Author Archive

People rarely use tools which they don’t believe offer personal benefits, much less ones they don’t understand or know about. Raising awareness and educating colleagues – activities communicators are ideally placed to do – are vital to building adoption; but they aren’t enough.

Recently, we’ve been looking at collaboration readiness in organisations. As usual, quantitative research was followed by conversations with employees, many of which reminded us that metrics only ever tell part of the story.

One way we look at collaboration readiness is to consider three dimensions:

• The ability the individual has for using collaboration tools (as determined by their current use outside work via social media sites like Facebook)
• The appetite the individual has for using collaboration tools at work
• The perceived availability of the collaboration tools in their organisation today

In some organisations we’ve seen figures which suggest low levels of perceived availability and appetite – regardless of actual availability. For those which have already deployed collaboration tools, an instinctive reaction is to focus on raising awareness, a challenge which falls to communicators.

In truth, we’re often being asked to create appetite. Viewed from that perspective, awareness and education are only steps in a journey to the moment when a colleague decides to invest their time and faith in migrating to a new way of working (or at least investigating it).

Today, most communicators contend that we need to move from a broadcast model to one of dialogue, and I believe this to be particularly true when driving adoption of Enterprise 2.0.

In conversations with employees who claimed to be sceptics, it was frequently possible to make them concede at least an interest – once the discussion had moved beyond education and become a personalised case for adoption. Many such conversations followed a similar pattern, and eventually I modelled it:

For me, it’s interesting how many different areas one must draw upon to respond to each question or statement convincingly:

Just glancing at this list, I suspect most communicators would agree that whilst we might take a lead on several activities, others will require expertise and action from a diverse range of stakeholders: leaders, managers, HR specialists, business analysts, trainers. Whilst the principle objective of adoption may be better communication (and performance), accomplishing it requires us to employ a broader range of capabilities than communication alone. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since ambitious change is often cross-functional. Neither does it mean communicators cannot – or indeed should not – take the lead in building a coalition of capabilities.

However, for me the paramount principle is that to gain real traction the proposition has to be made personal: and that means starting – and sustaining – a genuine conversation; and that’s where communicators can really make the difference.

One night in my late teens me and my best friend from university plugged a 14.4 modem into a wall socket and uploaded our first website (technically it was his second). 14 years later I found it again, completely intact, in an Internet archive. That should make you stop and think for a moment.

Beneath every social media website or collaborative tool is a database, and truly deleting content from a database is considered to be a bad idea. Asking for it to happen usually makes engineers wince and mutter about ‘referential integrity’. Much better, they’ll argue, to label the content as obsolete and stop displaying it. Storage is now so cheap that it’s usually commercially preferable to hide the data than work to remove it.

All of which assumes one is actively considering the question of what to do with old content. Increasingly, at least on a personal level, we don’t. Social media and collaborative tools are inherently conversational, and the natural tendency of most individuals (once they’re comfortable with online discussion) is to treat their contributions as they might their words in a face-to-face dialogue. Once said, or typed, it’s history. Unless you’re a public figure you don’t expect to be quoted back to yourself later, and the rate of technological change has rendered most of what we typed barely years ago inaccessible (just how would you read documents stored on floppy disks today?). So the persistence of our comments and postings is rarely front of mind when we make them.

That’s not to say we are unthinking contributors. Thanks to some painful lessons learned about indiscretions posted to Facebook, most people are also conscious of the need to exercise common sense when participating in online discussions. That applies even more for internal spaces, where it is usual for employees’ contributions to be attributed. But what if even the good things we write (or perhaps the ‘good at the time of writing’ things) have the capacity to cause us problems in the future?

A decade ago a multi-national I knew decided to create a database of every key promise or commitment made by its senior leaders in the previous 5 years. In the then largely un-digitised world that task was laborious enough to warrant a sizable team of researchers, despite the relatively small amount of data that had to be located and sifted. Digitisation and the evolution of search technologies mean that even with the explosion of content in the 2.0 era, a contemporary exercise would not only be easier, but yield richer data.

What that multi-national was interested in was transparency and accountability, words very much beloved of the social media scene. To be clear, this was a defensive action: the company knew external special interest groups were effectively performing the same exercise and it wanted to understand its exposure. The important aspect for us now is that the level of granularity was at the corporate level: this was about what a company had said (albeit through the mouths of its people), not an individual. At that time the only individuals who could reasonably expect to invite that level of scrutiny (and indeed generate that much easily-accessed content) would be public figures.

