LinkedIn Groups and The Laws of Unintended Consequences
The curse of dopamine addiction in well-moderated online communities
Although I retired from corporate life a year ago, I still have two unpaid roles connecting me to my old activities as a management consultant specialising in Organisational Change, Business Improvement and Quality. Actually, it’s three if you count writing about it!
Firstly I am the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Kegworth Heritage Centre. This is a small museum in the village of Kegworth, in the UK East Midlands. The museum was opened in 1971 but has had a fairly uncomfortable time during the last five years with a lack of funds, a lack of volunteers and a stack of problems with the building and its infrastructure. I joined the board in 2018 following a call to arms, hoping my management and IT skills might prove helpful. Then, two years ago, I found myself in the role of the chair. I’m planning to write about this experience in the not-too-distant future.
My other role is as the Group Owner for the Organisational Change Practitioner Group on LinkedIn. (Yes, I’m a Brit, and I insist on using British English!) There are about 82,000 members of the group, which is highly moderated and has stringent rules about its purpose and the content that members are allowed to share. I am not the originator of the group, but the latest in a line of gatekeepers, some of whom are legends in the world of change management. Their original vision for the group was as a forum for learning through discussion, and my mission is to maintain their wishes and keep the membership focused to that end.
The rules are best summarised in this picture:
LinkedIn groups have been as chaotic as the museum over the years, with the platform managers reinventing the Groups Product on at least five different occasions, each more horrendous than the last. We have repeatedly offered our support in helping them manage the changes to the product, but they have never taken us up on the offer. One of the classic LinkedIn behaviours is to introduce new features without understanding the Laws of Unintended Consequences. The latest such feature is the ability to post something from the main LinkedIn feed into any number of groups. So, when you create a new post, you are prompted to add it to some of the groups to which you belong. Since the feature was rolled out, group admins for moderated groups have been inundated with thousands of random posts. In our case, about 95% of the posts we receive in the moderation queue break one or more of our rules. Every day we have to ferret through hundreds of messages deleting the rule breakers and hoping we don’t accidentally delete a keeper!
What LinkedIn was hoping to do was increase the engagement of members within their groups. Unfortunately, LinkedIn has never really understood how to manage groups to get great engagement, and they do not want to engage with those of us who do! What they’ve actually come up with is a way to flood groups with spammy posts. Their invitation to post to a group doesn’t mention that specific group rules should be respected. And as usual, it means more work for the poor admins, with no additional tool support to assist us.
Sadly, this is a reflection of our modern dopamine-addicted world. There is an interesting irony that in the Organisational Change world, one of the mantras of a good change agent is to listen to all the different stakeholders and help them manage the change without telling them how or what to do but to help them see the problems and pitfalls so they can learn through the discussions.
What we actually get as a result of this LinkedIn feature is a whole bunch of professional change agents shouting at their peers and colleagues to listen to their infinite wisdom by telling them exactly what to do.
And the noise is deafening!