To change your world, put yourself in the boss’s shoes

Last month the National Computing Centre held its annual conference. Opening the event, which was labelled Sustainable IT, the CEO said: “There’s never been a better driver of change than green.” The conference chairman, the BBC’s Declan Curry, took up the theme and talked enthusiastically of “continuous change”.

Although the word ‘change’ is neutral – it can mean a change for the better or for the worse – the sense that came across was that change equated to opportunity. But given that the event was about sustainability, this sentiment seemed contradictory.

After all, change usually means chucking out the old and bringing in the new. And that nearly always comes with an environmental cost, quite apart from hitting the pocket of those who, quite literally, buy in.

Fast forward a few days to the Web 2.0 Strategies conference, an event supported by IWR, and guess what? Everyone wanted to implement change in their organisations. They wanted their institutions and companies to embrace new ways of working.

Again, the change had two faces. It threatened some people but presented opportunities to others. One of the most talked-about themes was how to make bosses understand the need for change.

During these conversations, an old lightbulb joke kept on running through my mind. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?” Answer: “First of all, the lightbulb has got to want to change.”

And it’s exactly the same with social software initiatives. If you want to introduce social computing into your organisation, you have to either persuade your bosses to support you or do it by stealth, deferring the persuasion bit until you have some evidence of value to hand.

This under-the-radar approach has an illustrious history. Take Euan Semple at the BBC. Appointed head of knowledge management, Semple knew that knowledge lived in people rather than machines. So he set about creating a social infrastructure that would facilitate collaboration. Visionary indeed, and no wonder he was chosen to chair the Web 2.0 Strategies conference.

During one exchange on the subject of organisational culture, Semple made a casual aside which cut straight to the heart of the matter. “Culture is a mealy-mouthed way of talking about power,” he said. It’s a good point. Why bother with the fluffy ‘culture’ word, when the hard-edged ‘power’ word is so clearly nearer to the truth.

We’ve been here before, with email. Once person A could reach person C directly, then intermediary B became redundant. Unless B added some kind of value to the conversation, they were just blockage.

Now, we can connect with many people and do it in a way that’s visible to other members of the same group or, indeed, to the world at large, depending on preference. Forget centralised planning and control. No one can plan these connections, or their value, in advance. Power shifts to the participants who, frankly, deserve it most.

Don’t think about what you want. Think about what the boss wants. Only then do you stand a decent chance of gaining support. The boss wants answers to questions like: How secure is our confidential information? How do we stop staff wasting their time? What’s the net benefit to the business?

The first two questions are about trust. After all, staff could already use the telephone to waste time or leak information. The third is about the hard (usually financial) benefits to the business once the implementation costs, which are usually peanuts, have been subtracted.
Good luck.

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