Room 101

Jay Cross comments on a post by JP Rangaswami about Facebook and its potential in companies. What interests me is this:

More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.

That’s how we are going to create the right learning environments. I think Facebook has the tools to capture much of this in the nonintrusive time-shifted place-shifted shareable way. Let the patterns emerge. Share the patterns. Get inside people’s heads.

Why get inside my head? Do you not trust me to share the knowledge we both need? It appears not. I really dont want people inside my head. And least of all my employer. In a knowledge economy my employer is buying what is "inside my head".

The above may be caricature, but what is transparency if we cannot choose when to be transparent. In the workplace, our value is individual, that is what each worker sells, it is what makes you employable. That value requires that the choice of what is shared remains with the individual. We all intuitively know this, and this is why this kind of tendency will not take, there will always be passive resistance. Sharing is not located in the tools, it is an attitude, and that involves changing the way business works, which is a very very tall order.

Until that change happens business will waste money on these tools and wonder why people are cagey. But sharing needs work both ways. If an employee shares and the company doesnt, more often using what is shared for "share"holder benefit (the dissonance between share as a verb vs share as a noun is a question for another day), then the employee soon stops sharing. Or rather the employee learns to pay the same lip-service to sharing as the company does.

The knowledge management literature, and the glorious chaos that is called Web 2.0, implicitly recognise the value and the power of the individual embedded within a social network. Companies do not. In the final analysis, that bottom line, the individual is explicitly viewed by the company/organisation/entity, (whatever individuals, CEOs or middle managers may do or think) as a "resource". People viewed as resources tend to keep the things that matter to themselves. Sure they will dance for your project, the usual sticks and carrots will apply, but in the same way as they always did. In other words, the contractual obligation. Web 2.0 in this context changes nothing.

This is arguably a stumbling block that can be easily massaged with figures. We can pretend it works, and people will play the game, and pretend to share. If you want more than superficial participation, Web 2.0 will facilitate that, but only if the company understands that participation cant be limited to the work processes, it needs to be wider, and especially, economic. And that means addressing the contract. Meanwhile Web 2.0, in companies is probably just another fad.