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.)