Social networks like Facebook, XING, Linkedin, and StudiVZ appeared because a handful of people began to turn a vision into reality very fast. They have succeeded and they have grown and grown. Suddenly these organisations feel the tensions between traditional management and innovative leadership. They were created from an idea, out of an impulse, they became successful, tried out new things, and threw all the rules over board. Mark Zuckerberg seems to be competely averse to following any rule, as I gather from his statements on data protection.

If social networks are successful, and have got their first Proof of Concept over successfully, then they get noticed by investors. The investors bring along their traditional rules of doing business and their traditional controlling-systems. [1]

Suddenly the people in these organisations find themselves confronted by a new challenge. Now they are expected to plan and guarantee success. The people at the top have to justify themselves to their investors.

As if this wasn’t completely illusory in a game that nobody has mastered yet, in a business that didn’t even exist 10 years ago, using technologies that are only just being developed by the people in these organisations.

If this pressure is withstood – in the case of Facebook Zuckerberg refused to sell and remained at the top himself - then the scales go down on the side of innovative leadership. This is not the kind of leadership everyone likes, since often it is quite dictatorial. The advantage is obvious, however: here new things are tried out. Zuckerberg does without road maps and himself creates the new paradigms for his architecture. On one side responsibility goes down as low as possible, on the other side he sometimes simply carries things through.

In other social networks, which were not so lucky as to escape the investors, the scales go down for traditional management. Here there is a demand for innovations, but then they are discussed to pieces in committees and governing boards. Middle management levels are built in, corporate structures created, and traditional reporting systems established.

The problem is, as Dieter wrote yesterday, that there has to be leadership, but at the same time social networks have to find a different kind of leadership from the one taught by traditional management methods, if they still want to be able to innovatively create something new.

And they would be ideally adapted to this, since they have evolved from the paradigm of the network. They have produced the infrastructure which is needed to collaborate over distances, while giving a voice to every individual inside the network, and creating evaluation criteria that allow the community to single out an individual and to appreciate a single achievement. Their evaluative mechanism is not hierarchical and they create leadership through followers. In this way a page or a person becomes a hub for opinions and thus a leader. Seth Godin calls these people the founders of tribes.

What would a vision for social networks look like? Social networks would have to find a way of utilizing these mechanisms within their own structures. This could mean that new features do not come from ABOVE, but are brought into play by employees and users. In that case the employees would decide on the next feature, and they would, if it looked feasible, realize it as fast as possible, and put it into the net.

If the feature was a success, it would stay in the network, if not, it would get dismantled again later. If the feature was so much searched for that more and more services needed to have it, then Management would decide whether to make it part of the functional social network platform. In this way the company would lead the Community in a direction that matches their own vision, and fits the Community.

Unfortunately reality looks different. To my mind, Germany’s social networks are losing their innovative power. They are hampered by traditional business models. Managers demand clear road maps, features have to pay their way, and customers are to get the things they demand. Team-Leaders get drawn in, the first hierarchies come into being, and there is a search for those responsible. There is pressure, not from the group, but from above, for suddenly deadlines have to be kept. Management begins to make deals with managers, without first consulting those who know better. Decisions are made centrally. Social networks turn into something internally that they pillorize externally: a boring, and self-satisfied tayloristic organisation.

It is possible to change this, and to stop this movement. Over the past 3 years we have seen how companies from the early internet age are able to gather momentum again with Scrum, the kind of momentum they had when they first began. I am talking about the big networks and portals in Germany (all the well-known German internet companies use Scrum by now – has Facebook ever tried Scrum? No idea!).

Scrum has offered an ideal start for every company on the way towards a more network oriented kind of working. Scrum has also offered these companies an elegant way out by limiting this kind of work to their development departments. But why? Why is it a problem for graphics designers, product designers, and all those,  to introduce the networking idea to their own departments, and to live with that basis of their existence, the network, inside their own company?

I have no clear answer for this, only an idea. It is a matter of power again. The network dissolves every kind of traditional view of power. Most companies see IT as a service. If I put the service people into a framework that demands more control while taking away power from them at the same time, then I will gain a lot of power. However, to question one’s own position in a network, does not only mean a loss of comfort, but a very real loss of original power. This is the weakness of any network-based strategy, and thus also that of Scrum. Scrum out-of-the-box does not have any profit to offer to middle management that could make up for their loss of power.

Companies that start with Scrum have to ‘think beyond’ Scrum, and have to deal with their structures in a holistic manner.

The day after tomorrow we will see what Jodok Batlogg has to say about Scrum and Social Networks. Let’s look forward to it.

[1] Google, if you read the Google Story aright, has escaped this dilemma because the founders, although they did take the money from the start, never let themselves be  interfered with.

[2] This is what Niels Pfläging calls modern companies  in “Führen mit flexiblen Zielen [Leadership with flexible goals] “.