Chapter 5
Growing Collective Intelligence
Collaborative tools are the breathing organisms that reflect the living
nature of organizations today.
—Don Burke
Intellipedia Doyen, CIA
On July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded within 50 seconds of one another on three London subways. A fourth went off an hour later in a double-decker bus on a busy downtown square. Together the bombs killed 56 people, including the four bombers, injuring nearly 700 people within the span of one morning rush hour, putting security agencies worldwide on high alert. Sean Dennehy watched the “7/7” events unfold from the headquarters of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency outside Washington, D.C.1
Dennehy had recently received approval to pursue a small, classified wiki project and, along with senior CIA analyst Calvin Andrus, offered to be the pilot customer for an intelligence-community-wide wiki being readied for deployment. Wiki (Hawaiian for quick) allows a group to make changes to a shared web page.
Dennehy couldn’t help but compare how rapidly Wikipedia, the largest wiki in the world, had synthesized information on the bombing with the traditional intelligence process of analysts individually reaching out to contacts, writing reports, and posting them in individual agency systems. Overlap was everywhere, each person focusing on the needs of the agency he or she serves while also defining the larger environment and scope of the event.
The year before, Andrus wrote a report called “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” detailing the need for the intelligence community to adapt to the increased pace of the world.2 With these new tools, intelligence community analysts could extend existing processes of idea generation and dialogue to the web with only a few mouse clicks. He laid out the wide-ranging intelligence benefit from collaborative tools with user-generated content.
What the United States needed after September 11, Andrus argued, was something that could handle rapidly changing, complicated threats. Intelligence organizations needed to become adaptive, driven to judgments by bottom-up collaboration, similar to financial markets or ant colonies—or Wikipedia.
For decades, the U.S. intelligence system had been structured to answer static or slowly developing, Cold War–era questions, such as the status of Soviet missile deployments or the construction of Soviet nuclear submarines. What the United States needed after September 11, Andrus argued, was something that could handle rapidly changing, complicated threats. Intelligence organizations needed to become adaptive, driven to judgments by bottom-up collaboration, similar to financial markets or ant colonies—or Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia model didn’t seem like a perfect match, but it looked like an interesting way for intelligence analysts to capture, share, and cross-reference reports of situations in the world. In intelligence organizations, as in politics or the news business, what’s new and captivating gains more attention than core information it’s believed everyone should already know. Some pages of the wiki would contain active analysis. Others would contain reports of past activities that might provide useful context for current situations.
Dennehy believed a wiki model could capture and integrate stories and define issues in a way that also showed contributors and readers what had been written, added, and edited previously and that wasn’t academic in its approach. It could also give people in the future contextualized insights and a way to reference other people’s work without repeating the same peripheral details.
Around that same time, intelligence analyst Don Burke was looking at the changing nature of analysis and how the CIA could do a better job capturing its knowledge. As part of that activity, he began learning about wikis and started contributing to an internal CIA wiki. When Burke learned about Dennehy’s work, he began editing and playing with the new, still in-pilot intelligence community wiki, now named Intellipedia.3
Soon Burke and Dennehy began bumping into one another within the wiki, both writing about the power of collaboration and laying philosophical and procedural roadmaps to how the tool could best be used by the intelligence community. Online they discussed meeting in person and were surprised to learn they worked in the same building. By the time they met face to face, though, they’d already solidified their partnership. When Burke’s project ended and Intellipedia was officially unveiled to the intelligence community, he was reassigned from his management position to partner with Dennehy on pursuing Intellipedia full time.
Five years after the July 7 bombings in London, intelligence reports about the events still exist. Some are retrievable, but few offer people the ability to analyze similar stories and glean patterns and insights that might help prevent further incidents. Those who wrote the 7/7 reports moved on to the next target, the next project. Their earlier intelligence was considered “finished,” although it did little to establish historical knowledge or provide cohesion with the larger organization, practices that are basic for transformative change. Reports often did not name their authors, due to counterintelligence concerns, so other analysts had no idea whom to contact for additional background.
