The Beeing, the Beez and the Beezness

At my college toastmasters club I am interested in the honey and not in the sting.  We as club members are developing mutual awareness of each other's strengths and values, and in turn my understanding of the club is as a hive of network intelligence.  As much as the sting captures our attention first, in a network intelligence world the focus is on value creation not destruction.

The traditional hive carries the weight of stings far more because it is full of legal people protecting the hive from possible damages.  The mentality of that hive is that damage will be done.  In medical practice doctors who damage hide behind lawyers and then patients claim for higher damages because there is zero network intelligence in that hive.  Then came along the birth of the apology movement and lawyers discovered network intelligence can actually work.

It is natural for most thinking of value to first think about protecting the hive but a focus on the sting may serve to extenuate the sting.  Compliance and regulatory matters are important but they are not the be all and end all - a cover up in the market, or suspicion makes stings worse.

Since the risk of reckless endangerment is much lower in the running of a student based club, much of my focus here continues to be on the honey and not the sting.  To get the honey I first need my club to understand what is different about existing in a network intelligence world.

The bee or human beeing is an important part of a network intelligent world.  The value in a network intelligence world is the pollination of the network.  In order to create hives of value within this network intelligence we need different types of hives, one type being the beezness.

The owners of a beezness are the beez.  The governance mandate of a beez differs on hive type, a hive governed for the market has owners who are the board, but a hive governed for a membership body has owners who are the members and a hive governed for a municipal government are the citizens.

To create a healthy system where network intelligence is whole hive thinking, the beez must understand their bee's and its relationship to hive value.  It is not the honey that is the value in a network intelligent relationship, it is the nectar.   A hive will have worker bee's, essentially the employee's that help the process of turning nectar into honey.   There are also hives that do not make any honey but are instrumental in pollination - the bumble bee is an example, whether that be public service or non-value add services not directly involving pollen.  Pollination is the seller event, but I am interested in the buying event - for I am the buyer.

When there is no bee's of any type, there is no pollination, without pollination there is no society, so sales is important, but so is the hive.  The flower here represents marketing and at this stage of my learning journey, I do not want to learn how to market to myself.  Even social media is most things marketing and it should be called "marketing media".  It is the hive that is social.

In a network intelligence world, the workers may create the hives, but it is the drones that engage the pollen.  This next piece of insight will come as a shock to those who find network intelligence an alien concept.   The employee worker and the drone customer is the same person even if the workers happens to be in a different hive.  If productivity is at the expense of wages or offshoring is a way of cutting costs - eventually the market is drained of customer value, rather than increasing this and so we so now see hives of value destruction rather than hives of value creation.

There is another relationship which is an insight that may come as a shock to those who embrace organizational and business myths.  The marketer is not the market and leaders are discovering myths that create distrust in marketers, as well as politicians who are not honey producing bees.  The wallet allocation rule is one of the examples of mythbusters.

At the club level I hope my fellow members gain a greater understanding of membership experience and we may test and articulate our own network intelligence as a hive of educational value.  As a private member body, we are the owners of our hive and we need to understand the network intelligence inherent in the club.

A major mental shift in network intelligence of in other words creating hives of value creation (where education is the primary value in our hive) is key point from a book called the Cluetrain Manifesto.  The gift that we can pick from that particular book is this :

MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS

This idea has taken a very long time to seep into the mainstream for the simple reason that most BEEZNESS ventures are not operating on a network intelligence mentality.  Instead of countering myths of marketing, business, strategy and human resource, the hold onto ideas that were formulated in the 20th Century, but not re-examined in the 21st Century.

The meme of BEEZNESS does mean business, but knowing our own business.  My honey focus on the club is based on cultivating network intelligence values, because these values are an emerging realization - they are not best practices but ideas that being born out of 21st Century practices.  This goes against the grain unfortunately of the way many other clubs are formed around a 20th Century charter, but it is not the charter that was 20th Century it is their thinking.

Every club member in our club then needs to be the BEEZ of our club, because it is a membership body and our governance arrangements are different from ownership that is in the hands of a board of directors.   We need to understand that pollination in a network intelligent world is fundamentally whole systems thinking and even if we opt to be Bees and not Beez, we must NEVER forget the human dimension, that it is HUMAN beeing and not simply beeing.

In a network intelligence world, those who support that may be a competitor but that competitor is a value-creation competitor and not a value-destruction competitor.  Collaboration equally is something I see on the same line as a value-creation collaborator and a value-destroying collaborator.

From here the hive of our particular college toastmasters needs other network intelligence minded members and that is the source of our honey, and that makes us all the BEEZ.

BE THE BEEZ - MAKE THE BEEZNESS