Note: this is the second blog in a series reviewing each of the 6 pieces of the McKinsey Article “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.”
The second piece of McKinsey’s article is all about letting the users decide the best use cases for Web 2.0 technology. In their words:
Efforts go awry when organizations try to dictate their preferred uses of the technologies—a strategy that fits applications designed specifically to improve the performance of known processes—rather than observing what works and then scaling it up.
In my experience, this assessment is absolutely dead on. It seems counter-intuitive, but I can easily imagine leaders sitting around a table trying to figure out who–EXACTLY WHO–could best benefit from an organic, flexible knowledge creation environment. Doesn’t this just sound crazy? I understand that most technologists, especially inside large organizational structures are used to the model of providing a technology that has a set purpose and a very specific target audience, but it seems very strange to me that you want to try to dictate uses for Web 2.0 tools.
Rather than trying to do shoehorn “ideal” groups into new tools and new ways of working, why not just let it happen? One of the beautiful things about Web 2.0 is that the best-of-breed software is free. That’s not to say they are without costs; however, Web 2.0 is best implemented in a “Fail cheap” model. Let users decide what works and what doesn’t.
Web 2.0 is about supplying tools for the toolbox. It’s not about setting up a technology and then trying to force users to participate. That’s just not how these technologies work. (This is not really how any technology deployment works: if it’s not in the work flow, then it’s just another thing that people “have to do” and therefore falls flat.)
Social media tools allow for emergent collaboration. They allow for self-organization, outside the formal organizational structure. They are flexible enough to work for many different projects and many different purposes.
What leaders need to do is provide the freedom and ability to experiment to see what works for a given organization (or part of an organization). Let the practitioners decide what tools fit the bill and improve the workflow. Leaders can then help spread the word about what works; they can help to tell the stories that emerge from successful use of the tool in an effort to help spread best practices and scale participation.
The article makes this point well: AT&T managers were able to help adoption “by supporting an awareness campaign to seed further experimentation”. As a final point, I do think that the article misses the boat a bit by talking about participation metrics instead of outcome metrics, but that may just be my own biases creeping back in.
