Driving Adoption is anti-2.0

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I have to admit, it'd be fun to hear Paula expound on this theme.

 
The 2.0 Adoption Council Engage. Evangelize. Empower.

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Can I be a ref?

If you're prepared to wear stripes and a whistle!

Oh, I'm prepared. 

I'll record it and post on YouTube for everyone's viewing pleasure

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Very curious to know how driving adoption is Anti-2.0? Seems to me the very spirit of 2.0 is learning and sharing with one another, so the more folks at the party, the better the learning and conversation. If I wanted to talk to the same people every day, I could just stick with the same boring meetings.

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Point well-taken - good blog post that I largely agree with. Still looking forward to the session and hearing the argument. 

 

I think it depends on how you define adoption as to whether or not it's good or bad...If you're striving for 100% adoption, you're way off track. Perhaps the more appropriate word is awareness...and if you've done it right, increasing awareness will facilitate further adoption.

The right tools make people want to use it because they're able to do things differently and better than before. 

How have we not met until now? 

Cheers,

Jamie

I also like M. Kanazawa's "People Don’t Hate Change, They Hate How You’re Trying to Change Them" - seems like a similar theme.

Daniel: Thanks for that reference. I am also one to quickly jump on the adage that "people don't want to change". I'll consider this messaging as part of the presentation.

Excellent point, Daniel!

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Matt: I've been thinking about a 'sexier term'. One of the challenges is that "facilitation" is a critical focus. When trained by a very talented individual on facilitation skills, I added critical skills to my repetoire and due to it's strength, facilitation (when done 'right') is as critical to collaborative thinking as the thinking is : )

It is also a concept that can occur 'by design' in proxy. Particularly for E2.0 the goal is to create an infrastructure that facilitates the work as if there were someone there helping. We're not talking about the intrusiveness of the failed Microsoft "Clippy" sort of thing, but that as is done with all good design, the path is cleared and groomed for the key scenarios that are likely to occur and that there are 'out's for the exceptions that cannot all possibly be thought of or accommodated.

Indeed, the term was significant enough that in my building of a case against Knowledge Management I immediately went to the goal that I labeled, "facilitate thinking" (addressed over a decade ago).

This is where you'd wish that we can do full-text searches on books. I swear that there was a specific reference that Tim Brown made in "Change by Design" but it's not in the index, so I'll need to go searching for it manually later.

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I think we may need a keynote from Dr David Vaine here: http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/david_vaine_on_corporate_blogging/

Here's the problem I have with that presentation -- it speaks in 1.0 language. It focuses on the tools and not on the capabilities.

Several years ago when advising a team that was putting on a full-day 2.0 event (it was more of a 'come-when-you-can', repeating schedule of events for the UK's Department for Work and Pensions) that their inclination to make lists of the technologies they believed were indicative of 2.0 had to be abandonded. It didn't mean that the technologies could not be mentioned within a specific context but that they could not LEAD with the technologies as the point of the discussion.

The bottom line is that a blog or a wiki is simply a means to 'format' content in a specific way (that's exactly what Word and Excel are, as well). The conversations need to focus on the content and the specific ways in which and why content needs to be exchanged (esp. within the context of existing work), and yes, how any of the technologies might help facilitate those goals.

David Vaine's presentation would not be my recommendation for anyone to watch as it reiterates the type of conversations and language that are just as detrimental as "driving adoption". He simply puts a bandaid on their already bad behaviors/language by embracing them, rather than eschewing them. So thanks for that additional fodder to add to my presentation : ) [of course I fully missed the fact that it was intended to be irony, but by doing so it invests a lot of time in the 'wrong language' and doesn't suggest what the 'alternatives' might be]

Paula - I think David Vaine's creator would be very happy if you used him as an example "worst practice".

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Aaron: I believe you are right, that leaders don't know what to replace it with. I also believe there's another dimension to it, they're too busy with day-to-day things and that because there is no normal place by which to assign these responsibilities (what budget is generally the first a CEO would think of when it comes to the design of humans interacting with their business? -- a very strategically relevant focus for which there is no standard organizational alignment), and thus they have no one to automatically turn to and have the follow up on this topic even if they believed it to be relevant, but weren't sure why.

That's exactly why AG Lafley had to create a VP of Design Strategy at P&G that reported directly to him. Oddly, Carly Fiorio had created a similar role at HP during her tenure, but it was minimized and has effectively become neutered by Mark Hurd.

And yes, command and control will not go away, but there's a need to swing the balance to the middle, which most businesses are not in. They are far too focused on what they believe is a goal of (borrowing from Roger Martin) "reliability" and in doing so sacrifice a focus on "viability" (or my preferred term for assonance, "relevance").

2.0 provides the mindset and the capabilities for us to make everything more relevant, without sacrificing reliability. The David Vaine presentation Matt offered above fails because it speaks in the language of reliability and offers nothing in terms of relevance -- which is why it's not 2.0 language. Indeed, that's at the heart of the issue with 'driving adoption' -- that's reliability language, not relevance language. Roger Martin deals with this topic in detail in his latest book The Design of Business, but I was first exposed to the details in this 2007 IIT-ID presentation (nearly 60 min), and summarized a few notes from that presentation in "Reliability vs. Validity".

