Man. Aint that the truth.

This quote is from a recent blog post by one of my favorite Enterprise 2.0 authors, Paula Thorton.  It literally jumped off of the screen, landed in my mint julep, and was ported directly into the underwhelming organ I refer to as my brain. I can count on one hand (finger?) the number of business applications I consider great experiences. As such, it has been stewing there for the past little bit and I have been trying to figure out why. Not necessarily why it has been stewing (that part is easy – I am simple), but why the statement is true.

I have also been stewing on a rallying cry I continue to hear while waging the undying E2 adoption battle. People seem to be transfixed on the idea that things (technologies) “must be easy to use” in order to opt for a change. I hear this in bunches and have sort of reduced it to ‘a technology must be relatively easier to use in order to induce change”.  For argument’s sake I mean change in the most binary of senses.  As in stop using SharePoint and start using Confluence. Forget all the other stuff like organizational transformation or culture shift or <insert change buzzword here>.

So when these two stews came together, I asked myself the following question:

• Does a great experience with a business application imply that it is easy to use? Moreover, should it be?

In attempting to answer this question I thought about experiences I consider “great”. What are the attributes of an experience, professional or otherwise, that inevitably make it great? After sifting through my collective experience of persistent mediocrity, it boiled down to a couple things. They usually entail some sort of hard work, possibly even pain, and a sense of accomplishment. For example, I hiked up Mount Washington with Brother Nash this past winter. In one day with temperatures well below freezing, we covered 8 miles, gained and lost a mile of altitude, and carried a sweet ice axe. Hard work? Yup. Sense of accomplishment? For sheezy. Great experience? Check. Another example is my obsession with CrossFit. Most weekdays, the fine folks at Primal Fitness DC are kind enough to hand back my ass after a seriously proper kicking up and down New York Avenue.  From Fights Gone Bad to dancing with the clown, there is definitely both pain and a sense of accomplishment. Mark another in the “great” column. Finally, the time I spent working in the Middle East was definitely a great experience. We accomplished many things and well…the reason why life might be a bit hard in Baghdad is pretty self-evident.

So how does this translate to business applications? The only app I really consider a great experience is our wiki. I have never really thought about it until now, but why is that? Why do I think it’s great? For the longest time, I thought it was because it was easy to use. But the more I think about it, while the tool itself may be easy, the experience is anything but. It is hard. It is sometimes painful. And frankly, it should be.

When we write professional content (like deliverables) in wiki form, we are forced to expand our minds beyond typical expectations. We must increase our understanding of context, look for the bigger picture, and understand where the content we are producing fits into it. What does this link to?  Where else are people writing about this? What are they saying? Am I wrong? Are they wrong? What should this link to?

I would posit that none of these questions existed so blatantly until I had a tool that exposed them to me. I worked away in my little silo of knowledge (more of a shed really) and never had to consider the bigger picture. Maybe there was some other eRoom with similar content, but I sure didn’t have access to it. Even if I could link my document to the other, what did that do? It didn’t help the search engine. It didn’t provide trackback for the other author. It would also usually break if either doc was moved or renamed. Now those were the easy days. So why bother?

Well…I didnt. And most people still don’t. Even though there is a clear option to  produce a great experience, people are still slogging through version control nightmares fueled by email attachments and track changes. Why? Because it is easier??? No. Ease of use is often a foil for thought laziness. Email attachments are easy. But they don’t precipitate a great experience. Why bother to expand your perspective when the siren of a paperclip icon (or a folder upload) calls so sweetly? Silo shmilo…I have Facebooking to get to!

My great experiences with business applications (or anything for that matter) always require some level of hard work. Authoring in the wiki provides for a great experience, but when the content is at its most powerful, it is in no way easier to produce. It forces me to think beyond what I usually think about. Isn’t that what organizations want out of their employees? Isn’t that what employees want from their jobs? Challenging assignments? Big thinking? I know it’s what I want.  And yes, it can be hard. But, just like the feeling you get from a correct choice in the Big Mac vs. spaghetti squash conundrum…it is great.

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I rarely disagree with these sorts of folks for two reasons. One – they are way smarter than I am. (Seriously. Not being sarcastic. I make it through the day by force of will and dumb luck. ) Two – they seemingly have way more time than I do to write retorts confirming the former. Disagreement sounds like a dicey proposition to me, but in the interest of perhaps proving my point, let’s run a few rounds.

