Penny Edwards blogs atWikiConsulting.com

In an earlier post I indicated that wiki ‘adoption’ refers to the stages through which users typically progress before committing to a new technology, with different adopter ‘types’ (e.g. innovators, early and late adopters) progressing through the stages at different times and speeds. Perhaps an even simpler (although less scientific) way of categorising users lies in the distinction between those who are technical (e.g. technologically familiar or curious) or non-technical, with ‘technical-users’ more readily adopting wikis and associated concepts of teamwork, knowledge capture and sharing, and learning therefrom. ‘Technical users’ tend to be ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ often comprising people from technical companies and engineers. In fact, my survey of 102 companies corroborates this generalisation, with the greatest proportion (37.26%) of participants coming from the IT sector followed by the professional services sector, and 22.55% being IT engineers and 15.69 being consultants.

The survey results indicated that high levels of self-learning (69.93% of responses) have been supported by peer-to-peer learning (18.18%) with very little targeted/tailored training (1.40%) or issue of best practice/usage guidelines (10.49%). Popular mechanisms used to supplement self-motivated usage and ‘unlearning’ of older inefficient yet familiar habits include information being placed on to the wiki, people being involved in projects using a wiki and emailing links to the wiki. Those mechanisms moved users rapidly through the first adoption stages of becoming aware of the wiki, to understanding through trial/experimentation with the wiki.

The Wiki Adoption Spiral depicts how ‘technical-users’ move through adoption stages and spread wiki usage virally to later adopters. It reflects that:

• adoption stages for ‘technical users’ (constituting the first adopter categories) are shorter and converge as they proceed quickly through initial (awareness, understanding and trial) stages, creating their own ‘transition mechanisms’ involving self-learning and experimentation with wiki use.

• adoption categories and processes are fluid, as different users can be drawn into the process without early categories having completed the ‘typical’ cycle. For example, due to organic growth other categories maybe made aware of the wiki prior to its ‘adoption’ (e.g. through involvement in projects wikis), and commence their adoption process.

• progress through stages can be halted (i.e. no growth through abandonment or rejection) if there is no perceived ‘need’ to use the wiki and/or barriers are not overcome.

Whilst early adopters more readily enter the adoption process because they are more technically competent/inquisitive, the implication from the above points is that top-down support /facilitation is equally important for developing good ‘wiki’ practices within the initial adopter group as for later adopters. Such facilitation involves generation of a shared understanding about collaboration goals, wiki purpose, responsibilities and ‘gardening’ practices. The experience/knowledge of those adopters can then be coupled with other transition mechanisms (e.g. more ‘technical training’, involvement in projects using a wiki and information being made available on the wiki) to accelerate the diffusion process to other adopter categories.

The high level of ‘learning by doing’ and peer-to-peer support illustrates an opportunity for users to participate in a collaborative learning experience, which provides an ideal platform for encouraging communication and collaborative behaviours in general (e.g. helping transfer knowledge/ideas throughout the company, working across organizational boundaries and learning from past experience/best practices of others).

Although reliance on email and familiarity of other tools may illustrate a reluctance to ‘unlearn’ habitual less effective work practices, there needs to be a balance between directive wiki usage and support for different communication styles as people become accustomed to using wikis and the different capabilities they can provide. That also requires responsiveness to feedback and anlyses of ways in which existing tools can be integrated with wikis to best support people in their work.

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Since a wiki does not replace discrete pieces of software or processes whose use may be highly structured and/or obligatory, thought needs to be given to:

• the wiki’s purpose;
• its relationship with existing work processes;
• how the wiki should be designed (e.g. should be unstructured or should some basic structure/templates be provided to guide users);
• the level of openness, and whether permissions should be used to restrict access to certain pages/areas;
• how users will be encouraged to use the wiki and move away from more familiar less efficient tools;
• how people will learn how to use the wiki - not just the technical features but the practices required to support their collaboration goals; and
• how and who will maintain the content,

all of which can help ensure the wiki provides a substantial positive impact on people’s ability to work efficiently/effectively, and thereby facilitate its uptake.

However, to what extent does such ‘thought’ equate to ‘planning’ and how much latitude should be given to allow the wiki’s use to emerge? In other words, can the wiki implementation be ‘managed’?

I discussed this issue with several consultants advising on the introduction of Web 2.0 technology. Euan Semple indicated that a different mindset is required for the implementation of wikis in organisations, where implementers encourage and repond to emergent uses and users with different expectations, rather than trying to preconceive/control how the wiki should be used. Ross Mayfield indicated that clearly defined goals/targets can help guide emergent behaviour and provide parameters for later evaluation. Jeff Weinberger indicated that in his experience during grassroots implementations people were making good use of the wiki from the outset, despite their being unplanned. However, he noted that the lack of planning may have stymied the wiki’s adoption in other parts of the company and the spreading of best practice in respect of its use.

In practice, I found that the majority of current wiki implementations have resulted from grass-roots initiatives (67.65% of businesses surveyed), so it was perhaps unsurprising that people also characterised the ‘management’ of the wiki as more emergent than planned (38.24%) or indicated that no wiki management activities were apparent (19.61%). These implementations relied heavily on high levels of grass-roots facilitation and self-learning and motivation to use the wiki.

However, such approaches have resulted in a myriad of barriers hindering wikis’ use and growth, including lack of clear purpose in using the wiki, reliance on email and chaotic/badly maintained content. Consequently, to sustain wikis’ use by these early adopters and grow it to other groups, emergence should be balanced with more up-front direction to ensure those barriers are circumvented from the outset.

Such ‘direction’ does not refer to ‘management’ in the traditional sense of ‘command-and-control’. Because wikis are different from other IT implementations, and represent a reaction to existing technology shortcomings, their management requires a different mindset, which actively engages and supports people in their use, structuring and maintenance so as to best suit people’s work needs.

Interestingly, Jim Highsmith has recently shared his thoughts on this type of ‘management’ style (which he coins ‘light-touch’ leadership) in the context of self-organising teams and the agile community. He indicates that:

“Light-Touch Leadership means that decision making is delegated to the lowest level possible and as many decisions as possible are delegated to the team. However, delegating decisions in an organization isn’t a simple task; it requires tremendous thought and some experimentation. To me, Light-Touch conveys the right mix of delegation of decision making to teams while retaining appropriate decision-making authority with the leader or in other parts of the organization.

While Light-Touch Leadership may be “light” in terms of decision making, it is heavy in articulating goals, facilitating interactions, improving team dynamics, supporting collaboration, and encouraging experimentation and innovation. These characteristics of a leader are more critical to success than delegation of decision-making authority, but decision making is still an important piece of the leader’s role. When a good Light-Touch Leader is working, she or he is nearly invisible. Things seem to happen smoothly and the teams operate seemingly without a leader.”

Whatever label is placed in the ‘management’ needed during a wiki implementation (or development of an agile community or self-organising teams), the themes are clear - the leadership style needs to embrace both planning and emergence to encourage and direct a deep broad set of people in their consideration of how they currently work, what their needs are, how things can be improved, setting goals and making decisions to those ends, and supporting them throughout the process.

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There are a number of ways in which new collaboration technology may be introduced into an organisation, including:

1. An ‘inside-out’ approach which focuses first on the business needs and capabilities to be developed, then on identifying the technologies which can support those needs/capabilities (McAfee approach - “Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology” Harvard Business Review (2006)).
2. Continuous scanning for innovations/new technology and matching promising innovations with relevant problems (Rogers’ approach - Diffusion of Innovations (1995) Free Press, New York).
3. Operating a ‘me-too’ approach as a result of ambiguous goals and a volatile/uncertain environment, whereby the implementation of new technology is influenced by/modelled on what other organisations are implementing or the current technology adoption trends in the market (Mimetic Isomorphic approach - DiMaggio and Powell The Iron Cage Revisited American Sociological Review (1983)).

In an effort to determine which approach businesses favour and the consequence of the approach in terms of wiki adoption, I asked survey respondents to identify the drivers behind their wiki implementations and how they are actually using their wikis, to gauge if there was a correlation between the two. The key business ‘needs’ identified spanned three broad areas of supporting collaborative work practices (27.88% of responses), increasing the effectiveness/efficiency of existing tools (22.68%), and improing the ability to locate or retain information/knowledge (23.05%). Few responses indicated (or admitted?) that the wiki had been implemented simply because it represents something of a new trend in collaboration technology.

In terms of what the wiki is actually being used for in the workplace, responses indicated their primary use as knowledge bases (22.53%), for ideas generation (16.21%) and project collaboration (16.21%). With the primary need being to support collaborative work practices, higher actual uses for ideas sharing and project collaboration might have been expected instead of the wiki’s predominant use as a knowledge base. Of course, it could be inferred that the primary need is being satisfied through a variety of wiki uses, of which the knowledge base currently predominates, with actual uses for ideas sharing and project collaboration increasing as people discover other uses the for the wiki.

