 Record to the cloud. Okay, good. We are now recording. This is Tuesday, March 27th, 2018. We are REX, the Relationship Economy Expedition, having a call about reputations and value and a bunch of things that I will describe in a moment. But first, as is our tradition, I will read a poem that has a little to do with our topic and might put us in a place to talk about it in different ways. The poem is titled Doing Without by David Ray. I will actually type a link to it in our chat so if you feel like reading along, you can. Doing Without by David Ray. Doing Without is an interesting custom involving such invisible items as the food that's not on the table, the clothes that are not on the back, the radio whose music is silence. Doing Without is a great protector of reputations since all places one cannot go are fabulous and only the rare and enlightened plaman in his field or on his mountain does not overrate what he does not or cannot have. Saluting through their windows of cathedral glass, those restaurants we must not enter. Unless, like burglars, we become subject to arrest, we greet with our twinkling eyes the faces of others who do without. The lady with the fishing pole and the man who looks amused to have discovered on a walk another piece of firewood. Let me just read it again. Doing Without is an interesting custom involving such invisible items as the food that's not on the table, the clothes that are not on the back, the radio whose music is silence. Doing Without is a great protector of reputations since all places one cannot go are fabulous and only the rare and enlightened plaman in his field or on his mountain does not overrate what he does not or cannot have. Saluting through their windows of cathedral glass, those restaurants we must not enter. Unless, like burglars, we become subject to arrest, we greet with our twinkling eyes the faces of others who do without. The lady with the fishing pole and the man who looks amused to have discovered on a walk another piece of firewood. So, welcome to our conversation. I will do a light setup because this conversation is part of a quest that Greg Oxton is on and he is on a call and I'm going to sort of ask him to steer us toward the topic in ways that would be fruitful for his quest. But basically we're saying how do we know and represent the kinds of value that a participant brings to their networks? Like how do we create the value that they create without damping their creation of value? Because sometimes the things you measure get warped. I mean, one way of looking at it is you get what you measure and there's a whole bunch of thinking about that. Another way of thinking about it is when you measure something that is implicit and make it more explicit by measuring it and valuing it, sometimes you screw it up because some social dynamics are actually very subtle. So, how can we find and represent and recall and use the value people create? Performance assessments don't really do this. What else might we do in particular? What have all of us seen that might be fruitful in our endeavors? So, Greg, is that a reasonable starting point for us? Yeah, I think so. Do you want me to give a little context? How about that? Yeah, that would be great. So, we get Kelly and I with a group called the Consortium for Service Innovation and we work largely with customer support organizations and we get them together and talk about ideas on how to improve the customer experience and improve the efficiency of the support organization. And one of those ideas that we've been talking about probably for 12 years or so is we call intelligent swarming, which is a highly collaborative model. The traditional support model is pretty inefficient in terms of solving new problems. It's pretty good at solving known things. And many of us have experienced the level one, level two, level three phenomena and being escalated and trying to resolve an issue. So, intelligent swarming says don't do that. Get the right person on the call on the first touch and let them engage the others that are most appropriate to help based on the situation and based on who's asking. And a lot of this very quickly led us to we need people profiles and one element of the people profile is the person's history of value creation, which gives people credibility and also I think in the business world could help if not relieve the managers of this awkward task of assessing people's contribution at least complement that with information that's based on those who receive the value. So, the premise is the dream is that what if we could build a system where the value people create is actually a byproduct of their interaction and it's actually articulated by those or articulated is not the right word. The value comes from those who realize the value is reflected back to those who create the value. So, the goal is we capture and reflect a person's history of value creation in a way that isn't, you know, gameable or compromisable that doesn't destroy people's willingness to help because they like helping doesn't create a motivation for people to help because they want to serve whatever. So, it's very difficult in a highly collaborative environment to assess people's it can be activity-based or time-based. It has to be value-based which is a bit abstract and we also think that a good portion of it has to be implicit that is it's a reflection of people's behavior or it's the value others reflect in the content that I'm associated with. It's not declared thumbs up, thumbs down kind of model or rate the buyer and seller like eBay does easily compromised and not nearly rich enough to really reflect what we're trying to get at in terms of the value people create. So, the question is are there any good models that we should be looking at or any good research that actually deals with this topic? And I'm reflecting part of what you said in the chat so that we can kind of go back to it and reflect on