Greg Dunlap  0:00  
So our guest today is Lisa Welchman. She is a digital governance consultant and the author of the book Managing Chaos: Digital Governance By Design. Community governance is something that's fascinated me for a long time. And so I'm really happy to have Lisa here to talk about governance, why it's important and how we can better manage the communities were a part of so thanks for joining us, Lisa.

Lisa Welchman  0:22  
Thank you for inviting me happy to be here.

Greg Dunlap  0:26  
So we hear people I feel like a lot of people hear the term governance a lot in a lot of different contexts and what does governance mean to you?

Lisa Welchman  0:37  
Governance for me is really about being really intentional about the ways in which we collaborate to achieve shared goals, right. So that can apply to any gathering of people that can be a government in a country can be multiple countries like you know, UN types from structures, NGO type structures, it can be a soccer team, it can be a enterprise, corporation for profit business can be a nonprofit healthcare. Girl Scout troop can be just about anything. And so it but it's being intentional about that, and figuring out how do we want to actually collaborate to achieve shared goals?

Greg Dunlap  1:24  
How much of it to you is about the how and the rules that you operate under and how much of it is about the who gets to make those decisions? So it seems like it's a lot of both.

Lisa Welchman  1:37  
If I had to lean in any direction, I would lean on the decision making. Right? I think that, you know, a lot of times when I'm working with organizations of, you know, varying sizes, and different intents, right, what the real challenge is, is that they don't know who's supposed to make the decision. Right. And so in the absence of that anyone makes the decision or part of the business that makes the most money makes the decision or the person who has the in with the chief executive officer makes a decision or decisions get made by force.

Greg Dunlap  2:11  
Right? So the person that nobody wants to deal with makes the decision.

Lisa Welchman  2:15  
It could be it really depends on the specific dynamics of the organization. But yeah, wait, the commonality is that it's arbitrary. Right. It's not and not intentional. Right. So which means sometimes people are making decisions about things that they don't know anything about, or that they're not qualified to make a decision about. Right? Or they're too uninformed to make a decision or worse yet, they don't even really understand the palette of decisions that need to be made, which is what I think you see in the technology arena, not people intentionally making bad decisions, but just having not thought it through because the stakeholder community that is sort of involved in the decision making isn't broad enough, right and not qualified. You know that this small The example of that would be, you know, developers making content decisions, because they're trying to get something done. And they're like, oh, we're just gonna put these words in the form this kind of works. Yeah. And then you've got these horrible forms that, you know, ask bad questions and give bad responses, and don't really make a lot of sense. And then the big broad cases are the big coms like Facebook and Twitter, who are basically overwhelmed and seemingly surprised by the breath of decisions that need to be made made around bringing their technologies to scale. So it's a lot of different things.

Greg Dunlap  3:33  
Would you say also say that not having clearly defined goals for what you actually want to do as an organization feeds into that as well?

Lisa Welchman  3:41  
Yeah, I mean, when, when I'm sort of working with folks to create a governing framework, the first thing that I asked them is sort of what is the scope of this framework? What are we actually making decisions about? Right? Because if we don't know what we're making decisions about it really can't help you figure out who the decision makers should be. Right? Because depending on what that is, that could be a different set of people. And what I found over the past, you know, five years, my book came out in 2015. And just doing this work over and over again, and at the time that I'd written the book, I've been doing this work for maybe 15 years. So I really thought I had a handle on it. And I think I do to a certain extent, but what I've discovered more and more as I work with larger and larger organizations, and then more and more senior level is that they don't know what that scope is. When I say what is digital inside of your organization. I kind of get a little stare. Oh, it's our websites and our marketing campaigns. Well, is it social media? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That to what about mobile, but we don't really have mobile. Okay, well, we have a couple of mobile apps. So let's throw that in. Well, is it data? Well, I don't know if it's that right. So I'm finding that the most robust part of the conversation of creating the first work isn't figuring out who the decision makers are. It's figuring out what it is that they're trying to govern. Once that's done, it's almost as if they decide who the decision maker maker should be just falls in. Right? It just becomes very obvious. Right? And so that's one of the biggest challenges.

Greg Dunlap  5:17  
Right? Because you can't make it on any of those decisions without understanding what your goals and priorities are in the first place.