A decade later, within organisations the capacity for ordinary employees to publish and navigate the published content of colleagues has changed completely. If your organisation is investing heavily in collaborative platforms today, think ahead to 2015 and imagine the body of searchable, attributable content that will attach to any future member of middle or senior management who has risen through the ranks. It will be non-trivial. It’s tempting to think that because common sense will have been exercised throughout, we have nothing to worry about; but think about three practical aspects of communicating as a leader:

• Often you must speak or write on behalf of your role or organisation, not as a private individual reflecting her/his own views
• It’s not uncommon for a business to change direction, rendering obsolete what was said or promised before
• It’s also not uncommon to be plain wrong

None of these make you a liar or inauthentic, but in many disputes advantage is gained by pointing to opponents’ documented mistakes and changes-of-heart. It’s almost a rule that candidates in any US election will have a charge of ‘flip-flopping’ levelled against them, and the commentariat will mysteriously forget that good decision making often means knowing when to change direction. By comparison, corporate leaders have historically had an easier ride: beyond heavily unionised environments the degree to which leadership cadres could control the internal news agenda and re-position issues has been significant. As organisations move towards giving everyone a voice, as well as the tools to search the past, change is unavoidable.

When the controversy first raged about drunken pictures posted to Facebook and how this might affect an individual’s future career prospects, many advanced the argument that changing social attitudes would quickly negate the risk. I’d like to think that will happen, but I’m mindful that forty years on from the 1960s politicians still break into a sweat when asked about smoking dope at university.

The smart Gen Y individual already knows how to manage her/his profile, and will leverage that advantage over less discreet peers in coming years. Moreover, the emergence of sites like the (quickly suppressed) Web 2.0 Suicide Machine suggests that, at least in the public sphere, some have new misgivings about their digital footprints.

If attitudinal change is required for organisations to live comfortably with the legacy of long term (digital) transparency, it probably begins with the collaboration cultures many of us are trying to build today. It probably requires us to work with IT and KM specialists to look critically at issues of content curation, the longevity of systems, and what we really mean – and want – when we use words like ‘transparency’ (and whether the answers hold true at all levels of the organisation).

It would be a shame if we rushed headlong into the next level of collaboration (which I believe offers us many benefits), only to later recoil at the thought of accidentally building our own Panopticon from the inside.

I don’t like Twitter as much as forums. This is strange because they have a great deal in common: they’re actually built out of the same core components. Still, they are patently not the same, and older means of classifying channels (based on medium or media type) are increasingly difficult to apply. This prompted me to consider another way to classify collaboration channels.

Participants, content, topics: in no particular order, and often under different names, these are the core components of most collaborative channels. Twitter has tweeps who tweet, sometimes about topics tracked via hashtags. Forums have users who post in threads. The concept extends beyond discussion channels: LinkedIn has members who exchange personal data and opinions for various professional reasons; MS SharePoint (amongst other things) lets employees share documents relating to a range of different activities.

Ultimately, all of these channels enable people to organise interactions and the products of those interactions. Same conceptual ingredients, different recipes and outcomes. One possible visualisation is a tri-polar space in which one can plot the position of any collaboration tool by considering the relative importance it places on participants, content, and topics:

Obviously this only rough visualisation, but the intent is to illustrate how different channels emphasise different core components. Twitter, I would argue, is all about people and content (with a nod to topics), whereas forums are highly topic-centric ways of organising discussions (content).

On reflection, I gravitate towards topics, which explains my love of forums. Truth is I became most comfortable with Twitter when I began to regard it as a gigantic forum that had been shattered into millions of fragments (which one must then selectively collect and re-assemble). That’s not quite as outlandish as it sounds: if you use hashtag search columns in TweetDeck, you’re effectively recreating forum threads (topics) on the fly.

Besides my personal angst about Twitter vs. forums, I think this model might be useful for planning an organisation’s collaborative channels mix. For example: if you’re already developing a next generation corporate address book with Facebook-alike features such as status updates, you’ve probably covered the participants angle well enough to consider skipping a Twitter-alike channel; however, this may leave you light on topic-centric channels, making structured discussion forums a better complimentary choice.

What do you think about this way of looking at the relative emphasis of collaboration channels?

Audio is often underrepresented in conversations about collaboration. Perhaps that’s because podcasting is no longer new and telephony is old (and Skype has recreated all of its features for low or no cost). Text is more portable and video is sexier. But one community, online gamers, has continued to evolve audio communication in some interesting ways.