it there. It's interesting because there's a whole HR function which I think all of us do an eye roll when we hear HR, right? It's like there's a standard universal eye roll response to HR and there are so many aspects of what HR does that I think most of us on this call would redesign immediately or even rethink and we wouldn't call it HR and so on and so on and so on. And so performance assessment is their job, right? It's what they're kind of tasked with doing, it's part of the thing they supervise and do. So it's interesting because you're trying to bring some innovation to a place where lots of innovation is needed and innovation is sometimes hard one, right? And the people who are part of your consortium are mostly not from HR, right? They're usually from call centers, customer service, strategy. Yeah, none of them are from HR. Yeah, nobody has. I think we have ever had an HR person attend. Oh, that's not true. We did once, I remember. It was memorable, but generally not. So I think, yeah, it's usually the manager's job to do the assessment and it's HR's job to manage that process, the system and process within which the managers do that. Exactly. And to make it uniform and measurable, uniform, fair in some way, durable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Maintain the illusion of objectivity. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because that's what struck me listening to you talk about this this time is the whole, you know, how are we assessing the creation of value and is that completely subjective based on the person realizing the value? And then how do you reflect that in a system, right? Susan, it's your first time on a Rex call. So I'm sort of low to do this, but I know you reasonably well. And I know that like the conversation so far has probably triggered 12 things in your head. And I want to like release, release those neurons to like, where is this taking you? You were right. It's not 12 yet, but okay. The little meter, I can sort of see the needle. Yeah. Well, the first thing, and I'll be brief about it, but just to put on the table and I haven't figured out what the consequence is for this. But there is a, there is a body of research that you might find. I mean, as you were, as you were describing your, your thinking should be the byproduct of their interaction, value by those who realize their value in a highly collaborative environment, reflection of their behavior, but not declared. I was thinking all those things resonate well with a, with what's known as in some circles as service science, because they wanted it to be, you know, respectable service system thinking, that kind of thing. And they're the sort of people who are, and they come from get this marketing and economics. Okay. So if you've heard of this, you can jump in and help, help walk this through. But very quickly, they are of the view that service, service rather than good, they exchange of service is actually more primary than the exchange of goods, which is reflection among other things. And they also are of the view that, which has been around a philosophical debate forever, that value is co-created in use. And you're set, you're you're right there. So what's the one thought that I have to offer is which means that it's not something, you know, a person does not deliver value, the value is, it is created in use, but they haven't, somebody else came up with this idea of the distinction between worth and value. Okay. And worth being, I proposed this to someone who's a talent, she said, oh, we don't make that distinction. So I thought, oh, okay, well, all right, I'm sure they do, but perhaps they don't have those words. And anyway, the point there was that you establish the monetary value, if you will, often upfront before you have a, the service is actually enacted. And, and then so I actually developed a model when I was at IBM and it's one of those zillions of things, I think Susan, why didn't you just do that for the rest of your life? But anyway, there's the idea was that you have two levels in the model, one is transactional and one is interactional. The transactional one has all the points on it that are in the contract. Okay. And I'll shut up in a minute, but one of the reasons we, I did this was because IBM was having trouble with its contracts that were being canceled before there was any sign that there was anything wrong. Now, anybody who knows anything about interaction, especially in a service environment, knows that that's, that's being established in every interaction that between the two parties with three or four. So, so we had, we had a little model that the, the value used the word that we use, which is the value is realized in the interactional layer. And there's a correspondence between the transactional moments in the transaction, the transactional value as it goes across time. But the interactional stuff is going on. That's where the value is being created. It's possible to track. I'm sure you know this possible to track the quality. I mean, how well that interaction is going. Now we were, you know, in, in the context of tenure contracts. And, and, and so, you know, 10 years is a long time and there are lots and lots of interactions. And of course, people are used to talking about touch points, which were just formal things like telephone calls and meetings and blah, blah. But it was the informal ones that we were interested in, which were the ones where the, the guy runs into the IBM guy in the hall and says, you know, we're thinking about getting ready for maybe a switch to whatever and I can be interested in, you know, helping us out with that. Well, the person they were talking to, of course, had no idea. And that comment never went anywhere. So there was a lot of that that was, was part of the background story. Anyway, I'm going to shut up there and just say this, this body of work, which now has some very readable material is, is I