Lisa Welchman  5:24  
Yeah, I mean, I think there's I think, I think goals and priorities and scope for me are sort of different, like goals and priorities feel like strategy. Right? And so knowing who's going to create the goals and priorities around what it is you're governing is important. I mean, if you take just a really simple example of just to say website, a website, that's like a plain vanilla thing until it's not right, just kind of plain old website. So the strategy behind what you're trying to achieve and the business goals that you're trying to meet by executing on that site are one thing, right? But the scope of it is just websites, right? Say, all we're going to do is govern our websites, the rest can just do whatever it wants to do, or we're just not going to deal with that right now, which usually makes no sense. So it's a little tiny bit of a difference. The scope is websites, right? And what that tells you is, okay, when we start to have these conversations, we need to have the people in the room who touch and manage and understand and fund websites. Right now, once those people are in the room, then you can start talking about the goals and priorities. So it's a little tiny nuance difference, right? Because what happens if you talk about the goals and priorities first, you may not have the right people in the room. In fact, the first governing mechanism that we figure out once we understand the scope is who is in charge of creating the strategy for this set of properties or these channels or whatever the case may be. And if it's omni channel, it's a really big group of people. It's sometimes it's the whole thing. Right. So really getting a handle on that helps you understand who's got to be in that room when those decisions are made about what you're going to do with those particular properties or channels. And so that's for some reason or another, sometimes hard for people to get that nuanced difference. And I think it's because we're so focused on execution. Right? we're so focused on what are we going to build? Right? And it's like, okay, we're, yeah, we're gonna build something, but just stop for a second. Just before we start building, can we just Can we just stop for a second? that that that indicator is really the relative youth of digital spaces? Maybe we can't say it's, you know, 2530 years now almost getting there for for digital spaces. So we can't really lean on that much longer, this kind of idea of where you are, and we're young because we're not really it just gets more and more mature. And so with that maturity, just set the pause for a second. What are we trying to do here? And who's going to be making decisions about it? Right? And just take a take a look at that.

Greg Dunlap  8:08  
Your book mostly focuses on like corporate governance for digital properties. But how would you say that the same kind of principles that you work through with those organizations apply to other kinds of communities, be they a community theater group or a open source software community or any anything else like that?

Lisa Welchman  8:30  
It applies to anything. I mean, you can it was one of the most gratifying experiences was that a colleague who used to be a client of mine, big huge company in Europe, I heard on the grapevine that they use the processes that we use to help them with their governing framework at their children's school, because the parents were making them crazy about making decisions about what they were gonna do. And so they came up with a governing framework. It's not complicated. This is what teams do. It's what football teams do. And this is what, what we do when we organize, we figure out who's gonna make the rules. Who's gonna make decisions, referees, right? And what roles do people play in this game that we're playing together? So this is not some kind of fancy pants thing. There is nothing that we do. Or how about this? I won't say nothing, because as soon as you say that, someone raises their hand and says, What about almost everything that we do is governed. It might not be governed well. And the the vast example of the different different governing mechanisms and this isn't a political statement, but an obvious one is the pandemic. You can see who governs well and who doesn't. Who is ability who has the ability to actually bring their resources together and achieve the shared goal of either flattening the curve or getting this under control so that we can get to the other side to the vaccine. We're seeing this array of different styles of governing globally, right, and different priorities and different choices that are being made. So every situation is governed. It's just not be may not be governed well, right. And so people fool themselves into thinking that because they didn't formalize the governing framework around things that they're creating and putting online, that there is none. It just means that there's an informal one, and that maybe developers are making some decisions that maybe they shouldn't be making. Or maybe they should, I don't know, but they just people are making decisions, right? And they're figuring out ways to collaborate. It just hasn't been designed. So it's arbitrary. And the bigger you get, the more crazy stuff that can come out of a system that's poorly designed a governing system that's poorly designed, or informally created.

Greg Dunlap  10:52  
The pandemic is a really interesting example to me because it's an example of how you know ... A lot of ways choosing not to govern something is a form of governance, right? Because there's, there's a group of people who are saying, you know, the best way out of this is to not do anything and live our lives. But that's a choice that you're making. You said you did a keynote at Drupal con several years ago. And one of the things that you said in there is that doing nothing is doing something. And and I feel like we see that trickled down into our communities too. Like I'm a member. I'm involved in competitive pinball. And one of the things that we've been talking about is when is it going to be safe for us to hold events again, and those same discussions are playing out in this little niche hobby that I have is are playing out in the nation as a whole?

