My preschooler and I played with my new iMac’s Photo Booth application. She insisted on using the “wrinkly” effect. She was very proud to have snuck in a few potty words during our performance, about a minute in.
There is a brigade charge underway to capture the wisdom (knowledge + experience) of the retiring corporate crowd. The urgency is perhaps driven by the fact that these “wisdom holders” will retire, then turn around and charge their former employers a hefty consulting fee for continuing their services. Not a bad gig if you can get it. But, those who have tried the knowledge management (KM) thing in the past will tell you that this harnessing, leveraging, capturing, harvesting – pick your favorite over-used word - is a hard row to hoe. And for the record, please do not try to harness or harvest my knowledge. I am not a horse, nor a corn crop.
Anyway.
Why is it so hard to get your smart people to share? Because human beings typically share their precious knowledge only with people they trust. Not a software application.
If you’re one of these retiring wisdom holders, or perhaps a Gen X/Y subject expert, you smell what I’m steppin’ in. You’re the ONE individual who really knows why the chemical process behind your best-selling adhesives is what it is, or how to deal most effectively with your top three multi-million-dollar clients, or the Colonel’s secret spices. Maybe you’re the only one who knows why your corporate authentication directory evolved into the weird Galapagos-Island-like thing it is today: “Hey, what’s a red-footed Booby doing in there?”… “Ask Lincoln, he’ll know.”
Because you are the one individual who knows this stuff, you are reluctant to advertise that fact, for fear of the avalanche of requests to collaborate. You need more emails, IMs, and phone calls like you need another orifice in your cranium. Plus, these people who would swarm you like flies on poo will not perhaps care too much if you are over-extended. But, you are more than happy to share what you know with one or two others, after you’ve discerned that they won’t abuse you, won’t stab you in the back, won’t take credit for your intellectual capital, and will perhaps return the favor. The people who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced point of view.
It is impossible for anyone to imbue the full power of their experience into a profile, a blog, a forum, a wiki, a presentation, a tag, a podcast, a video, or anything else. A wisdom holder’s value lies in their ability to bring their experience to bear on a situation within context, in real time. This is most often done extemporaneously, and in my world, over the phone. And if done well, true breakthrough thinking can happen. But, that’s another topic.
The spoken word trumps the written.
The whole point of social software, from the perspective of retaining corporate wisdom, is to make a wisdom holder’s surface knowledge available to a general population, so that other people can do the following:
Hoo boy. Twitterland is rockin’ with Stacey Monk’s (@StaceyMonk) guest post on Sam Lawrence’s (@SamLawrence) blog, Go Big Always. Dennis Howlett (@dahowlett) and I don’t know how many others blogged to get the word out as well.
Dennis tweeted me, asking what IBM could do. I’ve been on holiday in New York City these last four days (Mom, I couldn’t find your records on Ellis Island, bummer), but now I’m home, and wondering how on earth to move the dancing elephant to assist Stacy’s Epic Change organization. I know there’s a process somewhere, but I will have to blog internally for help to learn which levers to pull and which buttons to push to get the elephant to dance Stacey’s way.
Anyway.
Stacey is looking for:
Here’s what I’m going to do personally: give donations in my mother’s and mother-in-law’s names for Mother’s Day. They love this kind of stuff, especially since education was practically a religion in their houses. Don’t have a mom? Donate in honor of your favorite teacher of yore on America’s National Teacher Day, Tuesday, May 6.
It would be great if you could participate, even if you just blog and twitter about this worthy cause. Please pass the word, Web 2.0 style.
Just read how adoption of corporate social networks remain sluggish.
Let’s say you implement an online social networking system in your organization, and adoption happens. Over time, does it become a giant echo chamber of groupthink? Does everyone eventually become connected to the point that no original thought occurs? I believe so. On the other hand, the potential massive increase in productivity that comes from knowing what others know (call it “network awareness”) is nothing to sneeze at.
But, to remain healthy, a person’s network must continually expand (and maybe even atrophy – new cells form, old cells die). My friend, Kathryn Everest, explains it this way: I meet someone new, we have a burst of energetic collaboration and breakthrough thinking, but our relationship normalizes over time, and our differing points of view begin to become similar. To get that new thinking fix again, that jazz factor, I need to make a connection with someone new. Social network science calls this extending your reach, and it’s critical to innovative thinking.
This makes me think of The Truman Show. If your network can only expand to the edge of your corporate bubble, then what’s the life expectancy of a corporation’s ability to innovate?
Right. That’s why there are books like Wikinomics.
Oh. And Twitter.
Those who start from the outside first probably benefit more than those who try to start from the inside first. Also, it’s WAY easier to justify the cost of setting up an external online social environment with your business partners and customers than it is with just employees alone. Of course, you must have an “inside out” culture to support it.
I once read Mean Genes (loved it), and somewhere in that book the authors talk about how society’s evolution has greatly outpaced biological adaptation. This has caused, among other things, a human being’s inability to instinctually behave as if there are more than a few hundred other souls on the planet. Our biology is still stuck back in the day when we only thought those in our immediate community were the only other humans around.