think rich. And if, do you know about it? Is this something you work with? Yes. Well, I think so. It's Jim Sporer and the, the group at IBM Research and. Well, yeah, I was part of that group. But I'm thinking about the guys that he got it from. Right. Which is the, what's the name of the book? The service. Kelly, Kelly fills in the bikes. Service, service dominant logic. Yes, that one. Margot and Flush. Margot and Flush. Flush. Yes. Well, I should have asked earlier, but what do you make of that in your view? Well, we love that work. And we use co-creation of value as something that every service organization should understand and increase the presence of customers in their decision-making process and design of services. It's a, it's a pretty fundamental part of one of our models. I don't think any of our members yet are very good at it. But, but I, I just going to say I put the value stack paper in the chat for, if anyone is interested later. So, so we've identified four things that we think are key to creating a high value relationship in a service environment. And some of it is one of the four is the co-creation. Value is co-created and it comes from Vargo, Lush and their service dominant logic book. I just put links to that in the chat. I just put links to the book in the chat. Okay. So that's a, that's a concept we talk a lot about in the relationship between the service provider and the service receiver. And you still use those words. One of those words is going to go away. The service provider and service receiver? Yeah. Well, we need something to replace them with. I know. I was hoping you'd help. I mean, it does leave people down the track that there is a service and it can be delivered. And, and so all of the interesting stuff is in between. Yeah. Well, respond, respond to a requester as opposed, right? So we, as we've updated the methodology that we work on in this last sort of iteration, it was, you know, very much sort of like the analyst and the customer. And we've updated those words to request or responder in an effort to make the methodology cover more ground or generic. That's the word. So the other, the other person that comes to mind is an interesting worker and value is Verna Ali and value maps. And so that took, we've done a lot of work with, she's been with us numerous times over the last 10 years or so. It never gets much traction. I'm always way more excited about it than the members seem to be. I'm just actually using it and doing things with it. Yeah. Because she has the intangible and tangible, right? Right. Which I think is the same as transactional and interactional. Really, for sure. I mean, if you're going to map one onto the other, that's how you would do it. Yeah. Yeah. But what's interesting about your comment is I haven't thought about the co-creation factor in the person-to-person collaboration or in the three or a team or three collaborating on it. And that's, that is interesting to think about. Because the requester, if we use our requester responder language. Well, I like that. I have liked that because I do work design for, in work marketplaces. And we came up with, and I insisted we not use worker. So we had to spend a month on that. But, you know, what did you come up with? We came up with requester and producer. Oh, okay. But I don't know that I like that any better, but I'll put yours down, too. Okay. Okay. Because also it goes with thinking of work, getting work done. Mine's not about work so much as it's about getting work done. And which goes along with the interactional piece. Yeah. So we do use the term knowledge worker. And a knowledge worker can be either a requester or a responder, depending on the situation. Exactly. And there can be multiple responders to a request. And the, how well the request is formulated or, you know, if the person's done due diligence and they've done the obvious things and they've truly understand the problem or the question, that has tremendous value in producing an appropriate answer or an accurate answer. Well, it's important for an expected answer. I mean, an expected. Yeah. If the requester has an expectation, right, what it should be like, then the more they specify it, the greater the chances of that. The question is, what, when somebody wants to offer something that is more innovative, then it sort of, Yeah. What happens? Well, I want to hear how that plot turns out. Oh, that plot, well, it turns out badly. That's what I'm assuming because you've hesitated. Well, that's where it pushes into where I think you guys, I mean, you know this and I know this and still it has not been turned into appropriate tools and models and process or well practice, I would say practice not process, but which is that the, the more you, the more the person knows about what they want to need and can specify it, that's good. If they, if the producer or the responder is on the same wavelength, but you know, suppose you are trying to contract with people about in the realm of, and you're in this business too, in the realm of working on mind shifts. Yes. Yes, we're very much in that business. So how do you stop, I mean, I think of it in the conversations, you get going and you say, oh my God, they're never going to appreciate the value of what we bring. They don't understand what we're trying to do. Yeah, that place. Well, so I think, I often think of it as like making Julia Child's chocolate mousse. The chocolate mousse theory of value, I like this. Well, the value of mindset shift, I think, or the recipe for shifting minds. In my experience is it has to be adjacent to where they are. It can't be three degrees separate. And it has to be done in a way that they can absorb it. And so the Julia Child analogy is you can't add the butter too fast to the eggs because the eggs can't absorb it. If you add it too fast, the butter just sits next to the egg. You have to drizzle it in and beat it. And if you add it slowly, then