Lisa Welchman  11:46  
Yeah, I needed to bring it even closer into the internet in the web. Last year, there was the some kerfuffle over the selling of the .org, the management of the .org domains remember that, ISOC right? And what I found really interesting because I'm on the I saw policy list, right? And so I saw that the minute it came out, I saw that and then I watched as people just back and forth. It was like literally like cannon fire over the bay. I live in Baltimore. So everything's like Fort McHenry, the name but so, you know, I'm just, this is volleying back and forth as people are attacking each other. And it became really clear to me that it was not clear who was allowed to make that decision. Right, that they themselves didn't know, because some people were saying, you don't have a right to do that you should have asked the community. And I thought, well, they don't really have a governing framework that's clear around that. Right. And so there was a lot of strong arm and I think it ended up being the case that they didn't sell it. Or if they did, there were some various oversights that were put in place and pardon me, I just, I didn't even think I was going to bring this up. So I don't have notes in front of me. But the point was that I was like, wow, this is not government. Right, and the whole world wide web and internet is just a little bit of a free for all in that space. So if there's it's, it's not a surprise that some of the big players in that space also don't govern particularly well. And like I said before, to a certain extent, you can say this is new, right? You can say this is new. We didn't know what we were doing. That flies for a little bit, because you can't govern something that doesn't exist. Right? So you kind of have to put stuff out there first, right? And then figure out, Okay, this is what we're doing with it, how do we govern it? And so my argument is, before you bring something to massive scale, just kind of think about it. Like what would happen if this got bigger? What could go wrong? What could go right? Who's going to make decisions about this? Who's going to make decisions and it doesn't mean you don't move. It just means that you shouldn't be surprised, right about the types of things that might happen because you're scaling your tools. Your functionality or your event, right? And then if something does happen that's in the not pleasant or bad camp, you should be prepared to address it because you knew it was a possibility. Right? And so that's where I get really annoyed with, you know, some of the big comms, because when they're sitting there going, like we didn't know, and I'm like, why didn't you know? I mean, like, it's not like I could see it right, so other people could see it. So it's almost feels like willful ignorance on a certain to a certain extent. And so that's gonna have to get taken care of one way or another. But if we hark back to sort of your pinball event as well, it's the same type of thing. Do you know who in your community is actually going to make that decision? Are you going to try to make a decision collaboratively? What does that really mean? I'm very suspicious of collaborative decision making. I'm not suspicious of collaborative conversation before you make a decision. Right. I think they need to bring a lot of voices in But then at some point, it should be clear who makes the decision. And I think a lot of times, that's also where people fail. Like they sort of get their closest buddies in and make a decision. And then it's uninformed. Right? It's an uninformed decision when they had that opportunity to just be really broad and ask questions. And, you know, the excuse people will say is, well, we're agile. Right? And it's just like, nothing's agile, I'm sorry. I mean, I, you know, I've worked with big organizations, and they'll say stuff like, um, you know, we don't really have time to govern, because we're moving super fast, right? And then Tick tock, tick tock, four or five years later, they'll call me and they'll go, yeah, yeah, you know, okay, yeah, we're ready to work on it now. And their rationale for moving too fast was something like we're going to do a big redesign, or we're going to re platform the web content management system, four or five layers years later, they haven't done the redesign, and they're on the same stupid content management system to get off of and there are argument is we have to move fast, it just doesn't move that fast. Right? It just no content moves fast, right? Like content might change on a platform. But a lot of the big, chunky pieces that operate digital, they don't move that quickly. Right? And even if they do, do they really have to, or if you just kind of pumped yourself up into this, I believe in Agile world, which, you know, I have no problem with moving quickly, but quick and not say it's not good.

Greg Dunlap  16:27  
Well, I think you can move quickly and but you can still do it with intentionality. Right? When I think about the problems of any community that grows very quickly, be it a dotcom or a web forum or what have you, I see a lot of the problems with governance there being that either they never intended to grow that large, or they intended to grow that large, but because they were small, they didn't think it was a problem until it was too late.

Lisa Welchman  17:03  
Right? And you know, I think the latter of what you said rings very true for a lot of organizations, but I also don't have a lot of sympathy. That's a very well, here's the thing. That's a very sort of adolescent view. And when you are impacting people's lives, you're not allowed to be like that, right? There are no consumer products or consumer goods that are not sort of web based things. Baby strollers, cars, you name it that are allowed to be unsafe. And the excuses. "Oh, we didn't know." It's weak. It's a weak, weak position for people to be in.

Greg Dunlap  17:51  
You don't take $80 million of venture capital money without intending to grow to the scale that you'll be impacting people in that way.

Lisa Welchman  18:00  
That's right. And because we're 25 - 30 years in now, for some organizations, people who were 20 when they start these business, they're getting older. And so they can't even use young and dumb anymore. Right? And it's not safe. I'm working on a short book with Andy Vitale, called Designing For Safety. And it's all about what does it mean to be safe online? And what do we have to think about in our process of creating things online? What do we have to think about when it comes to safety? What does it mean to be safe? And certainly there are ethical implications. There's product safety, and so I'm learning a lot about Consumer Product Safety, right and wondering how some of that stuff may actually apply to things that we create and put online. These are products, right, but they're tangibly very different, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes we have options. Autonomous driving, right? So it's really quite an interesting and rich space, particularly when you get this integration of digital functionality. So maybe not so bad when it comes to, you know, your Wi Fi enabled washing machine, but it starts a little crazy with your Wi Fi enabled oven. And safety, right? There's just a real interesting set of things. And then there's just the data flow for the big social media giants of just, you know, what even is that? And how do you control for that? So I'm doing a lot of reading, to try and understand how that's worked in other areas, and what might apply and what doesn't apply and what is genuinely unique about the experiences that we're creating now. So hopefully, that'll be interesting.

Greg Dunlap  19:52  
I think the concept of safety is really interesting and especially if you take, emotional or personal safety into the equation, because there's been a lot of focus on that in the last few years, but I also feel like a lot of especially smaller or slower growing communities, like ... I got into pinball because it felt very safe to me to have a place where I could nerd out about this specific thing. But as it grew, the concept of what safety meant for a broader spectrum of people changed a lot. And if I feel like if a lot of groups thought about that earlier, when they were smaller, then that growth wouldn't be nearly as  tumultuous as it ends up being.

