I was talking to someone recently who had begun blogging inside a large organisation. He and a colleague had heard me talk last year and they wanted to take their first small steps towards creating a social computing environment in their organisation. He told me that in an attempt to draw in more readers, and create the sort of interest that gets conversations started, he decided to put a quiz on his blog. An innocent enough idea one would have thought but he was told to take it off his blog because it was on a non-work related subject. I was staggered.

What is the harm in kicking off these non-work conversations? Do they think the workplace will grind to a halt, people run amok and profit margins start to suffer? The irony is the very same organisation no doubt has creativity and innovation in their mission statement and probably employs a team of people to foster such activities yet they squash creativity as soon as it surfaces in the “wrong place”.

I reckon there are two lessons in this story.

The first is that the technologies we are talking about here, whether we call them social computing or Enterprise 2.0, are inherently social. They are about people and the associations they make both between bits of information and with each other. In order to do this they have to “be” social. They have to rub shoulders with each other and learn to trust and understand each other. This doesn’t happen if all you talk about is the latest sales figures or the latest corporate message.

While I was at the BBC we actively encouraged people to engage on any subject in the wikis, forums and blogs so long as they kept within the law - and I mean any subject! On one occasion there was a thread about the pros and cons of being single. This was testing even my resolve as at times it appeared to be turning into some sort of online dating service. I imagined someone somewhere having the same sort of reaction that my friend got to his quiz and I was getting nervous. But then after a couple of days a TV producer joined the conversation and said “I am about to make a programme about being single and this is fantastic - you guys have done half my research for me. Many times threads that appeared to be frivolous or a waste of time morphed into examinations of really interesting and business critical issues. It fascinates me that people can be in business, which is surely about providing value in the world at large, and yet have a culture in which talking about the world, and all the messiness that it involves, is seen as un-business like.

The second lesson is about structure. Show me an organisation that doesn’t say it wants innovation and creativity but, as I said, most of them throttle any chance of these with process, structure and a constraining attitude. Things have to happen in the right way in the right place. People build systems with this in mind and spend a lot of time and energy pre-planning and pre-empting activities and are spooked when they happen spontaneously. Yet one of the main benefits of engaging in social computing is the potential for serendipitous connections and encounters, It excels at enabling the unplanned and the unforeseen. It is invariably picked up by those at the margins or who are unrepresented and these are very often the people who bring innovation and creativity to the workplace. Innovation comes about because of dissatisfaction with the status quo and if all your systems focus totally on that status quo then you are in trouble. Surely it is better that energy surfaces and things get done even if this isn’t where or how you expected it to?

To quote Stowe Boyd who coined the title Edglings for this new breed:

“As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their worldview. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.”

It is true that there is something inherently disruptive about this stuff but it doesn’t mean it is uncontrolled. The art of managing these environments is in taking part - saying what you think and expressing your point of view. The type of engagement is different from conventional business. It IS personal, people do connect and they do start to expect to be able to act differently. They expect to be not only able to speak but to be listened to. Managers who learn this and engage with it can become increasingly effective in carrying out their day to day work.

Lets face it each person in an organisation whether at the top or the botom is part of a network of trusted individuals and having a more effective way of connecting and communicating is surely in everyone’s interests.

Isn’t it?