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September 21, 2003
Go With The Flow
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Jim McGee notes that peak performance depends upon flow, and:
The promise of weblogs in the organization is that they help us get more accustomed to flow. The threat they pose is the same thing; they work against those who are more comfortable with control than with performance.
The concern of control was raised in the early days of email adoption. At first, practitioners who had exposure to the tool at school or other organization brought it in on their own. Within 10 years a shift occured, and managers became the heaviest users of email.
Weblogs in organizations will take less time to make the practitioner to manager adoption shift.
Managers can be early adopters of some communication and collaboration technologies, such as Application sharing and IM. The simplicity of weblogs and wikis lower the barrier to entry for managers, precident set by other tools and their utility for managerial roles will accelerate adoption.
Email has set a precident for unconstrained communication, whether vertical, lateral or through the firewall. It has trained users that they own their words and are held accountable for them. It has empowered managers with an attention management tool and the ability to pick up on patterns of flow. But email is no longer a productivity tool because of commercial spam, occupational spam and viruses. And the latent value of email communication is lost and attempts to realize it abuse its privacy.
Comments (3)
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1. Amir Dotan on September 21, 2003 7:45 PM writes...
Hi Ross,
Sounds interesting. Can you perhaps elaborate a bit about how a blog is used in an organization by describing a possible scenario? I'm curious as to who the readers are and what sort of interaction is exhibited between the blogger and the readers in a working environment.
Cheers,
Amir
Permalink to Comment2. Ross Mayfield on September 21, 2003 10:30 PM writes...
Sure Amir, although it lets me get a little too commercial for Socialtext than I want to on M2M. Let me profile a customer:
Two product managers of a F500 software company have the challenge of communicating with over 500 field salespeople. Previously this was done with email and attachments. The product managers found themselves loosing time repeating themselves and not getting enough feedback.
By performing the same communication they would otherwise by blog, they are building an asset. The field can tune in anytime to find out what's new, the narrative thread that got them there and search for additional answers.
Some of the field uses news aggregators, some just bookmark the site, some come there when alerted by the product managers, some subscribe by email.
The product managers use the wiki to collaborate on developing complex documentation and for general project communication.
The field can provide feedback directly on a post-by-post basis, but also develop their own assets within the wiki. Over time the field will blog itself, resulting in a more decentralized use. People are readers first, commenters second and bloggers third -- what we have done is to make contribution a little easier by removing some structure. But for now its about saving time with a better, more open way of communicating.
This was a case of managers being early adopters. The interesting thing was they had exposure to blogs on the web first.
Permalink to Comment3. Amir Dotan on September 22, 2003 6:32 PM writes...
Thanks a lot Ross. You sure helped put it into perspective.
Cheers,
Amir
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