Lisa Welchman  20:44  
Yes, I think you're right. And I also believe that there are certain things that get sacrificed with growth, like certain intimacies. And I think that's just the state of affairs. I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong or anything like that. I think it's just the state of affairs. It's kind of like making one really nice plate of food for two, bespoke, and cooking for 500. It's just different. It can be the same meal, but one of them might have more nuance of seasoning, right? Or you can get it really customized to you. You can look right at the cook and say, "I don't like capers." So don't put the capers on mine. You can do things like that when you're small, that you can't do when you're doing things at scale. And so my argument has always been, it's not don't scale or don't be small. I don't even have an opinion about that. We're going to get a variety pack of things in the world. But if you're going to scale big you have certain responsibilities. And one is to be very clear about what you're doing, and at least have a conversation about how this might impact the people that interact with what you're doing. Whether that's pinball afficionados at scale or whether that is social media at scale. If you don't have that conversation, I guarantee you, when you bring something to scale, things will happen that you didn't intend. Right? And so then the question is, whose fault is it? And you know, a lot of times big company people will say, "Well, nobody knew." It's like, well, that's not true. Not thinking about it and not taking the time to think about it isn't the same as we didn't know. Do you know what I mean? Like it's willful not knowing. And so that's the part that really kind of makes me crazy and you know, in a smaller community like your pinball community, you might, in that conversation of understanding what happens when You bring things to scale, you might decide, I don't want to bring it to scale. I don't want to shift, right? I don't want to have to shift. We really like the small community. The whole point is small community. I mean, a little teeny tiny thing. Maybe this isn't the same thing. And I might get in trouble because maybe I don't know something. So I hate to say it, I'm very green. But the one place where I'm not particularly great is I love bottled water. Right? And my favorite bottled water is Badoit from France. Well, I can't really get that one in the US anymore. And there's a guy in my building who's French, and I asked him about it. And he said, the French government decided to stop exporting so much, because they wanted to be able to give it to people in France and they just couldn't bring it to scale. Do you know what I mean? They made a choice, right? Instead of saying, "Okay, we'll make fake Badoit." They scaled back and made a decision not to do that. And so I think more people could do that. But you know, that's really hard to do in the US, because we're all about how big and bad can you get and how fast right?

Greg Dunlap  24:15  
Yeah, the keynote, I referenced earlier that you did at Drupalcon, it was called The Paradox of Open Growth and I feel like it touches on a lot of those issues. One of the things you talked about is this balance between openness and control. People want a very open and participatory community, but that rebels against control. But as those communities grow, the need to have that control becomes greater and greater. And you're right, choosing not to grow and saying we're just going to be this and that's it is a choice you can absolutely make and it may be the appropriate one. And I think that may be one of the reasons why a lot of those communities struggle with governance as they grow is because they they don't understand what they're getting into when they choose to grow. They just sort of say we're gonna grow and go do it.

Lisa Welchman  25:21  
Well they think that if this is really great, if we do it more, it'll just be greater.

Greg Dunlap  25:25  
Right? It'll be the same thing, but bigger with more money and more people.

Lisa Welchman  25:29  
But that's not how it works. And this also ties back to one of the things that you mentioned earlier on in our conversation, which is, what are you trying to achieve? When I think about a digital strategy. I really think it's deciding how we're going to sort of exploit the technology of the internet and the web, to get whatever it is we're trying to get. It might be money, it might be saving lives, it might be whatever that target is, right? That's what it is that you're trying to do. I think a lot of people, when they don't define what they want, organizationally, like in your whole community, what's your guiding principle? What is it that you're trying to be when we grow up? Because if you knew that, and then you started having this conversation about bringing to scale, you could always be looking into the side and saying, do these things go together? We can't actually honor our principles and grow to this size. And so what that might do is lead to some other level of creativity. And you might say something like, "Okay, well, we can't grow in one big chunk, but maybe we can do regional stuff in a way right?" And then you can maybe start to get creative and figure out well, okay, we, we want to hold our values and we want to grow. So maybe we need to shift the way that we operate in some fundamental way so that we can hold on to that. But it's different. And that's where there are huge opportunities that I think a lot of big companies just miss, right? That's where the innovation comes in. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't do it. It just means that you probably ... maybe you can't grow and be exactly the same way you are now. Or strategically, when you're thinking about who do we want to be when we grow up. Who do we want to be when we grow up for a for profit business should include a number, right? When are we profitable enough? It doesn't make sense for us to you know ... let me let me find a better way to put this. Why are we always balancing assuming that maximum profitability, right is an okay place to be, an okay reason to be unethical, as opposed to saying "We're making really good money here. People like to work here. Our customers like us. And yeah, we have to stay competitive, but staying competitive doesn't necessarily mean making the most money." And so I understand the stock market, I understand the way business works. So I'm not saying that naively, I'm just saying, that's a choice. And there are a lot of small business owners that make that choice. Your local plumber, who just decides to be the one person plumbing business with one of their kids, yeah maybe they could get bigger, but they like the control or they like the sense of family or they like their other values that counterbalance that. And so I think, you know, the web could enable so many different ways of working and so many different ways of being, and it could create so many fundamental shifts, and I think we're seeing a little bit of that in the pandemic, people working from home and that's challenging. I've never been more glad that my child is an adult right? It's the best of all possible worlds. He lives nearby. So we can mask wave at each other, but I don't have to worry about schooling or university or any of those other types of things, balancing it with your work. I really feel for people. But I also feel that there's really on this cusp of just like, can we break through that and go, "Whoa, how could we engineer this better. How can we engineer this sort of thing better." And so if you haven't noticed, I'm all about the intentional design of things. And I know sort of UX people are all about that as well, but also people systems, right? Like, the way that we work together, the way we talk to each other, the value systems that we hold around each other and these technologies that we weighed in the internet and the web could be an immense enabler for the greater good. That was always the intent. I feel like we've maybe lost a little bit of sight of that and tried to just sort of pop it on to the old system of hierarchical capitalism that has as its goal the maximum amount of money and look, I'm all about having some money, right? It's not that. It's just the maximum at any cost thing always seems to get people in trouble. And so if you can hold on to your principles of what you want your organization to be like, and actually design governing mechanisms around that, and know when you've won, then you're good. If you don't do that, you'll always be like chasing money, chasing power, or whatever? You'll be chasing some arbitrary thing that you didn't really intentionally need to do, but that's what you're doing.

