Risking tweets for the benefit of elite sport

“He’s done what? on what?” - is probably how the conversation started for Richmond coach Damien Hardwick when notified that ruckman Dan Jackson had published criticism of the AFL match review panel on his Facebook page.

As reported in the Herald Sun on July 15:

After his third penalty for the season, a frustrated Jackson told his Facebook friends: “Dan Jackson is sick of playing a pussy sport and so is retiring in favour of playing a real man’s sport. Perhaps I’ll be better suited to the NRL?”

This message found its way into the public spotlight after one of Jackson’s “several hundred friends” on Facebook made the comments public.

As Hardwick observed: “Social media these days, with Twitter and all those forms of communication … it can be a dangerous thing.”

Understandably, naive use of social media like this by elite athletes can have significant negative ramifications for sporting organisations.  For Richmond it could easily have lead to the suspension of Jackson for one or more games.  Its not hard to imagine other disgruntled players airing grievances in more colourful language that could have dire implications – including fines and the potential loss of sponsorship.

With the rise and rise of social media, I am sure that more and more professional sporting club media managers and CEO’s are experiencing sleepless nights hoping that their stable of elite athletes are not indulging in ‘harmless pranks’ that can easily get out of hand – as per the infamous North Melbourne chook sex video which appeared on YouTube in 2009.

With these risks, one would expect many a club would be shying away from social media….

However, if developments in North America are anything to go by, just the opposite is likely to happen.

Activ8social.com, an organisation specialising in digital branding and social media network development, observed in May 2010 that:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put on his company blog: “next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. “  For the most part, we believe this statement is true at Activ8Social, and we also believe the shift toward a more open, social web is a good change for both the sports brand/team/athlete and the consumer/fan.

Why? Because Facebook now carries the personal identity of over 450 million people around the world enabling sports media outlets and brands that implement Facebook’s Social Plugins to more effectively build relationships with fans and consumers that are mutually desired.   It also gives third-party websites the ability to directly provide relevant and extremely targeted information to your Facebook news feed.

These sentiments are reflected in the North American National Hockey League’s evolving social media strategy. As reported by Greg Wyshynski on Yahoo Sports in October 2009,

The goal is simple: Make it more fun to be an NHL fan, which in turn will make more sports fans want to become one.

“Social networks aren’t about Web sites. They’re about experiences,” said Mike DiLorenzo, director of social media marketing and strategy for the NHL.

The NHL believes that bringing fans together socially online, and bringing fans closer to their favourite teams and players, is a fundamental way to grow the game in a changing media culture.

“Blogs are the original social networking tool. They bring a voice and perspective to the NHL media property that may not currently exist,” he said. “We’re trying to encourage more of our users to write about their favourite team and inspire more dialogue.”

In other words, the NHL wants to activate their fans into content providers and marketing foot soldiers, something evident by the League’s approach to both Twitter and Facebook in recent months. NHL Fans encourages users to bring the NHL to their favourite social media sites and to their personal blogs through widgets.

Other sports within North America, do not seem as keen on embracing social media for other reasons – as highlighted by Reuters.com on October 1, 2009:

The NFL, which zealously protects its on-field product, was the first of North America’s big four professional sports leagues to put a twitter policy in place, banning players from using social media platforms from 90 minutes before kickoff.

While coaches worry reckless tweets may provide inspirational bulletin board material for opposing teams, leagues are working to protect broadcast rights holders from tweeters getting too close to play-by-play.

These concerns from the NFL have not been lost on the NHL, as indicated by Wyshynski in his arcticle:

Twitter is an interesting concept for the NHL. As a League, it’s used the social network well; but it’s still trying to figure out the “proper” way for its teams and players to use it.

What then are the implications for sporting teams in Australia?

As listed by Anthony Alsop on SportsSpeil.com, there are some 47+ AFL players active on Twitter, along with coaches, team and regional leagues.

Alsop, who sees his personal mission as “to raise awareness of the positive impacts social media can have for businesses” and has researched and blogged on many aspects of social media and sport, has identified the following social media best practice for sporting bodies:

Be consistent: Throughout your social media ‘footprint’, consistency is key. If you have uploaded a video, post the link to your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts.. Not all members of each platform are members of the other, so the same message needs to be relayed to all fans – this also applies to direct E-Marketing.