the egg can actually absorb all the butter. And I think change is, so what we do with our conversations is, the reason we've been talking about this for 12 years is, and been doing it for the last five, by the way, they're about a dozen companies that we know of that are actually taking apart their tears of support. They no longer do escalation. They do collaboration. They've invented ways, some manuals are automated to get a question or some most likely able to answer it on the first touch, based on the question and based on who's asking and all of those, you know, the question and who's asking are both very important in this. And we're to the point now where people are doing it, but the whole performance assessment model becomes very disruptive because we've always individual's work based on counting things. Yes, yes, I know. Closed all that. And now we want to count value. And so here we go. Really struggling. If you wanted to count value, I went partway down that path. There is, I was watching and I, unfortunately the gig didn't last long enough for me to do the part that I wanted to do, but was actually picking out in conversation with the people sort of just sort of randomly, eventually got to the point where I could see three different little baby mind shift sets, mind sets shifts. I can never say that. And little baby ones and that they came in no particular order. But once they had them, the kinds of solution they were coming up with, the kinds of thinking that they were doing were would stick because we all know about the rubber band effect, right? Yeah, everybody goes, oh, so wonderful. And then they just pop right back. So, yeah, we can't work fairly, not in a conscious way, but in a subconscious way, calculating and how much we tell people about where they're going to end up. If that makes sense. Right. Because it's keep them, keep them going. Well, yeah, we often come up with provocative assertions that we have about five or six and we use frequently, but they're, they make people uncomfortable. Because it's too big of a stretch. And so how much this comfort is appropriate here is a huge issue because do you need to slowly step through stages or can you jump from A to B? Sometimes you can jump, right? And sometimes you make a big leap to some other place and you see differently and behave differently and sometimes you can't. And I don't know how to read that. Or you make people uncomfortable first off and then the tiny step doesn't feel so scary or so overwhelming. Right. Yeah, exactly. But they don't come, my observation is that they just don't come in an order for different people. I mean, you're in the same situation that I've been in, which is that you're, you know, it's a bunch of people. It's not just one person. I mean, you may have to, you know, if you get a champion who makes that leap, that's what I call that person, the champion. The sponsor, the person who has the money, might not make that leap. Then you're already in trouble. But having, it's the rare person where they are embodied in the same decision maker. But the people who go through this, you know, those little baby steps are, for each person, they're different. Yeah. So might I suggest that sometimes in some cases, the value increases with the discomfort that what at the moment feels like a really crap encounter or a challenge that you didn't like or an idea you couldn't swallow turns out a decade later to have been the thing you were told that you should have paid attention to earlier, that you got later. But there was insanely valuable. And the person, the provider, the, whoever you're a responder might not have delivered it really well, whatever. But the seed that they were trying to communicate was insanely valuable. And that's not going to map to how happy are you at the end of this call. Right, exactly. Exactly. Because I'm a constant bearer of bad news like that. So this is an important question for me too. Well, so Jerry, I have, I guess I would, if I answered the question about can, can you short circuit or take jumps in the evolution? My observation is that you can't, you can accelerate it. But if you skip a step, there'll be things about the future state that won't necessarily make sense that they haven't had an experience to really appreciate. So I'd be, if you have examples of where, where people have actually figured out how to leapfrog, you know, not go through the, The examples that come to mind are probably not very accurate or maybe trivialize the question. For example, I, my first computer was way back when, and I knew what assembler was, and I knew how the modem works and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, scroll forward 15, 20 years, and people are using instant messaging, and it takes over the telephone function. And they don't, they have no idea about any of the, any of the steps that are about how does this damn thing work. They went straight to, Hey, I'll, I am you that tomorrow. And I heard that on the bus one day in Manhattan, and I'm like, awesome. That means buddy lists are our mainstream, right? We're done. And nobody using buddy lists today needs to understand all the crap I needed to understand to get there. They just went straight to, Oh shit, I've got to tell all my posse to use this thing because it's so valuable. Everybody needs to install aim, Skype, you know, messenger, what have you. There was a, there was a string of these, none of whom spent a dime on marketing the value their application brought. It was an inherently valuable thing that everybody just went right into. And then it was a given. Well, there's an example that reminds me from a guy that I knew, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that came from Zaire and ended up in Belgium and never mind all the rest of it. But he was complaining to me that when computers came out and he was trying to, you know, get them, he said, you know, the people I know in, in the count