DrKW CIO, blogger, social software enthusiast, and true subversive JP Rangaswami just put up a great post in which he lists the most common ways in which enterprises try to discount or distance themselves from Enterprise 2.0. One of them is the threat of dumbing down, which was the subject of my last post here.
JP, to my great relief, agrees with most of what I had to say. He also dissects the reasons that the ‘dumbing down’ reasoning is off base. Here are few of his thoughts:
"As the boundaries between different disciplines continue to blur, expertise has new connotations. At least one of which is Trusted Advisor, Recommender-Worth-Listening-To."
"While each subcommunity is characterised by having a core, a moderator, a 1000lb gorilla, don’t make the mistake of believing that this core is incredibly tiny and therefore easy to manipulate. Just not true."
"Games and humour and satire are pretty normal ways of working out how new forms of communication work, how they can add value. But soon they grow up."
The whole post has much more good stuff, and is highly coherent. Give it a read.
JP’s business-side colleague Darren Lennard, who I interviewed for my DrKW case studies, emailed to swap observations about how employees were using Enterprise 2.0 tools to collaborate. He liked the fact that I quoted Jefferson, talked about his fondness for Hume and Smith, and wrote:
The Rangaswami + Lennard combination helped me realize that transparency/disclosure is not just a necessary precondition to collaboration; it’s a form of collaboration. I started this blog in order to get my ideas out there. It’s done that, but more importantly it’s also helped me learn what other ideas are out there, and who’s having them. I’ve found things out via comments, trackbacks, referrals, introductions, and emails from out of the blue.
Some of this, I’m sure, was jumpstarted by my article in Sloan Management Review, but it takes nothing away from that publication to say that the article alone wouldn’t have generated nearly as much interaction as article + blog has. Making thoughts more transparent by putting them up on an online platform has led directly to further thinking. And even though I haven’t included an anyone-can-edit technology (like a wiki) on my platform, I definitely feel like it’s been the base for a lot of my recent collaborations.
So we shouldn’t get too upset if our companies’ first wikis don’t gain huge and immediate traction, or if the first employee blogs aren’t swamped with comments. There are many ways for these technologies to be used, and to be valuable. If they do nothing else they’ll contribute to the conversation, a tremendously important form of discourse that the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott described perfectly as "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."
What could be better?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Andrew
Your occasional references to Weber, Hume, Jefferson and Smith remind me that we can learn much from sociology and political theory as we explore new technologies, both in the workplace and in broader society. Weber, Marx and Mill on bureaucracy can teach us more about modern organisations and enterprise 2.0 than most of us realise.
Andrew,
I completely agree with your argument in favor of transparency as a way to further thinking. However, collaboration in the enterprise is often hampered by the perception that advancement is a zero-sum game. In this setting an individual who discloses information without knowledge that similar disclosure will be reciprocated is at a disadvantage.
That is why it is so important for management to model and incent collaborative behaviors. Internal transparency must come from the top of the organization, because management already has an information advantage over those under them. The rational behavior is for employees to limit discretionary effort (i.e., collaboration) because they are unsure whether they or that behavior will be rewarded. However, if management demonstrates a legitimate commitment to collaboration and collaborative tools (such as making it a part of performance evaluations) they then start rewarding participation in a larger conversation that moves the organization forward, instead of singular efforts.
The threat of dumbing down is very much there. Very few people in the corporate environment understand the difference between a page coming out of a traditional CMS and a page collaboratively built using a Wiki.
The dumbing down is done by the same people who are watching the success of Wikis, Blogs, etc. on the public internet but fear that it would rouse the fire within the walls.
Whatever be the circumstances — I have personally seen grassroot level sparks, people trying to use these tools internally without any corporate backing and without any IT support. However long the time it takes, the future of Writable Intranet is very much on its way.
I had been looking for this product. Finally I found it in your blog. Thank you so much for the information
regards
weber grill recipes
{ 2 trackbacks }