Test the theory. Consider the last thing you were upset by — in one way or another your expectations were not met and/or your trust was violated.

It’s actually more fundamental to the way we’re wired — the principles of our psyche — how we learn and how we leverage our knowledge. We base our knowledge upon “sets of funded expectations”. We assign expectations to concepts and turn them into a set of things that we know. When we share statements of fact, they are based on our expectations about the truthfulness of ‘the thing’. The expectations are economically funded (reinforced) by a number of learnings or experiences.

“If we understand concepts as the fund of expectations in terms of which we structure our experience, it becomes clear that concepts and theories cannot be separated. My concept of a lamp is my theory of a lamp, in the sense in which ‘theory’ means the set of propositions, expectations, insights, that enables me to deal with it.” — Daniel Schön, Displacement of Concepts, 1963 : 8

The adoption of new concepts often requires us to ‘break open’ sets of our existing expectations and rearrange the bank of funds. Opportunity lies where there is willingness to readily do this — the banks are in deficit — the reality isn’t ideal (the process has never made any sense, but we’re bound by our role to embrace it). We’re looking for an alternative — any alternative — to replace it.

Exceptions to this are matters of trust. Some situations are made more deficit by the level of investment it took to acquire the knowledge. A detestable ERP system was difficult to learn and more difficult to maintain, but the funds of experience suggest that something new would be equally difficult to learn and maintain. Besides, we’ve invested so much already — it finally ‘works’ for us. It requires a leap of faith to bridge between a known trust (however deficit it might be) and an unknown trust. The leap can be minimized by making the unknown known.

Adoption of E2.0 is a non-issue where there is an exchange of value for deficit expectations and evidences to reinforce trust. Both of these are readily mitigated by immersion — try before you buy, dabble before you commit. This requires experiences with varied opportunities for low investment (acquisition costs) and high return (expectations and trust). These are the fundamentals of 2.0

Don’t misinterpret that last paragraph. The scenario is not focused on the person buying the tool from the vendor (although, a good vendor will show you their technology framed in your relevant context — help you envision the possibilities). “Try before you buy and dabble before you comment” are part of the adoption model of the employees. These options must be designed into the solution as specific tactics to lower barriers to entry.

If you haven’t done the research to find out what some of those barriers might be and why, you’re not going to be able to address them. If you know what some of the barriers are, you better have some minds other than the technicians to figure out how to customize the solution for implementation.

I’m not suggesting this was ideal or that it should be the norm (and I wasn’t dealing with E2.0 technologies either). I was on a project once (using a major unnamed Content Management System) where it took me 3+ months of sitting with the ‘tool expert’ (who was a whiz at doing installations) to get them to question the possibilities of the tool and really shape it to the needs of the business. Even then, the tool was so badly designed that we barely accommodated the ways in which real people think or work.

There is no such thing as ‘out of the box’, even for E2.0.