Huge Potential of Social Collaboration

In a recent McKinsey Global Institute Insight article named "The Social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies" the authors point out that the real potential of social technologies lies actually within organizations. While they see that social technologies will play an increasing role for reaching customers and gathering insights they find that:

"twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communication, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises."

They also suggest that productivity of interaction can be raised by 20-25 percent. I am not surprised, and agree that the potential is definitely there. Still too many silos in organizations that inhibit effective communication, knowledge sharing and innovation across (especially larger and distributed organizations). The report does mentions that the cultural effects play a key role as well.

And that is where a danger in falling short lies. Social Media tools externally seem to be "just there". To treat them the very same way internally will miss a lot of the potential, just like many "KM projects" in the past missed their potential value marks. To make the potential come true it needs more than just a tool, it needs a full-fledged initiative with the right support infrastructures (sorry, yes that means some investment in people as well - no free lunch). The tools must be simply to use, available anywhere anytime, if possible integrated into other information channels, but that alone is not enough.

You also need to create the type of support roles that are needed to cover community management, marketing and (business) training. "Build it and they'll come" is likely to fall short on the benefits. But with some investments into those support infrastructures it is a lot more likely that the potential benefits actually materialize.

Social Collaboration is a big trend - but as many trends make sure to not just pick one element (the tools) from it and forget about the rest. With the proper community management, marketing the business benefits properly to platform members and training them on their information channel portfolio management you have a much better chance that those involving will find it a useful tool for getting knowledge-work done.

If you like to learn more about how get that "support" piece working, the upcoming book "Connecting Organizational Silos" (pre-order now, available in Oct 2012) can help you.  

Nothing of value happens without passion!

Recently somebody asked me why I am so passionate on the topic of knowledge and everything that is connected to enabling the flow between people. I think to become passionate about something it takes a few conditions. For one you need to build knowledge on the topic itself, you exchange on it, collect feedback, have active discussions, that lead to developing ideas.

It is good to have one or more mentors as well. One of mine was one of the key contributors to the discussion on knowledge, Larry Prusak. He inspired with his excellent opening presentations at the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management member meetings. 

Usually 45min with a little piece of paper (no slides), filled with interesting well-told stories (in his New  York accent) and with quotes from many books - I always had the feeling he must be reading a book a day, the way he quoted from them. And Larry once gave a quote in one of those talks that stuck with me:

Nothing of value happens without passion!

After saying it, he paused and said it a second time. And he was right. When value happens it is normally with somebody somewhere putting in that extra thought and effort based on their true believe that there is actually value. 

Passion is not enough, being passionate about something but not building some knowledge and expertise as well might driving into the wrong direction. But if both are present, that is usually when great things can happen. 

What also fuels passion is the fact that some of your ideas get accepted and you see some impact and progress in the direction that you are taking. But as I mentioned in a recent blog entry on resistance, it can make you stronger on your ideas as well. At first it might mean that you get some push-back, but resistance also means you need defend and clarify your ideas, which could lead to a stronger path in the end. 

But back to my original question. Why this passion on the idea of knowledge flow management? First of all knowledge was always important, but in our age it has become one of the core principles that is being talked about it. In the stone age knowledge was shared as well, but people wouldn't talk as much about it from a conceptual point. Now everything is about the knowledge age that we live in. Starting with Peter Drucker this has been building over the last half century. I have only been part of this journey from the late 1990s, but the key idea how much potential lies in the flow of knowledge from one human to another, the exchange of ideas and leaps that can be taken by building on each other's ideas just amazes me. I started with a technical background but quickly the learnings on how humans share, why they do it, and why they don't, what the barriers are that keep them from it became the piece that made this picture complete. 

And my passion is partly fueled by the observations that so many are still stuck in the document-paradigm when they think knowledge sharing. And it is also fueled by the true believe that many organizations could really make so much more of the knowledge of their members if they would invest beyond technology, and instead really put some focus on enhancing the knowledge flows between their organizational members (and external parties for that matter). And the best way to do so is install certain support infrastructures that drive those flows - but that means investing in people (longer-term). 

On the other side the fact that so many organizations are not there yet offers a great potential to further work on discussing the idea with more people - build, develop and refine it - and maybe write about - in a blog like this one - or maybe even via third book at some point (currently the last one is still rather fresh and when "Connecting Organizational Silos" comes out in October there is still plenty to discuss with people about that one, I am sure. 

If you are passionate about knowledge as well (or similar concepts) - lets hear about it.