In the past, each of the hundreds of reports about any crisis lived on its own. Even when coordination occurred, a report written to meet the specific needs of a customer might contain fundamentally the same information as other reports but not reach the same conclusions. This meant that each reader had to find and synthesize hundreds of documents and determine what was different or the same to get the intelligence community’s perspective on an issue. There was simply too much information to sort through and synthesize in a useful way.
Dennehy, Burke, and about 30 others used the widely read Andrus paper, the first National Intelligence Strategy, recommendations from the 9/11 and Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commissions, and other documents to introduce Intellipedia across the intelligence community. Although the Andrus paper spelled out the many reasons why it would be an asset for national security, cultural resistance and pushback were stiff. Initially, analysts who were asked to participate said they were too busy or just preferred the old proprietary databases managed by individual agencies.
Others didn’t see this collaborative and social approach fitting their mission-driven organizations because it wouldn’t be easy to measure the impact of crowd-sourced entries. An individual focus is a powerful way to keep people on track, but detrimental because it’s so tactical and lacks vision.
When Sean Dennehy and Don Burke were tasked with increasing knowledge sharing across the intelligence community in 2005, it was like being asked to promote vegetarianism in Texas. Against the odds, these analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency succeeded in promoting a tool that breaks with the prevailing culture, increases the flow of information, and ultimately contributes to making the United States safer. |
One big hurdle was convincing security-minded people that the system would be safe from outsiders. To allay concerns, Intellipedia was built into the existing secure and classified network known as Intelink, which connects the intelligence agencies in the United States, the U.S. military, the Department of State, and other agencies with access to intelligence.
The vision was to break down barriers to information sharing and capturing knowledge, demonstrating that intelligence knows no geographic boundaries.
Years later, now a sanctioned initiative with tens of thousands of registered users and upward of 10,000 page edits a day, Intellipedia gets people what they need and when they need it. In 2009, traffic on Intel-lipedia became so heavy that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had to find extra money to upgrade its servers.
The site’s real-time, user-generated content has proven pivotal in the unfolding of several major events. For example, in February 2007 when Iraqi insurgents conducted several attacks incorporating chlorine into an improvised explosive device, someone created a wiki page asking what intelligence officers and others in the field should do to collect evidence of chlorine use. Twenty-three people at locations around the world chimed in to create a serviceable set of instructions in two days. No time was wasted on meetings.
Intellipedia doesn’t aim to produce “finished” analysis—a term used widely in the intelligence community to imply completed reports for decision makers. Those are still written the old-fashioned way and circulated for peer review and consensus. Instead, Intellipedia encompasses a constantly changing world that can never be complete but can provide lessons at any time.
Another example of a visible change in learning and practice came as a result of 10 Islamic militants overrunning two hotels in Mumbai, India, on November 26, 2008. Analysts stationed around the world immediately converged on a newly created Intellipedia page about the attacks, which they updated continuously as new information came to light. Over the course of the three-day standoff, the page logged more than 7,000 views and was integral to understanding and analyzing the attack.
During the Beijing Olympics, a personal matter prevented an analyst from writing the official reports on the events, but the information he had contributed to Intellipedia over the previous years provided invaluable analysis to those who did write the reports. When the topic of Beijing surged, others in the intelligence community had a place to start and a context that kept them from coming in cold. Thousands of examples such as these, showing that people who are connected are more powerful than any number working alone, are needed until this way of working becomes part of the intelligence-gathering fabric.
Intellipedia doesn’t aim to produce “finished” analysis—a term used widely in the intelligence community to imply completed reports for decision makers. Those are still written the old-fashioned way and circulated for peer review and consensus. Instead, Intellipedia encompasses a constantly changing world that can never be complete but can provide lessons at any time. The online intelligence encyclopedia can also provide more accurate data than in the past because a wide range of experts, who help keep the material current and accurate, can scrutinize and amend what’s written.
The CIA is only one of the U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and military organizations that use Intellipedia on top secret, secret, and unclassified networks. Burke and Dennehy have been two of the most visible proponents of this new model, but Intellipedia’s success derives from a core group of advocates who have quietly worked within their organizations to demonstrate and articulate how Intellipedia can be used to improve the mission of the intelligence community.
Managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Intellipedia captures current conditions by giving broad access and updating rights to 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community. In 2008, Intellipedia access rights were given to state and local law enforcement officials so they could benefit from relevant, up-to-date intelligence.
Deploying and keeping Intellipedia active is no easy task, though, when it’s outside people’s daily routines. At times, Dennehy who is now the Intellipedia and Enterprise 2.0 evangelist, knows some analysts may have informative conversations on Intellipedia and then have to document the exchange on an agency’s official system, too.
Intelligence analysis should be a process of working on problems and trying to get sharper at them. Intellipedia is ideal for that. Greg Treverton, director of the Rand Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security, says, “If you slice it at any given time, you are saying, ‘Here is the best state of understanding at the moment.’”4
Dennehy points out that, “It’s important to look at how we get to the finished intelligence. Intellipedia does this by making the process more social and creating a dialogue that’s transparent.”
“In addition to analysis, we need people who can create an ecosystem of knowledge that is not specifically about answering tomorrow’s questions, but creating a world of information that is connected,” adds Burke. “It feels alive.”
Intellipedia is largely managed by volunteers and watched over by “shep-herds” who answer questions and keep track of individual pages in their areas of expertise. Like Wikipedia, the authorship of articles is clear: There are no cryptic user names to hide behind. People can find and learn where ideas come from fast.
Intellipedia has become a shining light of possibility for a better way to work thanks to the countless contributions from individuals who post blogs, edit Intellipedia, tag pages, and persuade others to try these tools. It represents the efforts of thousands of intelligence and national security professionals, who often had to swim upstream against a culture of status quo. It allows federal agents to share information, intelligence, evidence, tips, and background information across agency boundaries and serves as a hub where people can quickly glean details that matter to their work.
Intellipedia is largely managed by volunteers and watched over by “shepherds” who answer questions and keep track of individual pages in their areas of expertise. Like Wikipedia, the authorship of articles is clear: There are no cryptic user names to hide behind. People can find and learn where ideas come from fast.
Intellipedia begins to peel away the old need-to-know mentality and enables a need-to-share culture. It builds a case that collaboration has an impact on how situations unfold.
Increase Collective IQ
Watch a group of four-year-olds build a skyscraper made of cardboard, and you might think anything is possible. One offers up her vision, another gets the boxes, and a third clears the space in anticipation of something big. No one taught them their roles or pointed out the opportunity. They each saw something greater than they could do alone (or at least in the time before playgroup ends), and they joined in, collectively.
Collaboration is something we’ve known how to do our entire lives. Working together to produce something more significant than one person can do alone is timeless.
Modern collaboration tools, when used by several people simultaneously, enable a shift in individual thinking about the energy and intelligence we can produce together. Add to that the complex nature and urgency of problems facing organizations today, which are increasing faster than individual capabilities to understand and cope with them, and it’s clear why we should take advantage of collaboration tools to work collectively.
“If you ask someone what data they want to share with whom, in a general fashion, people give up, overwhelmed,” says Adina Levin, collaborative software visionary and cofounder of Socialtext. “But when tools enable people to share information about themselves, their organizations, and the urgent issues they face right now in the context of who they are meeting with and what they are working on, people make pretty good decisions and create real digital social networks.”5
This chapter introduces both the opportunities and challenges for people working together to develop outcomes reflective of right now and supporting the large world around them. Working together isn’t something new; capturing perception, thinking, and the ideas needed to understand the full context of a problem and produce something that remains up to date is revolutionary.
To support keeping information current, create systems that support updates and contributions from many people who are affected or who have additional perspectives—where the group can capture, organize, share, and use its emerging and dynamic knowledge.
Published works represent points frozen in time. When an analyst at the CIA develops “finished intelligence” or an analyst firm writes about the state of wikis in a traditional report, the information is instantly dated. It might be extremely valuable, but the second it’s printed it is no longer fresh.
