by Euan Semple
January 2, 2007 at 5:36 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
The above is a quote used by a friend of mine going through counseling training many moons ago and it has always stuck in my mind and been a salutary reminder in so many situations. I also feel it is worth bearing in mind when talking about Enterprise 2.0.
Basically the point is that telling someone, or an organisation, that they are broken and need fixed is one of the most dis-empowering and disabling messages you can give them. When you then add to this the message that you are the one who has come to fix them and are therefore de-facto superior to them you are likely to create even more resistance. When you then add in a geeky glint in your eye as you rave on about blogs wikis and online fora and fauna then you’ve lost 90% of your audience.
A while back I wrote on my own blog that the challenge with social computing, or Enterprise 2.0, is cultural and huge. We are talking about a significant shift in world view here if we are to make any real headway and these things don’t happen overnight nor without a few casualties on the way.
The main work, as I see it, for those of us committed to the possibilities of this new way of working is in slowly, carefully and patiently working it into as many corporate conversations as possible, building catalogues of stories that illuminate aspects of the culture and give people a glimpse of its potential but perhaps more than anything else it is in giving people the space and time to find their own way to and to have their own “aha” moments. This isn’t to say that a laisez-faire approach. It takes a lot of energy and commitment to care enough to engage with your organisations and frankly courage to allow it to happen at its own speed.
Patience is one of the main characteristics of those who have made social computing happen stick in the workplace combined with a respect for their quarry. At risk of being overly self-referential in this post I suggested some time ago that the skills of a fly fisherman were what were required and bemoaned the dominance of a trout farming mentality amongst so many practitioners!
Permalink
I think you’re absolutely right in your approach, Euan. My theory is also that some of this resistance is actually a hangover from web 1.0, when executives felt bullied and confused by suppliers half their age, many of whom relied gobbledly gook tech talk to confound and deepen insecurities (and pry open corporate wallets).
There’s mistrust in the marketplace – many companies were burned by interactive agencies that went under and took the source files with them, and their development experiences were painful. However, as with any field, if you can build and deepen those relationships with your client (and really get to know them and their business) you’ll do fine. In the end, I think everyone just wants to find someone they can trust to show them the way.
Euan,
This is a great post. And great advice…. advice that perhaps I would have done well to take. The partner I used to work for at EY used to say it a different way: “Don’t call their baby ugly”.
It’s hard to accomplish this goal, however, when you are trying to change something.
When I was in consulting, it took me years to realize that clients did not want you to tell them what to do, or how to fix their problem. Instead, the best way to achieve change within an organization was to start a process to consider alternatives for new approaches. As consultants, we tried to make sure that the client made all decisions about which road to take at each key decision point. Our role was merely to facilitate the decision making. The result was people feeling happy about the direction chosen by the team.
The same applies to social computing. All you can really do is show large organizations the possibilities. They have to choose which approach works for them. End users who are expected to participate in these social computing systems will only really do so if they see that there is something in it for them.
Great post
- Rod
Thanks for the nice comments guys. If you are interested, and haven’t read it already, I can recommend Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship (Series on Organization Development). It is not cheap but a good read!
» Subscribe to the RSS feed for these comments
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Additional comments powered by BackType
