Cues And Interactions In Temporary Tribes

 

“He who cannot howl will not find his pack.” - Charles Simic

This is a post about the mechanics of interaction in temporary tribes. I recommend you first read the introduction post to temporary tribes.

Temporary tribe: A group that together pursue the fulfillment of a certain outcome. And after they reach their goal, they stop being a group. An important element of a temporary tribe is the communication infrastructure they work on. It’s digital, it’s mobile and it is global.

You get an email from someone you have never met before, offering you thousands of dollars. He needs to get millions of dollars out of his country and would like you to help him. For a nice fee of course. Do you trust the sender? Why not? Why do you think some people still fall for this kind of spam?

This article is all about social cues, trust, tags, communication and filters.

Tags: The Social Cues Of Cyberspace.

People can catalog almost everything on the Internet. You can add words to photos on Flickr that describe the picture. On Amazon, users can put labels on the products, labels they associate with the object. It’s called “tagging”.

Users from the bookmarking site Delicious add tags to the web pages they find interesting. If they put “project management” and “best article ever” to one of my web pages I’ll be delighted. If their tag reads “this sucks”, well, that sucks.

Tags are the little labels we put on everything on the web. There is no overall top down structure. Everybody can add tags. The tags can be any word or couple of words. Whatever your association is, it’s your tag.

A collection of tags describes a picture, book, products or blogger in a short and effective way. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false. It’s about the perception of community.

After years creating The Project Shrink, blog, podcast and persona, that’s how I view living online: a struggle with tags.

On Twitter I exchange short messages with other Project Managers. We have a secret handshake. Every message contains the letters #PMOT, which stands for Project Managers On Twitter. By using these letters, you label yourself as a PM. And a cool one. One that is On Twitter.

The blog Project Shrink started out about “Project Management”. But I experienced that under that label humans don’t play a role. (At least, that’s what I’m told.) In “general management”: yes. In “human resourcing”: yes.

After a few years I adopted “Project Leadership”. Now that is a lovely area in which you can throw any human topic you can imagine. The drawback is, nobody really knows what it is exactly. It may be a safe tag, but it’s not an effective one.

If you use a tag, you want it to be clear. You use a word, a word that means something to you. Agile approaches are getting more and more in fashion. Therefor more and more approaches are getting the label “agile”. To piggyback on the success.

Brian Marick believed Agile is being dumbed down. So he created Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. Just to be sure no one would take that name and create it into something else. I am pretty sure that this tag wasn’t taken already.

After “Project Leadership” I switched to “Temporary Tribes” as the topic for my blog The Project Shrink. A new, fresh tag. An empty container all mine to fill with meaning.

Tags are the social currency of cyberspace.

It’s the stuff we want to collect, get rid off or give online. This is not typical for online interactions. Labeling is a concept from sociology. According to Wikipedia “… is (sociology) the study of the social lives of humans, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions.”

Online. Offline. Society. Project. Doesn’t matter. The awesomeness of the virtual space is, you actually use real tags. We see them. We use them as keywords in our filters. We use them in our one sentence pitch on LinkedIn. But still. Always the same principles. It’s about group affiliation and identity.

Tags are social cues.

During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default or by choice. I am Dutch (default) and a blogger (choice).

The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. Actually, we have more than one identity. We can choose, we can switch depending on the situation. As Amartya Sen writes in “Violence and Identity”: “Given our inescapably plural identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any particular context.”

As an identity is how we see ourselves within the ultimate large group of humans, it not something that can be seen on an individual level. It is a group thing. Without groups, the whole concept of identity wouldn’t make sense. We are shaping identities by combining three mechanisms: categorization, identification and comparison, as mentioned on Wikipedia. Although broadminded people like to think they do not put everyone in boxes, everyone does.

We always put people in categories, we label them. This is done by looking for signs that we associate with a certain group. These signs are the mentioned use of icons, rituals or speak. These are the social cues. For “Dutch” it’s wooden shoes and tulips. And yes, I live in a wind mill.

To be able to associate yourself with a group, we first have to divide society into groups. Identification is the part where you affiliate yourself with a group.

The affiliation is done by taken on the social groups norms and other aspects which are used by humans to label an individual to a category. With the identification you label yourself to the group. To be able to do this, you take on the cues that cause the label. Comparison is looking for differences between groups. With the group affiliation you create your identity, your place in society. For this to work you are also indicating where you are not standing. It is always a comparison between groups.

Cues And Communication.

Think of a soda can as the actual message you are trying to tell someone. Now place this can in an empty shipping container. The container makes up the cues people are looking for to interpret the message. They provide context to a message.

In a virtual and global context the shipping container, the context of the message, becomes more and more important. It is the story about cues, trust filters and needs.

Cues And Slices Of Reality

When dealing with incomplete information from unknown sources, social cues play an important role. As Malcom Gladwell explains in his book “Blink”, we only experience small slices of our surroundings. Then we go through some kind of mental database to match this slice with something we recognize.