So, you know how hard it is to get people to consistently reduce, reuse and recycle? It’s the same for online social participation behind the firewall. “So I tossed a plastic bag. What difference will it really make?”… “Who is going to even care about what I have to say in a blog or forum?”… There’s no immediate gratification in either of those actions. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the butterfly and/or cumulative effect our social efforts, online or otherwise, can have.
It takes effort to think globally.
My “gig” last week was in front of about 70 folks from the Canadian government. We were in a smaller version of the United Nations auditorium, and I felt very diplomatic. Themes encountered during that meeting are turning into a tune that I just can’t get out of my head. I haven’t kept meticulous track, but while speaking to this customer, plus about 30 large Americas-based enterprise customers over the past few months, and over 100 since February 2007, I’ve noticed the following tune:
Ability to search using a Blackberry for profiles, not just for phone or email, but for skills, affinities and networks, is perceived as very valuable (nobody has mentioned an iPhone yet)Most large enterprises feel more comfortable when they have an inkling of how they’re going to get people to use social software, and how they’re going to govern that use, before they sign a purchase order. I’m hoping Oliver Marks can help shed detailed light on the governance part (to see entire Twitter conversation, click “View Conversation” here).
There are emerging professional services from large and small consulting companies, emerging communities, and scads of blog posts about how to refine this melody for the enterprise. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony on this one, but it’s going to take some serious organizational cultural shifts before we can strike up the band (ok, done with the music metaphors).
I read Cryptonomicon in 2006. That was my introduction to Mr. Stephenson’s brain. I then tried to read Quicksilver, no go. Just finished Snow Crash (loved it), and I’m in the middle of The Diamond Age, at the part where Hackworth has just been arrested by Constable Chang. The whole nanotechnological-Victorian thing reminds me so much of the Wild Wild West TV show (yes, I know it wasn’t set in the Victorian period).
In the book, a woman gets a nanosite tattoo known as the “Jodie.” And the protagonist is a little girl named Nell. This book was published in 1995, a year after the movie Nell, starring Jodie Foster, was released (“T’ee in the wayah!”).
Coinky-dink? Maybe.
Clay Shirky’s session at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco caused a wave of wow throughout TwitterLand, which was the only way I was able to participate in the conference.
He has blogged an edited transcription of his infectious discourse, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. And now I am wowing.
Shirky explains that at each major shift in society – from the ages of agrarian to industrial, to information, to Web – it’s too much to handle, so we self-anesthetize (with gin, sitcoms, what have you) for awhile before we’re able to figure out what to do.
He goes on to explain that our kiddos are growing up expecting all media to include the ability to not just consume, but to produce and share. What a beautiful definition of that phrase I hate, “Web 2.0.”
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Has anyone read his book? Did you enjoy it?
Incidentally, I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, in which he describes a future media world that includes (inte)ractives and (inte)ractors. Payors buy the ractive they want to participate in, and ractors play some of the parts in the story. This book was published in 1995.
(Read Parts I and II for context)
Tagging’s yuck factor for the traditional worker
T.W. says, “Urgh. Tagging. Look, I just want my dang folders. It’s what I’m comfy with. Piles of papers all over my desk. More papers in filing cabinets underneath it. Documents in folders on my computer. Like the little rooms I imagine are in my head, where I store all the crap I’ll forget when I’m older.”
Ah yes, Grasshopper, but you can usually only put something in one folder at a time, right? Wow, that’s a lot of cognitive pressure to come up with THE magic folder label for that thing on the spot, and then somehow remember what you called it later. I take it you enjoy doing mental gymnastics every time you need to find something again.
Tagging is the reverse of foldering: instead of putting something into one folder, you put lots of “folder labels” onto the thing.
After T.W. clicks “Bookmark This!”, and before she clicks “Save”, she can put some “folder labels” on that bookmark. TIP: use tags that you would normally type into Google to find that thing again.
So now, T.W. can categorize something in many ways, not just one. She can find it again later by remembering any of those tags, then either searching for it, or clicking on it in her tag cloud in Dogear. And, she can use Dogear to bookmark anything she can browse to, inside or outside the firewall.
And then…
T.W. will eventually find loads more stuff from other people who’ve used the same tags, and then, “wow! look at that! I was just looking for that last week! Heyyyy, this bookmark/tag thingy is cool! Hey, T.C.W. (Traditional Co-Worker)… c’mere and look at this…”
Back to my customer discussion.
We talked about the value of using a tagging service to let people type tags directly onto intranet web pages themselves, like this:
But, since traditional workers are not used to typing directly onto a web page (that’s not Web 1.0!), and since this method doesn’t really place that page into their own personal bookmark stash, they skip it.
Maybe you’ll find those who’ll tag pages directly for the needs of the many, since they outweigh the needs of the few, or the one, (unless you’re the one). But those folks are going to be a minority for now.
I say, address the “What’s in it for me?” thing first, before guilting them into helping out the rest of the company.
