The term symbiosis in biology refers to different species living closely together in a way that is usually1 mutually beneficial. I'm using the term to refer to mutually beneficial arrangements between groups of people. Successful organizations operate in a state of symbiosis with their customers or members. Reciprocity can go beyond “I give you money and you give me a product or service”, though that is often the baseline needed for organizational survival. Sometimes referred to as “win-win,” creating symbiosis means looking beyond selfish motivations of “how much can I extract from you?” towards creative ways to expand value for everyone involved.

Often one of the best ways to come up with the sorts of arrangements that increase symbiosis is through participation. Having a better understanding of how to meet the needs of your stakeholders will often reveal ways your organization can provide more value.

It's also possible to look for symbiosis beyond your closest stakeholders and out into the surrounding community and wider world. For instance, finding ways to reduce energy use is beneficial for the environment but also for your expenses. Keep in mind, however, that true symbiosis goes beyond superficial PR stunts which will eventually be exposed as shallow and self-interested. Look for authentic ways to live out your stated organizational values and invite your customers or members to come along with you.

In your organization, what creative ways can you create symbiosis with your various stakeholders?

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Every organization has stakeholders - including employees, volunteers, customers, constituents, members, investors, even vendors and business partners. By definition, stakeholders want the organization to be successful (whatever that means, based on the purpose of the organization). So often leaders take an adversarial stance against other stakeholders, seeing them as interfering and demanding. An attitude shift towards assuming good intentions can completely transform relationships and skyrocket success.

Often a company will hire consultants to tell them what to do – while ignoring all the experts connected to their organization who are clamoring to provide feedback and ideas.

Personally, I am more invested in organizations where I can share suggestions in a way that doesn't feel like screaming into the void. For example, there are a few software packages I use daily for my work such as SmartGit and ManicTime. Over the many years I've been a customer, there have been a few times I've encountered an issue or had a feature request. It was clear how to contact these companies via email, and when I did, I always received a personal and helpful response.

In the case of ManicTime, I once made a suggestion that it would be easier to use the software if the custom reports list was alphabetized. A few minor versions later, I noticed that improvement in the reports list. I also sent them a message recently expressing dismay at a radical redesign of the interface. They directed me to clear instructions on how to revert to the prior version and the old UI. Several weeks later, they followed up with me to let me know that they had made some adjustments to the new design based on my feedback (and that of some other vocal customers) and had released a new version I might want to try out. Not only is this excellent customer service, but this level of personal connection gives me the impression that this company cares about making a great product and is willing to listen to customers’ needs.

There are many ways other than personal emails which can allow participation from stakeholders. Often having a publicly accessible web-based system is one of the most effective ways to solicit great ideas. Platforms like UserVoice, which allow software companies to collect feature requests that customers can comment on and vote for, are a great tool. Even having an online forum is a good option – which also allows your stakeholders to interact with each other as well. The Umbraco CMS I use regularly encourages participation. They have active community members as part of official “Advisory Committees” for various products and initiatives, and the core CMS product often has public “Request For Comment” (RFCs) where new feature implementation strategies are hashed out in public with expert developers from around the world weighing in. These are examples of the best types of crowdsourcing – where more feedback from actual users leads to better outcomes for everyone. Of course, open source software in general offers the ultimate participation, of adding to and changing the product directly.

Thinking about your own organizations… What problems could benefit from some stakeholder input? Are there mechanisms you can put in place to give people channels for closer involvement?

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I am convinced that every organization can become more transparent – as long as their aims are legal and moral. Truly, we should all demand more transparency from companies, governments, and any communities we participate in. A lack of transparency might only indicate a lazy communication strategy or an entrenched culture of closed-door control, but it can also hide plans and motivations which are not in the best interest of the purported constituents, customers, or members.

Look, everyone has the right to pursue their own desired ends (if they are legal), but it isn't fair to hide the true purpose from people who are being asked to trust and work with the organization. (This includes employees as well.) For example, if a company's true goal is to make billions of dollars by manipulating people and selling their personal data, it's obnoxious to tell those users that your aim is “community and friendship.”

There's nothing wrong with a profit motive – without it many goods and services we enjoy today wouldn't exist – but it disrespects people to pretend that money isn't a primary goal of an organization when it obviously is. Sensible people recognize that it takes resources for us to have things that we want. We understand that paying for a bag of apples keeps the store where we purchase them open, provides supplies to the farmer growing the apples, and pays for the people to pick, pack, and ship those apples.

Similarly, being a member of a club or religious institution involves paying dues or donations because these services won't be available if no one is paying for the website hosting or the building maintenance. When organizations open up about how they are able to pay for the things necessary to operations, it creates understanding, trust, and support.

Transparency goes beyond financing, however. It also means letting people know what changes are coming, why certain decisions have been made, and even in some cases how decisions are made. If there is a board of trustees or an executive team, being open about who exactly are in these groups is important.

