Web 2.0 shifts Organisational transparency
How much visibility do your staff get into your company’s processes?
Integrating thoughts is a core human task. Its central to everything we do both at the individual level, and as companies (and companies are just a mechanism for humans to get economies of scale and get focus in their efforts).
Integrating thoughts at the individual’s level is about collecting ideas, reckoning with fact vs. hearsay, synthesizing one’s own opinion, reconciling priorities, and making plans. Its something everyone does in both the background, in idle moments, and actively, when alone sketching plans and in conversation. The expressing-feeling feedback cycle gives us a gut-feel for whether something is right.
But, as soon as others are involved, and the more people the more this is true, there’s the likelihood that the others are not fully listening.
Regular team meetings in firms are a case in point. Status report meetings (whose purpose is primarily to achieve transparency) are especially boring as often you have to listen through say 3/4 of the meeting just to have your say. Everyone is a little (or a lot) disengaged. Yet, status reports have been one of a few methods for getting a group to go through that same process of integrating thoughts… until collaboration software came along.
Web 2.0 creates collaboration as the modus operandi (default way of being) . Its said to be the Architecture of Participation for a reason, you know. In this context, the power comes from the user base - and that’s usually those in the extended value chain (customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, government regulators). Applications designed for the architecture of participation are there to embrace members of the community to help them function both as individuals and as a group. Its by finding new ways to aggregate their actions that value is added.
So these meetings we keep having, whose purposes are to create a little transparency, can readily be substituted with an online mechanism such as a wiki or blog. And indeed they are finding just that role in many organisations.
And in fact, when organisations shift to wikis and blogs, they find something else: that transparency goes far deeper than previously possible.
One can now:
- see any depth into the organisation,
- absorb content at the speed of reading instead of at the slower rate of speaking, skipping the boring bits but able to rewind and search
- read and give feedback at any time convenient for the reader,
- give feedback and make human and idea links across that organisation far more rapidly and effectively
Finally all this has a real impact on the firms capital knowledge base. Bringing new people on board is much easier when they can read the conversations that led to a decision and re-engage people in them. And that’s got to be good for the Baby Boomer Retirement drain.
It’s not that anyone is trying to discourage visibility, indeed innovation is a top priority for most CEOs. It’s just that until recently, most enterprises have had no means to enable true transparency throughout the organisation.