What’s intersting about this however, is that wikis are being employed mainly for internal purposes, and not for marketing and collaboration with clients (a mere 3.85% of responses indicating use for this purpose). On the one hand, given the relative newness of many wikis (remember that 47% of the 102 wiki implementations survey were under a year old) the responses may suggest that wikis and capabilities regarding their use/management are still being developed internally before being extended outside the organisation. Alternatively, given the importance of collaborations with customers, it may suggest that businesses are not in fact applying the wiki to key needs, which requires the development of capabilities so as to be better able to deliver what it is the customer wants. Integral to that is the ability communicate quickly and effectively with customers.

During the interviews I conducted, I asked Suw Charman what ‘needs’ were driving the implementations (e.g. inefficiency/ineffectiveness of existing tools, inability to locate/retain information and/or knowledge, better support for collaborative work practices, etc). She noted that “there is a difference between what businesses need and what they think they need”. She went on to indicate that due to their popular public uses (e.g. Wikipedia) businesses implement wikis to help employees find and access past/current information, instead of thinking about issues surrounding efficient work, and better collaborative, practices. Consequently, “they tend to look at the problem the wrong way around … since it is not about sharing knowledge and the introduction of a new technology per se, but about getting work done quickly and easily”. Her comments reflect the practicalities of the Rogers’ approach and the imitative selection processes that create a form of ‘pressure’ as a result of the Mimetic Isomorphic approach, which approaches may not in fact focus on the collaborative behaviours/capabilities which need to be developed and engender requisite/appropriate managerial support to do so.

In light of the reported barriers to wikis’ use (e.g. time to contribute/maintain content, reliance on email, lack of managerial support, culture, lack of clear purpose for the wiki and wiki not being integrated with other tools) it seems that reliance on the Rogers’ approach or the Mimetic Isomorphism approach is resulting in a lack of commitment to the change process integral to the adoption of this style of collaborative technology, undue reliance on voluntary adoption and insufficient support during the adoption process, and loss of opportunity to recognise why such tools like wikis are being introduced to the business and their potential to help resolve issues with existing knowledge management/work practices and develop collaborative capabilities both internally and externally. In other words, a more holistic ‘inside-out’ approach.

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In an earlier post I indicated that during my research on ‘Managing Wikis in Business’ I was interested in finding out how themes of the ‘learning organisation’ can aid and be reflected in the management of wikis in business, and the extent to which such management can in turn encourage organisational learning and foster collaborative behaviour. Whilst there is still some lack of clarity regarding the distinction between the ‘learning organisation’ (end form) and ‘organisational learning’ (means), interwoven themes are apparent and common to both.

John Moss Jones (OU) summarises those themes and their relationship as follows:

“In order to perceive the [learning organisation] concept the organisation needs to be perceived with a systems perspective. The leadership group is the prime mover in establishing vision and identity, and modifying the internal culture. The vision must give high priority to people issues to maximise learning, for people are the vital element in learning. The ongoing learning needs to focus on challenging existing mind-sets, and developing creativity, adaptiveness, effective team working, and feedback. And taking all these together, it is argued that the whole organisation needs to develop a culture which promotes all these themes continually.”

‘Systems thinking’ is a cornerstone of the ‘learning organisation’. It encapsulates the idea that business behaviour like complex systems. As such they should be viewed holistically in terms of their subsystem connections, and how changes to one sub-system affect or can be affected by other subsystems.

‘Leadership group’ refers to the new view of leadership, where managers are designers, stewards and teachers, and are vital for encouraging the generation and spreading of new ideas/practices about purpose, values and vision. ‘Vision’ requires the maximum number of people to contribute to and share a picture of where the organization is going in terms of its external context (e.g. target products/clients) and internal design, development and operation. ‘People’ includes the principal and often “massive undeveloped potential” that exists within every organization, and raises issues about creating and sustaining cultures/processes to tap that potential.

‘Learning’ refers to double-loop learning which requires challenging existing mindsets that form the basis of (possible out-of-date) behaviour and affect perception of feedback. It probes the cause of things going wrong at a system level rather than simply identifying and correcting errors within existing organizational routines. The ultimate goal being to spread such learning from individuals and teams throughout the organization, ensuring that work experiences are captured, consolidated and disseminated so as to create new capabilities as a whole.

Within that learning process, ‘teamwork’ involves working across organisational boundaries, questioning routines and providing feedback. ‘Creativity’ and ‘adaptiveness’ are required to cope with rapidly changing environments and act upon learning by altering behaviours. That requires generating attitudes, processes, skills and knowledge, and translating them into more effective organisational practices. Finally, feedback is central to systems thinking, and critical to learning and adaptation, because “current perceptions of what is going on must continually be as close as possible to ‘reality’” (Moss-Jones (2005)).

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