by now the Congo, who want to use computers, they want them to learn to type first. He said, why should we go through that? He's a perfect example of when can you leap? Yeah. And do people leap? And I think that this steps versus leaping thing is a really important issue. I don't know anybody who's got, you know, great answers on it, but I have a suspicion that many of our step models, part of our conversation later today is going to be about spiral dynamics, for example, which, which is a staged model that says that you go through each of these stages and you have to sort of have to evolve through each stage and the life conditions at each stage determine how you're going to respond and crises drive you to the next stage. And there isn't much of a, Hey, you might actually go to straight to turquoise. You know, it's like, do not pass, go to not collect $200, go straight to turquoise. That's a title, Jerry. Go straight to turquoise. I like it. But the model doesn't present that as a possibility. And to me, that feels very constricting because what if you could, one of my, one of my life models is Milton Erickson, the hypnotist who used to suggest things to people's unconscious, which they would then kind of do because he had just opened up their behavioral vocabulary without them knowing it. Well, is that something? I mean, you, you must do this all the time, but here's, here's a hypothesis that the leap happens when somebody is already uncomfortable and you give voice, you give words, you give language to that discomfort. So I'm thinking in particular of a woman, I gave a very short talk at media X and I was talking, and I was basically saying, it's not so many words that, you know, stop thinking about no talent management and start thinking about what the work is and how it needs to get done and the rest will follow. And she came up, she was so excited. She said, it's about the talent, not the work. And that just gave voice to, I'm sure that one of the reasons, Jerry, you are so valuable is that you give voice to these, you have a sense of where's people's discomfort is and you're already ahead and you can give voice or maybe not ahead. Maybe that's the wrong way to put it. Maybe someone else on the spiral. Yeah, exactly. But I wonder, there's a difference between things that we do versus mental models or mindset or perspective of our level of awareness of, or how we perceive the world around us, which I think is kind of, isn't that what spiral dynamics really, it's not really about doing anything. It's about the evolution of one's awareness, I guess. I'm not a student of it, but it seemed to me. Well, it does involve the doings along the way because each of those levels informs how you're behaving and what you're focused on. I wish Kevin Clark ran the call because he's a master in integral and all the stuff that's come out of spiral dynamics. So I'm unclear, but that to me is a big important open question because I like catalytic quick change and if you presuppose a model, then you start aiming for the model. So for example, let me give a completely different example. I'm not crazy about the compulsory education system. I think it creates the modern obedience, compliance, independence. I've got a whole big critique of it. And I was at a nice dinner recently where one of the people who knew a lot about unschooling, homeschooling, who knew all the backstory, he was obsessed about models and he said, we just don't have the right developmental model. And if we did, we could kind of step through it and it would solve a whole bunch of issues. And then I started thinking, because he proposed a model and I started thinking through his model, and it immediately took my mind away from one of the really big important issues to me, which is a sense of agency that the consumerization of our world and the treating of students as the objects to pour education into takes away their sense of agency, their sense of responsibility or permission to change their world. And the second I got into his model, which was not an unreasonable model of develop, first you need this, then this, then this, then this. I completely lost my plot for the bigger important issue, which was about how do you see the situation? Well, mental models were about, I mean, I thought, I thought mental models were about, about how things work. Yeah, they're allegedly descriptions of how things work. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. And like far, like Farham Street is all about mental models. Your behavior, your thinking and you're going to change how you do it in the first instance. It's, let me, let me throw like a floppy fish on the table here because it's, it's alive. It is flopping. It is, it is full of energy. One of the solutions to your quest, Greg, is Ray Dalio and Blackwater Associates and their use of the dot connector. Have you heard of this? No. Bridgewater, sorry, not Blackwater. Blackwater is actually Blackwater. Blackwater is the mercenary organization run by Prince. Now, now we name to something much easier. They're probably doing a reputation model at Blackwater though, I'm guessing. I bet they do. I bet they do. Yeah. So, so the dot connector program at Bridgewater is something that they came up with. And what's happening is everybody in a meeting has a tab has an iPad in front of them with running the dot connector app. They, in live, real time, are busy rating everyone and every idea. And so your participation and it's, it's, it's, it's cold. It's arm's length. It's not meant to be personal, but if you showed up and like gave a really stinky idea, you will hear about it immediately in the dot connector. And part of this turns into your reputation value over time or your credibility. In, in addition, I think that over time they look at your predictions in meetings and writings and whatever and did those things pan out and that becomes part of your credibility rating over