Transparency creates trust, so whatever an organization can reasonably share should be shared. Certainly, there will be some things which are confidential or trade secrets and not open to general sharing, but organizations would do better to share more, rather than less, whenever possible.

Some companies will insist that all their value lies in secrets they can't share, but unless you are involved in national security or law enforcement, it's likely that your secrets are less valuable than you think. Ideas are pretty worthless without implementation and anything which eventually becomes public can be emulated by competitors.

An interesting example of transparency enhancing rather than inhibiting value is open source software. As its name suggests, this is software that anyone can view, download, and edit the source code for. It might seem crazy that giving away all the secrets of the software would increase its value, but it does. Many people specifically choose to use certain software because it's open source. Its operation and implementation are visible, so they can be sure that the software isn't doing anything with their data that they don't approve of; any calculations or algorithms in the software can be examined and verified; there is no mysterious “man behind the curtain” in open source software.

Even for people who don't understand the source code this transparency is beneficial because there are plenty of people who do understand it and who can vouch for its stability, security, and accuracy - people who are NOT the software's founders.

If you have influence within a company or other organization, ask yourself: How could we be more transparent with stakeholders? What could we be more open about? Our aims? Our processes? Our decisions? Pick something and put it out there. See what feedback you get.

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Over the last year I have been thinking about the success of a community I am part of – the Umbraco CMS community. There are many things which have made this long-standing (20 years now!) community successful – some intentional, and many by accident and providence, I’m sure. Of course, things haven’t been perfect. There have been <ahem> incidents which are now not widely discussed. Some people have been hurt, and have left for various reasons, but overall, my personal experience has been extremely positive.

The first thing I should explain is that “Umbraco” is an open source ASP.Net Content Management System (CMS). Which means it is software which can be used as a framework to build websites that have a user-friendly “back-office” where content editors (who do not need to know anything about web development or ASP.Net) can update page content, add and delete pages, etc. I myself am an ASP.Net developer, so this is a beloved tool and through development is how I got introduced to the community, but the interesting thing is that though the community is perhaps dominated by people who identify as “developers”, it has also expanded to welcome a broader spectrum of people who use Umbraco – including content editors and people who run agencies which build Umbraco sites for clients, among others.

Though the Umbraco community is often rather technical (though not exclusively), I believe there are lessons which can be extracted from this rather niche ecosystem and applied more broadly to other types of communities and organizations. I am interested in parsing out things which have been particularly helpful to the establishment and growth of the community, and which have made the associated corporate entity (referred to as “Umbraco HQ”) a growing commercial success. I don’t see Umbraco HQ in any sort of “competition” with the Umbraco community – in fact, HQ actively invests in and supports the community and benefits from it as well. This is a symbiotic (if not always conflict-free) relationship.

One advantage of Umbraco is that it is “open source” software – which has its own set of principles and cultural norms, and thus Umbraco itself starts from those principles, and the community coalesces around them, whether consciously or not. I think these principles are a good place to start when looking at why the Umbraco community has been successful, and how others can be as well. The three main principles I have noticed which are transferrable outside of software and into various sorts of organizations are: transparency, participation, and symbiosis.

Transparency

I am convinced that every organization can become more transparent – as long as their aims are legal and moral. Truly, we should all demand more transparency from companies, governments, and any communities we participate in. A lack of transparency might only indicate a lazy communication strategy or an entrenched culture of closed-door control, but it can also hide plans and motivations which are not in the best interest of the purported constituents, customers, or members.

Look, everyone has the right to pursue their own desired ends (if they are legal), but it isn't fair to hide the true purpose from people who are being asked to trust and work with the organization. (This includes employees as well.) For example, if a company's true goal is to make billions of dollars by manipulating people and selling their personal data, it's obnoxious to tell those users that your aim is “community and friendship.”

There's nothing wrong with a profit motive – without it many goods and services we enjoy today wouldn't exist – but it disrespects people to pretend that money isn't a primary goal of an organization when it obviously is. Sensible people recognize that it takes resources for us to have things that we want. We understand that paying for a bag of apples keeps the store where we purchase them open, provides supplies to the farmer growing the apples, and pays for the people to pick, pack, and ship those apples.

Similarly, being a member of a club or religious institution involves paying dues or donations because these services won't be available if no one is paying for the website hosting or the building maintenance. When organizations open up about how they are able to pay for the things necessary to operations, it creates understanding, trust, and support.

Transparency goes beyond financing, however. It also means letting people know what changes are coming, why certain decisions have been made, and even in some cases how decisions are made. If there is a board of trustees or an executive team, being open about who exactly are in these groups is important.

Transparency creates trust, so whatever an organization can reasonably share should be shared. Certainly, there will be some things which are confidential or trade secrets and not open to general sharing, but organizations would do better to share more, rather than less, whenever possible.