To support keeping information current, create systems that support updates and contributions from many people who are affected or who have additional perspectives—where the group can capture, organize, share, and use its emerging and dynamic knowledge. This leads to both living content and the means to come together to quickly and intelligently anticipate or respond to a situation, leveraging collective perception.
Living content tools (those in the general wiki category or specific tools such as Google Docs or DimDim) can be thought of as malleable publishing platforms. They are less structured technologies than those used to create online communities, or to support media-and microsharing. They can fulfill many different objectives for collaborating, teaching, recording, and learning.
Their success should be measured not by how many people use them but by a finer outcome: developing something broader, deeper, or more innovative than individuals could create on their own. Value grows from the ability to embody content that seems alive, morphing over time to represent the current state of what’s known and the status of a network’s capability to identify and act on what’s relevant.
Doug Engelbart, the father of personal computing and an advocate for over a half century for the creation of collaborative tools to augment collective work, believes the answers are right in front of us—if only we could reach them.6 What if groups of people could access their collective knowledge quickly when facing a decision, sorting through all other noise, and keying in on the most relevant information? It would vastly improve our ability to deal with complex, urgent problems—to get the best possible understanding of a situation, including the best possible solutions.
The success of any size organization or team is based on its collective IQ, a measure of how well people work collectively on important problems and challenges. It becomes a measure of how effective we are at tackling complex, urgent problems and opportunities and how effectively a group can concurrently develop, integrate, and apply its knowledge toward its mission.
Share for Our Time
The power of collaborative content tools is in their ability to offer a single destination where people bring their ideas together, vet them with their peers, and publish them in a way that they can be revised and revisited, representing multiple viewpoints.
For the social media tools that can be used for learning and working together, codifying the multifaceted nature of information, Burke and Dennehy have identified three qualities that stand out as markers of success: vibrancy, socialness, and relevance.
Tools in Use Jesse Wilson, who works at the U.S. Central Command’s Afghanistan Pakistan Intelligence Center of Excellence, describes his work with living tools this way: |
I use these tools in several ways, but I’ll give three examples. First, I track issues I’m responsible for every day. Everyone in my group has a choice: to either save that information in folders only accessible to a department, or to put that knowledge into department-neutral, issue-based pages. I’ve chosen the latter. And when others do this, you not only pool the community’s collective knowledge, but you also begin to build a social network of other people working on the same issues. |
I’ll give you an example. A certain issue popped up. Rather than releasing an updated report every week, we integrated our knowledge into a wiki page, which was up in a matter of seconds, and invited as many people as possible to contribute. Over the course of several months, that page was edited 500 times and viewed more than 12,000 times by people all across the community. We had 13 offices contributing to the page. It was amazing. |
We also use it to track our team’s weekly activities and productivity. Friday used to be the day when everyone scrambled to compile a list of what they did over the course of the week, usually by sending a thread of emails back and forth and eventually compiling a list to send to our boss to send to his boss. Now, instead, our team adds things to a page throughout the week, and on Friday we simply send the link to our boss. |
Finally, the other way I use the wiki is to upload large files that I don’t want to email out to hundreds of people and fill up their inboxes. Instead, I upload the file and email the link. This is a much more efficient way of sharing knowledge. |
Source: J. Wilson, interview with authors, 2009. |
Vibrancy
Living content tools, similar to their social counterparts such as online communities, media-sharing sites, and even microsharing spaces, are measured by their vibrancy and their ability to energize the people who use them. They showcase people’s needs, interests, passions, and emotions.
Vibrancy characterizes the inviting, energizing place where people want to be. The space is jumping, alive with energy. People come back because they find value.
Envision a party. When you walk in, it takes only a few seconds to judge if you want to be there and if it has taken off. People are exceptionally good at assessing this. It’s primordial. We have millions of years of evolution in our DNA telling us to be wary of a dead place where we stand out, where we wonder, “Is it precarious for me to be here?”
When a collaborative space is hopping with activity, form follows content, not the other way around. Planning revolves around how to get more “eyes on content” to improve accuracy, add perspective and subtleties, and show it has captured what’s new.