time. Like, well, okay, like 80% of the time when Jerry said something was going to happen, it actually seems to have happened and we should maybe incorporate that into his future, you know, prognostications. So, so it's very interesting. It's completely in your face. It's very, you know, to people who step in and even read about this, they're like, holy crap, what? And it sounds like a high productivity, highly transparent, highly honest, maybe overly frank way of running a meeting and doing exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. Although explicit. Tremendously explicit. So, so explicit as to be painful and probably to bounce some people out of the whole, the whole system. I'll point you to an article about the dot connector in the New York Times. But it does sound very interesting. And, and well, my, my curiosity about that is like just because Jerry has not been a good predictor or, you know, in this example, or, or has, you know, generated a bunch of ideas that we rated as bad at the time doesn't mean that he hasn't drastically influenced our thinking about whatever it is we're trying to solve. Right. So this is, I think, exactly the question. The example that we use a lot is like Greg and I are working on a thing for two hours and we can't crack it. And then Melissa shows up on the call and we can't, we give her the three sentence summary and she goes, Oh, have you thought about this? And we're like, Oh, yes. That's exactly what we needed. This is exactly right. Like this has sort of solved all of these things or put all of this into order. And now how do we rate anyone's contribution to solving this problem? Because it took Melissa three minutes. It took Greg and me two hours and we keep wanting to count work in discrete units. And so, yeah, but notice that has the characteristic of you were predisposed. I mean, you predisposed yourselves. You were looking for something and then somebody said something and it was, you, it fit that trigger that closed that gap. But yeah. Well, and so, right. And so in the dot connector example, it's possible that Jerry has totally forwarded the thinking, right? He's advanced the thinking in ways that never would have been advanced if he hadn't come up with things that allowed us to crystallize that we thought actually that was the wrong idea. And so then to have his reputation or his credibility be negatively affected because we've, we've judged it on a scale, right? Then you're like, And also today's heretic is tomorrow's hero or tomorrow's idiot, right? And there's a really, really fine line between the two, right? And what sounds like heresy today will be bashed down and rated poorly. And so you have to be very careful that your feedback loop is so quick that you dampen anybody's enthusiasm for putting the really out there idea in because, again, I think the most out there ideas are often the most valuable in the moment because it's, you know, it's one of my favorite quotes is, of course, Alan Kay's point of view is worth ADIQ points. And my take is it's how you're seeing your situation, how you're framing it, what language you're using, the mental model you have around it, that's probably stopping you from solving it. And, you know, if you could, if you could shift that. And so partly changing people's minds is a little bit of mental jujitsu of shifting how they see their situation. Are you in a situation of scarcity or abundance? Do people have generally good intent or bad intent? And now I'm over generalizing a bit. But still, I think those are part of the part of the big frame here. And that connector also is relying on economy and system one entirely? Sort of, because just because it's quick and real time doesn't necessarily mean people aren't being very conscious about how they rate, because I think they realize the long term effects of the rating. So I'm pretty sure it's not all system one instinctive like, I hate this, blah, blah, blah. I'm pretty sure people are like, well, this was unpleasant to hear, but very considered in delivery or something like that. Here I'm making up what the software does or lets you do. But these are highly intelligent, overpaid people in a room where they're making decisions that matter a lot, in the long run to them. So I think two concepts we've kind of loosely embraced or find worthy of keeping in mind. One is that we definitely want to design this reputation system from the point of view of abundance. And that seems to be coming, you know, as people stop doing stack ranking in organizations, and there seems to be ever so slow a movement away from some of that traditional bell curve and stack ranking kind of behavior in businesses, that's, I think, very encouraging. But the other one is that the feedback in the system and the reputation model, this comes from Mark Smith and Jerry, you and I talked about this a little bit before. Mark's assertion that I found quite profound was that a system, a reputation system should be 80% implicit and 20% explicit because the clearing, they got value versus monitoring people's behavior. So the frequency with which I would invite Melissa to come and help us would be an indicator or the frequency with which we don't. And you're inferring those things from some, you're trying to find proxy behaviors so you can infer the implicit stuff rather than assigning measures and scoring and reading. So if you get good proxies, you're in business then. Yeah, yeah. And then, but then again, it's very complicated because, because measuring those proxies can be difficult. But I think so, so, so one, we've kind of had this design principle. One, it needs to be 80% implicit, 20% explicit. And I don't think those numbers are absolute, but the concept is mostly. I think it should be 82%. Oh, well, let me update that. And then the second one is around abundance that, and it really, and Susan, you might know how IBM does its IBM fellows, but some of the conversations we've had