Some companies will insist that all their value lies in secrets they can't share, but unless you are involved in national security or law enforcement, it's likely that your secrets are less valuable than you think. Ideas are pretty worthless without implementation and anything which eventually becomes public can be emulated by competitors.

An interesting example of transparency enhancing rather than inhibiting value is open-source software. As its name suggests, this is software that anyone can view, download, and edit the source code for. It might seem crazy that giving away all the secrets of the software would increase its value, but it does. Many people specifically choose to use certain software because it's open source. Its operation and implementation are visible, so they can be sure that the software isn't doing anything with their data that they don't approve of; any calculations or algorithms in the software can be examined and verified; there is no mysterious “man behind the curtain” in open-source software.

Even for people who don't understand the source code this transparency is beneficial because there are plenty of people who do understand it and who can vouch for its stability, security, and accuracy - people who are NOT the software's founders.

If you have influence within a company or other organization, ask yourself: How could we be more transparent with stakeholders? What could we be more open about? Our aims? Our processes? Our decisions? Pick something and put it out there. See what feedback you get.

Participation

Every organization has stakeholders - including employees, volunteers, customers, constituents, members, investors, even vendors and business partners. By definition, stakeholders want the organization to be successful (whatever that means, based on the purpose of the organization). So often leaders take an adversarial stance against other stakeholders, seeing them as interfering and demanding. An attitude shift towards assuming good intentions can completely transform relationships and skyrocket success.

Often a company will hire consultants to tell them what to do – while ignoring all the experts connected to their organization who are clamoring to provide feedback and ideas.

Personally, I am more invested in organizations where I can share suggestions in a way that doesn't feel like screaming into the void. For example, there are a few software packages I use daily for my work such as SmartGit and ManicTime. Over the many years I've been a customer, there have been a few times I've encountered an issue or had a feature request. It was clear how to contact these companies via email, and when I did, I always received a personal and helpful response.

In the case of ManicTime, I once made a suggestion that it would be easier to use the software if the custom reports list was alphabetized. A few minor versions later, I noticed that improvement in the reports list. I also sent them a message recently expressing dismay at a radical redesign of the interface. They directed me to clear instructions on how to revert to the prior version and the old UI. Several weeks later, they followed up with me to let me know that they had made some adjustments to the new design based on my feedback (and that of some other vocal customers) and had released a new version I might want to try out. Not only is this excellent customer service, but this level of personal connection gives me the impression that this company cares about making a great product and is willing to listen to customers’ needs.

There are many ways other than personal emails which can allow participation from stakeholders. Often having a publicly accessible web-based system is one of the most effective ways to solicit great ideas. Platforms like UserVoice, which allow software companies to collect feature requests that customers can comment on and vote for, are a great tool. Even having an online forum is a good option – which also allows your stakeholders to interact with each other as well. The Umbraco CMS I use regularly encourages participation. They have active community members as part of official “Advisory Committees” for various products and initiatives, and the core CMS product often has public “Request For Comment” (RFCs) where new feature implementation strategies are hashed out in public with expert developers from around the world weighing in. These are examples of the best types of crowdsourcing – where more feedback from actual users leads to better outcomes for everyone. Of course, open-source software in general offers the ultimate participation, of adding to and changing the product directly.

Thinking about your own organizations… What problems could benefit from some stakeholder input? Are there mechanisms you can put in place to give people channels for closer involvement?

Symbiosis

The term symbiosis in biology refers to different species living closely together in a way that is usually1 mutually beneficial. I'm using the term to refer to mutually beneficial arrangements between groups of people. Successful organizations operate in a state of symbiosis with their customers or members. Reciprocity can go beyond “I give you money and you give me a product or service”, though that is often the baseline needed for organizational survival. Sometimes referred to as “win-win,” creating symbiosis means looking beyond selfish motivations of “how much can I extract from you?” towards creative ways to expand value for everyone involved.

Often one of the best ways to come up with the sorts of arrangements that increase symbiosis is through participation. Having a better understanding of how to meet the needs of your stakeholders will often reveal ways your organization can provide more value.

It's also possible to look for symbiosis beyond your closest stakeholders and out into the surrounding community and wider world. For instance, finding ways to reduce energy use is beneficial for the environment but also for your expenses. Keep in mind, however, that true symbiosis goes beyond superficial PR stunts which will eventually be exposed as shallow and self-interested. Look for authentic ways to live out your stated organizational values and invite your customers or members to come along with you.

In your organization, what creative ways can you create symbiosis with your various stakeholders?

Leave a comment

Do you have organization you’d like to make more “open source”? I’d love to have a chat with you to discuss ideas that fit your current structure and goals for an article. It can be published identifying your organization by name and website, or it can be anonymous. Contact me if you’re interested.

I welcome your comments and questions. Thanks for reading.