Greg Dunlap  30:51  
It's interesting. This is the third one of these podcasts that I've recorded, and it's the third one that eventually gets to capitalism. It's interesting how so many of these small issues that we see interpersonally relate to the greater systems that we live in. It's fascinating to me.

Lisa Welchman  31:14  
Well, if I have a fault, which I have many of, but that you would care about, it is that I operate in a gray area. I understand intersectionality. I understand complexity. I think because part of my job is to go into a large organization and ingest from 80 or 100 people over the course of a week information about how they work. And so I see all this diversity of opinion of people who think they're doing the same thing but aren't really doing the same sort sort of thing. And so, you know, there's nothing wrong with tempered capitalism, right? And there's nothing wrong with tempered socialism. There's something good to be plucked from everything, or almost everything, because I'm sure there are absolute no no's, right. But there's something good to be plucked from a lot of different systems and again, just intentionally designing what you want, right? Instead of just saying, "Oh, it's just all out capitalism. Oh its just all out socialism." This binary way of thinking makes me crazy, because nothing works like that. Everything has subtlety to it. People can't do that for some reason or another. I don't know why. Maybe if I were a psychologist, I would, but I don't.

Greg Dunlap  32:53  
We've talked a lot about the kind of changes that we see in governance over time as communities grow or shift. I've been involved in online communities since back in the pre-internet days, like calling BBS's in the 90s. And I feel like there's always in any community I've been a part of, there's a point at which things go from being very like,  everybody's together and on the same page, to everybody's kind of starting to question the whole point of the thing, and it's usually tied to growth. Do you do see any signals or signs that a community is starting to reach a tipping point where maybe it's time to start thinking about these questions more seriously, before they get into bigger problems?

Lisa Welchman  33:51  
Wow, that was a really loaded question. And what you asked me at the end was not where my head was going with it. So I kind of have to back up. So I'll just say my first philosophical point, which is, nothing is permanent, everything's always changing period. Right? So businesses will go in and out of business, or teams will form and fall apart. Unfortunately, that's the way it is. Thinking that something's going to mainstay in its same shape and form forever, it's just not real, right? So I think for an organization to understand that, and figure out how to sustain themselves over time, which means flexibility. And so when you think about when should an organization consider governing, it's like, as soon as you can, right? Because its your best hope of being able to sustain something over the long term, which is actually a sort of unnatural thing to do. I mean, trees and plants, human beings, everything goes through a life cycle, right? They come together, they fall apart. They come together, pull apart. So if you're trying to do something that's sort of unnatural, which is to sustain something over the long haul, maybe past its point of relevance, you're going to have to intentionally govern and make decisions for sustainability. I mean, a really good example of that is the newspaper industry. At a certain point, you know, they go, here comes the web and the internet. They were like, very cool. Let's put all of our stuff online for free. Oh, wait, that wasn't a good idea. A lot of them went down in that.,When you watch that organic movement, they had to make some decisions about who was making the decisions. What's the primacy of digital? Do we put in a paywall? How do we put in a paywall? In reality, that idea of this folded piece of paper being delivered kind of went out the door, and so the ones that have made it were the ones that were able to govern and push themselves through by making some sometimes really tough choices. And so that governance is there for sustainability. Not just accountability for what you're making, but for sustainability, something that is not so attached to what you're creating but more attached to the values and intent of the organization. The other mechanism of an organization that ought to be doing that is the board. If you have a board of directors or some kind of oversight committee that's not operationally in, but just going "Oh, wait a minute." We see early in the dotcom days, boards just failing and the example I use in my book and everybody uses, you know, Blockbuster versus Netflix. They just didn't get it. They just didn't see that sustainability. So these governing mechanisms are there as  the skeleton that's going to exist throughout the lifecycle of your business or organization, as people fall away, as decision makers swap in and out because somebody retires or comes back in, and that's the thing that is sustaining that. So the sooner you can get that in, the better. And the more that you can think of it not as a control mechanism that's going to force people to make certain types of decisions, but the backbone that you can build your operational model on, the better. The sooner you can really figure that out, even if the early governance model is "we do everything collaboratively and these three people make all the decisions." Maybe that's the first governing model. It grows and changes a little bit as you shift.

