The Enterprise 2.0 Sitcom

The whole Enterprise 2.0 thing feels a bit like a sitcom sometimes:  Seinfeld vs. Enterprise 2.0

 

We've lost our way.  Enterprise collaboration is not simply more conversation through more and easier channels among more people.

Let's back up and re-establish the RATIONALE for Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Collaboration, the Participative Enterprise, the Flat Organization, and all the other aliases used for this concept.

1. recruitment and retention -- this applies to employees, customers, partners, ad vendors.  We can make it easier for them to talk to and hear from you and each other, which will reduce the transaction cost of doing business with you (reduced communication friction and latency) and elevate their satisfaction with the experience. (man is, after all, a social creature)
2. multi-party creation -- this also applies to employees, customers, partners, and vendors.  We can make it easier for them to study the organization as an organism situated within an ecosystem, to develop and analyze hypotheses about how to improve the vitality of that organism, to create new products or methods or messages based upon those analyses, and to promote it all in a way that mobilizes the necessary mass of support to move the organization ahead.

Very, very much has been written about the first rationale.  I understand it, and I agree that it's real and valuable.  It is necessary, but it is not sufficient.  

Some, but less, has been written and done about the second rationale.  To a large extent, our efforts to allow multi-party creation have still been limited to … the ability to create conversation.  There has been very little focus on emergent hypothesis development, testing, and exploitation.  In other words, most of the work to-date has been about allowing people to talk about pre-developed content; so, the conversation is emergent, but the data content itself is not.  

IMO, this is a problem.

When we define a priori the content around which the participants can converse, we kill thought in at least 3 ways:

1. We make issues forgettable.  As the Madison Avenue folks have known for a long time, your brand is more memorable to a person when you involve her brain more.  Spoon feeding does not work.  Remember the Marlboro billboards?  Why was the cowboy image imposed over the brand name?  To get your brain to play with the ad like a puzzle.  And, it worked. When we feed people static or pre-digested or bounded informational content, they forget it.
2. We constrain the conversation to status-quo thinking.  If you give young kids plastic farm animals, they will role play Farmer John -- not Gordon Gecko.  If you want creative, emergent solutions you have to allow for creative, emergent content as input to the process.
3. We dim the brightest bulbs.  The best brains for creative problem solving are driven by curiosity.  They NEED to try new things, look at things different ways.  Play and experimentation and exploring actually energizes them, lights up their brains.  If our collaborative environments do not allow these minds to play, they will not engage.

Most professional/commercial endeavors are fact-centric at the core.  If our conversations do not revolve around living/dynamic factual UGC -- where the "C" is for "Content" -- then those conversations will be deemed irrelevant by decision makers.  And, Enterprise 2 will fade as just another in a long line of over-hyped tech buzzwords.