This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, though. Someone has to create the vibrancy, open the space, and welcome the guests. Someone has to get the ball rolling. Intellipedia became successful because initially a core group of people was willing to contribute before there was any reason to do so, before the other participants arrived.
NASA’s Spacebook, an online community for collaboration and sharing resources, became successful because its developer, Emma Antunes, the Goddard Space Flight Center web manager, specifically sought user-generated content. Spacebook’s earliest features were a general discussion group, a place for new employees to meet, and an equipment exchange forum, similar to Craigslist. They were created first because people could immediately see a personal benefit and an organizational success from every addition.7
At NASA, the challenge of encouraging adoption and active participation—vibrancy—was sky high because the site encouraged communication and collaboration outside the bureaucratic channels people knew.
Socialness
If, as Woody Allen said, 80 percent of success is showing up, at least 10 percent of the remaining 20 requires engaging with those around you who can contribute to your success.
If people don’t talk and support each other and build off one another, social tools don’t provide much benefit. Interaction among people amplifies individual contributions. Articles on similar subjects can change from noise to sound when they’re synthesized and cross-linked.
The chipmaker Intel has a rich collaborative wiki environment, which is called—you guessed it—Intelpedia. Started in 2005, it is the epitome of socialness. With more than 44,000 total pages, topics range from the Intel Acronym Dictionary to tips on giving presentations and include more than 13,000 files uploaded from business groups.
The success of the wiki led to increased visibility for social computing and to Intel’s launch of Planet Blue, an online professional networking and community tool. Employees now have personal homepages with contact information and biographical data, lively discussions, and places for groups to congregate as they work together. An authoritative listen only to the expert culture has transformed into one that hears experts alongside novices, reaching around the world and surfacing creative solutions to the newest challenges.
With more than 125 million page views, more than 325,000 page edits, more than seven average edits per page, and more than 380 views per edit, it seems that socialness is leading the way on Intelpedia.
One of the most active groups in the space is Intel’s Learning community of practice, pulling together people from business groups across the globe that care about the topic of learning. With more than 50 training groups and even more people working in unidentified training roles, connecting everyone in the learning community has been impossible. Now, however, 320 of the more than 1,000 employees in the learning community have joined together in a global conversation. When someone asks a question, it’s seconds, not minutes or hours, until someone responds.
A year after a very popular career development workshop, a collaborative community was created for those who continued to be interested in the topic. Employees share thoughts, questions, and even career opportunities as they take what they learned about themselves in the workshop and apply that knowledge to their daily work.
The PERL Programming Community is only one of several dozen collaborative spaces for programmers and engineers to share tips across all of Intel’s geographies, cutting down the time it takes them to be competent in their roles and to find solutions. Along the way, they document leading-edge practices, explore new ideas, and update one another on how their work is changing.
Another collaborative community is Intel Learning and Development, a group of about 200 people across the globe. Since creating the community, members have stopped all mass emails except those that point to discussions happening in other parts of Planet Blue. Their periodic “all hands” meetings now also have an online component.
Allison Anderson, program manager for learning innovation at Intel, points out that with these collaborative spaces and vibrant conversations, organizations can go far beyond benchmarking, a practice that captures what came before.
Allison Anderson, program manager for learning innovation at Intel, points out that with these collaborative spaces and vibrant conversations, organizations can go far beyond benchmarking, a practice that captures what came before.8
Relevance
What good are vibrant social exchanges if they aren’t pertinent to the people and mission of your organization?
Four years of double-digit growth has made training and retaining talent a priority for T. Rowe Price Group, the Baltimore-based investment management firm. It has also made Michael McDermott, vice president of learning and organization development, a very busy guy. Rather than create more traditional courses, he worked with the IT group to launch Discovery, a company-wide, wiki-based, collaborative knowledge management tool that incorporates online forums, RSS feeds, bookmarking, tagging, and search.