to date have been, we want to recognize skills and then we want to recognize the value that people create with those skills and that could be a badging model. And then a collection of badges would give a person a distinction. So this is, you know, the most obvious example of this is the Boy Scouts badging. You earn certain number badges you get, you become a tender for it, you're under another, and then eventually you become an Eagle Scout. Eagle Scouts are rare, but there isn't a limit to the number that can become Eagle Scouts. They're rare because it's hard to get to. And I think it's the same with IBM Fellow or Cisco has a distinguished engineer designation or distinction. And there are very few of them because it's an extremely difficult thing to achieve, but it's not necessarily limited. And that's, so that's, when we think about abundance, it's that, you know, we're not applying any kind of a distribution algorithm to who can achieve any certain level of recognition for the value they create. It would be set based on criteria. And if you meet the criteria, you earn the distinction. Yeah, but they so often don't they get, you know, if you can only have one fellow a year or two, you know, there's a practice, maybe there's no rule, but there's a practice that is really rare. And so, yeah, but is it, is it rare because of the limit, the number of them are rare because it's so difficult to meet the criteria? That's what I know. My experience would say that, but I'm not, I was never part of those actual negotiations for fellows. If I look at their performance assessment, it's, it's relative ranking. Yeah. Yeah. And I think partly it's, these are standout individuals who change the organization in some significant way. And those events don't happen that often. Right. I guess. And I was just thinking that I actually keep explicit track of people and ideas that change the way I see the world. Like, like Rex is based partly on that. There's a thought in my brain called contrarians who make or made sense. These are the people whose, whose concepts shifted how I see the world and helped me come up with this whole idea of a relationship economy. Very explicitly. Yeah. And, and, and that has made me much more aware of outsider-y kinds of points of view and more appreciative of them. And maybe I hope a little more critical of them on occasion because, because again, there's this really fine line between conspiracy, nutsiness and heresy that's actually tremendously useful. Really, really gray area between the two. Yeah. Really gray area between the two. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one other model. So I'm going to, thanks for the dot, what is it? Dot connector. Dot connector. I will look at that. The other one that I've heard bits and pieces about is Agile, the Agile development methodology. Apparently people are not measured as individuals. They are only, the only measurement of performance is against the team, which I find terribly intriguing. And when you have a highly collaborative environment, team measures to me make way more sense than individual measures. I'm back to the scenario that Kelly went through. If the team is highly effective and then everybody on that team and, and, you know, any effective team has different kinds of different skills and people play different roles at different times. And so there's nothing, it's fairly dynamic. It's not a static kind of relationship, I guess. So I don't know. Is there any more Agile methodology in terms of? Do we have any Agile black belts on the call? I'm not. I know some people who definitely are. Agile and Lean black belts. I should have, I should invite them or ask them. But I was wondering just those embedded in what you just said, Greg, was this made me think about Jerry's comment about his own perspective with respect to context. And I think part of what makes a, I mean, the more, the more you have shared context, the more implicit you could afford to be offloading just as we do. We are offloading it onto the context, right? And that part, you know, that part is just so weird to me, who people think about, you know, doing work with people they don't know. I mean, you have no idea what their context is wildly off. And that takes time to build and be able to rely on. So then, you know, that, pardon? I tried to, I tried to quote you, but I think I got it wrong. And I think Kelly is correcting me now. Go ahead. And I'm going to have to jump off the call at the top of the hour, and I will leave the call open and you guys can go as long as you want. I think that'll, I think that'll work. So yeah, what we're trying to do with these people profiles. So there are five elements to a profile of a person, at least so far. One is their identity. That one's fairly static and declared. Another is interests. Also, maybe not quite a static, but declared person declares their interests. Another is skills. And to infer that it should, we think it's largely, first of all, it's very dynamic because we're constantly learning and shifting our focus and that it's very minimally declared mostly inferred. Another is reputation, which is a person's history of value creation. And that's the portion of a person's profile that we're talking about. And then the last is preferences. And so if we could figure out how to create a rich profile that is largely a result of the work they do in the interactions they have, not something they have to manually maintain, then I think we could, I don't think we'll ever replace really knowing someone and the context, because I think we have a capacity to know people in a very multi-dimensional way, a human being. But I think we could get closer to creating relevant connections if somebody has a need to find them, the person that most likely would be able to help them in a way that would create a pleasant experience. And that's preferences and style and that come into play. So can I just sort of state