The new #LinkedIn #algorithm has got me down.
Join the discussion on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_resisting-categorisation-for-reasons-activity-7092044224208023552-PVEl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Organised systems want people (and things, and nature, and ecosystems) to be #legible- to fit neatly into boxes.
LinkedIn wants ‘experts’ who fit their ‘knowledge clusters’ to provide advice to other people in the same ‘professional fields’.
__
If you’re a LinkedIn #marketing professional with a profile showing your experience marketing on LinkedIn, you post about how to market on LinkedIn, with relevant hashtags — and you are read and commented on by other LinkedIn marketing people — then you will do well.
I get it. It’s a professional network, and if we’re not careful, we’ll have the culture wars, (too many) pet pictures, and more posts which are gleefully shared by @stateofLinkedIn on Twitter…
But there are two important #systemsthinking things going on here — and a human thing.
___
When you make things ‘legible’, you make them fit your boxes — but that means chopping off the rough edges — and you lose value that way.
In ‘Seeing Like A State’ by James C Scott, there’s the tale of the ‘Normalbaum’. Tax collectors had to assess the value of timber in a forest to know how much to tax it. But forests were messy, sprawling, things with real #complexity. So they encouraged ‘scientific’ forestry — neat, organised, rows of trees, a standard distance apart, looked after in a standard way — the standard tree or ‘normalbaum’
This made it *easy* to assess tax — if you knew the dimensions of the forest land, and how old the trees were, you knew how much wood was there.
But by taming the unruly, messy forest you lost a lot of the value. Fewer beasts to hunt and eat, fewer bees for honey, and reduced diversity harmed the forests. Less wood, and much less of the other uncountable things.
__
In 1968, Mel Conway wrote about how systems design tended to be done by large groups — ‘committees’.
His finding, immortalised as Conway’s Law, was:
“Any organization that designs a system… will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”
Isn’t it fascinating that LinkedIn, created by software business people, and used mainly for recruitment and marketing, sees IT and software recruitment, and marketing as it’s main categories? Those LinkedIn marketing professionals are really good at helping other LinkedIn marketing professionals (just like the people who get the most from Tony Robbins events are people who are, or who are becoming, life coaches — or coaches of life coaches).
___
The human thing is important. When the world gives us categories, we fit into them — or we move away, but lose out. Businesses do better if they fit into the categories that enable Google or Linked advertising. The more we define disciplines, the more we need the interdisciplinary and the transdisciplinary.
Where’s the space for an entrepreneur to give a perspective on garden design?
Or a poet to give insight into LinkedIn marketing?
How can we bring back these possibilities?