Humans need some context around a message. We use this context to fill in the gaps, the unknowns, in the information we receive. Humans have the need for stereotyping. We need a place holder for unknown information. Even if we know this information is not correct. We need to put a value onto everything unknown. Otherwise we are becoming restless. We use stereotyping and labeling for filling an unknown mental void.

We look at cues that helps us interpret the context. If we see Dr. before a name, we know he’s smart. If he’s young, he must be naive. And cues don’t have to be that obvious and cliche. “Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction?” Do you know this quote? If you do, we have something in common, we both like the book “The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy” enough to know some of its text by heart. I would even assume we have a similar taste of humor. It’s a social cue.

Communication And Needs. And Noise.

The purpose of communication (to engage in the act of information exchange) is the fulfillment of one’s physical or emotional needs. If you are tired, you start asking around for a cheap hotel. The effectiveness of the communication is determined by the quality of the communication channel, the quality of the interaction, if you will. If there is noise on a channel, the effectiveness of communication reduces.

The risk of noise on a channel is determined by a need to cheat, and the opportunity to cheat. The need to cheat arises when there is scarcity; when you get in direct conflict with others when trying to fulfill your needs. If the entire village is competing for the same bed, asking around will probably sent you in the wrong direction.

The opportunity to cheat appears when information can be manipulated, when it is possible to provide wrong information on purpose. If information is not clear, complex or ambiguous the opportunity to cheat increases. When there is no way to verify information, when it is difficult to get feedback the opportunity increases also.

Trust-Filters.

Of course, people are aware of the risk of noise on the channel. We have some build in “trust-filters” that should guard is against cheaters on the line. Social cues also play an important role in establishing the “trustworthiness” of a person. “Trustworthiness” is in this view determined by association (is what I expect the other to be like) and similarity (is to be like me).

This works fine as long as people have the perception they can fulfill the needs on their own. However, some people need other people to find e.g. food, water or a bed to sleep. This perceived dependency on others lowers their “trust filters” for information, they are quicker to accept information, they want to believe.

Trusting People You Don’t Know.

I have more faith in a friendly clean-cut doctor in a white coat, than one in a jeans with anti-social behavior. Although. For anyone remembering Dougie Howser, MD, the 1990 television series that starred a teen aged child as clean-cut white coat doctor, I would not want him to be my physician. I would prefer House, the grumpy but brilliant doctor, who “doesn’t do white coats”.

Why do you think a certain person is more “trustworthiness” over another person? This is a relevant question. Not only when dealing with television doctors but also when operating on the Internet, or working with people you have never met.

Let me illustrate this situation with a game called The Prisoners Dilemma. In this mental exercise two inmates are planning two escape from prison. They are unable to communicate to each other as they are located in different cell blocks. Both prisoners have two options: if they work together they have a chance of escaping together. If one of them tells the guards that the other prisoner is going to escape, he will have a very high probability of escaping while to other one is almost certain to be caught. If they both decide to defect and tell the guards, they are both caught.

Facing a certain situation, a person has to select a strategy to interact with another individual. They have two options: they are going to cooperate, or they are going to be egoistic (defect). In The Prisoners Dilemma the outcome depends on the strategies chosen by both parties.

In essence it is a situation where

• if people cooperate, both have success,
• if one person is taking advantage of the other (defect) this person has an even larger benefit, but the other suffers a loss,
• if both persons defect they loose both.

If you play this game over and over again with the same opponent, you can let your selection be determined by all previous games. If a person always plays defect, you can base your strategy on your mutual history. If you know someone for a longer time, history can provide you with enough experiences to draw some conclusions.

But what if you haven’t done multiple iterations? What if you meet a person for the first time and you are confronted with a Prisoners Dilemma? Researchers call this the “one-shot prisoners dilemma”. Michael Macy and John Skvoretz, two professors of sociology, model this game by introducing the notion of “telltale signs”. In a situation like this, people are trying to determine the “trustworthiness” of others. They are trying to read “telltale signs”, look for behavior or other marks that they identify with trustworthiness. This might be as simple as being friendly and saying “hello” every time you see someone down the hall. Perhaps you have automatically more trust in someone wearing a suit, or a person with PhD behind his name. The idea is that you are trying to detect signs of trustworthiness, whatever that may be for you.

Next to this detection, the projection of your own intentions plays a role in the decision of the strategy; if you want to cooperate you are more likely to be biased into “seeing” the other as trustworthy. So, we use projection and detection as a mechanism to compensate for the lack of history one has in one-shot Prisoner Dilemma’s.

How people detect the tell-tale signs of trustworthiness is not only based upon behavioral markers that society associates with it; it has also to do with the similarity of the other with you. Persons that are more viewed as being equal or “the same” or more likely to be considered honest and sincere towards you.

This is not a one dimensional thing, people are associated with multiple social networks and groups. And every social group has its own rituals and signs that communicate its uniqueness towards the world outside the group. If you have a lot of aspects associated with a certain social group, you will more likely be considered trustworthy by members of the same group.