Be yourself: Fans come to your site for transparency, for something unique that they can’t achieve through traditional outlets such as press releases or website news. They want that extra special something that makes them feel like a fly on the wall.

Be active: Online users will often come to your website two or three times a day. If you are not posting news or links on a daily basis your consumers will go elsewhere. You need to stay active to keep the attention of your users even in down times. ‘Content is King’ and one must entertain his subjects.

‘Dialogue not monologue’: Create fan polls, react to comments posted on forums, articles or Tweets, become engaged in what the customer is saying. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, so allow your consumers plenty of opportunity to place feedback. If a fan has an ‘authentic interaction’ from an athlete or celebrity this is an incredible experience for them and often can strengthen the bond, between brand and consumer, club and fan.

Spread the word: You have an online community or ‘e-tribe’, so use them. Encourage your users to retweet messages, use Digg as a method of spreading the gospel of your website or even give away prizes for fans that use your brand in a Twitter #hashtag or Facebook update. This will ‘activate’ other fans and they too will become part of your community.

Constantly changing technologies: The future of the web is on portable devices such as iPods, smart phones and gaming platforms such as Xbox and Sony Playstation – how can we ensure these platforms achieve equal status to their web counterparts?

Social media has elevated a fan’s experience beyond just wearing their favourite team’s scarf or guernsey to the game. Fans can now carry around their favourite team in their pocket wherever they go. They can now be involved with like-minded fans at anytime of the day, from anywhere in the world

There is no doubt that sporting organisations will need to accept and embrace social media as a way of enhancing the service and experience provided to their customers (i.e. their fans and supporters).  To achieve this, the social media platforms and the content contributors (i.e. the athletes) should be integrated into the business operations of the organisation and appropriately resourced, staffed and supported (i.e. Trained).   Those organisations that fail to address these challenges will have to contend with the well publicised risks – and a lot of sleepless nights for media managers and CEO’s.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

Clay Shirky’s book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is a good study of the emergent trends within social media and collaboration behaviour – I recommend it as essential reading to anyone who is interested in Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

One of the stories in the book is particularly enlightening – I had a hunt around and found this online version of ‘Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone’.

The story entails a lost phone and the leveraging of social media ‘to deliver a lesson on the etiquette of returning people’s lost belongings’. This episode graphically illustrates the power of group action – given the right tools – and how people react to, participate in, and even alter the story as it is unfolding.

What is interesting, and more than a little disturbing, is some of the unintended side effects:

• Someone driving by Sasha’s house, videoing the house and posting it on the internet.
• Members of Luis’ military police unit enquiring about allegations of threats to a civilian.
• Online conversations about whether Luis was taking sufficient care of his uniform.
• Public pressure on the NYPD resulting in the tasking of 2 detectives to investigate a minor crime and arrest Sasha.
• Evan’s success in generating media attention leading to freelance work doing PR.
• The New York Times and CNN picking up the story of a stolen phone because it was wrapped up in the larger story of national and international attention – the story ended up in more than 60 newspapers and radio and TV stations and more than 200 web-logs.
• The number of people interested in talking about the stolen phone and the standard anonymity of internet users made conversations effectively impossible to police - Evan’s bulletin board quickly become host to public messages disparaging Sasha, her boyfriend and friends, single mothers, and Puerto Ricans as a group.  One thread involved discussion by male participants as to whether Sasha was attractive enough to sleep with.
• Though Evan was clearly benefiting from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it – the bargain he had crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see.

As Shirky observes:

The story demonstrates how dramatically connected we’ve become to one another.

It demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about ourselves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinised in public.  It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience.  It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat.  And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilised for the right kind of cause.  But who defines what kind of cause is right?

This story illustrates the kind of world we now find ourselves in:

Do we want a world in which a well-off grown up can use this kind of leverage to get a teenager arrested, as well as named and shamed on a global platform, for what was a fairly trivial infraction?

Poor people lose phones too, and the loss hits them far harder; why should Evan have been able to browbeat the NYPD into paying attention to this of all lost property?

Policing time is finite, yet the willingness of humans to feel wronged is infinite.  Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?

