E2.0 Evangelism & The Curse of Knowledge

Have you ever been in a presentation, where the speaker was obviously an expert but they just couldn't convey their ideas to the audience leaving them confused and uninspired?

In the past, I've written about the challenges of being an expert. Expertise can limit our ability to be radically creative and open to suggestion causing us to miss opportunities for disruptive innovation. There has been some great research in this area by William Torbert and David Rooke that looks at "experts" in the context of one of the seven ways people lead. Here is a quotation from their HBR Article, "Seven Transformations of Leadership"

"Experts are great individual contributors because of their pursuit of continuous improvement, efficiency, and perfection. But as managers, they can be problematic because they are so completely sure they are right. They will frequently treat the opinion of people less expert than themselves with contempt."

"Expertise" has several implications to the social computing world, including the long-tail value of "non-experts", self-organization, and creating a collaboration culture. In this post however, I thought I'd talk to the specific challenges expertise has on our ability to communicate and inspire.

The term "curse of knowledge" is one I borrowed from the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan who put out the very popular book, "Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die". It's a great book, and quite practical. In their research, they examine why some concepts (even completely false ones) are memorable and others are forgotten (even the best, most innovative ideas).

Chip & Dan demonstrate through examples how the more you know, the harder it is to "not know" or remember what it was like to not understand. An experts' communications can become crammed with details that the casual recipient either doesn't understand, doesn't care about, or will soon forget anyways due to information overload.

For those trying to promote a culture of collaboration, and the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technology, we can become victims of our own knowledge. Sometimes this manifests itself as a laundry list of different technologies, often accompanied by a list of technical terms and a series of acronyms. Sometimes we drive into extreme detail on theory and academic research. Sure, to other social computing enthusiasts the concept of weak ties and centrality in social networks may be fascinating but will this win over the masses?

So what would Chip & Dan recommend to E2.0 evangelists looking to create a compelling message that is "sticky"? Well, they summarize the key principles of memorable messages in the acronym SUCCES.

Simple — find the core of any idea. Focus on that.
Unexpected — grab people's attention by surprising them
Concrete — make sure an idea is real and not too theoretical
Credibility — give an idea believability allow people to test it themselves.
Emotion — help people see the importance of an idea by tapping emotions
Stories — Stories are great ways to achieve all above.

I try to incorporate these principles when crafting communications, to help inspire folks around the potential of social computing and collaboration. Hopefully it'll help you too. If you have stories that have worked for you I'd love to hear them!

Keeping the Faith: The E2.0 Evangelist

It's said that when asked if she would join an anti-war protest, Mother Theresa responded that she would rather be pro-peace.

I was reminded of the Mother Theresa story in a post by Euan Semple and it was timely for me after a long week.

Many of us who push the concepts of social computing, and enterprise 2.0 are often referred to as "evangelists". From my experience, this is a pretty good way to describe what we do. We spend huge amounts of effort & time bestowing the values of engaging employees, providing them an opportunity to be heard, to really collaborate en mass.

And we have to do that without having hard "proof". Belief without proof? Well, I guess that's referred to as faith. Considering the number of blogs I have seen that talk to "trying" to calculate an "ROI" for Enterprise 2.0, I am guessing that several others share this challenge on selling the concepts of social computing in an organization. It's hard, it's really really hard!

So why is it so hard? Well, corporations are often geared towards "risk management". When I've had to push concepts of social computing in my professional career, I have on several occasions encounter folks that jump to "risk management". Why not? Haven't we trained people to think this way?

Companies often say they want to promote "risk taking" and "innovation" but we don't reward them for that. The truth is that we ask for this, but when we take a risk and it doesn't pay-off, the company often comes down hard on those people. Actions speak louder then corporate messaging. Over time, we train people to be risk averse. You won't get fired for NOT adopting social media in the company.

When did all the departments shift from being centres of excellence to becoming "risk management" centres? Human Resources (HR) is about what we shouldn't do. Corporate Communications is about what we shouldn't say, Finance is about what we shouldn't fund. Someone help! We are "risk managing" ourselves to death!

Perhaps the pendulum has swung in the wake of the big corporate scandals. Perhaps it's just reinforcing Maslow's hierarchy and we're too busy worrying about survival that we're nowhere close to self-actualization. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear, and that is the challenge ahead of all E2.0 evangelists is enormous.

But keep faith my friends! Because in your organization, there will be people that "get it". That will support your concepts. They may not get it yet, but they will. Because what you're evangelizing isn't about a bunch of technology. It never has been. It's about the human potential. About a more efficient and effective way to collaborate. Collaboration is the ENTIRE reason a company exists. That's why we brought people together, because we could do more together. Our perspective needs to change and you need to be that agent of mental change management. In a way, you too are managing risk. The risk that your organization will be irrelevant if doesn't start thinking about what social media means.

I'll give you a tip. There is no "one way" to succeed. I've seen top-down, bottom-up, middle-out evangelism that have all been successful. There are several tactics you can use, but I'll save that for another post. For today, I just wanted to remind you that it's worth the effort and you're not alone! Don't give up.