that most of these things are expressed so poorly these days? As a small example on skills, right? Okay, so you list proficiency and spreadsheets and speak two languages and that's kind of the typical SEALS profile. It's sort of like tags, right? And then it's really impoverished. And one of my observations over the last many years is that people don't know their own superpowers. They have no idea what they're especially really good at because they think everybody's really good at it. So April, my better half, has a calendric memory. She can tell me what we were doing on this day for the last seven years, for example. I can't tell you what I was doing seven days ago without looking at my calendar. And April somehow thinks that it's sort of normal to have that kind of time memory. And I'm like, no, no, no, this is a total superpower. So sometimes it takes other people to express for us what our superpowers are. And then we also need to understand how to express our superpowers better. So we understand them with a little bit more depth. And I think that would help the matchmaking that you're talking about. So that's why I think the feeling is that that needs to be mostly inferred. Skills need to be mostly be inferred. Microsoft did some interesting research some years ago about self declaration of expertise. And they found experts underrated themselves because they had a sense of how much they didn't know. And novices overrated themselves because they had no idea how much they didn't know. And that it's, you know, self declaration, an explicit skills model is problematic, but better than nothing. Well, you have, you know, in IBM, the thing is, Jerry, if you go off on the skills thing too far, I mean, IBM had a list of 4,000 skills. Somebody had to manage those. And so they're trying to automate, you know, matching people to projects that needed people. I was briefly with Price Waterhouse before it was PWC. I was in the strategy practice and every quarter you had to fill out a 20 page questionnaire that was your skills questionnaire. And you filled it out fresh. You know, this is unfortunately in the early computing days, but, but you had to fill out a fresh, like what? And it was pretty much worthless. Yeah. So we're hearing, we're hearing rumors that, that you can infer skills from the content people are associated with. And that programmatically, you can determine with the, you know, you could manage programmatically, you could manage your skills profile with 4,000 elements in it. You can't do it manually. And Microsoft actually is doing a person's skills profile as a function of the cases they solve, the articles they link, the articles they write, the web pages they look at, the PDFs they look at. So they index, just like a search engine indexes content, they index all the stuff that a person's associated with. And of course, if you write an article about a topic, then that's a higher weight. But it's all done programmatically. So as their engineers start to work on a beta project, then their profile starts to reflect because we're dealing with content that has to do with this new release or a beta product. Coveo, which is a search engine based out of Canada, claims to be able to find both people and content. And they do it in a very similar way. There is no profile of a person, but they'll, based on your search arguments, they'll identify people that are likely to know something about that topic based on the content they're associated within the various repositories that they're indexing. So this is another dream we have, is that the skills profile would be essentially a byproduct of the work you do and the content you interact with. You would never really have to worry about it. And it would be largely inferred. Very interesting. So what about the, like, the total genius who basically never looks like anything up in the PDFs and kind of has everything in an unaided recall in their head, and when you call them, goes, oh yeah, just go look in this thing over here, hates writing articles, like can't be put upon to go write articles. But they're the savant everybody turns to. They would write really poorly in the system, right? Can you give them like a wild card? Yeah, I think so. Well, I think if you also had some way to measure how often people go to that person. Right. And one of the problems of making these things explicit is that you screw things up. So in the early days of social network analysis, you know, Val describes and Mark Smith and all these other people. One of the things that shows up is, hey, it turns out that when you graph who talks to whom and who does what this executive assistant over here is absolutely central to this organization. And, and, and like, no, and the problem exactly and the problem was that management managers don't know how to deal with that information. You don't want to like triple her salary because her value is so high. I assume sorry for the assumption that it's a sheet. And yet these people were often the people who had softer skills were very social, we're real connectors, we're highly trusted. Those are the aspects of the people who are undervalued by most measurement systems. And I just threw another like wet floppy fish in the conversation. But now I have to leave you to join a different zoom call, but I'm going to leave this this thing open. I'm just going to mute myself and the others want to continue or show me. Yeah, what do you think? And I need to go ahead. I think shall we wrap the call then? Yeah. Yeah. It looks like we all have to go. Damn it. It was just getting hot and heavy too. It always does. Yeah. We know it's coming. Well, I thank you. This has been like a fabulous topic to dive into in a really nice conversation. And Susan, you know, the gods are smiling on us. You're the right person to have in the call. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you all. Thanks for chatting. Okay. Thanks guys. Bye. Bye.