources of information failure. Executives who are obsessed with customer satisfaction are focusing on the wrong metric. A persuasion analysis reveals how decision process influences organization behavior; including quality problems in data collection.
- Managing In The Winter Of Our Discontent shows how to understand when measures conflict with objectives “If you reward conformity, people are intelligent enough to know it.” What’s measured gets done. But ease of programming influences which measures get built into systems. CIO.com’s Connect the Dots understands “No matter how well a CIO wires a global enterprise, a top–down management style will keep it slow and inefficient”
- Measure Up explains informational measures are systemic measures, designed specifically to mask data on individual employees (individuals often deprived the information, tools or authority to address root causes or make substantive changes).
- ‘Us’ power explains why Google and other companies give employees time to pursue pet projects.
- Many articles talk about command and control management as a business relic. Few explain how computer systems hardwire command and control procedures into the very fabric of business structure. Captology starts by helping you discover how computers are influencing your company right now.
- The 500 Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next
- Time–based currencies are a good starting point for understanding the administration of what Watts Wacker calls energy.
- According to Jeffrey Pfeffer in Danger:Toxic Company, some companies see employees as costs or liabilities while others see them as assets. Both have evidence to back up their view. What could be an information paradox is answered by captology: you get the culture you design. The article has a noteworthy example of rhetorical analysis.