With Discovery, associates can ask difficult research questions and capture answers, creating new and emerging categories of relevant information. The program has increased the ability to publish and update information quickly. The robust search capabilities reduce the turnaround time for answers to research questions and leverage for future use all the information being submitted.
Discovery also serves as the infrastructure for one of the few new courses they’ve built, Building Change Capability, where associates can access a dedicated wiki site, blogs, and other social media tools to supplement the course materials; have ongoing conversations; and add to the course content so it gets better and more applicable over time.9
Taken together, a site’s degree of vibrancy, socialness, and relevance offer a distinctive way to evaluate the success of a collaborative environment. More powerfully though, these criteria can serve as objective measurements of the quality and reputation of a person’s or group’s contributions. Are people contributing? How, when, where, and how often? Are they interacting in a positive way? Sentiment analysis could even be applied. Does editing have a positive tone? Are people discussing, cross-linking, and debating in a healthy way?
Such measures allow organizations to evaluate employees not by their direct output (number of reports, accounts won, or hours on the job) but by how well they facilitate and enable a virtual collaborative community and contribute to something larger than themselves.
Break with the Past
Emerging technology and the need for speed drive the creation of living content sites. Many of the most active and successful environments, including Intellipedia and Intelpedia, have embraced the new technology and the culture that comes with it by overcoming organizational hurdles. Here are three principles developed in 2006 by Dennehy and Burke that helped chart Intellipedia’s growth and may benefit you too.
These were items in the Office of Strategic Services’ (the precursor to the CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual, published in 1944. Now declassified, it reads almost like a manual of how some organizations operate today and hints at why living content meets resistance. |
Do the statements below reflect characteristics of your organization? |
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Source: U.S. Office of Strategic Services, Simple Sabotage Field Manual (Washington, DC: OSS, 1944), retrieved June 20, 2010 at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/26184. |
Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit shortcuts that would expedite decisions.Think Topically, Not Organizationally
Is your organization too siloed? In a rigid hierarchy, it can be difficult to meet the fast-changing needs of the marketplace because it takes precious time to move up and down the chain of command (if it’s even possible) to develop relevant relationships or access vital information.
Joe Sullivan, an extreme problem solver in the corporate scientific community, finds that organizations lull themselves into a false sense of safety with their hierarchies rather than recognize the danger of discouraging information flow, keeping data out of the minds of people who need it.10 In a way similar to the inevitable errors in childhood games of telephone, information can become diluted and ambiguous, filtered and repackaged, or at worst incorrect when it only flows one way.
The Intellipedians constantly have to guard against new contributors who are inclined to tag their entries in Intellipedia based on the agency of origin so their organization can “get credit.” For example, a page on former Cuban president Fidel Castro might be tagged in the subject header as coming from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, although the FBI is not the subject of the article; that tag doesn’t help others find the document when seeking information on Castro.
A single source of aggregated information on a topic serves the larger community better because it helps eliminate territoriality of authorship. Debate can focus on the topic instead of who said what in which organization. When working topically, each organization can add what it knows to a common page—and then, if necessary, create subpages or articles unique to their group.
With many people noticing what has changed, what ought to be challenged, or what pertains to colleagues elsewhere, information can be amended and repurposed for better accuracy, currency, and wider value.
When the shared space includes information that can be easily linked, searched, and tagged, anyone new to the organization or to a task can get up to speed quickly on a topic or teach a class about it, can find previous discussions and debates, and see its status as it lives today.
Work with the Broadest Possible Audience
Is your organization too myopic? When working in a collaborative system, people are encouraged to work with the broadest audience possible, which runs counter to many organizations’ prevailing culture of specialization amid need to know.
Without collaborative alternatives, people duplicate work because information is lost in shared drives and old emails. It can be eye opening to participate in a virtual community and realize we’re not the only ones doing particular work or who have the information and insights others need.
The broadest possible audience is the widest network to which an individual has access. Where sensitive issues are concerned, build hubs of information for the far-reaching audience and then move to more restricted space for sensitive information.
In Intellipedia, users can create links among environments, a process called “creating breadcrumbs,” leading from where you came to where you’re going. The network can then control access. If a person has access, they will be able to follow the link. If they don’t, they at least know that more information exists, and they can begin following the breadcrumbs.