My first issue is this paragraph from Venkatesh:

The exciting people — say the guy leading the consequential re-org, or managing the “bet the company” product launch, is probably far busier than everybody else. But I suspect there is another reason: to put it in terms of an American high school analogy, it is the same reason the “cool kids” avoid the “loser kids.”  Enterprise 2.0 is mostly populated by the equivalent of band geeks. The equivalent of football players and cheerleaders are possibly avoiding it. Just possibly, they might be thinking “nobody who is anybody goes there; nothing that matters happens there.”

Wow. Talk about a shot to my E2 gut. I was in fact a band geek in high school and I think Mr. Rao just stuffed me in a locker and stole my flute-playing girlfriend. On to something similar from @sradick:

Ultimately though, no matter how many pages your wiki has or how fantastic your internal blog is, the technology is going to reflect your organizational culture.  Not the culture you talk about on your website, but the real, honest culture of your organization.

Huh. So if I slap these two thoughts together, I am left with the fact that our Enterprise 2.0 implementations have been nothing more than a transparent magnification of the collective loserdom.

Gentlemen…Respectfully…I disagree.

First off, the claim that Enterprise 2.0 is inhabited by the equivalent of band geeks and high-school losers sounds like a text message you wish you could take back after a SharePoint bender. My dear friend, we are not losers. We are the organizationally elite. We are a minority because of the majority interest’s penchant for feeding tube IT and collaboration that is…well…easy. Keep thinking I sit alone at lunch because nothing that matters happens here. I am sorry, but in the rat race to be a better, faster, more informed knowledge worker (can I still say that?), the cool kid good looks, easy going nature, and belief that all problems can be fixed by relationship X or quid pro quo Y is a surefire sentence to a lifetime of inconsequentiality.

Secondly, the claim that technology is nothing more than a reflection of your internal culture is sleight of hand for change management consultants. Enterprise 2.0 technologies do not reflect a culture. They present a desired future state and an opportunity for that culture to change. It is not that I was always this collaborative or transparent. It is not that I have always wanted to blog (or whatever). In fact, I didn’t think anything of the sort was possible until I was exposed to the technology. Furthermore, I didn’t jump in immediately, thinking that this wiki thing was some sort of missing glass slipper I had been longing to wear. It was the opportunities that the technology presented that allowed my personal culture to change. The capabilities and power of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies are there out of the box. As the culture begins to change and understand their value, the culture itself becomes a representation of the capabilities manifested in the technology.

Frankly…both of these ideas have some merit. However, they are gross oversimplifications. Yeah sure…there are some geeks using the technologies. And yeah sure…the  guy who is a jerk in real life will probably be a jerk on the wiki. But in both of cases, having these events occur in the clear will go a long way toward said “loser culture” breaking down the crippling organizational and technological silos – put there by the football players and cheerleaders –  evidently as a representation of their “winner culture.”

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The gym at the Intercontinental in Amman is respectable as far as hotel gyms go. Not usually crowded, it can be a respite to the weary/bleary/eerie traveler on their way through the middle east. I was all three the fateful morning I discovered a mildly cultish experience I have since bought into in a mildly obsessive fashion. Check that. Majorly cultish experience in an obsessively obsessive fashion.

I was huffing and puffing my way through a set of pullups when an ominous, somewhat bearded man of significant magnitude approached from the far side of the gym. He was clearly (hiding being) American but with a smile and an overly firm handshake he said to me…

“How long you been doing CrossFit?”

Racing through my memory bank, cluttered by the trans-Atlantic-business-class-all-you-can-convince-that-nice-woman-who-works-for-United-wine-fest of last night’s flight,  I stuttered something that hopefully would garner an iota of respect.

“Yeah…it’s cool. I just uhh…started but am not really…umm…sure yet.” (cue man shrug and realization of complete idiocy).

He stares at me quizzically. Perhaps wondering whether English is my first language and after what might have been against his better judgment, smiles again and says, “Keep it up. It will change your life.”

We exchange another (awkward on my part) handshake and he moves on to what I assume is a day consisting of a flight directly into the IZ. However, I was intrigued by this thing he referred to as “CrossFit”. Was I doing that? Should I be doing that? Why am I not doing that now? Do I need to grow a beard? After completing the balance of my paltry workout, I immediately set to googlin’ and came across a phenomenon that in fact, has changed my life. And maybe, just maybe, might provide a corollary to helping spread the goodness that is Enterprise 2.0.

In short, CrossFit is an open source “strength and conditioning fitness methodology”. There is a website/blog where daily workouts are posted and in turn, the participants post their results. The key differences between this and other programs that may sound similar is that these workouts are blow-an-o-ring difficult, usually require little equipment, and encourage competition through public reporting of performance or achievement. As a result of this, the community that has developed around CrossFit is extremely loyal, passionate, and somewhat insubordinate with respect to the “old way” of exercising. “Forging Elite Fitness” is more a badge of honor than a slogan, and gyms catering to xfitters have sprung up across the world. In my experience, the approach produces superior results yet is often shunned by the traditional fitness complex, starving for consumer dollars. It can be argued that CrossFit is the land of zealots. Yes, we are in excellent shape. Yes, we are training not to suck at life. Yes, we have a supportive community and almost limitless, free resources. Yes, organizations like the Marine Corps, law enforcement, and emergency services have adopted the approach. Yes, all indications seem to point to the fact that CrossFit might be the best way to get your widening derriere off the couch and into those hipster jeans. The results form a somewhat bulletproof business case.

Yet…we are the minority. We are overshadowed by Zumba classes and Bowflex. We are surrounded by Old Country Buffets and other food borne assaults on the human condition. Critics have painted us as cultish, a fad, and lacking rigorous certification standards. Despite what I have seen as overwhelming success in my own life as well as those around me, CrossFit is still not yet mainstream. In some instances, traditional gyms have banned its practice altogether.

In preparing for my participation in the “Reality Check” session at the E2 Conference this year, it occurred to me that this is not a dissimilar situation from the state of transparency within the enterprise.

In my current (past?) company, the use of our Enterprise Wiki to peel back the layers of otherwise tacit knowledge bears the same characteristics of the situation surrounding CrossFit. We are a somewhat cultish group of contributors who passionately believe in this way of working. We have wholesale adopted the practice of creating content in the clear, seek and use input from across the organization, and raise an indignant grimace to the “old way” of collaborating. Our approach requires little client side equipment, a puny corporate investment, and focuses on driving value from the crowd by changing yourself first. Yes, we are writing more informed deliverables. Yes, we have a supportive community and almost limitless free resources. Yes, organizations like IBM, Cisco, and the DC City Government have adopted the approach.  Yes, all indications seem to point to the fact that Enterprise 2.0 might be the best way to get your darkening corporate knowledge base out of Exchange (or whatever) and into the light of utility. The results form a somewhat bulletproof business case.

Yet…we are the minority. We are overshadowed by large corporate investments in permission-granted, file-driven technologies. We are surrounded by the easy and familiar technology mega buffet of so called collaboration suites. Sure, there might be grilled chicken in a steam tray somewhere, but in comparison to the volume pumping through the mac and cheese hopper, the healthy options look a bit lonely. Criticism is not as vocal, but passively manifested in lack of participation or continuation of traditionally opaque practices. Depite what I have seen as overwhelming success in my own life as well as those around me, Enterprise 2.0 is still not yet mainstream.

More respectable and knowledgeable bloggers than I have pointed out too many times to cite, that this may have something to do with fear. While I agree fear is a part of it, perhaps transparency, the core of Enterprise 2.0, is avoided for the same reason we choose a leisurely twirl on the elliptical machine over a fight gone bad.

Simply put – transparency is hard. Transparency might hurt while you are doing it. Transparency might actually injure you if not practiced with common sense and an objective view of your capabilities. Transparency requires you to think about work in a different way, not a different place. Sure, you can check the transparency box by standing up a corporate-apedia, viewing it a couple times, and maybe adding a link or two. But immediately sending a status report as an attachment thereafter is like doing a single pushup before riding a desk all day. Might make you feel good about yourself, but the marginal gains are lost in the grand scheme of things. Much like CrossFit, I believe transparency can only improve both an individual and an organization. With time, it becomes easier. With time, you begin to better understand your capabilities. With time, the community helps to gauge your performance and ultimately drives a greater, leaderless good. With time, you can forge your own brand of elite organizational fitness.

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