Greg Dunlap  37:50  
Yeah, the newspaper industry one is really interesting to me. I have a journalism degree and I got my start in the Drupal community at one of the major metro newspapers. It really kind of to me ties together how earlier I was talking about goals and priorities versus governance, but like your goals and priorities and your values and your governance model are really intertwined. Because I know at the newspaper that I worked at, one of the problems that I saw there was I felt like they didn't focus on what their core value as an organization was. They were much more focused on how can we keep what we've built? And this was a family newspaper, so that was almost more complicated. Rather than saying, look, we have to face the reality of where we're at. And if our core value is to deliver the information that our community needs, then let's look at what we have to do, even if it's painful, to continue to deliver that core value. And they had a very strong governance model and they understood who was in charge and the board and stuff like that. But because they never really aligned that back to what I would have interpreted as their values. None of that really came together. They acted very reactively. And they're, you know, now kind of a shell of what they were even five years ago. So it's interesting to me how no one of those pieces is more important than the other, they really all have to act in concert with each other.

Lisa Welchman  39:31  
Right? And what you're describing, to me sounds very simplistically like fear, which honestly, I absolutely hate. If I owned a newspaper when the web came out, I'd be scared too, and to be blunt about it, hat's why some people don't make it. And some organizations don't make it. That fear keeps them from making good decisions. Right. So that's hard, Lisa. Softer Lisa would say, Wow, what a really tough spot to be in. You've made your money this way for 40-50 years or however long and this is the kind of business that you know how to run. Here comes this upstart technology. And yeah, I can kind of see what's happening. But the business model around how to make money from it doesn't exist yet. And maybe I'm not creative enough, or I don't know enough about the technology to invent that myself. Not everybody's got that creativity. Not everybody's got that creativity to look at a new technology and jump. And so knowing that to say, Hey, you know, we're not we're not bleeding edge. You can still put a governing framework or strategy in place. It allows you to actually look at the indicators that matter so that you know when you're in trouble. You can still manage yourself and a lot of organizations do is they just are like ... la la la. Fingers in their ears. They don't want to look at it. And then it's too late. So what I tell people who maybe don't really want to govern who say, you know, we're B2B, we make screws, or whatever the case may be. It would like, okay, but get ready, have a governing framework in place. Here are the metrics that you should be paying attention to, to see if you're getting ready to tank. Wide eyed, clear eyed, understand what's happening in your space, particularly as it relates to digital disruption. And by definition, direct disruption is something that you can't see, but a lot of times you can. You can see it coming for five, six, ten years before it actually does its sort of death row. So there's no reason not to have your eyes open. Even if you figure you don't want to be an innovator, but a lot of people they just really, they don't want to see it. They don't want to see the truth. And I think even with some of the ethical things that we're seeing in social media, that's the case. They saw it. They just didn't want to deal with it and the implications that that would mean for their poor business model. And so it's just ... it's just people.

Greg Dunlap  42:24  
Yeah and I didn't mean to imply, you know ... I worked at this paper, and it was a family paper. And I wouldn't want to make those decisions either. Like, I fully acknowledge that, especially for an organization like that, where many of the people have been employed there for 15-20 years, a decision to say, we're just going to become smaller and leaner to deal with the real world and that's going to mean losing a lot of you who have been part of our family for this long. I mean, I would be crushed to make those kinds of decisions too. But it comes back to what we were saying before, the whole thing of being reactive versus proactive. The choice to do nothing is still a choice, right?

Lisa Welchman  43:07  
That's correct. The choice to do nothing is still a choice. And so you shouldn't be naive about that and the consequences of refusing to look at the consequences of your behavior, whether that's an individual a business, a nonprofit organization, a Girl Scout troop, or I don't know. I was a 12 year old girl scout, I keep bringing them up. But you know, the consequences of not understanding the impact of your behavior. Like that's just not okay, that's not mature. That's not what mature people do. That's what children do. That's what adolescents do. And I feel like the industry of technology and digital spaces is moving out of adolescence into adulthood and it's just not gonna fly anymore.

Greg Dunlap  44:06  
And I was just gonna say, I feel like a lot of the pain and struggle that we as a society are feeling right now are the result of those decisions. You look at what the impact of not having the journalistic institutions that we had in the McCarthy area is giving us now, or the impact that the decisions that the major social media players, many of these very well documented at this point, are having on real people's lives, en masse and individually. And you know, that impact is is very much tied to people's decisions not to make tough choices about how they're governed or what they're doing.

Lisa Welchman  44:47  
Yeah, or refusing to look at or believe that because they wish they weren't making a harmful tool. That coupled with a lot of money is a powerful position two be in, it means they can do it for longer. Right? Poor people can't do that. Right? It doesn't work for them. But wealthy folks can and wealthy businesses and poor businesses can't do that. Right? It really is revealing when you get into situations like this. So when I see this much churn in the world, I am simultaneously terrified and excited. It's kind of a sublime type of experience, because you know, that change is on the way. But you also know that its like when you've got your foot in on the clutch, and you're not sure if you're downshifting or up, right? Like you're coasting, you could go any way, and you're not sure what gear it's going to be in. And that's where I feel like we are on a lot of different fronts globally right now, politically, socially, and in the technology world that I work in and love so much. And so I think there's a really good opportunity for folks to be really intentional about where they push back here. Right? And we should really be mindful and smart about the choices that we make. And hopefully the leaders of these organizations will realize that the jig is up. Right? You're not a teenager with the car keys and mom and dad's gonna get you out of trouble. You are the grown up, and you need to act like the grown up.

