One of my favourite activities at the moment, after having resumed my blogging mojo just recently, is to currently revisit a number of different blog articles I have put together over the course of time in this blog to check whether they are still relevant or not, in this day and age, in terms of exploring how further along we may have gone into that so-called Digital Transformation journey, if at all, and so far the results haven’t been too comforting, nor reassuring, for that matter, since a good number of those articles seem to be still incredibly relevant. Yes, I know what you are all thinking right now, that it’s a good thing for you in terms of what you saw coming back in the day, but then again I think it’s just another indication of how we are all, pretty much, just on the tip of the iceberg in terms of the change and transformation we would all want to witness AND experience. Let’s start with some of the basics, for instance: where, or when, (and why?!?!) did we go from Live Social to Do Social?
My good friend, Jane Bozarth, author of the wonderfully inspiring book ’Show Your Work’, which I can highly recommend as a splendid summer read, put together a rather thought-provoking article a couple of weeks back that reminded me about how little we have progressed, if at all, in the last decade or so, around our very own Social Business efforts. In ‘It’s Not About ‘Doing’ Social’ she exemplifies a couple of instances that relate to how most businesses try to embark themselves nowadays into that so-called Digital Transformation journey and how one of them would be more successful than the other and for obvious reasons. Mostly, the one that’s least manufactured, structured, over-engineered, institutionalised (or industrialised for that matter) and governed by command and control, top down hierarchical decisions. Yet, it seems most change efforts out there around Social keep reinventing themselves as just another IT project for which we’ve been given two years to show, prove and demonstrate results. Yikes!
I’m not going to spoil for you the two scenarios Jane describes quite accurately in her blog post, on the contrary, I’d encourage all to go ahead and read through them to see where your own adaptation efforts around Social Business have been happening at your workplace. It’s a rather eye-opening exercise, I tell you. However, what I’d really like to point out, and perhaps quote over here as well, is the brilliantly captured conclusion as to why one of the scenarios keeps failing big time. Like I said, to quote her:
‘So it’s not about “doing social.” It’s about supporting workers as they work by giving them the time and the right space to talk about it. It’s about listening. And it’s about using social tools to support conversations and performance already in progress.’
While reading through it, I just couldn’t help but nodding my head in violent agreement with her reflections as to how spot on she is. It reminded about a couple of blog posts I put together over here myself over 4 years ago that pretty much touched on those very same points Jane has been highlighting as to what’s stopping us all from moving forward with our very own adaptation efforts around Social. Have a look into ‘Dear Social Business Evangelist, Where Art Thou?’ and ’The Fallacy of Social Networking’ to see what I mean.
At one point in time, not sure when, why or how, we seem to have decided to do social (at work) vs. living social. And I suspect that’s where we got it all wrong, because you can do as much social as you probably wish, or can, and still pretty much bring forward with you plenty of the dysfunctional behaviours and mindset that keep troubling organisations to date. It’s like we have just switched masks by putting on a new one, hoping that all business problems will disappear and new markets will be created. Well, not likely. Remember? Putting more lipstick on the pig, it will still be a pig! 🐷
Yes, indeed, as you may have guessed it, Social Business & Digital Transformation efforts aren’t just another IT project with a rather reduced budget put in place hoping it will stick around for employees to fully embrace it, because, you know, they won’t have a choice anyway. Otherwise, it will be just another IT project going in the gutter. The thing is that employees *do* have a choice, they always had it, they have it now and will have in the near future. And that choice is all about the mindset and behaviours they would want to exhibit as they adapt to a new working reality with all of these social tools available at their disposal. It’s their choice as well to showcase how dysfunctional the organisations they work in really are, not necessarily to demonstrate how broken they may well be, since they all know it already, but to perhaps highlight an opportunity to want to do something about it and fix that dysfunctional corporate culture. It’s their choice.
That’s why, all along, I have always advocated about the subtle differences between doing social vs. living social. And, eventually, be more inclined towards living social as a philosophical movement that can inspire yourself, and others, for that matter, to embark on that equally exciting and exhilarating personal transformation journey where we become more open, transparent, collaborative, caring and empathic about the work we all do. Why I’ve always been such a huge fan of Open Business vs. Social Business more than anything else, because long long time ago I realised you just can’t change people, nor organisations for that matter!
Change is personal, one individual at a time, and for their reasons, not your own, so the only thing we can all do is to provide the necessary conditions for that change, hopefully, in small increments, to take place as a personal decision from each and every knowledge Web worker out there, which means that everything we’ve been doing at work around adaptation to social tools over the last few years, including change management, needs to change, pun intended!, and pronto! There are tons of really good work to be done and this past decade has just helped us understand why we need to shift gears from doing social to living social. Default to open as an opportunity to help organisations understand the new dynamics of organising, AND getting work done more effectively, via social networks and communities and not just through the traditional, hierarchical, top down archaic structures.
Time to up the game, all of us, collectively, because, remember, after all, it’s our individual choice to help define how we get to spend more than one third of our lifetime (i.e. at work), and reframe, accordingly, what work should be like for us all, not just a few, don’t you think?
