Comments on: E2.0: Unleashing the Potential

By: Paula Thornton

Paula Thornton — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:52:03 +0000

Thanks for all the kudos. Oddly, this piece was rejected for publication as a wrap-up piece to a book on Enterprise 2.0, for being too broad/scattered/irrelevant : )

By: Dan Keldsen

Dan Keldsen — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:06:05 +0000

Paula – you have really outdone yourself on this. This is by far the best piece you’ve done, and great synthesis across multiple disciplines. Agree with Rachel, the Lava metaphor is fantastic, and of course I agree on the need for architecture, or I woudn’t have named our company InformationArchitected.

It takes work to “be Enterprise 2.0″ – and it’s silly to trivialize the technology OR the people and specifically the adoption/addiction side of instigating change. It’s ALL important, or NONE of it is worth doing.

Fascinating – this is definitely a watershed year for Enterprise 2.0 – let’s hope we can all keep pushing the stone up the hill to crest the other side, as doing it right and doing it well will mean we can all get a lot more QUALITY work out of ourselves, our customers, our organizations and on and on. Still an uphill battle, but we’re making far more progress than I’ve seen since I first started talking about Wikis in the enterprise around 2002 or so.

Onward and upward!

Best,
Dan

By: Rachel Happe

Rachel Happe — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:37:01 +0000

I really, really enjoyed this post. There is a lot of talk of revolution and open systems and people are sometimes surprised when I tell them that they should set clear goals, boundaries, and policies in community environments and be very clear & firm about those. Boundaries and structure is what enables productive creativity and knowledge work. The lava lamp metaphor is a great one!

By: Paula Thornton

Paula Thornton — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:49:12 +0000

Bas: Looking forward to learning more about the “theory of Giddens”.

By: Bas Reus

Bas Reus — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:24:08 +0000

Great post Paula. You mention an important factor why projects fail or not. To find the ideal balance of the tension between structure and freedom is not easy, and is a job for the E2.0 architect.

I think the structuration theory of Giddens can help us here. Will try to discuss that soon.

By: Paula Thornton

Paula Thornton — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:37:10 +0000

Ryan: You continue to amaze me and expose me to new lines of thought (even though I’m still all tied up with the lines I’ve got!). I’m not even sure I realized the significance of the ’structure’ reference when I wrote about it. You’ve just taken it to a whole new dimension!

By: Ryan Gensel

Ryan Gensel — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:30:12 +0000

This is great Paula! I have my own favorite Schopenhauer quote “The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.” The current emphasis on symbolic meaning is reminiscent of the intellectual struggle between “Structuralists” and “Post-Structuralists”, in which PS realizes the inability to distinguish individual interpretation, and S ignores the fallacy of individualism. I think we can decompose a topic until there’s no structure left, but I think we have more to learn from why things can not be architected or symbolically divided from context. Power words in persuasive speech are generally “false nouns”, that embody a host of references, meant to evoke a certain cultural reaction. What would happen if we had to plan all business projects in E-Prime?

-Ryan Gensel

twitter.com/readysetproject
ryangensel.blogspot.com