Carol RozwellIn an earlier post Beware: The Seduction of Social, I commented that the “provide and pray” approach for social technology doesn’t work. While working on the Business Gets Social scenario for fall symposium, I explored two critical uncertainties: how organizations will allocate resources and how work will be executed. During this exploration, it became evident that I was correct in my assessment – most of the time. Provide and pray can work, but for most organizations it’s a long shot.
There are some situations in which offering social tools to workers will result in their spontaneous adoption. It’s rare – less than 15% of the implementations we’ve studied – but it can happen.
So the critical question becomes, under what circumstances does this unaided uptake occur? The short answer is: when it worked the last time. The organizations that have a track record of successfully letting “1000 flowers grow”with other technologies will likely see a similar response with social.
To add some meat to that bony answer, the implementations were we’ve seen workers more or less spontaneously adopt social tools are characterized by:
- A high percentage of pioneers who are naturally curious about how new technologies can help them work better (however they specifically define better)
- A self-directed workforce that is empowered to set goals and act on them
- A network-centric leadership style where employees are involved in decision making
- A management team that not just endorses the concept of collaboration but demonstrates their belief in it with their actions.
So back to scenario planning. One possible eventuality I explored in the scenario is a world in which resources are allocated to work based community interests and workers decide to participate in projects when they capture their imagination. Leaders who believe this world is a viable outcome should compare their organization to the four criteria mentioned above. Where they are lacking, they need to take action to close the gap. In most cases this will require a significant re-education of the management team and a rethinking of critical work activities.
I hope you will be able to join me at Symposium/ITxpo 2011 in Orlando to hear the rest of the scenario.
Category: Change management Collaboration community Knowledge management Social media Social networks social software Uncategorized Tags: Change management, Collaboration, Collaboration dynamics, Collective, communities of practice, community, Community of practice, Knowledge management, Social media, Social networking, Social networks, symposium
6 responses so far ↓
1 Chris Lynch August 19, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Nice post, Carol. With regards to adoption, what we’re finding is that the closer a social platform maps to business process and integrates systems of record that employees already use each day, the more successful the adoption is and the less likely it becomes “an extra thing to check.”
With business champions, it’s really important that they don’t just say, “work from here now,” but that they also identify what business processes should be moved into the platform and lead by example in that regard.
-Chris
twitter.com/cglynch
2 Carol Rozwell August 19, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Chris,
Thanks for your comment. You mentioned a few critical factors: integration into work practices, management action (not just buy-in) and utility.
3 Pearl Zhu August 22, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Hi, Carol, enjoy your posting, social/enterprise 2.0 really provides the platform to reinvent our working environment, and framework the open or social enterprise, as a couple of bullet point you summarize above, as well as how to integrate the new working scenario into the business process, or organizational structure (pyramid, matrix or lattice., etc). The goal to re-imagine the work place it to make the work more fun, employee more purpose-driven, and business more agile., thanks.
4 Carol Rozwell August 23, 2011 at 5:32 am
Pearl,
Thank you for your comment. There is some pretty exciting potential to be explored, for sure!
5 Charles Bladen, University of Greenwich August 26, 2011 at 8:04 am
Thanks for the post Carol. I found it through your linkedin profile. We’ve recently been writing an events management book, one chapter of which explores the use of social media. We have generally found that post such as yours are the most useful “real world” material out there and shall be paying close attention to your comments in future as this develops. Charles.
6 Carol Rozwell August 26, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Charles,
Appreciate the compliment and glad to know my comments resonated with you.
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