Every historical phase has its Age of Discovery and Exploration. Each Age has its own focus. The Portuguese, Spanish, and English of the late 1400s to the early 1600s focused on conquest and riches with the intent to exert European power in the world. In the late 1900s and the early 2000s, the focus is on the discovery and exploration of new communication models with the intent to connect people. Today's discoverers and explorers face the same missteps of their earlier counterparts. As a result, the true success of this current work falls to the virtual map-makers, pioneers, settlers, and community builders who are gradually appearing. If businesses want to participate in the development of these new models, they must engage the explorers to better understand the potential. Business needs to assesses their workers who are already engaged in social networking to determine what they are understanding and what they are learning about the environment. Although the initial tendency is to prohibit social networking, a better path engages the explorers in the data collection and the future development. Together, business leaders and social-networking explorers formulate the questions to be answered. Freely use the following questions to start your thinking. Who uses these networks? What do they want to accomplish? What skills do networkers need to be successful? What kind of information is transmitted? How is the information used by others? How do networkers know whether the information provided can be trusted? How do the networks connect with each other? What activities do the networks provide? Next, rely on the networkers to formulate the questions that more closely tie to their learning and less closely to what worries business leaders. As knowledge grows, understanding emerges. With this emergence, leaders and networkers can now define the visions of the future for social networking. They can project that vision into business practices that can leverage the current capability and trends of social networks. In this vision, protocols need clarification. How are decisions made? What is the desired culture of the community? What frustrations can be anticipated? What kind of commitment should be requested? Wherever, possible, use visual language and images to describe the visions and protocols so that people can more easily grasp the big picture. Human, social skills are vital skills for this new environment if we are to move toward productivity networks. Without understanding and refining those skills, business will fail in any attempts to move forward. Today's social networkers are learning how to navigate these virtual environments. They learn who and how to trust, a critical skill for the future. They see the weaknesses that are inherent in simple social networks. They see the potential minefields that can cause great destruction to both humans and ideas. Gradually, they are making the mental leaps needed to move into community building and settler engagement. They will develop the maps the rest of us need to find our way into productivity future. As a final reminder, frustration is a large part of the movement from social networks to productivity networks. Consider the following, the simple zipper took approximately 30 years to be accepted for its true potential as a fastener. Remember, in addition, the early video game players quite likely became surgeons who use two-dimensional video to conduct three-dimensional surgery --- a process which requires extremely refined hand-and-eye coordination. Social networking is less than a decade old. Business can choose to fight the progress or participate in the future development. Quite possibly, the lead-and-follow behavior of today's social networks will produce leaders who can develop sustainable virtual communities that can identify, clarify, and solve problems facing the world and its people.
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