Organizations are looking for the bulletproof collaboration strategy. I often hear, “How are you going to do XXXX?” I might reply that “my plan is to do YYYY, but if it doesn’t work we will try something else”. The reaction takes people off guard because they think there is a right way to do all this social stuff. It is not that I don’t know what I am doing.
It is not that I am incompetent and guessing what we should do. Rather we have to remember that Enterprise 2.0 environments are not build on software (which is possible to implement perfectly) but rather they are based on people who are fickle and not altogether stable.
Their likes and dislikes change, they are moody and they have strokes of insights that can change everything in the matter of one day. Yet too many times – especially if the Enterprise 2.0 project is headed by I.T. – they want it done right. (This leads me to my next blog post on opposites, coming soon.)
Remember this: There isn’t a perfect “right way”. And what might be right today may be wrong tomorrow. What is right for my organization may be very wrong for yours. The way to develop a collaborative strategy is tailor it to your org and run with it. But then be flexible enough to change – this is all very iterative.
Because this is about people you must be willing to change. DO NOT treat this like an IT project. Treat it like a people project. In fact, it is not a project at all. It just is. It is woven into the way we work. It is about sharing, collaboration and openness which don’t need a project to work well. This is a difficult concept to help key stakeholders understand – but help them understand we must.
Iterate. Try, fail, succeed, share. (In fact, as Bart Schutte points out, there is also a bit of luck to it.)