Food for thought…

Cheers,

Carl

Shock of the new … Enterprise 2.0 implications for management culture

One final observation I’d like to make regarding Andrew P McAfee‘s Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006)  is about the impact that Enterprise 2.0 is likely to have on management culture.

In my previous blog entries regarding McAfee’s article:

• I summarised the SLATES framework that was proposed by Andrew P McAfee in his article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006)
• Provided an assessment of Alfresco Share against the SLATES framework as a way of providing more context to the key technology concepts of Enterprise 2.0 identified by McAfee
• Outlined a simple knowledge building approach using Alfresco Share as an Enterprise 2.0 platform to avoid information anarchy.

McAfee observes that today’s corporate intranets typically reflect one viewpoint – that of management – and are not platforms for dissent or debate.

However, as an organisation moves to adopt Enterprise 2.0 platforms, blogs, wikis and other ‘voice-giving technologies’ will be available for staff and will reduce management’s ability to remain in ‘unilateral control’ and suppress dissent.

The key challenge for the culture of management within the organisation is ‘can the organisation’s leadership resist the temptation to silence dissent’.

McAfee provides a useful example to consider:

‘What will happen the first time that someone points out in their blog that an important project is behind schedule and that corners are being cut?’

McAfee recommends that leaders play a delicate role, that changes over time, if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.  They have to:

• Firstly – encourage and stimulate use of the new tools
• Secondly – refrain from intervening too often or with too heavy a hand.

If they fail at either of these roles – if they are too light at first or too heavy later on – their company is liable to wind up with ‘only a few online newsletters and whiteboards, used for prosaic purposes’.

I agree with McAfee’s observations … But offer the following commentary …

As McAfee points out earlier in his article, most knowledge workers won’t use the new Enterprise 2.0 technologies, despite training and prodding – just as most people who use the Internet today aren’t bloggers, wikipedians or taggers.  They don’t help produce the platform – they just use it.

Those that do adopt the new Enterprise 2.0 technologies – the early adopters – may well have an agenda to push.

Consequently, if details of a project running late are published on the intranet and management is perceived to respond quickly to address the issue, then it is highly likely that other staff will form the view that the way to get management’s attention for their current problem is to publish it on the Intranet.  That is, ‘the squeaky wheel gets the oil’.

This situation is likely to deteriorate rapidly – if management doesn’t respond to ‘highly visible’ problems they will be perceived to be negligent in their role.  But if they do respond, they will be forever chasing down the latest published problem on the Intranet.

I think a safer approach is to adopt a business engineering approach that I have seen applied to facilitate continuous improvement initiatives:

Business Engineering Approach

Using such an approach, all staff are encouraged to identify ‘improvement opportunities’ and enter these into a register.  All entries within the register are periodically reviewed, analysed and prioritised.  From this analysis, improvement opportunities are selected and grouped into an improvement proposal and subsequently addressed via an improvement project.

The value of this process is that it is transparent to everyone and provides a consistent, planned approach to addressing issues.  The ideal location for the Improvement Opportunity Register is somewhere on the Enterprise 2.0 platform – where issues can be freely added, links created to other issues, discussions added, and (importantly) resolutions can be advertised.

Following such an approach should enable management embrace Enterprise 2.0, avoid the perception of ‘only oiling the squeaky wheel’, and allow them to demonstrate that they are serious about addressing issues while also being cognisant of limited time and resources.

Cheers,

Carl

Avoiding information anarchy – a simple knowledge building approach

In my previous blog entries, I summarised the SLATES framework that was proposed by Andrew P McAfee (Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006) and provided an assessment of Alfresco Share against the SLATES framework as a way of providing more context to the key technology concepts of Enterprise 2.0 identified by McAffee.

In this blog entry, I want to pick up on McAffee’s observation that ‘build it and they will come‘ is not a realistic deployment strategy.

As highlighted in an example, McAffee describes a stalled deployment where:

“people weren’t clear on what it was, what it should be use for or what its advantages were, so they stayed away”.

Use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies appear to spread most quickly when there is some initial structure and hierarchy:

“Information anarchy is just that – you have to give people a starting point that they can react to and modify you cant just give people a blank canvas and say ‘use this now’”.

