I am a digital narcissist. There, I admitted it. Perhaps, we all have a little bit of narcissism in us. Not the bad kind, where ego and attention are a character flaw involving vanity, selfishness, arrogance, entitlement, etc. I’m talking more about the healthier sort of narcissism where we crave some amount of recognition for our work, our contribution to society, or even our ability to entertain our social circles. In a sense, it is the opposite of insecurity. You can trust me on this one. You are reading about a guy who dealt with insecurity issues his entire life. So, it feels good to have your post commented on, see your quote and name in a story, get an “atta boy” or “atta girl” for something you did that added value, whatever it might be. To be recognized by your peers as a knowledge leader is a means for you to shoo away those insecure feelings at least for the time being.
Andy Warhol coined the phrase that in the future, we will all be world famous for 15 minutes, which was later truncated to indicate that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame, but what does “fame” mean. Is it constrained to your social circle, group or team, organization, neighborhood association or is it something larger like a society, a region, perhaps the entire world? Many of us will never attain the latter, books will not be written about us nor movies depicting our life. However, recognition is still critical. In fact, it factors into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where the 4th tier deals with self-esteem. As my colleague, Jesse Schell described in his lecture on “The Pleasure Principle” one of the reasons why games work focuses on Self Determination Theory (SDT). SDT argues that Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness are required to foster high quality motivation and engagement for activities. OK, so you have self-esteem and competence as 2 critical needs for motivated healthy individuals.
Unfortunately, this does not translate well into the enterprise. We often see silos of data, closely guarded information, and collaboration relegated to channels like e-mail not over open platforms. Why? Knowledge, especially at the ideation stage, is hard to operationalize and measure. From an employee perspective, it’s viewed as putting yourself out there especially for reproach. In addition, sometime the payback is not in line with the risk. One reason for this might be that it’s hard to track the flow of knowledge and the contributions within an organization. Knowledge management systems are phasing out and being replace with more socially oriented software. However in order for these tools to be effective we need to take a look at the culture of sharing within the organization and identify the motivational factors and incentive structure. If your incentive structure is not aligned with your employee’s expectations than knowledge sharing breaks down.
So how can you “attribute” value creation back to the multitude of folks that worked on a project or even all the way back to the person(s) who first voiced the idea? What should their incentives look like? Recognition, monetary incentive, promotion, name on a plaque, new significant title? I think some smart folks should develop a system that tracks knowledge across an organization real-time, in a visual fashion so that anyone can quickly understand it. It would attribute value back to the source(s) and weigh contribution accordingly. It would also show how knowledge evolves and morphs associated with connection points and different skillsets. Users view their particular dashboard to understand where their idea/contribution lies in the innovation funnel and allows them the potential to jump back into the discussion. I think this would be a powerful motivator to accelerate sharing and advance collaboration within the enterprise. Now if only I could find some smart students to help me build it, hmmmm???
