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.