Twitter and the Search Barrier

I am currently reading Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Benefits, a book by Morten T. Hansen of Harvard Business School. It is an interesting read so far: he has laid out some of the key benefits and risks to collaboration, a number of which are quite interesting and potentially useful. However, what I have found most interesting thus far is his take on the four most significant barriers to collaboration. His list:

1. The Not Invented Here Barrier: People not willing to seek input from others outside their unit;
2. The Hoarding Barrier: People not willing to provide information for others outside their unit;
3. The Search Barrier: People are not able to find people, expertise, or information easily, and;
4. The Transfer Barrier: People are not able to transfer complicated knowledge from one unit to another.

All of these points have some validity, and are definitely important and significant barriers to collaboration in the workplace; however, I want to spend some time with the third barrier, the search barrier.

As a side note, I have as yet not read how Hansen proposes to overcome said barriers; I’m only halfway through the book.

What is the Search Barrier?

According to Hansen, the search barrier is the inability of a company or organization to “know what it knows”. This can be due to a number of factors: company size, physical distance, information overload, and poverty of networks are the ones that Hansen cites. The search barrier is one of the most significant hurdles facing large organizations: think about all the expertise and experience that exist in most organizations, and how hard it really is to tap that knowledge (specifically the tacit knowledge). Basically, it’s too hard or too much work to search through your organization to find the support/input that you need; consequently, organizations are inefficient because they are continuously solving the same problems.

So what does this have to do with Twitter?

It's about finding the RIGHT person, not just people.

In the spirit of continuing to treat Twitter as a solution searching for a problem, I think that this is a very real business problem that can be greatly helped by microblogging. After all, this is one of the most appealing, at least for me, uses of Twitter on the open internet.

Twitter actually addresses many of the key problems cited by Hansen as components of the search barrier.

• Company size could be less of an issue, if only because the network of followers (a.k.a. the target audience) serves as the filter of information. So you aren’t searching all the units of an organization for an answer; you are asking people to serve as a filter and pass on information and/or people that they already know.

• It’s clear that microblogging helps with bridging distances. However, it’s also important to note that microblogging enables “weak ties“, allowing for people to maintain relationships that may become more important in the future.

• Though relatively counter-intuitive, microblogging can help with information overload, because your network serves as a collaborative filter. For the same reason, microblogging can help solve the problem of poverty of networks by making it easier to keep in touch with colleagues.

But microblogging is just a technology

In much contrast to the rest of this entry, I do want to emphasize that simply having the technical capability for microblogging does not ensure success: effective deployment also entails organizational and process challenges in order to achieve the desired results. Social media success is only sometimes about tools; most times it’s more about changing behaviors and inculcating more collaborative mindsets.