Greg Dunlap  46:28  
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the there's been a lot of damage caused by the time that we've gotten to what is finally developing into kind of a day of reckoning for those organizations. But, you know, this is this is why people should be thinking about this stuff earlier.

Lisa Welchman  46:44  
Yeah. Well, that's what I've always said.

Greg Dunlap  46:49  
What do you what do you see as kind of the major changes in how organizations or communities should govern themselves? In the five years since Managing Chaos has come out, what is changed? And how has it impacted the work that you do?

Lisa Welchman  47:08  
That's a really good question. And I think it's related to what we're talking about. Well, no, actually, let me take it in a different direction. I think one of the things that's been the most interesting for me over the past five years is who it is that calls and asks for help. And what I see, most interestingly, is that it's usually a larger, more mature and pre web and internet organization that already has mature governing mechanisms in place for everything else? Who's kind of going, Oh, yeah, we need to add this into the pile of things that we are governing. So I'm seeing that sort of big global multinational push, it's kind of like maybe their quality  isn't the best, which that's a whole other different story of what they're putting online. But they're really wanting to get their arms around particularly the policy space. And make sure that like ... employee workspaces, that's a really hot area right now in terms of all these people working from home, and what are the implications of that, and the technologies that support that. So I see a lot of sort of maturity in that area. What I don't see, which is not what you asked me, is this engagement from these big dotcom players, and I'm not just picking on Twitter and Facebook. All of them. No big online catalogs, people who have a largely digital first business, really stepping into this maturity space, and understanding that they are the big bad businesses of the day. And that they need to behave in that way in terms of how it relates to their employees and the types of safety mechanisms that they put in place. And so if I were to characterize it as anything, it's almost like they're stunned. It's almost like they're stalled. So if you already had a mature sense of governance, you're going, "Yeah, I need to do this." And they're not doing a great job, but they're at least going, Yeah, governance is a thing, and I need to do it. But what I see in the digital spaces is people who were really into agile, they're going "Oh, wait, agile got us into this mess. Now, what do we do?" They're literally like deer in headlights. That's what I'm sort of feeling in this space now. And I think it's going to take a couple or more years for people to just really understand the impact of what they've done, and their participation in it. Because I think when you realize that, yeah, I was, you know, responsible for just mindlessly putting up functionality and not considering the impact that it might have on people and that you participated in that? There's a shame that comes along with that, and trying to back out of it or get out of it or excuse making it. So I feel like there's a lot of excuse making now or people are just silent in a corner. So maybe I'm not really answering the questions you asked me, but I think that's the only answer that I have. I'd like to say, "Oh, yeah, everybody's governing, you know, they're seeing it, it's a real thing." I think they're still in the part where they're a little bit shocked at how off the rails it's gone and don't know what to do to get it back on. I mean what do you think?

Greg Dunlap  50:36  
I think the reference to agile is really interesting, because, you know, Facebook in particular has had this mantra of move fast and break things. And I think that the reckoning that the major digital players are coming to is that move fast and break things impacts people's real lives. And that can be true of Facebook or Twitter or Google or Amazon, especially when you consider like now, Amazon is in some ways, for better or worse, kind of an essential service now. Any company that's offering delivery of goods online during the pandemic is to some extent, kind of an essential service. And a lot of these people who have put together these digital properties think, "Oh, this is fun for people to play with, and blah, blah, blah." And what they've turned into is very, very different. And when we talk about the rise of agile methodology, which was driven out of a need to develop things in a way that was in an ever changing world, out of the software engineering community, but I think that when applied any farther than that starts to create real damage. And if we talk about what's been different in the last five or 10 years, I would not disagree at all that that's a huge part of it.

Lisa Welchman  51:09  
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. Agile is an operational methodology, its not a business model.

Greg Dunlap  52:17  
To build software.

Lisa Welchman  52:19  
Right? Right. It's an operational model. It's not a business model. But when your whole business is a product that's built with agile, those things get conflated. And people don't understand the difference between the two of them. And so I think people are starting to get that and to be kind of understanding, or I hope a bit understanding of it, is that you know, as I said earlier, you can't govern what's not there. My challenge isn't that people didn't come in and say okay, lets write a governance model and now let's build something that kind of doesn't make sense. It's that they built stuff and even when the indicators started to show that maybe it wasn't quite right, they just kept going. I mean, there are so many different inflection points in the development process for a lot of big dotcoms where they could have slowed down down and said, "Oh, you know what, we're getting kind of big here. Let's just check on a couple little things." It's kind of like, you know, when people talk about accessibility. It's really better to do it in the design phase than to add it on afterwards. And so now what they have to do now that the business model is all juiced up and pumped up with money coming through all these different slots, some of which are unethical, now they have to fix it.

Greg Dunlap  53:52  
But of course, turning off those faucets after they've already been opened is much more difficult.