Replace Existing Processes
Is your organization too habit-focused? Social tools present an opportunity to replace old, time-consuming processes with faster ones.
Let’s say you and your co-workers need to compile and synthesize a lot of information every day. Instead of working individually to gather data from shared drives, folders, and work documents, you can do this work in a wiki. Instead of using email to debate an idea, you can use blogs. Instead of using your browser’s “favorites” list, you can use social tagging. Instead of storing files in a shared folder behind a firewall that is not indexed by search engines, you can use a shared document repository.
You might believe you are too busy to learn a new tool or to deposit information in more than one place, but replacing your current processes with new, more efficient ones is not adding more duties.
IBM uses a wiki-based tool specifically for capturing knowledge from retiring workers. Dubbed “Pass It Along,” the wiki allows employees to post their knowledge and create tutorials for people coming up behind them.
Living content tools such as Pass It Along and Intelpedia provide a way to help new employees understand how the company operates and familiarize themselves with its various systems. It does this in the context of the people who have walked those systems for years, noticing the subtleties and the obvious roads mapped in handbooks and training classes.
Teresita Abay-Krueger, a marketing executive with IBM’s software developer outreach program, says, “From the point of view of an enterprise decision maker, you need to onboard employees quickly and uniformly. Pass It Along is an effective way to give new employees a tool for understanding how the company operates and the legacy systems it has.”11
Respond to Critics
Do these ideas and practices sound appealing but you know others will have objections you will need to address? Here are the common questions we receive when introducing the living content approach and how we address them.
Finished Content Is More Valuable than Works in Progress
There is a spectrum of knowledge that goes from the most nascent early stages of information up to polished presentable deliverable content—in the form of a report, presentation, web page, and more. If your organization relies on the sale or distribution of products that capture a situation on a certain date, consider the content created in a living tool such as a wiki as complementary rather than competing. Collaborative spaces are where people in your organization can synthesize issues, ideas, arguments, and actions into coherent, meaningful messages and learn from one another as they produce a product for a customer at a particular moment. These spaces become a venue for enhancing the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of the product.
At EMC, work-in-progress content is more valuable than finished content because it shows how the organization arrived at where it is, which is often a key element that employees, customers, partners, prospects, and even the media are keenly interested in. Works in progress also show EMC stakeholders that there is room for improvement and room for commentary, and, in fact, both are welcomed. This exposure makes the organization more vulnerable and yet seem more human when not everything that comes out is polished and professional. It provides insight into the organization that might not have otherwise been gleaned and, in turn, offers stakeholders more reason to trust the organization because it has shown how it works.
It’s Risky to Let Anyone Post Anything
In a wiki, all posts are attributed to the person who makes them. They are more discoverable than emails or a bulletin board where rumors or innuendo can circulate forever without attribution. This transparency makes it a lot easier to spot people who are posting things they shouldn’t and address their comments or inappropriate behavior quickly.
Perhaps more important, contributors can actually build a reputation on the site. This becomes an incentive for some to adopt the tools, actively participate, and publish high-quality content, knowing they may gain the attention of leaders and others working in complementary roles throughout the organization.
Our Information Is Unique; There Is No Way to Share That
The uniqueness of information is precisely why it should be shared in flexible systems. Unique information doesn’t fit neatly into document management systems that enforce rigid workflows and archiving rules. Living content tools can have templates that impose some consistency, but beyond that, they can be freeform and open to presentation specific to the characteristics of the content or conversation itself.
We Have a Wiki But Only a Few People Contribute Articles
If people believe that creating Microsoft Word documents and sending them around in email works better than using a wiki, consider converting a few documents to the wiki and sending around a link where people can find and edit them online. Next time, people may try posting documents to the wiki first.