Promotion  of collaboration in the enterprise space needs to be strongly encouraged and reasons for their use have to be manufactured and nurtured.   Additionally, I routinely find that individuals often find the plethora of tools available within Enterprise 2.0 platforms daunting and intimidating.   A key frustration that is often expressed is “what do I use that tool for versus that one?”

To pre-emptively address these concerns, I recently provided the following simple knowledge building approach to an organisation that was adopting Alfresco Share as their prime enterprise collaboration platform:

The approach comprises:

Simple Knowledge Building Process using Alfresco Share

A sanitised version of the presentation is available here on Slideshare.

Discussions start as threads within the Discussions tool of Alfresco Share.  All members of the site have access to these discussions and content alerts are provided via RSS feed.  Discussions may start around typical questions such as:

“How do I …?”

Or

“Has anyone …?”

Over time, members of the team may conduct more research into these issues leading into greater insight into the problem or solutions.  Alternatively, a team member may get frustrated with having to reread through multiple replies within a discussion to determine the agreed consensus position, so they summarise all contributions and upload the consensus position as a document into the Document Library.  Simple work flow within the Document Library can then be used to have this document reviewed and approved by key stakeholders or management authorities.

Building on this documented insight and/or consensus leads to a more formal, experiential-based definition or refinement of processes, glossaries and/or domain dictionaries or asset registers.

This approach is conceptually simple and illustrates how the various tools within Alfresco Share can be used to build and refine collaborative knowledge.

However, when presenting this model, I always point out that this is not an automatic process – it requires effort and leadership from individuals within the team to try and build consensus, share insight, and lay the foundations for collaborative knowledge sharing.

In my next blog post, I intend to pick up on some of the organisational issues for management that adopting Enterprise 2.0 presents.

Cheers,

Carl

Alfresco Share on the SLATES

In a previous blog entry, I summarised the SLATES framework that was proposed by Andrew P McAfee (Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006)

McAffee proposes the SLATES framework as a way of understanding the six key technology components of Enterprise 2.0 platforms:

1. Search
2. Links
3. Authoring
4. Tags
5. Extensions
6. Signals

I think the  SLATES framework is a potentially useful conceptual model for understanding Enterprise 2.0 – but don’t necessary agree that all components are required for all platforms.

Recent experience in deploying, using and coaching others in the use of Alfresco Share has served to highlight to me the importance of many of the SLATES components.

What is Alfresco Share?

As per the product descriptions at Alfresco.com:

Alfresco Share is built on the Alfresco enterprise-class document repository and delivers out-of-the-box collaborative content management.   Alfresco Share provides a rich web-based collaboration environment for managing documents, wiki content, blogs and more. Share leverages the Alfresco repository to provide content services and utilises the Alfresco Surf Platform to provide the underlying presentation framework.

Put more simply, Alfresco Share is a simple, robust, open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

How does Alfresco Share stack up against the SLATES framework?

I thought that it would be useful to run the SLATES framework across the functionality provided by Alfresco Share as a way of providing more context to the key technology concepts of Enterprise 2.0 identified by McAffee:

Search

Alfresco Share provides collaborative workspaces, called ‘sites’, that have a number of tools (or content types) including:

• A Site dashboard which can be personalised with ‘dashlets’ which provide quick links to content within each of the tools
• Wiki
• Blog
• Document Library
• Calendar
• Links
• Discussions
• Members list
• Search
• RSS feeds

By hosting all of these collaboration tools on the one platform, Alfresco Share can provide Search functionality across a single site, or all sites that the user has access to.

This is one of the crucial collaboration  enablers – effective search across all of the tools used to generate or manage content within the enterprise.

Often collaborative endeavours are frustrated and inhibited not by a lack of tools, but by too many tools.  Effective collaboration works well when relevant content can be found, and the absence of relevant content can be verified.  Poorly structured, diffuse  or siloed content typically leads to duplication of effort as authors and contributors struggle to locate content which has been generated by  others using different tools.

As Alfresco Share leverages the Alfresco repository for all content management services, the search functionality within Alfresco Share is simple, fast and effective.  Experience and observation has revealed that users gravitate quickly to this function in order to locate content that they either know exists or want to check to see if it exists.

