Sad to say, many leaders cannot find time to read a book or even a lengthy article. Here, for the time-challenged, are the notes of an interviewer who chatted with me earlier this month.
Bullets
It’s not about the technology.
* Boil learning down to its basics; then match up to Internet technologies.
* Learning is social – if you’re raised by wolves you won’t develop what makes us human.
* We learn through participation. Encourage people to start experimenting.
The added value of technology is then that it helps you make more connections, and potentially do more with them.
* Tools like wikis, when they hit a rich and latent seam in the organization, also have the scope to shoot through information silos.
* If people have burning issues to deal with, they will find a way to work and learn together, no matter what the technology infrastructure.
So the most responsive approach is to find the affinity group and then layer the technology on top.
Communities of practice are natural affinity groups who will take to social networking.
* Much of the discussion that goes on is about defining the way the community will deal with the future.
Nine out of ten wikis fail. Why? Because it’s easy to set one up, so many people do this, but if there’s no reason for it to exist, no one’s going to come and add to it.
* Meeting off-line is a valuable and important way of reinforcing ties within a social network.
* You can’t force a social network to succeed.
* All you can do is create the optimum conditions for it to flourish where and when it takes hold.
* A buddy system can be useful for new entrants, to ‘meet and greet,’ show them the ropes and help build confidence.
Every group needs a champion.
* Peer support is a different function from championing, and it’s hard for one person to combine the two.
* It’s also important to have support roles like clearing up all the crap that happens on a wiki and keeping it clean and coherent.
You’ve got to give up control.
* Knowledge workers have to be trusted – otherwise they won’t be able to do the work that’s expected of them.
* Nowadays you can do guerrilla prototyping of just about anything – this gets round the corporate IT department’s control.
* As a participant, you take control; you don’t need an expert.
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0 comments ↓
It makes a good aide-memoire.
I think the ease of setting up wikis can be a strength — the fact that they are lightweight and somewhat unstructured jumpstarts “guerrilla prototyping” as you put it, so their failure rate may in part be a function of that kind of experimentation. Nevertheless, I’m wondering where your failure rate stat of 9 out of 10 came from.
Teresa, yes, I agree that ease of experimentation with wikis drives up the failure rate. Same as with blogs. It wasn’t that long ago that pundits used the rate of blog abandonment as proof that blogging wouldn’t last.
The “9 out of 10″ is more a way of saying many more wikis succeed than fail; don’t expect it to be precise. My source on this was Bill Bruck of Q2 Learning. Bill’s been at this as long as wikis have been around. Before that, too.
Harold, aide-memoire is a great term. I’ll add it to my list of performance support tools.
Thanks for this excellent snapshot of key points. I particularly liked:
Tools like wikis, when they hit a rich and latent seam in the organization, also have the scope to shoot through information silos.
In particular, I like the “rich and latent seam” part. That is a concept that hadn’t fully formed in my mind – thanks for giving it life.
Jay, I did see the “9 out of 10″ figure as a metaphor, not a statistic. I think it’s good enough for metaphoric purposes, though I think the failure of some wikis to thrive can also come from the awkwardness of the technology and the unfamiliarity of the process.
E.g., the coding for some wikis gets in the way of what people want to say (the technology). Also, the nonlinear structure is a hurdle that’s hard for some people to clear: where’s the table of contents? Where’s the index? I have to MAKE them?!?
I’d add to the list the value of a small but working prototype (or demo project) — e.g., if my project team is able to work effectively using a wiki, then word-of-mouth and the actual example will serve as encouragement to others to experiment.
I think wikis fail more than succeed so far because people don’t have time or find themselves in the right place with the right device when they do have time, audio wikis may change this e.g. http://cag.csail.mit.edu/commit/papers/08/kotkar-hci08.pdf
It would be interesting to get some stats from someone like SocialText (miki) re the effect or no effect that having mobile wikis as part of wiki solutions makes?
When I suggested this in last role, there was mixed opinion as to whether mobiles would make a difference and concern about audio file size, hopefully CSAIL and others will be able to provide more insight?
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