The importance of pigheadedness - Suw Charman
I just read an essay by Clay Shirky, Gin, Television and Social Surplus,
about how the industrial revolution has resulted, after a brief period
of societal gin-soaking, in a surplus of time and productive capacity
which has been mopped up by TV sitcoms. Now, however, this social
surplus is being put to use in things like Wikipedia, World of Warcraft
and blogging. People are taking their spare time and energy and they're
doing something with it.
It's a great essay, and I strongly recommend that you pop over and read it, right now,
all the way through, because it articulates something that many of us
know is happening, but which a particularly large chunk of the media
hasn't cottoned on to yet. It's not the content of Clay's essay that I
want to further discuss, but one little line that has much broader
ramifications:
The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out.
Every
now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some
random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that
social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of
some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside
their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social
software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few
more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which
are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes
to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of
negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are
inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them
necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn't work.
Sadly, we don't often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up
making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees
enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.
There is a lot of failure in the use of social software in business,
on the web, in civic society, but we need to see this as a part of the
cycle, a step along on the learning curve. We can't afford to stop
experimenting, just because something failed once, or because it didn't
work out for someone else. And we can't afford to take part in the
Great Race To Be Second, either, because if you're waiting to see how
other businesses succeed (or fail) before you leave the starting line,
you're not going to be second, you're going to be last.
From a business point of view, the nice thing about social software
is that a lot of is is free or ridiculously cheap, so the monetary cost
of failure is low and made up mainly of the cost of people's time.
There is no need to judge a social software project based on the same
criteria as, say, a massive software deployment from a megacorp vendor
that cost millions and took three years, yet these are the terms by
which many businesses are judging their blog, wiki, or social
networking experiments. And because the tech is so cheap, businesses
can afford to run many small experiments to find out what works before
they deploy tools more widely; indeed, they cannot afford not to.
But we also need to recognise that the biggest speed bump in social
software projects is invariably going to be the social, not the
software. The technology is improving every month, mainly because it's
being developed by small, nimble vendors who use the software they
create and want it to be the very best it can be. But the tech is only
a fraction of the battle. The rest, like Soylent Green, is made of
people.
And this is where the problem with failure comes in. Generally
speaking, people don't much like change. They don't even like choice
all that much, although they'll tell you that they do. They certainly
don't like failure, or anything that looks even remotely like it.
(Especially in the UK, although I think that the US is a bit more
tolerant.) And they don't like trying again when things do go a bit
wobbly.
Failure, real or perceived, is inextricably entwined with status
and, frequently, if a project looks like it's about to go bottom up,
instead of figuring out how to save it, people figure out how to
distance themselves enough to save face. In a business culture where
rewards and punishments are focused on the individual, the teamwork and
collaboration required to make a social software project a success can
become too much of a risk. But if you've got the right skills and
personality, you can turn that around.
To be successful at social software implementations in business you
need firstly to have a solid understanding of how people work and
relate to computers, tools, and each other. You need to understand how
to introduce tools in a way that is non-threatening and which
emphasises utility and benefits. You need to understand the political
climate within your business, and know how to route around anyone who's
threatening to be obstructive.
Secondly, you need to be really pigheaded. If one team doesn't take
to a wiki, try working with another. If one blog fails, try to figure
out why and then start another. Iterate. Change things. Experiment. Try
again. After all, it's only failure if you give up.
~~~
source: http://strange.corante.com/
I am seeking meaningful work.
bio: http://aqalicious.gaia.com/
I spend most of my "forum time" these days on The Integral Pod: http://pods.gaia.com/ii/
"You've never seen everything." - Bruce Cockburn