Monday I mentioned my dad's disertation as part of talking about the ways that social media has democratized the distribution of ideas. Well today, by golly, I'm going to reference the thing because there are ideas in it that I think apply directly to the challenges of driving social media adoption within organizations. Title of the disertation is "Three Themes of New Left Ideology". The New Left was the social movement that gave rise to the civil rights efforts of the 1960's, the anti-war demonstrations regarding Viet Nam, and the general social upheaval of that era. On page 5, I came across this passage:
"As a sociological type, the New Left is a general social movement at that point in its career somewhere between the 'stage of popular excitement' and the 'stage of formalization'. Because it is a general social movement...it is groping, uncoordinated, unorganized, episodic, operates over a wide range, has scattered manifestations of activity, and so on. What gives it its identity, as much as anything, is a shared set of meanings as to what the world is and what it ought to be."
Yep, that's my Pop...As an aside, I've just given you a glimpse of what my family's dinner table conversations were like when I was a kid:
Dad: What did you learn in school today?
Me: 'bout The Revolution.
Dad: Well, of course you can't talk about 'The Revoluton' as a single event. First, to which revolution are you referring? Second, if you are referring to the American revolution then you have to understand that the conflagration that began at Lexington was the culmination of a general zeitgeist of unrest and political dissatisfaction that had been percolating for some time and that, furthermore, it could be argued that some elements of that revolution remain unresolved to this day. Eat your peas.
But back to the point at hand: In his book "Here Comes Everybody", Clay Shirky explains that social media is, itself, an outgrowth of a social movement. We live in a time in which attitudes about "what the world is and what it ought to be" are very much in debate and social media tools and activity are a manifestation of what appears to be the prevailing attitude about how the world's power structures and communication processes ought now to be organized. And doesn't the description of the New Left circa 1972 as "groping, uncoordinated, unorganized, episodic, with scattered manifestations of activity, and so on" sound equally like a description of the current state of social media adoption? It does to me.
So then, what can we extrapolate from the history of social movements to anticipate what might be the future of social media? Two things of note in answer to that question that I came across in my dad's text:
1. Social Movements evolve from generalized social attitudes to specific application - Social movements swirl about as general but unsustained energy until a specific goal presents itself that garners enough popular support that it causes that disparate energy to coalesce and to focus. It's like the way a tornado takes shape. Within our American society, the Obama campaign is a recent example of such a goal. There was a generalized, majority dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and a belief that it was time to do something very different from the status quo. Barack Obama represented that "something different" and the goal of electing Barack Obama gave focus to the generalized energy.
2. Many social movements articulate ideological themes with "revolutionary implications in the sense of requiring for their realization sweeping structural changes in society." - To take the Obama example again, briefly: the organization of political campaigns hasn't changed much over the years. Or it hadn't until Obama came along. His was an unlikely candidacy, electing him was a revolutionary goal in the sense that achieving it would change everything forever afterward about how campaigns were organized and run. Obama couldn't have won with a conventional campaign, he had to -- and he did -- fundamentally change how a political campaign was organized, managed and funded. Obama's campaign asked the people rather than the "vanguard elites" to lead.
Now I mentioned at the outset of all this that there are parallels between political social movements and the challenges of achieving successful adoption of social media practices within an organization. Here's what I see:
1. Rest assured your employees are using social computing tools already, maybe only personally, but they are using them. They get it, they're generally comfortable with it wherever it delivers relevant value to their lives and they would adopt it within your organization too. There's a general energy of interest swirling around these concepts, but you need to focus that generalized energy on a specific goal. The more you can coalesce that generalized, scattered interest on specific projects within your organization the more foothold the new practices will achieve. You can drive social media adoption in your organization to a tipping point by achieving these kinds of smaller goals first. Roll out social media tools for one department, one team, or to help achieve one project first and then build from there. Success builds interest, so as each of these smaller goals is met using social media tools and people take note, you'll be building the deeper, more focused interest necessary to achieve adoption enterprise wide.
2. You need to be willing to allow revolutionary change to the structure of your company. I posted a question to a LinkedIn discussion group a few weeks ago asking why Enterprise 2.0 (social media in business) was not yet more widely adopted. A surprising number of responses focused on the idea that the management cultures of companies is not yet structured in a way that makes Enterprise 2.0 efforts sustainable. Command and Control, top down management that prescribes process and dictates who gets to speak about which ideas when is the antithesis of the spirit that drives people to engage in social media. If your goal is to achieve enterprise-wide adoption of social media practices then sweeping changes to the power structures in your company may be necessary. Open the doors, open the blinds, open the conversations and the decision-making, become transparent. Empower the grass root constituencies. Get your culture right first because that's the soil out of which social media adoption will grow.
That is an easier idea to say than to achieve and retrofitting old structures with new elements is always disruptive. Perhaps the greatest success for Enterprise 2.0 will come not from restructuring existing businesses, but will come in the form of new businesses that are being formed now, that are rooted in the thinking of the day. But again, if political social movements are a reliable guide -- and I believe they are or there'd be no purpose to this post -- it is possible for societies to be restructured from the inside out and emerge better than they were. Just think about The Revolution, for example.
Since this is not a disertation, just a blog, I'll stop there, except to ask you: what do you think?
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