LinkedIn "New Groups" - Disruptive Daemons

The term “Disruptive Innovation” was coined in 1995 by Clayton M. Christensen but came to public prominence with the impact of Apple in a number of business and technology sectors, notably in the music, film and video industries, and of course with the iPod, iPhone, iPad and most recently, Apple Watch in the mobile device industry.

Disruptive Innovation creates or changes a market and significantly disrupts existing markets and displaces established companies, products and value chains. Unless you happen to be one of those displaced entities, the disruption is generally perceived as being ‘a good thing’ and many more people benefit than lose out.

If you lookup disruption in the dictionary, more significantly in a thesaurus, most of the synonyms are highly negative. Words like disconnection, fracture, discord, schism and destruction set the tone. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to etymologists since the word disruption stems from the Latin word disrumpere meaning to break apart or split.

Over the past few months the LinkedIn jungle drums have been beating with increasing vigour. The much loved, and much abused Groups functionality of LinkedIn was going to get a makeover. Last time this was promised, back in 2015, LinkedIn did the unthinkable and shoved an almighty spanner in the works. Since then, many Group Owners and Managers have sweated blood and tears to try and maintain their groups integrity and encouraged their members to continue to support the groups platform through their engagement. It has not been easy. The work that goes into running a successful group cannot be over-estimated, and of course this is done as a labour of love.

The largest group I am responsible for (Organizational Change Practitioners) has over 66K members and attracts new members at the rate of 15-20 per day. Between the three admins, we spend several hours a week each monitoring, approving, and contributing to the discussions, and looking for ways to further engage with the membership to make it a rich, safe and valuable place to visit, participate and learn from. Since the night of the long spanner in 2015, the tools at our disposal have been very limited but we persevere.

In the run up to the ’New Groups’ implementation, various rumours started circulating amongst Group Owners and Managers. The spokesperson for the Groups Product has tried to manage the rumour mill but has very limited responsibility (and no accountability) for the actual details of the implementation and really has been put in an impossible situation. The Group Product Manager has remained silent until the release of a poor quality video released some days ago. The two managers in the video hardly exuded an air of excitement, and it seemed that the long awaited update was a shift to the existing LinkedIn technology stack and the ability to upload video into group discussions.

Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly apparent that Group administrators had every reason to be concerned. The limited tools available to them to manage their groups were almost all being dumbed down or in many cases, completely obliterated. And when the roll out finally began at the beginning of this week, their fears were confirmed. For anyone managing a group with several thousand members, a reasonable growth rate and a decent level of engagement, their job has been made harder than ever. Worse still, years of effort performing good stewardship of their groups have been made worthless overnight as almost all control has been taken away from them. The previously tightly controlled borders have been thrown open to the army of spammers and trolls who blight every unregulated or poorly regulated element of social and business media networks. 

Members of these groups will not escape unscathed from this change. The changes to the interface are baffling; the appearance of new discussions is carefully camouflaged and the order in which comments are displayed has been randomised according to some bizarre internal algorithm. I can however add video to a discussion and I can finally edit a comment - something that should have been available from day one, not included as an afterthought years later.

As a Group Admin I’m now in the situation where anyone in my group can invite anyone else, therefore by-passing our membership rules. Approving a LinkedIn user who wishes to join the group now takes four clicks where it used to take one, and two clicks to find out if there were any pending members where it used to take none. Members previously on moderation have been released back into the wild, and no moderation functionality currently exists. Blocking a member who violates the group rules now also takes significant effort whereas before I could take action directly from the infringing post. The list goes on…and on.

As an Organizational Change Practitioner I can point out dozens of ways in which this change has been poorly managed and executed. Most notable is the absolute refusal of LinkedIn engage with long term group owners and managers with regard to their requirements, or even to connect with them when they began to understand the extent to which they were being threatened. Coupled with a failure to give any indication of a roadmap for the change (and forthcoming changes which are being promised) just add fuel to the fire.

As a software professional I can point out numerous examples of where existing ‘rules’ of user interface and web design have been violated and as a technology professional I can explain where technical best practice has been wilfully avoided.

As a business professional, I can honestly say that if I was the Groups Product Manager responsible for this train wreck of a change initiative I would have expected to have been sacked by now.

The LinkedIn Groups platform is not dead as some commentators have suggested, but it has been turned in a zombie, and most of the vibrancy that once existed in these channels has been all but sucked dry.

This is truly a disruptive change in all the wrong ways, and LinkedIn are going to have to work incredibly hard to put the life back into it. If indeed that is their intention - I fear this may once again be the beginning of the end.