I’ve been chatting to Al Robertson at Tuttle for a while now about a consulting model and process that might emerge from the network in addition to but not in competition with the small and hypernimble JFDI crowd.
Al’s a great thinker, writer and strategist, he has the interestingness of the plannerly crowd that introduce me to him and he also knows how to put a good pitch together. So he sent me the following. I was tempted to fiddle with it, but I’ve gained just enough sense to know when I can’t add anything more, so I present here unedited, for your perusal, pontification and the picking of holes. I’m starting to try this out with potential clients – ideas and introductions to more folk who might find it useful are very welcome.
The Crowd – Tribe – Team process
Tuttle consultancy is rooted in the Crowd – Tribe –Team process. Before describing what that is, we should define a Crowd, a Tribe and a Team.
The most open, freeform way of organising a group of people is as a Crowd – that is, a disparate group of people with no clearly defined internal relationships, or external goals. A Crowd is a seed. It’s full of potential, but that potential needs attention and focus to help it grow.
When Crowd members start to engage with each other, they begin to discover others who share their particular interests, or they realise that they all share a common interest set. The Crowd then begins to assemble itself into one or more, more purposeful, Tribes. A Tribe is a loosely organised group of people, united by common passions or ambitions. A football crowd, for example, isn’t really a crowd at all; it’s a football tribe.
As Tribes develop, they become more organised, and their members become more action orientated. They begin to create clearly defined aims that spring from and support their shared passions or ambitions. In order to achieve these goals, Teams are formed. Individual Teams are created with specific goals in mind, and are assembled from Tribe members with the relevant expertise or interests.
The Tuttle Club began as a Crowd, but it has now become a Tribe. Within that Tribe, individual Teams are working to complete clearly defined tasks. One Team, for example, is putting together a book on Twitter, while another has been thinking about how Tuttle can use its tribal expertise to help other groups of people. While working through that process, we’ve realised that the Crowd – Tribe – Team process can be a very useful consultancy tool.
We begin by meeting you as a Crowd of highly experienced, highly creative and highly competent people. As we engage with your business, we work with you to create a series of Tribes – groups formed around your specific business issues, made up of those most engaged by them, and with experience most relevant to them. Finally, each Tribe becomes a Team, committed to delivering clearly defined solutions to specific, carefully considered issues.
That process evolves the traditional solution-orientated consultancy model, by understanding that asking the right questions is as important as developing effective solutions. So, it brings a very broad range of expertise to bear on the process of understanding and framing those questions. This helps our clients look in new directions for highly creative, highly original and highly effective responses to their business issues, and ensures that delivery of those responses is based on an in-depth understanding of those issues.
a good three level categorisation of organisational form
may i suggest a continuum
so that people can self organise from individual
to team
to larger and larger groupings?
[...] teams wanting to do something practical that relates to those interests (on this process, more here and in upcoming [...]
It’s a fascinating area to be thinking about. On the self organisation, I wonder if Andy Gibson’s 45 Social by Social Propositions would be useful? (his draft thoughs: http://sociability.org.uk/2009/04/06/45-propositions/, my cross-bred with Clay Shirky remix: http://disappearing.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/here-come-45-social-propositions/)
[...] A lot of it draws on our careers resource Careers Tagged, which has turned out to have a way too complicated user interface (though a lot of people feed back that they still find it very useful) but the data and tagging engine for which is driving a lot of our current projects, including this one and our new Job Online, which uses Careers Tagged. Careers Tagged’s engine looks at a job selected by a user and suggests other relevant vacancies, along with a set of online resources to find out more about the background to a particular sector. The tagging behind it is crowd-sourced but from a very select crowd – the careers information offices and advisers who work for us. So the relevancy of the hits is surprisingly high. Not so much crowd-sourcing, perhaps, as tribe-sourcing, to loosely adapt a concept from the Tuttle peeps. [...]
[...] strongly with the various Web 2.0 inspired events that have been happening recently. Unconferences, Tuttle Crowd / Tribe / Team workshops, meet ups of one kind or another, and even more traditional conferences and exhibitions – all [...]
[...] that after I’d explained what we would do in some detail, Catherine agreed with me that our Crowds, Tribes and Teams methodology would be an interesting way to unpick the brief and get to something [...]