Yesterday I had the honor of speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, and before my session I caught a pretty rich dialog on the main stage between Andrew McAfee and some of the leadership behind Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hello, a home-grown intranet not unlike IDEO’s Tube.
Gratuitous, marginally-related image used to make an all-text post look more appealing
Art Fritzon, Senior VP at Booz and patron of Hello, offered an anecdote about changing mindsets around social software that is just too good not to share. I’m paraphrasing here, so forgive me Art if I mess up a detail or two:
We had an older senior partner at Booz Allen who didn’t understand what we were up to with our social intranet project and thought it was a waste of time, or perhaps a fad.
“Go check out Wikipedia”, I told him. “I want you to find the article in there on Booz Allen. And when you do, I promise you you’ll find something wrong in it. When that happens, I want you to press the ‘edit’ button and fix it. Then come back and talk to me.”
Sure enough, the senior partner went out, tried the little experiment, and came back a changed man. “This”, he told me, “this is the future of our business.”
It’s easy for those of us who live in the middle of this social media revolution to forget what a mind-bending paradigm shift our first experience with social software was. Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia — these things joggled our minds the first time we interacted with them. Social software is funny in that way — it simultaneously wants to fit into existing cultural norms while breaking rules about what is possible.
Ooh – somebody tweet that last sentence. That was a good one. Wait – too long. Dammit.
Social software paradoxically wants to fit into existing cultural norms while breaking rules about what’s possible.
There. That’s better.
“Social software paradoxically wants to fit into existing cultural norms while breaking rules about what’s possible. ”
I think it’s a platitude for getting people “in” while trying to continue to move the envelope forward. If you were to say “Social software has the potential to change your organization by allowing employees to organize however they choose, perhaps deciding that you, management, is irrelevant, connecting with each other to gather that knowledge that you currently hold so dear….” well, conversations like that don’t really get very far.
It’s going to take awhile for work to change. Look at how long it took for email to be a primary mode of conversation from the time it arrived to the time of adoption. Then think about how long it’s going to take to shake the model of the industrial revolution…we’ve had it for hundreds of years.
Social software can enable it, but it won’t do it alone miraculously, and those who attempt to get it into the organization must be aware of sounding fan-boi-ish…that will just scare those for whom knowledge, and the sole possession of such, is power.
I think social software simply represents the evolution of computer technology towards better replicating real world interaction.
Wikis, discussion forums, profile pages, Google Wave, Enterprise 2.0: It all represents a step forward in technology being like the conference room, water cooler, dinner table or beer keg.
Art was lucky: he found the right key to show it to him and at the same time he was enough open-minded to get it at the first try.
However, the point you’re making here is true: we need often to make a step backward and try to see how the technology looks from the eyes of someone not already immersed in it.
About this I find interesting to look someone teaching an elder one (often, not too much elder! Even a 50-years-old person is more than enough) since the two mental models are completely different and it’s nice to see how the two interact to try to find some kind of common ground.
hello everybody
I am very glad to come here
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