I liked Ian Leslie’s review (from a few years ago) of the book Rational Ritual, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe, which focuses on an intriguing aspect of ‘common knowledge’ which Ian summarises thus: ‘For everyone to know something is not enough to force change; what matters is that everyone knows that everyone knows’.
There’s an important difference, writes Ian, between shared knowledge and common knowledge. When I know or believe something, and you do too, we may have shared knowledge. But common knowledge arises when I know that you know and that you know that I know. The shared knowledge is made visible, palpable, discernable. And this may happen perhaps through rituals, stories or ceremonies:
‘The desire for “common knowledge” – for knowing that I know what others know, and that they see what I see – is deeply human, and what’s more, meeting it is crucial to the organisation of any society. …We are all partaking of the same reality.’
Our knowledge of what other people know enables us to act together, make things happen, and feel part of a community or group with a shared purpose. We have created many different ways of generating common knowledge because taking part in things that other people are taking part in is a powerful motivation for us as social beings. Cognitive Psychologist Steven Pinker has spoken about how understanding what other people believe is critical to social coordination (particularly when there is an element of risk involved) and that we’ve become accomplished at knowing whether something is shared or common knowledge. His experiments have shown that common knowledge supercharges coordination and collaboration.
There are some intriguing examples that Ian gives of the creation of common knowledge including email habits (cc-ing rather than bcc-ing), political and campaigning movements, conspiracy theories, and how ideas can spread on social media. He also talks about the application of this thinking to advertising – the idea of brand ‘fame’ being at its heart about us knowing that other people know that the car I’m driving is of high quality and expensive for example, or the effectiveness of a billboard coming not only from me seeing it but my knowledge that others see it too.
A clearly distinctive and differentiated set of brand values work to promote a brand because they send the same signal to everyone, not just to me, which means that the brand can benefit from a form of network effects whereby the more people that reference it and use it the more meaningful and powerful it becomes. As Ian says, this is fundamental to the value of brand advertising: ‘messages can be targeted but meaning must be mass produced’.
As I was reading Ian’s essay I was also thinking about organisational change. When I wrote about tipping points in social convention and change a while back I talked about how so many change initiatives are treated as a marketing exercise – an announcement from the CEO, a presentation and a launch date. But then everyone goes back to the day job and nothing changes.
Far better to think of an organisation as a social system and one where a ‘diffusion of transformation’ pattern can bring lasting change. Of course it’s important to announce a new vision/direction/change to the whole company, but to make change actually happen leaders then need to focus their efforts on early adopter groups that can forge a new path and demonstrate to others in the organisation what the change really means. We might think of these as missionaries, not mercenaries.
As Tom Loosemore said, this is show, not tell: ‘Build a broad movement that actually does things differently. Then shine a light on what’s been done, who’s done it, and how it was done.’ This approach makes the difference in behaviour or focus more visible to the early and late majority and more likely to then be adopted by the rump of the organisation. And as Mark Earls noted (also in the comments to my tipping point post), to ensure the effectiveness of this progression of change from early adopters to the early and late majority of the organisation, leaders need to manage the optics. To ensure that adoption behaviours become more visible, or helping non-adopters to find their own versions and embrace the change for their own reasons.
But in doing that leaders are actually generating common, rather than shared, knowledge. They are enabling a wide audience to feel that they know something that many others know. People within the organisation are partaking in the same reality.
One final point on this. Common knowledge can help drive change but the lack of it can also be a barrier to change. Ian gives an interesting example:
‘In 2011, Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, led the business into a rash restructuring that it soon had to reverse. Afterwards he discovered that senior executives had expressed doubts about his decision, but not to him, or to each other. The dissent never reached critical mass. Afterwards, Hastings instituted an online internal forum called Farming For Dissent, in which executives share their ideas and invite criticism and disagreement.’
Which goes to show that an environment that supports the creation of common knowledge is essential to change in multiple ways.
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