Links

The Wiki, Blog and Discussion tools all use a simple WYSIWYG editor that allows links to be easily and painlessly added.

There is also a Links tool where commonly used/referenced links can be added.  I haven’t found a lot of value in this tool to date – other than exposing some common external links on the Dashboard via the ‘Site Links’ dashlet.

When I first encountered Alfresco Share, I was surprised and a little intrigued as to why the application provided no support for ‘internal linking’ to content. To link to another page of internal content, I find the easiest way is to open another browser tab, navigate to the content page,  copy the page URL, and then paste the page URL into the page that I am editing via the ‘insert link’ option.  I can only surmise that this keeps the application simple and robust…

Authoring

The Wiki, Blog and Discussion tools provide the primary tools for online collaboration, while the Document Library provides the means to share and version control document files.

All content within Alfresco Share is stored in a collaborative workspace called a ‘sites’.  My experience with the platform leads me to believe that the rapid and easy creation of sites to cater for any size of collaborative endeavour is one of the reasons why users find the application easier to use and less intimidating than other enterprise content management applications.

Within a site, all content is team based. The ‘blog’ is not a personal platform for individual promotion, but rather an area where the entire team blogs and entries are displayed in order of entry, and not sorted by user.

Again, this is not what I expected, but on reflection, a simple and pragmatic means for promoting increased communication between team participants.

Tags

Alfresco Share enables simple tags or categories to be applied to all content entered.  That said, my experience to date has not seen this functionality widely used in Alfresco Share.  I can only surmise that, with collaboration occurring primarily within the team/group construct of a ‘site’, users have not found the need to use functionality.

Extensions

Extensions is the one area of the SLATES framework that I don’t believe that Alfresco Share supports.

Signals

Alfresco Share provides RSS feeds for all of the tools (except the Calendar) to signal users when new content appears.

Surprisingly, there does not appear to be a ‘site summary’ RSS feed option that  provides a daily summary of all content entered or updated within the site.  The closest feed that is provided is an RSS feed on the ‘Site Activities’ dashlet.

What does this review of Alfresco Share tell me about the SLATES framework?

From the above review of Alfresco Share, the following is evident to me:

1. The importance of Search across all of the collaboration platfrom(s) is extremely important for enterprise collaboration.  This does not mean that everyone gets access to everything – security and confidentiality are important and implemented best within Alfresco Share via private sites.
2. Links provide the navigational glue to enable rapid access content – but I am less concerned about analysing the number of links or the most-linked content.  I suspect that these considerations become more important for larger cross-team collaboration analysis rather than the team-based collaboration focus of Alfresco Share.
3. The team-based site structure and simple tools of Alfresco Share appears to be highly conducive to encouraging participation (Authoring) for projects or initiative based endeavours.
4. Tags work, but I am yet to see them leveraged well in Alfresco Share.  I suspect the team-based structure combined with cross-site search capabilities is adequate functionality for most users trying to locate content.
5. Extensions – are not evident, and I am not convinced of the need in the context of the services that Alfresco Share provides.
6. Signals are well supported but is an area of improvement I would like to see addressed with Alfresco Share.

This quick analysis shows that the SLATES framework is a useful model for thinking about the technology components of Enterprise 2.0 platforms.  However, what really interests me is how we encourage people to use them well.  In my next blog I will pick up on McAffee’s observation that the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies appear to spread most quickly when there is some initial structure and hierarchy – you cant just give people a blank canvas and say “use this now”.

Cheers,

Carl

SLATES and the keys to success

My recent experience in deploying, using and coaching others in the use of Alfresco Share has served to highlight many of the benefits and challenges of deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

I was pleasantly surprised to read an article by Andrew P McAfee (Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006) that provided a serious examination of the technologies and factors that contribute to the successful adoption that I had witnessed.

McAfee asserts that most of the information technologies that knowledge workers currently use fall into two categories:

• Channels - include email and person-to-person instant messaging where content is typically shared by the few people who are part of the thread.
• Platforms - include intranets, corporate websites and information portals where content is widely visible.