Relevance is the watchword for our insistence that design requires embracing the context. That's why there are no 'best practices', only relevant paths that others have taken, in specific contexts. It's why there can be no 'experts', as they only know answers that work in the specific contexts they were in, and even for that situation, everything has changed since then. It's why our designs continue to 'fail' -- because the context is CONSTANTLY changing, and yet all the methodologies are design to 'lock things down' (a reliability language).

See also my piece E2.0: Unleashing the Potential. In the continuum there, represented by the graphic, the two items on the left correspond with relevance, the two items on the right correspond with reliability.

When I think about the design of humans interacting with their business, I immediately think of what the governance model is.  There's three domains that come to mind -- business and its customers; business and its partners; business and its employees.  IMHO, there's a need for a thin layer of shared leadership on what tools and what philosophy the business is going to engage in, but in the case of business and its employees - a learning function might be a good fit for designing how employees interact with the business (and each other), since an argument can be made that such interaction is in the realm of managing know-how.

Being a learning person, it's easy for me to have that perspective (#caveat) ;)

The problem with managing 'know-how' is that it is only contextually relevant and typically it is not stored in a way that specifically outlines all of the contextual relevance : )

That for me is the most fundamental reason KM efforts fail -- not to mention they're built using methods and language of reliability, when they should be more relevance focused. No one expresses the significance of this more clearly and with more passion than Patrice Livingston when I interviewed her at a conference this past October. As she notes, the real value is in the unstructured content vs. the structured content (that most KM technologies focus on).

I think there's KM and there's KM. American KM has focused on technocratic solutions and efficiency - altho there is evidence that this is changing. Australian KM has had a much stronger focus on the importance of context. Enterprise 2.0 can offer us richer ways of keeping more of the context of interactions & documentation.

This sounds alot like what Rummler's managing the white spaces. We have the command and control org charts to give us contextual relevance about how work is organized, but the white spaces between the boxes on the org chart is where the real work happens. I'd say *2.0 can help surface and capitalize on (not to mention contextually organize) the activities that happen in the white space.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

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Ooh. Thanks for bringing up the voting thing. There's still a lot we have to learn about it all. Voting is relevant in certain contexts. But is it more relevant than other factors such as level of 'energy' around a topic or the prevailing sentiment (positive or negative)? Yes, even voting is very 1.0 (on/off, white/black vs. 2.0 shades of gray), but we don't have the semantic capabilities to replace it yet.

Voting will be one aspect of the selection process. There are others here too Paula - "intensity" being one of them.

Of course, getting the word out will be important. Having Esteban digging your proposal can't hurt!

I am indeed working on an ESP project that truly captures sentiment (as opposed to the crock that people buy into today).  My backers don't want me talking much about it, but it is based on thoughts, presence, intensity (as hutch said), reputation, and about 200 other variables measured directly from the brain via sensors as opposed to voting.

based on my early alpha model, this session is going to capture the top spot... that is until the 1.0 people come in and vote for their friends without knowing why :)

Hutch,

Thanks for the vote of confidence...

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TJ: Did you read ANY of the commentary? If you're not meeting people in the middle of their established processes you're NOT DOING E2.0!

Hi Paula,

 

Thank you for replying. I actually did read the comments, as well as your explanatory blog post on the topic. While I think we both agree that "meeting people in the middle of their established processes" is important, I think my point still stands: you actually have to do more than have elegant design and integration to get real value out of enteprise 2.0 technology. I preface this by stating a fact verified in every information worker study we've conducted to date: employees using enterprise 2.0 constitute a small niche in the workplace. The rest? Setting aside those who say it's not available to them, those who don't take advantage of these technologies overwhelmingly tell us that it's just not important to their job. That does not bode well for organic growth or creating that powerful network that leverages the brainpower of the entire organization.

 

Let me pose a simple question: how do you convince someone who sees little or no value in their company's social network to update their profile (beyond the tombstone information dynamically pulled from Active Directory) in a meaningful way that will allow them to contribute to the "conversation?" Let's assume that you've tied the network to SharePoint, used the API to attach it to your CRM system, and allowed people to make updates directly to it from email (i.e. you've done your best to meet them in their process). As long as that employee perceives a workaround ("I know the people I need to work with, and I can send an email out to a pre-established list to find people in other departments"), she's not going to gravitate toward these shiny, new enterprise 2.0 toys. So, the people who really buy in and start using are a small group of evangelists who, quite frankly, may turn off others in the organization if they become overzealous in preaching the value of enterprise 2.0. Our data and anecdotal evidence bears this out.

 

Businesses, particularly in this fast-paced world, don't have time to wait for all employees to get with the program. And, rolling this back around to the originial point, this is why I don't see the problem with the notion of "driving adoption." It's great that some people will get onboard on their own (it's the hallmark of viral adoption), but if the company has decided they really need everyone in the company to be active on the social network, they need a way to get everyone (the leading edgers and the laggards) on board. It's a problem that's faced all business technology, and, as we've seen, it's the same problem that enterprise 2.0 tech faces -- regardless of its "social" nature.

 

Once again, thank you for your reply. This is an interesting debate and I'd be happy to discuss further. I suspect that we're not actually that far apart in thinking (as I mentioned, this is probably just a semantic difference).

 

Cheers,

 

TJ Keitt

Analyst

Forrester Research

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