Lisa Welchman  53:56  
Of course, it's upstream versus downstream, right? So it's easier to do something upstream. Like just do it at the closest to the conception point is possible. Now, some would argue, and they would be right, that that can stifle some innovation or the earlier you govern, the less juicy things can be depending on your government framework, right. I mean, Apple was different when Steve Jobs was alive. They had a benevolent dictatorship and it worked for it. And it came out with all these innovative products and services, but that was tied to his personality and his way of being and design elements that he worked with Jony Ive. That was a governing model. Maybe not the one people would think it was, because it was really quite tight.

Greg Dunlap  54:49  
Not necessarily the best for the people who were employed at Apple either.

Lisa Welchman  54:53  
That's right. That is correct. And so here's the thing, you can't go backwards. So what can happen is dotcoms that are starting now can look at their older brothers and sisters and think about them and say, hey, maybe we're not going to make that mistake. Those organizations can do that. The bigger ones are just going to have to make some very difficult choices about who they want to be. That's going to be a challenge. They're publicly traded you know, it's much harder to do it now than it was. Downstream is harder. There are aspects of some of those business models that if you wrote them down on paper would just look unethical. So what does that mean? Like, what are you going to do about that? So in some ways, it's a very clear picture. And in some ways, it's a very murky picture? And so it really depends on how you're coming. If you're coming at it from an ethical perspective, it's a very clear picture. If you're coming at it from "I'm the board, and we're trying to keep this stock price up" it looks completely different. And so there's the fight. Right there.

Greg Dunlap  56:15  
Especially at scale, because those decisions are so much different when your user base is 100 million people than they are when they're 1 million or 100,000.

Lisa Welchman  56:26  
And there's complexity in it. I mean, I shut down my Facebook account because I could and it's not something that I use for business. I'd been thinking about it for a couple of years. And I was just like, I'm personally fed up, I'm not going to do this anymore. But then there are people in the communities that are concerned that leverage that platform as well. And it's so pervasive. It is not incorrect to say, shut down your account. don't give them any of your data, which is basically you're the product, right? I get that. I even believe that personally. But as a governance consultant, I look at that and I go, it's complex. There's not a single organization that I've worked with that doesn't have complexity like that. And I've worked with some really good, ethically focused organizations. So it's not just the evil demon Facebooks of the world that have this type of complexity in the system. Everything is this complicated. And so the question is, who do you want to be as an organization? What are your values? And are you holding true to them? And what it looks like now for some big dotcoms is this negative way of being ... or perceived as negative, that's judgmental language ... but perceived is is that they're comfortable with being that. That's what it appears to be right now. And then people are saying, you're articulating that loudly and then people get to vote with their feet. But it's really challenging because I run my son's soccer club on Facebook where all my friends are. There's all this complexity comes in. And people are like, well its a utility and it really ought to be. They start talking about it like it's a social service and not a for-profit business. So I found all of that fascinating. And I don't pretend to know what the answers are, which is why I'm not a really great pundit because I refuse to just kind of throw down the hammer. On one side, personally, I act. But as a consultant, if that differentiation makes sense to anybody, I just kind of I have to look at the complexity and see what's going on. Because there are very, very few perfect systems and very few perfect people in the world. And so that's why having a governance framework that helps to support the intent of the organization, and being clear about the intent of the organization, is crucial. Because otherwise, it's really just kind of like a spit bite right? You don't even know what you're fighting over. And so that's one of the challenges to me. It's just one of the challenges and interesting things I think about working in this industry in general. There's so much new coming up and you know, to sound more hopeful, so much incredible opportunity to rebuild lives, and the ways of being with each other, that are just more positive, more empowering, and kinder, to be honest, honest with you.

Greg Dunlap  59:34  
I think that that positive note sounds like a great place to wrap on, because I'd like to wrap more conversations on positive notes right now. So you mentioned that you're working on a new book. Could you tell us about that, and maybe how people can find you online if they want to learn more about the work that you're doing?

Lisa Welchman  59:58  
Sure. Well, I'll do the second one first because it's easier. If you want to get in touch with me http://lisawelchman.com works. I've got online digital governance training courses which are at http://digitalgovernance.com. And if you want to listen to some music I wrote, I have a SoundCloud and my name's scientificease. The book that I'm working on with Andy Vitale, its working title is Designing For Safety and it's really going to try and take on understanding what it means to create safe spaces online and things that people who design and develop these spaces need to take into account during the development lifecycle to make sure that we sort of don't end up in places like the places that we are now.

Greg Dunlap  1:00:48  
I think that sounds absolutely fantastic and I can't wait to see it because I'm sure that like Managing Chaos, it'll apply not just in these corporate digital worlds, but to all sorts of different models and ways that people get together. So I'm sure it'll be really valuable. Do you have a give a timeline for that?

Lisa Welchman  1:01:09  
Early next year? Hopefully. That'll be when it comes out. But you know what, there's a pandemic. But I guess that's all the more reason why I should be able to, you know, write a masterpiece, especially since I'm writing it with someone should be easier, right?

Greg Dunlap  1:01:26  
Sure. Of course. Yes. Famous last words. 

Lisa Welchman  1:01:31  
Yeah. It's a governance model. 

Greg Dunlap  1:01:38  
Thanks a lot for coming in and talking to everybody. It's been really great to talk to you and I'm a big fan. So just thanks again for coming in.

Lisa Welchman  1:01:46  
Thanks for having me. Sure.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai