How it works
This method should be used during the initial session of people who have to collaborate. Immediately after the initial round of who is who and why are we here together today, form pairs of people from different backgrounds, cultures, organizations or whatever barrier you wish to level. Ask these pairs to write down on sticky notes what prejudices their colleagues might have against people from the other “side”. It is important not to ask what prejudices they have; as that might result in only the politically correct responses. While they are writing these down, walk around and stimulate them with questions such as: “What did your colleages say when they heard you had this session?”.

After a few minutes, when you notice that “the popcorn stops popping” ask the people from one “side” to read out what they have written down. Write key terms on a big piece of paper. Try to defer any defence (“I would like to react on that…”, “Let me put that straight…”) to the next phase. Then ask the people from the other side to read out what they have written down and collect their key terms on a different piece of paper. Then start the next phase by just asking “Who would like to react?”

Our experience is that this method is a powerful starter for cross-organizational collaboration projects.

(c) photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agharti

1. Social Media Market – a workshop in which we take you and your team through the current Social Media landscape and explore which of these fit your needs and preferences.
2. Social Media Hands-on – a pilot in which you and your team experiment with a social tool of your choice. Apart from enabling and facilitating the use of the tool, we help you in gathering lessons learned and in assessing whether this tool actually provides added value for your team.
3. Social Media Strategic Advice – an independent, realistic advice on what social media could mean for your organization in relation to the business issues you are faced with. This series of activities help you to gain insight in whether or not to apply social media, how to introduce these tools in your organization and how to help your people use these tools in a smart and responsible way.

This line of activities is also a good way of getting to know us and our way of working: with a clear objective, timeline and budget we work together with you to achieve results and learn along the way. And hopefully raise your interest in broader research on future ways of working.

As Nathan argues, successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. Also from my own experiences, I know that cultural maturity is usually the biggest hurdle: it takes bravery and trust to take a discussion to a shared space or even to an open space.

Therefore, we also perform personality tests during our pilots in Future Workspaces. We are testing a hypothesis that personality is an important factor that determines what workspace fits a person. (According to our hypotheses, other main factors are a person’s activities and personal working style.)

This would mean that for some people blogging or contributing to a wiki is a more natural way of working then for other people. However, even if personality is an important factor, this does not mean that you are “stuck” in a specific state, determined by your personality. I believe that in a culture of mutual trust and with appropriate support (starting small, sharing good practices, showing success stories, talking about things that are scary), people can learn to share more (intermediate) thoughts in an open space.

To lower the threshold for sharing in a shared space or in an open space, I combine two main approaches:

1. Help them find opportunities to embed this sharing as part of normal work processes: if they are used to creating a document with intermediate findings while searching for information on topic Y, why not put that information in a wiki page? Moreover, this may speed up the search process, as others may contribute as well.
2. Explain that sharing thoughts in a blog or in a wiki is not about sharing final results, it is about contributing to an ongoing conversation. That is one of the main reasons why I do not like to compare an Intranet wiki with Wikipedia, as it sets completely wrong standards for contributions.

Picture by Ton Zijlstra

We then continued with a knowledge café: moderated by Mireille, we split up in groups and discussed issues and good practices around the introduction and usage of social software in an enterprise environment. During the knowledge café roundup we discussed our findings.

For me it was the first time of participating in a knowledge café and I was pleasantly surprised about the results. Thanks to the active contributions by all participants and the moderation by Mireille, we could really share knowledge and experiences, while getting to know the people behind the stories. Some points I took away from the workshop:

• Making sure that employees have control over their personal profile, especially when the system automatically tries to establish expertise areas and connections, seems to be essential for user acceptance of enterprise social software.
• Be very careful when giving a manager the role of facilitator in an online discussion: make sure your facilitator is a linking pin and can actually put in the time and effort to keep the conversation going.
• To have some insight in the benefits of enterprise social software, collect anecdotes of how people used the software to solve business issues. Any way, make sure you have statistics on the number of active users and the number of times people queried the system.

For an overview of the event, the participants and links to relevant sources, visit the workshop wiki page.

I would like to end by expressing my thanks to Erik Krischan, Mireille Jansma and all participants for their active contributions. Let’s keep the conversation going!

Purpose of the case

• Help Rabobank define a strategy for the introduction and use of a wiki for knowledge sharing across department boundaries.
• Train KIRA employees in working with a wiki and embedding in their working practices.
• Collect good practices for the introduction and use of a wiki for knowledge sharing

Key lessons learned

• Help people to embed the wiki in their normal working processes; avoid they see the wiki as an extra task.
• Employees have to perceive a personal need to use the wiki; just knowing what one can do with a wiki is not sufficient.
• Wiki use is hampered when the need or the culture to share information is lacking.
• Not understanding how a wiki relates to other technical means can be a threshold for wiki adoption.

Introduction strategy
For RaboWiki a grass roots introduction strategy is chosen, whereby a small group of enthusiastic employees convinces others about the added value of wikis, based on their own experiences.

Step 1: Identify key user groups

Step 2: Identify & analyze key figures

Step3: Turn key figures into “evangelists”

Step 4: Turn “evangelists” into trainers

Step 5: Stimulate (unintended) use

For more information

For more information about the RaboWiki case contact Robert Slagter: robert.slagter@telin.nl, +31 53 4850 488.