Andrew McAfee led a panel of the Wednesday morning presenters, including the two I just posted on, Pete Fields and Simon Revell, as well as Sean Dennehy of the CIA (not the Culinary Institute of America but the other guys who did Intellipedia) and Ned Lerner from Sony. Here are some bits of wisdom from the panel in note format with some comments from me added in parens. First the panel itself thanks to Flickr.

World is changing – tools reflect this – but challenge is to get those who are still in old world to come over to new world and the new tools, especially middle management – people now feel they need “middle cover” not just top cover.

Now major changes happening within a life time – older people lived before computers and younger people who have never lived without computers – make for a very different mindset (I think us old guys are not given enough credit to adopt here. This is also not the first time such transformations have happen – think electricity, trains, planes, cars, telephones, etc. – My uncle’s father took his family on vacation to Colorado in a covered wagon and they followed the train tracks because there was not a good road. – I have told many of these types of stories on this blog and will not repeat them now. People are better at adopting to new technologies than adopting to new management styles.)

Act of leveraging tools is different as older people are more likely to use single tool for everything, younger use a variety tools. (more beating up on us old people. Tom Davenport has written and said that really productive knowledge workers tend to use one or two tools really well for multiple things. Shall we get another debate going here? It may be that younger people are using different tools rather than more tools.)

Many more people are readers than contributors at Sony in the game making area but that is okay as not everyone can be thought leaders – their employees were already using wikis when they introduced them inside in 04 – challenge was to get them to use their wiki.

Andrew said is it correct that senior management is not a block to enterprise 2.0 (by implication it is more middle management)? People in the panel implied that in their companies the answer seems to be yes. Transparency can be a good management tool if used correctly – enterprise 2.0 makes it easier to look directly at work. Getting middle management on board is more of the issue. Middle management’s task is to make things work now – change is disruptive to making trains run on time. (especially when planes are introduced)

Senior executives want truth so they pay millions to consultants to get it since they cannot get it from employees. (I remember being on a sales call as a consultant a number of years ago with a senior executive that was going south. We could not get his attention. As a last resort we said that “your people say you are the reason nothing gets done” – which was the truth - that got his attention, - he got up from his desk and came over to the table we were sitting at in the corner of his office and said that he never approves anything because he never sees anything worth approving – we actually won the work which was to develop a new plan and he did not throw us out of the office – we quickly spun the story with middle management as a way to get support for what they wanted – disclaimer - do not hold me responsible if you try this sales approach) – so perhaps a their is a desire from senior execs for the transparency that can come from these tools – (if used wisely). The question often heard from management – how to do enterprise 2.0 safely – not “do not do it” – they see value in transparency. (BTW - I also have heard senor executives say that they paid millions of dollars to consultants to do the work that they could not get their own employees to do. Perhaps enterprise 2.0 tools could help here also.)

Andrew asked for final recommendations from the panel –
1. One person said go for the big project with big impact – not safe small pilots (that is what he did)
2. Another person said start with a pilot to show value (I guess that is what he did)
3. Hardest thing to do is to give up control – if you do it employees will come through for you (and it is cheaper than hiring consultants to do what you want ☺). Andrew added advice from a mentor when first starting teaching – trust you students – he said when he did it always worked but it was hard to do– so this should translate to trusting employees

4. Fight lock down (from CIA guy) – other said yes - need scale to get network effects

5. Look at email in box and see where the clutter is and move this to a wiki or a blog

6. Need to show appreciation when people do get involved

Question from audience – enterprise 2.0 implies large scale - Are tools valuable for ten people companies – yes if energy – new people will be able to use the knowledge made accessible through these tools (I agree completely but for more reasons. I am now part of a four person start up and we have reached the point where we need a collaborative platform to get our planning and collaboration out of the dark hole of email. I went looking for one at the conference.)

I will have some more notes on Friday from another session.