A Kudos Network Application
With anything new, first convince yourself before sharing with the rest of the world. As we convince ourselves, our partners, our friends, supporters, colleagues, everyone from our inner circle to the world market, there’s a point where words, diagrams, discussions, interpretive dance 🕺etc. start to take more time than it would to simply “do” something demonstrative, and let them observe. I call this “thinking externally”, aka experimenting.
Kudos credentialing has reached this crossroad.
The idea of a Kud0s network, a graph of peoples’ interests and their peer value, has received very positive feedback. We have started working with the local pizzeria we’ve mentioned to begin “thinking externally”, to demonstrate kudos’ administrative use within an organization, and it all begins with what might motivate their employees.
Generally speaking, the owners, “we”, are exploring using kudos to affect: salary, promotions, bonuses, profit share, venture share, access (use of facilities, etc.), invitations (owners’ christmas party), and of course credentialing to recognize transferable skills. The goal is to populate the kudos network, evaluate team performance, and recognize network patterns that correlate with that performance. In time, we should be able to develop an algorithm that automatically recognizes the spectrum of performance, enabling us to automate all the incentives we can imagine.
This process starts with employee interviews, first the owner (done), high performing employees, employees with different experience, etc. Eventually we’ll introduce the system and compare our expectations with employee activity. Our first goal is to ensure kudos are flowing, which means seamlessly integrating kudoing with employees’ daily activities. Since we know what all the employee activities are, we can calculate how many kudos should be flowing, and the maximum kudos flux possible in any given work shift.
Once we have healthy kudos flux, kudos network analysis begins. We could get into the graph theory, system entropy, or fractal geometry we might use to recognize productive patterns, and you can get a good look at a T-bone by 🐃🍑… let’s take my word for now that it’s an established field of data science 😉
More importantly than the algorithms we might use, is what we do as we recognize quality kudos flux and networks. We can’t assume anything until we use the analysis results to suggest questions we might ask employees, in an effort to confirm or deny our suspicions are valid. In time, when these questionable patterns turn up, possibly as a result of employee churn, we might prompt the other employees to evaluate and vote on potential actions, leaving prompting of the owner only when multiple efforts don’t have the desired results.
Once a system is in place, we focus on the business value. Theoretically, operations costs should go down, sales and revenue should go up, management should have time to… do whatever they want, and employees can use their kudos kredentials to help land their next gig. In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, well, we’ll have to find out 😎🍕
