Aside from the buzz and enthusiasm of social software deployments, there's sometimes a back-story. I've been wondering about how well organsations deploying social software plan catch to on-boarded users before they fall back to old habits. Here's the scenario that I am thinking of.
When we deploy business change technologies, we tend to measure on-boarding as a one-off activity (we measure stuff like that partly because it's easy to measure, which is a bit of an anti-pattern in itself). So, once a user has been trained, posted, edited a profile, added people to a network, we cross them off a list. However, this fails to recognise what, from my experience, is the strong influence of learned-behaviour of the non-social user, and how these users' inertia can reset interactions to levels of lower social value.
The reasons we fall back to old ways and habits are many:
The derived social value of an interaction obeys the "Convoy" principle
The answer to the question "How fast does a convoy of ships move?" is "The maximum cruising speed of the slowest ship". In the same way, the derived social value of an interaction is level-set by the least collaborative participant. If one participant is (still) using mail, then expect the conversation to take place in mail, as opposed to a forum. In my experience, in that situation, interactions will sink to the lowest social value, just to get the job done. You need to aim, in your business adoption selection of participants, for those who have *roughly* equivalent social ways of working, and work hard to move business to social tools when they drop out. That's a key role of business change agents - to gently but firmly change behaviour by moderating interactions to keep the social value high.
Humans find habits are hard to break, easy to fall back to
We've probably all been lured back to sharing files by mail, using mail as a discussion thread for public conversations that belong in a community context, or working out of a mail on shared tasks as a project planning tool. It's easy to do, because it's a learned-response from years of having no real alternatives, and from not understanding the impact on the low social value of mail. Let's compare this with another habit : smoking. Statistics on giving up smoking show that the longer you stay smoke-free, the better your chances of staying that way ; and the converse also applies.
There is a way to catch the "recidivists", and it's going to be part of a successful adoption strategy : measure the inactivity of people who had shown some initial involvement in use of the social software. My contention is that it is a good use of business adoption time therefore to:
When we deploy business change technologies, we tend to measure on-boarding as a one-off activity (we measure stuff like that partly because it's easy to measure, which is a bit of an anti-pattern in itself). So, once a user has been trained, posted, edited a profile, added people to a network, we cross them off a list. However, this fails to recognise what, from my experience, is the strong influence of learned-behaviour of the non-social user, and how these users' inertia can reset interactions to levels of lower social value.
The reasons we fall back to old ways and habits are many:
The derived social value of an interaction obeys the "Convoy" principle
The answer to the question "How fast does a convoy of ships move?" is "The maximum cruising speed of the slowest ship". In the same way, the derived social value of an interaction is level-set by the least collaborative participant. If one participant is (still) using mail, then expect the conversation to take place in mail, as opposed to a forum. In my experience, in that situation, interactions will sink to the lowest social value, just to get the job done. You need to aim, in your business adoption selection of participants, for those who have *roughly* equivalent social ways of working, and work hard to move business to social tools when they drop out. That's a key role of business change agents - to gently but firmly change behaviour by moderating interactions to keep the social value high.
Humans find habits are hard to break, easy to fall back to
We've probably all been lured back to sharing files by mail, using mail as a discussion thread for public conversations that belong in a community context, or working out of a mail on shared tasks as a project planning tool. It's easy to do, because it's a learned-response from years of having no real alternatives, and from not understanding the impact on the low social value of mail. Let's compare this with another habit : smoking. Statistics on giving up smoking show that the longer you stay smoke-free, the better your chances of staying that way ; and the converse also applies.
There is a way to catch the "recidivists", and it's going to be part of a successful adoption strategy : measure the inactivity of people who had shown some initial involvement in use of the social software. My contention is that it is a good use of business adoption time therefore to:
- be sure to capture the need to monitor the ongoing involvement of new participants, and
- worry about those potential drop outs, and be able to catch them at the time that their level of collaboration starts to drop off, and
- make sure to learn from their stories : they dropped off for reasons that are likely to common, and you might need to address in future iterations of your adoption plan
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