In short, “trustworthiness” is in this view determined by association and similarity.

Association: is what I expect the other to be like.
Similarity: is to be like me.

Telltale Signs Of A Project Manager

This makes me wonder if Project Managers, as a professional group, have tell tale signs of “trustworthiness”. If you have never had any experience with a certain person, what are the labels, the social markers you associate with a professional Project Manager?

In 2007 I asked visitors of The Project Shrink blog, project professionals, this question: “If you have 10 minutes, how do you judge a Project Manager?” Although this was by no means a scientific experiment, it provided some interesting clues.

A summary of the responses is given by this statement: “If they just use jargon from a handbook, I put them on the lower end of the scale. If they talk about the importance of stakeholders and people in general I put them on the high end of the scale. If they talk about stakeholders, they must have been in the trenches.” Note the importance of language.

If one has only ten minutes appearances do matter. The respondents hesitate to admit this, because it sounds very superficial, but it is true; people are looking for visual clues of competence, confidence and calmness. Clothes have some importance in the first impression; dress with taste, clean cut and similar to what your client is wearing are the advices in this area.

It is a cliché that a Project Manager should be a good communicator. So this is the area that gets to most attention. In the interaction the new PM should good listener, a good conversationalist that doesn’t dive immediately into “shop talk” but can converse with confidence and respect about life, the universe and everything. He should under no circumstances have a loud-mouth, heated discussion about a topic. Knowledge and opinion is one thing, in control and respectful are considered far more important.

About the messages that are exchanged in the first ten minutes people are short: people are looking for words like “you”, “we”, “our”, “team” and “support”, and are absolutely allergic to buzzwords. “Plain English Please!” as one of the respondents wrote.

Artifacts can also function as telltale signs. We all have seen people spending days behind MS Project to create a proper Gantt Chart. I have witnessed adults getting all excited when they could inform me that their project “had a risk profile of 18%”. I smelled the sweat of humans trying to fill every box in a project plan template, relevant or not, just because it is in the template. People have seen me polishing up a nice, shiny Chart. I spent 3 days creating this Monster Gantt Chart that I had to plot on A2 to get it printed. I rolled up the paper and went to my client.

This client was an senior sales person just before his retirement. He was old school, but one heck of a salesman. I rolled out my wallpaper-size plan, and guided the customer through the steps. All the time he was silent, he didn’t say one word. After a while he took the plan and threw it in the garbage bin. While taking his pen and paper he looked up and asked me: “What is it that you want me to do?” Point taken, Gantt is a Project Management icon, and not every one seems to be a PM.

Different people have different associations with tags. Because it’s all about perception, there is no “truth”.

Noise. Unreliable Social Cues.

Social cues are not reliable. They are the source of context around a message. But they are also the source of noise on the interaction channel.

For example, online personal branding is incredible powerful in communication. Personal branding is carefully crafting the image of yourself. Conscious about your mission. Radiating what you’re about. Stuff like that. Your conversation partner can look you up online before a conversation and get some context about you. A context that helps them understand your message. It is a context you carefully created.

But is it correct or not? When you yourself are curating your own personal brand online, the best we might get is a “plausible me”, a phrase coined by Laurent Haug. The context provided online is not necessarily true, it’s plausible.

Your online digital footprint, the digital trail of your online activities over the years, provides important clues. How long are you online? Do you stick with one topic or are you switching back and forth every year?

But this digital shadow of “you” might not be sufficient. It might still be curated. So the best we can do is “plausible”.

This validation issue opens the door for noise. Cues can be fabricated.

Hyperpersonal communication

Cues need to be validated. With validation we need to establish a first hand experience with our conversation partner to validate our perception, to validate our interpretation of the cues. In pure online communication this validation is the key problem. And the lack of validation is another source of noise on the channel.

There are two theories that together illustrate this issue: Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) and Hyperpersonal communication, both created by Joseph Walther, a professor of communication studies.

With SIPT Walther examines how social relationships develop online. How do you get to know someone without nonverbal cues? Without face-to-face interaction? Basically it comes down to using the online information and interaction that is available. Profiles, images, textual cues in email like language and grammar. According to Social Information Processing Theory you can develop genuine social relationships online, without face-to-face interaction. The process is only much slower.

Related to SIPT is the notion of Hyperpersonal Communication. Within this notion people that use online cues to communicate create a hyperbolic and idealized conceptualization of each other. Based upon the limited information available we create an idealized image of our conversation partner. The sender filters his cues, so he only sends socially desired information. Because the communication is a-synchronous, we can edit or correct any mistakes we made, thus making the communication stream near perfect. This process gets reinforced by feedback. Hyperpersonal communication explains why people can create very deep and personal discussions with others online, without ever meeting.

Bas de Baar is a writer who draws about people in transition. He loves to make visual maps and travel guides for the collaborators of our brave new world.