Sage Advice on Wiki Adoption: The Pitfalls

Apr 24, 2008

Sage Advice on Wiki Adoption: The Pitfalls

Nate Nash, a friend who works for a large, publicly-traded, professional services firm has shared some of the best advice from his experience leading wiki adoption in his organization:

A New Way to do Work

It is not a new place to put work, it is a new way to do work.

A new way to do work. How often do people claim something is a new way to do work, when it’s just the opposite. Fortunately, wiki is the real deal. The history of the wiki’s initial creation shows a back-to-basics, assume-nothing-and-question-everything approach that has resulted in a tool where everything about information creation and management, structure, interaction, and collaboration has been rethought and rebuilt in a less cumbersome, more natural way.

We might be witness to one of the first times in the history of technology that a fundamental rethinking has resulted in a simpler, easier to use tool that puts people at all levels of tech savvy on equal grounding, and enables them to work with each other, instead of in isolation.

Let People Step Forward

Speaking of this, when a new way is introduced, people need to have the leeway to explore that new way without the rules that govern the status quo:

Overactive security models, excessive taxonomy, and extreme management oversight will turn your wiki into nothing more than the magnificent, inflexible shell you originally created.

The best content comes from a user community free to express themselves, without fear of (overwhelming) retribution. Critical mass will be impossible to achieve unless people are willing to step forward on their own.

Plan for Success, not Failure

All too often, rules place greater emphasis on what not to do, as opposed to what people should do. Guidelines, by contrast, have a more positive connotation and are a more direct way to influence positive activity.

Keep in mind that too little guidance will result in too little activity, because it only appeals to the most self-directed people:

A blank slate with little guidance or seeding will work for only the hyper-creative. We paint lines on roads for a reason.

The bottom line here is that you should be thinking in terms of guiding people, instead of imposing a strict set of rules and measurements (both of which take away valuable time you could be putting into the wiki). If you focus on giving people access, guidance, and motivation vs. rules, consequences, and quotas, they’ll deliver a stunning amount of success - far beyond your expectations and the scope of your measurement criteria - and they’ll be even more motivated to continue.

Managing to the possibility of failure, not success – If you are more focused on how the wiki will fail, instead of how it will succeed, you have already written your destiny. The cost of failure is relatively low. The value of success is immeasurable. (Really, it is – so don’t try and measure it.)

Subscribe to Grow Your Wiki

12 Comments, Comment or Ping

Dennis McDonald

I like, most of all, the points made in the “Let People Step Forward” section.

I’m not convinced that alkl organizations will respond positively to the “different way of working” message, though. I’ve found that it makes sense to match the business proposition for initial social media adoption with the organization’s management practices.

If it’s an open, non-hierarchical, collaborative organization to begin with, the “new way of working” argument might make sense. If it’s a more rigid, hierarchical, structured, or repetitive organization, more/better/faster arguments and time saving might make more sense.

Dennis McDonald
Alexandria Virginia
http://www.ddmcd.com

Apr 24th, 2008
Chris Punke

In theory, I think everything you state is true and ideal… however, in practice I have found that many people who exist in a rigid corporate environment tend to be VERY RESISTANT to the idea of a wiki. I find that very surprising… one would think that people would lean toward finding ways to collaborate and experiment with tools to improve communication — but there are those cultures where this sort of community effort is just resisted. Completely.

How do those that see the potential in collaborative information systems like wikis reach those people who either don’t understand, or just refuse to step outside the rigid world they find comfortable?

Apr 24th, 2008
Sunir Shah

Is rigidity the problem? I thought the real challenge was that most people at work use wikis as a place to dump unstructured notes. It becomes impossible to find anything because typically no one takes the time to redesign or refactor the content to extract real information.

Well, amongst non-engineering teams. Engineers have a higher probability of organizing the content, since it is analogous to code.

I’m not sure this will improve by any simple means. Most people don’t know how to write and edit even a Word document, which is the basic skill necessary. I’m going to try doing some experiments in guided information design with bibwiki.com.

But, Yes!, I strongly believe that wikis really are a new and awesome way to work.

Apr 24th, 2008
Manolo Alvarez

Hi Stewart. I recently bought and red your wikipatterns book and have started implementing Wikis in organizations in my country, Guatemala.

I read a quote from Mike Krzyzewski yesterday and I think it goes very well with this post:

“The truth is that people make up rules so the don’t have to make decisions”.

Thanks for all your efforts from a Central American country starting collaboration and wiki adoption in spanish!

Apr 24th, 2008
susan scrupski

Hi Stewart. People– aye, there’s the rub. Someone smarter than I should devise a “risk co-efficient” for open collaboration. If I’m collaborating with a team deciding the next happy hour location, my risk co-efficient is pretty low. If I’m collaborating on a strategic direction for my brand or division, that’s high and makes me vulnerable in the organization.

It’s like the song: “People are people so why should it be, you and I should get along so awfully?” Sorry to invoke Depeche Mode to make my point, but people naturally disagree, take sides, etc. Just human nature. The only true open, non-hierarchical collaborative organizations are probably ones that self-organize for a cause, then disband before factions, territories, and egos start interfering with progress.

I’ve been thinking lately that we need more group therapists and fewer social media evangelists to spur open dialog and adoption.

Apr 24th, 2008
Craig Cmehil

Working in a company that embraces the use of Wiki so much it’s hard to take a stance but being a Community Evangelist and introducing a wiki to the community I’d have to agree with you quite a bit, then again I certainly have to agree with Susan as well.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that in most forms of “collaboration” the factions form and the “elite” comes into play, then the process starts all over again. That is what we need to break!

Apr 26th, 2008
Nate Nash

Excellent points Stewart and thanks for the shout-out. Great comments as well. The impending case study we are releasing on our 17k user wiki implementation should hopefully address some of the questions the comments pose.

I would add an additional point to consider for the comments above. We have found that wiki adoption seems to be more about unlearning, rather than learning. This applies for both the users and the champions. Question your own championing efforts to see if you are in fact pushing people to work in a new place, or whether you are guiding innovation about a new way to work. If you have moved unstructured notes to the Wiki, that is not a problem with the Wiki, it is a problem with the notes. Use the exposition of the authors notes to the public as an opportunity to improve their organizational skills. Or to crowdsource the organizational task all together (Mechanical Turk-style).

We made our Wiki successful because quite frankly, we blew people’s minds with innovative uses of the technology (in a services firm). We showed them what it looked like to think differently. And that they could do it themselves. If you can do that, the people, structure, content, adoption problems will melt.

Keep Wiki-ing!

Apr 29th, 2008
Jay Hariani

Unlearning old patterns of behavior is sometimes vital for innovation. Unlearning how to use Office and how to email attachments, for example, are critical to untangling business from these legacy, “stone age” approaches to knowledge creation and distribution.

Apr 29th, 2008
Steve Kent

I agree with Sunir - from my (short) experience with wikis, everyone gets excited about having a nice open bucket into which they can dump their unstructured notes / thoughts / ideas / gossip etc, but the end result is a bucket with a mess in the bottom.

Apr 29th, 2008
Guy

“Plan for success, not failure” - that’s spot on - not just for wikis, but for everything!

May 2nd, 2008

Grow your wiki — Mid-Tier Support - Apr 30th, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 Adoption: Business Case, Overcoming Barriers - Jun 10th, 2008