While we’re building out lists of five tips for gaining adoption of Enterprise 2.0, I’m reminded of the difficulty of motivating people, and even harder — getting them to change their behavior. If you’ve raised a family, or managed people at work (not that different), you know that making them think any change in action was their idea pays great dividends. A sense of ownership is an awesome thing, and too often missing in corporate cultures.

And I firmly believe that any shift like Enterprise 2.0 is fundamentally not about technology and productivity and management principles. It’s mostly about people and process — and those are affected deeply by ontology and behavior, both individually and in groups. Indeed, Enterprise 2.0’s most beneficial offering may be that it allows individual and group behaviors to mingle and reinforce — or repel — at scale. Enterprise 2.0 helps collaboration and ownership of knowledge scale up, as well as down.

So, given that touchy-feely preamble, the top five things to keep in mind to grease the skids of Enterprise 2.0 adoption are:

1) Encourage people to have fun. Learning is intrinsically fun, and most comedy is based on the sudden realization that you know something. Even better when it’s a group-know. We can all laugh at our collective insights. Teaching is best done with a sense of humor. So to get the sharing going, to get the creation of content — and learning-teaching activity — into adoption mode, then get the fun meter up. Find a way to make meetings fun; really.

2) Take a page from Google. Their corporate credo allows their workers a period of time to work on projects of their own making, or that specifically pique their interest while not part of their regular jobs. This identifies what they want to learn about, and what they will want to teach too. Their pet projects will emerge from the context of their skills, which instills ownership and pride. They will naturally want to communicate about it, even publish. They will have fun (see number 1 above). So give your people time to be creative on their own terms. Then harvest the knowledge and good will.

3) Encourage and allow a sense of ownership broadly. This also plays off of the first two tips. Pride and benevolence are huge motivators, and when harnessed will buttress any moves to exact change in enterprise cultures. When an individual or group expresses pride and a sense of “we did this” and then wants to share that willingly, the organization benefits. Enterprise 2.0 offers the tools to fuel this. By allowing fast, ad hoc delivery of content, knowledge and productive adaptation, these tools can be turbo-charge with the pride of creation and of sharing.

4) Allow more people in the organization to directly interact with customers and prospects. Gasp! I know what you’re thinking. But a major practice, of rigidly channeling who gets to talk to the customer, won’t hold up in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 world. If the boundaries are down, and transparency is up, then let the knowledge and exchange extend between your workers and your customers and/or prospects. Let everyone sell themselves and the value of the organization. Give the “conversation” an opportunity to encourage more business by making your business and their business closer, more friendly, and ultimately develop a series of feedback loops that are not hobbled by too thin a funnel of control. If we all can sell, the sales people can find more people for us to talk to, instead of trying to explain what we mean (with another slide deck).

5) Reward the prodigious publishers. When you’ve unleashed more of the creativity and expression from your knowledge-based community, recognize that good communicating on an on-going basis is hard and requires vast self-starting energy. So institutionalize the ability to determine the master communicators, encourage them, and reward them. “Publishing” now comes in many forms, and is more swift, inexpensive and potentially global in its reach that ever before. Exploit this. Companies that produce high-quality information and freely make it searchable and available will be the ones most heard — and understood. Support those who do this best with prestige, financial incentives, and time.