Modern gamers have to be good collaborators: most games now include or consist solely of online play. But early in-game communication was mostly via text chat. Being under fire and communicating with the soldier next to you by typing instead of shouting was clunky. Typing got you killed. Gamers quickly realised that some form of conference call was required: but one that worked without a ‘phone and cost nothing, because nobody had a conference ‘phone at home and the soldier next to you lived in Brazil.

Enter products such as TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Like Skype (which both preceded), these enable players to talk with each other for free over the Internet; but like chatrooms the focus is on persistence and multiple participants: a single channel might contain 100 players.

So far, so much like a gigantic conference call; but as games became more complex this medium evolved too. In massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EVE Online, players can belong to groups numbering 100 or more. Operating like small corporations, such groups frequently employ dozens of different audio channels, each reflecting a sub-group of players focused on a particular activity or mission.

Unlike conference calls, these channels are unscheduled and persistent; players move between them with a single click. Perhaps more importantly, etiquette also makes it permissible to eavesdrop and flick between conversations as befits one’s interest or current activity. In many circles it’s considered perfectly acceptable to enter a channel and, at a suitable break in the conversation, ask a question on the off chance that someone listening might know the answer. For those of you who use Twitter, this model of crowdsourcing / friendsourcing answers should be very familiar.

Despite this revolution in communication, gamers still spend a lot of time being dead. So having a channel for the dead is also commonplace. Being able to simply chat with fellow players is a vital part of building a community, in exactly the same way that golfers congregate in the clubhouse bar between rounds. So when not actively playing it’s normal for gamers to lurk in a channel as they might in a chatroom, half-listening to the conversation and participating occasionally. Crucially, the ability of these applications to share your earphones with iTunes makes it a background feature, like the chatter in a real office.

In an era of increasingly dispersed teams I think communicators and collaboration specialists might just find this approach interesting.

Consider a team split across multiple locations. A common audio channel in which everyone lurks provides the digital equivalent of talking with colleagues over the desk partitions. For impromptu break out conversations individuals simply move into an empty channel for as long as required (without sending meeting requests and booking dial-in numbers). Leaders and co-ordinators might also find use for special paging features, which allow them to broadcast urgent announcements across all channels. Like evolving a forum, it’s relatively easy to tailor these tools to reflect a team’s structure and working practices.

Personally, I suspect it’s the listening component of this set-up that has most value. When one’s colleagues are physically distant, being able to listen to their background chatter can inform and connect in ways that formal update meetings (or even daily blogs) might not.

Update (15 DEC 2009): Apologies to the open-source community, I should have mentioned Mumble in my original edit. Mumble is worth checking out, especially as it comes packaged with its server software (Murmur) – perfect if you want to do some free testing with friends or colleagues.

Recently, we’ve been talking to a lot of people about their hopes for Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Something that may surprise heavy proponents of social media and collaboration technologies was the number of tech-savvy users who were less than enthhusiastic. Whilst these hesitators often valued the tools, they all feared an over-proliferation of channels and noise. This prompted me to ask myself: how many different ways can people can reach me, today, for a conversation?

Actually, I began by mapping my situation in 1999, looking specifically at routes to communication. These are more granular than a channel; for example: instant messaging (IM) may be a channel for communicators, but if I have accounts with 2 different IM providers and contacts on both, those are 2 different routes to conversation for me. The distinction is important because at a practical level those are 2 different services I must log into and monitor (however passively).

Some simple rules for the diagrams: I focused only on routes to conversation and ignored broadcast media, the press etc. I also allowed duplication by virtue of device (if I could get email from the same account on my work and home desktops, that counted as 2 routes). Then I colour-coded everything: blue for work-only, green for mixture of work and personal, and orange for personal-only. Here are the results for me in 1999, when I was a project manager:

NB You can view the above diagram in full-screen (this will open a new window). Zoom in / out buttons will be on the bottom-right of the new window.

Back in 1999 I had around 25 different routes to conversation. That surprised me (I had guessed at 5 or 6). Here are some ways that breaks down:

Three quick observations and recollections:

• Most innovation was happening at work and then being adopted for personal use, thus the high proportion of mixed-use routes.
• Instant messaging was in its infancy, which is reflected in the bias towards asynchronous routes such as email or faxes, which do not require participants in a conversation to be present (physically or virtually) at the same time.
• Mine was an immobile world: most routes were tethered to desktops and physical connections.

However complicated my 1999 set-up seemed then, it looks primitive (but attractively simple) when compared to the picture in 2009. In a decade my routes to conversation have almost tripled to 72. For the map below I used the same rules; the only tweak was that I included bookmarked conversations and IRC channels in which I participate at least daily:

NB You can view the above diagram in full-screen (this will open a new window). Zoom in / out buttons will be on the bottom-right of the new window.