Stuart Mader, author of Wikipatterns, suggests a wiki “barnraising”—a planned event in which a community meets at a designated time to build content on the wiki together. A barnraising gives people a chance to learn how to use the wiki while interacting with others as they work, strengthening community bonds and creating a support network that keeps people using the wiki.12
Eugene Eric Kim, founder of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank focused on improving collaboration, points out that “People seem to get very caught up with getting everyone engaged. If you install a wiki in your organization of 100 people and only five are actively using it, some might see that as a failure. I have never seen a great social tool go from zero to everybody overnight. With large groups, you will always see a power law of participation, where only a small percentage of people are actively contributing. And there will be plenty to learn from that participation.”13
Recommendations
Begin to publish online in an open, organic way. When people in your organization can begin collaborating with the assistance of online tools and make their work visible, current, and available to everyone, doors will open to wider participation and more vibrant, social, and relevant results. Here are some first steps.
Be Bold
Be bold in updating whatever you read in your wiki or other shared tools. Momentum builds faster when people fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, make sure the language is precise, and so on. How many times have you read something on a website and thought, “Well, that’s wrong. Why doesn’t somebody fix that?” Collaborative systems not only allow you to add, revise, and edit an article—they encourage you to do it. It does require some amount of politeness, but it works. You’ll see. And of course, others will edit what you write. Don’t take it personally. They, like all of us, just want to make the results as good as they can possibly be.
Don’t Be Reckless
Being bold in updating pages does not mean that you should make large changes or deletions to long articles on complex, controversial subjects with long histories, without careful thought. The text may be the result of long and arduous negotiations among people of diverse backgrounds and points of view. Before you edit an article, first read it all, read the comments, and view the page history to get a sense of how the article came into being and what its current status is. It’s also worth reading some related articles to see if what you thought was a problem or an omission has already been addressed.
Begin Where You Are
Because shared spaces need people to start conversations, consider starting with topics that you care deeply about, things you want others’ perspectives on and that would help in your work. These are the topics you will be the most motivated to invest time in.
Have a Sense of Play
Experiment with new ideas; learn by trying and doing rather than expecting the first piece of content you contribute to be perfect. A sense of play adds a personal, lighthearted tone to a space, even those used primarily for work-related collaboration. It just sets a tone and helps maintain an environment that feels authentic, personal, and human.
Gain Grassroots and Top-Down Sponsorship
Begin at whatever level works for your organization’s culture. Some organizations respond best when people on the front line participate first. Others only get involved when they see senior leaders contributing. If you have early conversations with people from both groups, as well as those in the middle, you’re more likely to garner the attention and participation of those who are curious but a little timid about jumping in.
Use the Crowd
A group can help keep its members on track through constant reinforcement of good practices, building and communicating guidelines, reverting or removing inappropriate material, and having continual social dialogue about the right balance. On rare occasions, organizations need to take action, but those are few and far between and usually, in the end, reflect more positively than negatively because they demonstrate the power of peers managing one another.
Ask Hard Questions
Asking a dull question takes as much time as asking a meaningful one, so ask those that get at information you and your organization need. “So, how far along are you with this idea?” Or, “Has anyone else succeeded in doing this?” Those who make the most effective members of a collaborative team are those who get to the heart of issues and facilitate effectively and honestly.
Collectively Apply Metadata Through Tagging
Tagging allows people to apply their own metadata to content and documents. Tagging also allows people to leverage tags others have already applied to a particular piece of content. The result is a collection of terms, a user-generated taxonomy or “folksonomy.” In this way, people interested in certain topics, subtopics, and themes can come together to get their work done.
Don’t Rely on Tools Alone
You can’t make people collaborate just by making living content tools available. New practice and tools often come amid resistance. When copy machines, fax machines, email, and instant messaging were introduced, initially there was skepticism. But over time these tools were adopted because people saw their value and eventually their necessity.
Although individuals ultimately decide whether or not to use these tools, it’s critical for organizations to adopt them because no one these days can gather the information he or she needs fast enough to respond to the quickening pace of work without them. Problems are becoming too complex for one person to solve; issues have too many tentacles to be understood fully by a single person. By augmenting the natural reaction to share interesting information, improve the work of others, and help organizations succeed, we create systems as alive as they are useful.