In her recent report, Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Networking, Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group explains that although organizations are embracing social networking inside the enterprise, they are experiencing mixed results.
“Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants.”
She goes on to explain the problem.
“Most companies approach enterprise social networks as a technology deployment and fail to understand that the new relationships created by enterprise social networks are the source for value creation.”
If you are interested in social business collaboration (SBC) in the enterprise then I suggest that you have a look at her report.
In this posting I would like to begin to explore how our habits conspire to limit the degree to which we unlock the value creation potential of SBC technologies.
We all have heard of the Digital Divide between the Digital Natives and the Digital Immigrants. In his seminal article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky, said
“It’s not actually clear to me which is harder – “learning new stuff” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.” I suspect it’s the latter“.
I agree.
More recently, in Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success the concepts of fixed and growth mindsets are explored, including their relationship with the ability to change and learn throughout life.
As I assume many of you have, I have seen examples of colleagues failing to use the new ways to collaborate. Some resist the use of instant messaging in favor of the more familiar email messaging. Others insist on sending documents as email attachments instead of simply providing a link. On occasions when a number of colleagues have needed to collaborate in real-time, we have limped along using only a teleconference, painfully describing to a remote participant the contents of a document projected on the screen, when a webinar would have been quick and easy to organize. Ironically, many of the same folks that complain the most about the difficulties of finding content on an SBC platform also fail to use the tools that facilitate search such as tags, likes and ratings.
The people that I refer to are intelligent, hardworking and dedicated to their profession. So, what holds them back? It appears that their ingrained habits and fixed mindset have conspired to prevent them from investing the time needed to master the new technologies and change the way that they do business. For many years as an ERP implementation consultant I have extolled the benefits of a combination of education and training when deploying technology. I believe that an educational curriculum required for successful SBC deployment must include a healthy dose of social psychology, an area which I have not recommended in the past.
If an organization employs a coordinated program of education and change management initiatives, then it is possible to change works habits and to adopt a growth mindset. It does not happen by accident. How-to training will not be enough.
I am interested to know what your organization is doing to help its Digital Immigrants succeed. Please share your comments.
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