For most organisations today, the predominant mode of collaboration is via channels.  The problem with this reliance on channels (e.g. Email) is that the knowledge developed or exchanged can not be easily accessed or searched by anyone else.  This results in the day-to-day outputs of most knowledge workers being invisible to most of the other people in the organisation.

McAfee suggests that the challenge with adopting Enterprise 2.0 is to encourage knowledge workers away from Channels and to embrace and use Platforms.

What are the key components of Enterprise 2.0 platforms?

McAffee uses the acronym SLATES to indicate the six key components of Enterprise 2.0 platforms:

Search - for any information platform to be valuable, its users must be able to find what they are looking for.

Links - provide structure and easy access to online content – and have a side effect of providing an excellent guide to important content through dense link structures.

Authoring - when authoring tools are deployed and used within an organisation, the intranet platform shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many.  Blogs let people author individually and wikis enable group authorship.  Content on blogs is cumulative (individual posts and responses to them accumulate over time), while on wiki’s content is iterative (people undo and redo each other’s work).

Tags - are simple, one-word descriptions (categories) that serve as reminders of a page of content is about and also enables grouping of content together.  The categorisation scheme that emerges from tagging is called a folksonomy and is in some ways the opposite of a taxonomy, which is an up-front categorisation scheme developed by an expert or group of experts.  The main advantage of folksonomies is that they reflect the information structures and relationships that people actually use, instead of the ones that were planned for them in advance.

Extensions - automate the work of categorisation and pattern matching and attempt to provide contextual recommendations to users of the information platform (e.g. Introductions to others with similar interests, related topics, etc.)

Signals - is infrastructure to signal users when new content of interest appears (e.g. e-mail alerts, RSS feeds).

What are the key success factors for the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms?

McAfee is less clear here about the key factors required for successful adoption and seems to provide some contradictory anecdotes.  My take-away from his analysis was as follows:

1. Make sure the information platform is easy to use – preferable with nothing more than a browser required.
2. A receptive culture is required – where new collaboration practices may be cultivated and flourish.  An organisation with low trust is probably not going to spontaneously start to share information just because a new tool is available.
3. A common platform – choose one large platform instead of many unconnected ones.  A common platform allows collaborations to emerge that probably would never have happened otherwise.  If a company’s infrastructure consists of many mutually inaccessible  areas, the search , links, tags, extensions and signals can’t work across them
4. ‘Build it and they will come’ is not a realistic deployment strategy.  As highlighted in an example, McAffee describes a stalled deployment where “people weren’t clear on what it was, what it should be use for or what its advantages were, so they stayed away”.   Use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies appear to spread most quickly when there is some initial structure and hierarchy – you cant just give people a blank canvas and say “use this now”.   Consequently the early adoption of the technologies need to be strongly encouraged and reasons for their use have to be manufactured and nurtured.

This article by McAfee gave me some important context for the successes and challenges that I have observed with Alfresco Share … In my next blog, I’ll try and provide my assessment of Alfresco Share against the SLATES framework.

Where are the alligators?

“Carl, you have got to learn from your mistakes!”  How many times have I heard those words throughout my life?

I think it started with my father encouraging me to improve, or to grasp some new skill on the football field or in the tool shed.  Although boys rarely listen to their fathers, the mantra of ‘learning from mistakes’ has been echoed at me from many sources – both personal and professional.

Too often I think we fall into the trap of thinking that ‘learning from our mistakes’ is the best, and sometimes the only, way to learn:

• In the field of learning and organisation development we note the importance of ‘experiential learning’.

• In business, we often expect staff to ‘learn on the job’ – but most organisations are notoriously unforgiving when mistakes are made and are intolerant of failure.

As noted by Clay Shirky in his Writings about the Internet – A group is its own worst enemy:

But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”  Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say.

Good point – I hadn’t looked at it that way before …

Learning from our mistakes is expensive, time consuming and wasteful of precious resources.

With ubiquitous access to the internet becoming the norm for many of us, a proliferation of social media enabling rich collaboration, and the emergence of more powerful knowledge management capabilities, we have better tools for learning and remembering …

So … I’m thinking of putting a sign above  my workstation – “where are the alligators?”

