A new Enterprise 2.0 approach: the principal processes with a differential value (3/4)

In this third post I’m going to explain the principal processes that express the differential value of my approach.

In general, if we consider no integrations with an external network (for example, social CRM, ecc.), the main objectives of an Enterprise 2.0 project are knowledge management objectives with a strong social component:

Open and relational behaviors (social base of a learning organization)
– Participation
– Collaboration
– Knowledge sharing
– Belonging

Individual practices of efficiency (motivation and engagement)
– Contents production
– Contents quality

Collective practices of efficiency (complex system intelligence)
– Collective problem solving
– Collective error checking

Auto-organization (implicit knowledge and dynamics)
– Emergence of skills
– Emergence of leadership
– Bottom-up feedback

To nudge a determined behavior it’s necessary:

a) build a social space (Social Usability) inside the organization. Today, with the correct approach, we can use apps and communities as a easier and safer way to create a social place for a culture of collaboration. It’s necessary to have a model of organization and group as an orientation point. For example, the learning organization or the open source community or the community of practice, ecc.;

b) persuasive design of apps and networks that combine intrinsic incentives (Relational Motivations), with triggers.

Social Space + Persuasive Design

=

Social Usability + Relational Motivations

To build a community is to trigger a complex system, to build a group with its rules, codes, values, practices (see the continuum explained in the first post). So, from the first moment, an Enterprise 2.0 project is also a Change Management consultancy. In the next post I’ll explain the role of minimal change of the organizational culture that is necessary to trigger the behaviors of the users.

So, how to achieve these objectives?

I’m asking you to do a continuous mental shift between complementary levels and opposite concepts (see Edgar Morin), to be dialogic, a double logic. It become a hybrid approach between the community of users and the group of professionals, between professionals and persons, between cognitive interaction and social interaction both with knowledge management objectives. Let’s see the principal processes.


1. Social Presence
The relation between community and group in a physical organization space can be the first advantage to know and to use.
The Social Presence is a process that expresses the extension of our social dynamics in a mediated interaction. In other words, when you feel that there is continuity between your social life in physical place and also in digital place that is the product of the Social Presence.

In an Enterprise 2.0 I use the Social Presence as an opportunity in two ways:
– sandbox (incentiving the change): the community become the place to test now opportunity and gradual change in the culture of the organization;

example 1- it’s easier to resolve the hierarchical resistances of the company if you propose to select implicit leaders as attractors of a complex system to engage users inside the community

example 2- use the community as an extra space from bureaucracy to manage knowledge in bottom-up logic

– alternative space (reduce the anxiety of changing): the Social Presence in the network creates not only a continuity but also a difference between the community users and the group of professionals in the organization, this duplicity could be used to protect the balance of organization during the strategic changes of the culture in the community:

example 1- the plan put in place to legitimate the implicit leaders inside the community lives in a context that helps to express the underlying dynamics, allowing to manage them with social network analysis and the explicitation of behaviors online

example 2- in a network you can decide constraints and possibilities


2. Indirect social adoption
In my opinion the principal advantage of Enterprise 2.0 is that by designing and managing the IT not only as a cognitive artifact but as a social and psychological artifact too you can have:

– Less processes: and less consultancy companies to nudge adoption and learning behaviors, because the user experience on the interface of collaborative apps, of a network becomes a place where there is a concrete convergence of cognitive and social processes in the users. The economy of processes isn’t only about the convergence of adoption and learning but also about the interaction with the technology and the collaborative interaction with the colleagues.

example 1- building a channel of communication with a limit of letters like twitter is, in the same time a channel of communication, a setting that nudge the adoption due to its simplicity and the learning of brief style of communication, learning to use this kind of app is in the same time the implicit creation of a practices more efficient of communication

– More persuasive channels: with the persuasive level of the design we have a more opportunity to persuade constructive behaviors of professional as users.

example 1- putting in the center of user experience in a social network the profile of the users produces the relevance of the people on the information, the community on the hierarchic flow and priority of information


3. Alliance between person and professional
Generally the companies don’t consider the person part of their employees but only the professional part. But we know that when a professional is working don’t finish to be a person, so the traditional organization culture crate by itself, by an implicit way a unknown land of knowledge, relations, conflict, motivations, ecc.. The vantage is to make an alliance between professional and person.

How to do that? By intrinsic motivations. In fact the intrinsic motivations are:

– the best kind of incentives that nudge the persons to do, because extrinsic incentives produce different behaviors less strong and persistent (don’t forget the extrinsic tend to eliminate intrinsic);
– the principal kind of motivations that nudge collaborative behaviors that are the bases of many knowledge management practices.

example 1- use, motivated by the design and  internal communication campaign, the needs of the users to express themselves and their competence in intranet that generally is a place of only a top-down information, communication, formation inside a cultural ecosystem of a organization too much rigid

To do this alliance is necessary a internal campaign of communication and influence the design too.

There is a relation between professional and person with the explicit and an implicit organization (see Knowledge Management and Organizational Psychology). It’s important to remember this relations because the implicit organization could influence not only the users, the employees but the consultants too. I’ll talk about it in the next post.


4. Virality
We can have some users, some employees that adopt and learn new technology and good practices but how they can influence their colleagues, their friends in the network, to do the same?

Leadership is fundamental to influence the others persons. It’s important in two temporal phases:
– starting phase of the community, to trigger the complex system, to reach the critical mass;
– during the cycle of evolution of the community the leaders are the capacity ti improve or stop collective behavior.

The subject of leadership can be not only individual users, persons but groups too that they move as an entity.

example 1- put a limit to the possibility to enter in a group could be an incentive for other users to find the opportunity to enter doing behaviors the are strategic for the network

How can leadership influence others?
By bottom-up legitimation that increase reputation.

example 1- design the apps in a way that show explicitly the best behaviors and stop implicitly the wrong
example 2- it’s important manage the needs of competition that are powerful but with a fragile balance like the “dark side of the Force”

So it’s important to design implicit processes that help the emerging of leadership and manage this dynamic.

If in one hand the leadership puts in the center of viral processes the person, the user, in the other hand there is an intrinsic virality of some contents. This could append in two ways:
– content as a symbol of beliefs, mental models, implicit dynamics, subconscious complexes (individual or collective);
– content that produce a strong emotional impact like several viral videos on youtube.

If the leadership is generally more relevant in the design level of persuasion the contents are relevant in internal communication campaign. In the virality process is important to use social network analysis to check what’s going on in the network.

In the next post I’m going to show the principal operative phases of consulting.