One Serving of Trust, Please
I had the luxury and pain of working in two extremely diverse projects previously.
The first one – a highly supportive, trusting and friendly environment. Enterprise 2.0 tools was implemented – wiki, collaborative project management and IMs. Everyone worked really well together and there was NO conversation like “I will send you an email to confirm what we have just spoken (so that I can document this conversation)”. People trusted each other and the Enterprise 2.0 tools flourished. People contributed, shared knowledge and discussed for the better of the program. When the client saw what we were doing, they asked to join in the “fun” and the relationship between the client and us became better as well.
The second one – a extremely cunning, slimy, scheming, competitive and politically challenging environment. Armed with a extremely good Enterprise 2.0 experience, I thought Enterprise 2.0 might reduce/soften the politically climate. I was extremely extremely wrong. I proposed E2 tools a few times and it got rejected. It never went live. I then checked out a FAQ that someone else had in another part of project. There was some information on it that I needed and a few months later, I went back and the page was missing. After some investigation, I found the guy who deleted it and asked him why. He said, “my boss didn’t want me to share such valuable information.”
Although through the above examples, I cannot generalise on the requirement for trust and friendliness as a prerequisite for the success of Enterprise 2.0 but I do believe to a certain degree this will be true. If the organisation is politically very heated, it is unlikely people would share and contribute. After all, humans are more likely to share with someone else if they trust and like the person – this is human nature.
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