Passive communications and the dangerous flame

Part way through Rework (Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals.com), I was surprised to see the following passage:

“…when you do collaborate, try to use passive communication tools, like email, that don’t require an instant reply, instead of interruptive ones, like phone calls and face-to-face meetings. That way people can respond when it’s convenient for them, instead of being forced to drop everything right away.

Your day is under siege by interruptions.  Its on you to fight back.”

I was surprised to read this advice from a highly successful web product development company … I was expecting to read more of an emphasis on ‘high bandwidth communications’ like face-to-face meetings.

I can agree with the sentiments … But only to a point, as ‘passive communication’ is not without its problems.

Michael Marshall (New Scientist, November 19, 2007) provides a highly readable article, “Don’t flame me, bro”, about some of the problems, and the associated psychology, of online communications.

Michael identifies the following issues:

• People vastly overestimate their ability to communicate unambiguously by email
• People interpret emails more negatively than other forms of communication
• Email is a more informal and relaxed form of conversation and people (authors) don’t expect to be taken seriously
• Online communication is a more remote form of communication and the ‘more remote’ the more prone people are to aggressive behaviour
• Text-based messages are inherently more ambiguous because important visual or audible cues that are available in face-to-face meetings or telephone conversations are not available.

I suspect, although I have not read any research to support this, that passive communication works best once strong team-based or inter-personal relationships have been established… And the fastest way to establish trust in such relationships would seem to be via meaningful face-to-face interaction.

They need to want to collaborate

“Can you give a presentation next week on collaboration using Alfresco Share? – its really important that we get these guys onboard and working together.”

“Sure,” I replied, “no problem.”

Agreeing to give the presentation was the easy bit … I’d been using Alfresco Share for some time and had a reasonably clear conceptual model on how I thought it could be used effectively as a collaboration platform and as a means to build knowledge within a group – or at least enough to get them going.

That wasn’t the problem.  The problem was a question of motivation – I could explain the concepts and show how the various tools could be used together, but how was I going to make them want to use the tools?

The problem nagged at me all week – how could I make an audience of professionals want to collaborate on a platform that many of them had probably never seen before?

I sat at the back of the meeting room and listened to the introductions and the preceding presentations.  Little by little, I started to get an appreciation of their work culture and some of their frustrations around not knowing what was going on within their own team or within the broader organisation.  As I sat there I reflected on my own frustrations with poorly run projects and departments that I had worked with in the past … How decisions were often made without consultation or justification, how rumours spread throughout organisations and sent morale into a downward spiral, how often I had heard the words “my door is always open”, and how few people ever venture through such doors.

As I stood to give my presentation, I decided on my approach.  I opened the presentation with some simple introductory slides and then asked the audience:

“Can I have an indication of who has used Alfresco before?”  No one – just what I expected.

“Ok … Does anyone have a blog?” No movement – not surprising.

“Ok … Is anyone a member of an online community?”  Some tentative hand raising.

Pause.  Time to be blunt and get personal.

“Ok, … who wants to work for an organisation where no information is ever shared?”  Eyes widened, no hands move.

“That’s right, none of us wants to work within an organisation that doesn’t share information – its frustrating, demoralising and leads to lots of duplication of effort and rework.  However, I don’t think that you can simply blame management for a lack of communication.  If you don’t want to work for a crappy organisation where information is never shared, then its up to all of you to create the right collaborative environment and encourage others to share information freely.”

Pause. Stunned looks – at least I now had there attention.

“What I am going to show you today is a set of tools within Alfresco Share that can be used to support collaboration and information sharing …”

From there I continued with the rest of the presentation but returned to this theme in the wrap up:

“I think its really important to think about the type of organisation that you want to work for … If you want to work for an organisation that does share information freely, where you do feel that you know what is going on around you, then I think that you also have a responsibility to proactively share information yourself.”

“You also need to be cognisant of your behaviour with respect to others who are actively sharing information.  In Australia we tend to have the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ and mock anyone who is doing something extraordinary – be careful that through casual conversation and jokes that you don’t reinforce behaviours that deter active information sharing.”

Was it the right approach? Not sure – I think I held the interest of some individuals.  Only time will tell whether the seed I planted was enough to make them want to collaborate.

A sanitised version of the presentation is available here on Slideshare.

Cheers,

Carl