Hansen explains Molotov cocktail in the context of network
building and explains how weak ties can be detrimental to the transfer of tacit
knowledge. Tacit knowledge (by definition knowledge that is un-codified, not
visible and sometimes, not “articulatable”
in very black and white terms) requires strong ties to be shared. Strong
ties—as we know—are based on trust.
With complexity,
chaos and constant change taking over and becoming the norm, we can expect
codified knowledge stocks to have a shorter shelf-life. A constant state of
flux will give rise to ambiguity, uncertainties and questions—all of which will
exist in the form of tacit knowledge in the minds of people as they encounter real
world challenges, device innovative ways to deal with those, make mistakes and
learn from them. We have moved from an age of best practices to emerging
practices and no one can be intelligent on their own any more, as rightly
quoted by Michele Martin in her post Learning
Together. I loved the quote so I have pasted it in its entirety below:
(Socrates) introduced
the idea that individuals could not be intelligent on their own, that they need
someone else to stimulate them. . . His brilliant idea was that if two unsure
individuals were put together, they could achieve what they could not do
separately; they could discover the truth, their own truth, for themselves. ~Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate
History of Humanity
The complexity is further compounded by the nature of distributed organizations. In today’s model of a global organization, teams are
often scattered, employees work onsite or from home, road warriors are always
“on the road”—in short, the concept of teams working shoulder to shoulder every
day, literally and metaphorically standing by each other, talking over problems
and challenges at their desks are slowly being replaced by virtual teams who
interact via social tools and platforms, use Webex for meetings, get into
teleconferences to talk over issues and update each other via emails. In this
context, how do we build trust? Given that knowledge sharing and knowledge
building are much more than an exchange of information and updates and involves
the realm of tacit knowledge, it is critical that we build trust first.
Enter social business!
Emergent social platforms made communication and knowledge sharing easy even
among people residing on opposite corners of the planet, total strangers to
each other. We suddenly had access to all the experts whose books and posts we
had read with admiration. Twitter changed it all. Seeing how individuals
adopted the entry of e2.0 for personal growth and development, organizations
decided to jump onto this bandwagon, and with good reason. Adopt, adapt or be
annihilated!
But very soon organizations treading the path of social
business realize that a “platform does not well-knit organization build”. What
is required is a move toward a trust-based, dialogue-driven culture that will
facilitate the evolution of new ideas, reshaping of the old and the spread of
the new. Collaboration in an enterprise is very different from collaborating
with individuals for one’s personal goals. As Hansen explains in Collaboration,
organizational collaboration is meant to achieve certain goals—whether it is to
resolve a tenacious problem, come up with a new product line, or to make a
breakthrough discovery. However, matters
become sticky here. All of these situations require the sharing of tacit
knowledge, a willingness to express half-formed thoughts, safety belts that
allow people to make mistakes publicly and learn from each other. And the
overarching quality that can make this happen is trust.
And in the context of
a distributed workforce with workers who have in all probability never met each
other, how easy or challenging is it to build trust? Can we engage in
meaningful conversations via a social platform with someone we have never met
before and share those half-formed thoughts?
Even as organizations invest in social platforms to conduct
their day to day to business, online communities are taking over real world
teams. This does not automatically make the former more efficient, it is just
the way it is going to be. We can no more fight it than we can prevent the sun
from rising. And this is where I think one of the biggest behaviour changes is
needed. As John Hegel says in the post, “It turns out that the very practices
that helped us to build trust in the past are now contributing to the erosion
of trust.” If we continue with practices that helped us to foster trust in an
environment where we met each other face to face almost daily, those practices
are not going to be very effective in an environment driven by activity
streams, social tools and apps, and conference calls.
When the very premise of communication has changed, we have
to re-think and re-imagine our efforts at building at trust. It will require a
great deal more courage to come forth and express our fumbling ideas on a
social platform for all and sundry to see and comment on than it did to express
it within the safety of a room with five other people of one’s team.
