By now so very much has been written and said about

1. the impacts both positive and negative of hyperlink-driven mass collaboration,
2. the vast potential for increased effectiveness related to sharing information and scaffolding knowledge, and
3. the apparent flattening of organizations that will follow. 

I have been a proponent, though I would like to point out that I have never suggested hierarchy will disappear or that it is not a necessary component for decision-making and direction in many if not most contexts.

I have been blogging for at least five years.  I consider reading comments and sometimes adding a comment of my own to be an integral part of blogging .. in fact, as often as not I learn more and get more out of the comments section than from the blog post itself.  I have also consulted to organizations for about 20 years on work design, work effectiveness, competencies and performance, knowledge management, management and leadership development, and organizational learning and change.

Euan Semple is well known for helping to create, grow and sustain the effective use of social software tools in a complex knowledge-intensive environment (the UK’s BBC).  Part of his role in doing so was to offer workshops for managers and leaders about working effectively and "managing" knowledge in that environment.  No doubt part of the effective use of such tools and processes involved people "thinking outside the box" out loud, in the semi-public exchanges between colleagues in the organizational context.

Here’s an excerpt from an anecdote he published last year titled "Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There".

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"I could never trust my staff to use these sorts of tools", he said, "they would end up wasting all of their time".

[Snip ...]

The first thing I did was to ask if he thought his recruitment policy was working for him. If he couldn’t trust his staff to make minute by minute decisions about how they spent their working days how on earth was he going to trust them to make bigger decisions on his behalf? He brushed this aside and restated that whatever his staff’s judgment the sort of activity I had been describing was still a waste of time.

To this I replied first that, contrary to his assumption, people took moments to glance at a forum or a blog and if by responding they answered a worthwhile question their answer could benefit thousands of others and save a lot of time and effort.

Secondly I responded that people have always had all sorts of ways of wasting time available to them from staring out of the window to having a coffee and if they are truly wasting time then surely it was his job as a manager to deal with them and their under-performance?

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In knowledge work environments people are always reading and talking, exchanging information and opinions, pointing to things of pertinence and related interest.  In a sense, people are already doing substantial parts of what is involved in the use of blogs and wikis … it’s just that the new tools are making it more visible and let workers capture the content for immediate or future use.  I do not think that there is much constant full-on dedication to executing a chronologically-arranged set of daily tasks (though much reengineering and embedding of work processes in the "electronic concrete" of many ERP systems in search of constant efficiency would mitigate my assertion).

So … it’s logical to assume that one of the key propositions of value to enterprises with respect to the use of blogs and wikis is the learning and the construction of pertinent knowledge that derives from the interaction and exchange of participants. 

This visible interaction and exchange is also the area that I believe raises skepticism and resistance on the part of many managers and executives.  I suspect that in many enterprises unless the tools’ use and the conversations they engender are always aligned with the mission and objectives of an enterprise or the projects / initiatives where the tools are applied,  the conversations will be seen as wasting time, or creating or supporting unwanted questioning and dissent.

I think it’s also quite possible that without effective moderation and facilitation a fair bit of the interaction and exchange of information enabled by social software inside the firewall will be cautious and measured, which can have a damping effect on the full range of the potential available when people converse on purpose about shared focus and activities.

It has often been suggested that organizational culture is or can be a significant obstacle to the effective and productive use of social software in enterprises.  I’d add managerial style and leadership philosophy (see Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management).  There is quite a bit of evidence available from the growth of wikis and blogging that publishing relevant content, commenting and the interaction that can follow facilitates increased and / or more rapid learning and idea generation.  As we become more experienced, we are learning that social computing initiatives are greatly affected by the context, purpose, boundaries and moderation styles in use for a given community.

So … I suspect that there will be wave after wave after wave of examples where enterprises begin to use blogs and wikis, don’t pay enough atention to context, purpose, boundaries and moderation,  and find that the organization’s culture and the style(s) of various managers are at odds with the dynamics of blogs and wikis.  When things seem looser or less aligned, I suspect that there will often be reversion to command-and-control, whether by tightening the ways the blogs and wikis are used or by canceling the experiment.

I also think that there are many employees in many organizations that mostly want clear direction and a clear set of tasks and objectives to be given to them by management, in exchange for a wage, decent working conditions and some possibility of some employment security.  They want hierarchy, to reduce ambiguity and possible confusion and uncertainty (Lou Gerstner of IBM once said that his toughest challenge in making substantial change work was the desire of many to "delegate upwards"). 

It takes an inspiring vision and purpose and a healthy respectful culture for most people to get excited about engaging in improvement, responsiveness and innovation.  Implementing social software towards the creation of an Enterprise 2.0 will I believe be a significant leadership and management challenge, and will often sharpen the issues for personal, management and organizational development. 

Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives will often be a major organizational change, mainly in terms of the communications and management challenges, and sharpens the game with respect to listening, empowering, coaching and responding clearly and truthfully.

Hierarchy 2.0 ?

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Tags: organizational change, hierarchy, wirearchy

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