Six Months of Manufacturing Enterprise 2.0 Dissent

Calibrate your range: depending on your fame, there is a baseline level of reaction you will get on social media no matter what you say or how stupid it is. Oprah will get 100x more retweets for her most inane thoughts than I will for my most useful tweet. That is your lower limit. Your upper limit depends on your skill, but will be limited at some point by your reach.

Separate your mood from your rhetorical intent (but not all the way): 10 years ago, the reason I couldn't control the level of provocativeness in my writing or the probable intensity of the reaction was that I hadn't yet developed the maturity to separate rhetorical intent from my own feelings. It is one thing to spout vituperative nonsense because you are mad about something, and quite another to (for example) dramatically posit a "War" between social media and knowledge management because you think that will start an interesting debate. On the other hand, you can get too detached from the content of what you are saying, and get addicted to the sociopathic delights of baiting and button-pushing. Don't. Stay detached enough to control, close enough to care.

Really understand your rhetorical intent: Self-awareness is key. Don't delude yourself that you are trying to foster useful dialog when all you are doing is creating linkbait to drive up your page rank, or rationalizing a desire to vent or spew venom about someone/something. The absolute best intention behind provocation is personal learning. If you are the kind who is into provocation as part of an SEO (search-engine optimization) strategy, smart people will soon tune you out, and you will find yourself surrounded by idiots and other SEOers.

Dichotomize, dichotimize, dichotomize: Your two favorite colors should be black and white, and in any given provocation post, you should talk about both and pick one. Don't insult your audience's intelligence by offering philosophy 101 lessons on the futility and falsehood of all dichotomies. Not any dichotomy will do: picking the right dichotomy to poke at is like finding a social earthquake fault-line. The latent energy has to be out there, not in your head. Usually in the form of two non-talking cliques that are silently wooing fence-sitters on some issue. A newbie mistake is to assume that any old silly post with a title like "X vs. Y" or "A or B?" will work.

Be careful about adopting polarization as a goal: Dichotomies are necessary to create fertile framings for public discourses. But if your goal is to create a deeper chasm between two sides (polarization) and more cohesion on both sides, you are basically preparing for escalated conflict. There are some who believe this is never a legitimate goal for a public discourse, but I tend to be somewhat agnostic. I am willing to believe that there are sometimes irreconcilable positions, and that you have to help move the public discourse towards a winner-take-all conflict.

Qualifications are your cadmium rods: A friend of mine has a great rule of thumb for crisp writing: round off to the nearest simple assertion. The more you qualify bald statements, the more you will dampen the response. That's not a bad thing. That's how you exercise calibrated control, like the cadmium rods that prevent nuclear reactors from turning into nuclear bombs. Baseline high-clarity assertions, where 10 words articulate 80 % of your nuanced "internal truth" position, should be your starting point. Every additional 10 words worth of qualification will get you 80% of what remains. So 10 words will create a perception that is 80% true to what you believe, 20 words will get you to 96%, and so forth. You need to put in a minimal amount of qualification based on your estimation of the sophistication of your audience, and then add more to the extent that you want to dampen debate.

Target a level of provocation that matches your own level of uncertainty: Here is a paradoxical rule: the less sure you are of your position, the more provocative you should be. If you are unsure what you believe, a highly-qualified 96% true-to-you articulation will result in a turgid, gray, useless article that merely expresses your own confusions. An 80% true-to-you articulation will create room for others to challenge and support you. But here's where newbie agent provocateurs make a mistake. If your level of confidence in your own position falls below a certain threshold (that you need to intuitively judge), you basically don't know enough to play the catalytic agent provocateur role at all, and you should shut up. Pick topics where you have more to offer than the average listener, but aren't 100% certain of your position either.

Decide what you want out of the conversation: It goes without saying that despite your best efforts at managing the ensuing conversations in your own comments sections, others' blogs, and places like twitter, the overall public conversation may not reach closure at all, may converge to multiple different conclusions in different places (or even the same place), or solidly converge to a "you are WRONG!" outcome that you still disagree with. You need to be very very modest in setting your own goals. My goal is rarely persuasion, polarization, conversion or bringing a choir closer to me. My goal is nearly always to draw my own private conclusions from the conversation, move to a more refined position myself, and bank the learning credits. Only rarely do I share my revised position in a follow-up post because that rarely serves any purpose (though I usually publicly thank/acknowledge those I learned from). The public conversation you have caused will likely have too much momentum and locked-in equilibrium positions for you to strongly influence further in the same medium. Further influence will need a higher impact medium. To the extent that I have a public-spirited goal for others, I hope others take away some private learning like I do.