The true number of routes to conversation is probably higher, but I excluded rarely used social networks. Either way, that’s a staggering increase. Here are some ways that breaks down:

Three more quick observations and thoughts:

• Innovation has shifted to the consumer space: the routes I have as a private citizen are often superior to those at work; my proportion of mixed-use routes may also be inflated because as a consultant I have more control over my systems than a typical corporate employee.
• Synchronous routes of all sorts have overtaken asynchronous ones, although the majority are text-based and not as intrusive as voice calls – allowing me to multi-task (there is a case to be argued that IM is actually semi-synchronous).
• The mobile-centric future which we envisaged when I worked at Vodafone a few years ago is definitely begining to take shape, although there’s still a way to go.

So is my communications world too noisy? Suprisingly, not yet. However, what these maps do not show is the relative usage of each route – that’s a really different picture. In a follow-up post I’d like to write about that, as well as how and why I haven’t (yet) fallen victim to noise, but for now I just wanted to share these illustrations and this thought:

Rewinding to my earlier definition of routes to conversation (as opposed to channels), I’d suggest that this is something communicators should acknowledge more. Talking about a channels mix made perfect sense when there was an almost one-to-one relationship between official channels and how an employee interfaced with her/his organisation, but as collaborative functionality proliferates the reality for the individual becomes more complex. And the extra twist is that many of these new routes are beyond the direct control of communicators.

More on this later, but for the moment I would really like to hear from other communicators: today, how many ways can people have a conversation with you?

For many knowledge workers a popular unit of exchange when collaborating is an MS Word document, with discussion occurring via tracked edits and comments.

As an approach to collaboration this has drawbacks: even if people use the reviewing features properly it scales poorly. Discussions bleed into emails (which not everyone is copied on), versions fall out of sync, and often someone has to resolve it all manually. Document management helps, but the collaborative aspects remain clunky because the conversation is still tacked on like a collection of Post-It Notes.

However, as an approach to creating an information product it’s great. One might lose version and discussion data, but a standalone information container remains, often in a form that’s easy for newcomers to consume.

So as a unit of information exchange the document is king; but that may be changing.

If you’ve been following the development of applications like Google Wave then you may have noticed the document-centric paradigm being eroded. Words, images and video are all just information assets which pepper the new unit of exchange: the conversation; and I mean conversation not as an abstract concept, but as a thing that can be accessed and manipulated by people and software.

Google Wave makes this shift obvious, but for heavy users of tools like Skype IM and forums this is a change that’s been happening quietly for some time.

Last week, after a long discussion with friends via Skype IM, we realised that since our conversation had not been centred on a document we had two choices for capturing our outcomes: author a memo, or paste the whole chat log into a forum thread. We chose the latter, and I doubt we’re unique – but are we short-sighted or efficient?

A key feature of Google Wave is ‘Playback’, which allows you to re-run an entire conversation (potentially even if you weren’t an original participant). As an approach to collaboration this is superb.

So is the conversation the future king?

Possibly; but if so then it raises questions about how we communicate beyond the original participants in any discussion. Reading the so-called ’scroll-back’ from a conversation may offer rich content, but as an information product it’s vulnerable to bloat, and in the broader context it may scale poorly.

To use a practical example, recall any first day you’ve had in a new job. In the near future will it be a case of reading through a collection of key documents, or scanning an equivalent collection of digital transcripts; and which would you and your colleagues prefer?

True story: At the height of the dot com years a friend fell in with the New Jersey punk scene. About the same time, the punk scene discovered blogging. Punks blogged about all sorts of things, but mostly they blogged about each other. It was lively and scurrilous and probably libelous; and like watching a slow motion cat fight, it was utterly gripping. Until it became hard work to read.

Following any particular conversation involved jumping between a dozen different blogs, chasing it through posts and comments from at least as many actors. It made me wonder why the punks didn’t just use a forum instead, but I was missing the point. The culture of the crowd was self-expression; forums tend to be topic-centric, blogs are people-centric. Whilst a forum would have been more efficient, it made much more cultural sense for the conversations to happen via blog posts and comments.

Collaboration tools are not all alike, and often approach the same ground from very different starting points (usually reflecting the heritage of their makers); some focus on people, some on files, some on converations, some on project management. All are perfectly valid approaches.

For communicators embarking upon the journey towards Enterprise 2.0 I think the blogging punks can offer us an interesting lesson: that a tool which is culturally aligned with a group has as good a chance of success (if not better) than one which meets all the requirements on paper but is somehow alien.