Social technology in the workplace: Ten principles guiding the value of social knowledge creation in building organisational capacity

Business models have a life cycle: they age, become redundant and die. It just happens faster these days.

Indeed, as Harvard Business School professor Gary Hamel says in The Future of Management (2007), sometime over the next decade your company and its model will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.

The change is coming everyone’s way, so you might like to contemplate the following.

1. The only truly sustainable business is one that is always competitive, always learning and agile, no matter what changes around it; those with the best social internal feedback loops for what is happening around them are likely to be the most responsive to the factors demanding change in the way they do business.

2. Insight borne of the tacit knowledge of workers is the source of all business breakthroughs. The capacity to harness it and employees’ inventiveness repeatedly in building a stronger business will be tomorrow’s critical differentiator between competitors.

3. Tomorrow’s most successful organisations will build human capital by ensuring that the sum of their people’s intellectual capacity is engaged and geared for continual knowledge development and business improvement in the face of inevitable market disruption. The internet is dangerous, it’s never wise to bet against it.

4. Social technologies provide channels through which an organisation’s internal conversation can be cultivated to build learning and unleash new thinking and inventiveness across the enterprise.

5. Effective social knowledge creation strategies will drive the value of these channels in building organisations’ resilience and responsiveness to change: the most important thing is to have a strategy.

6. Social knowledge management can invoke new learning when and where it matters most and has the greatest impact, and that is where the work is being done and change is experienced first-hand. Much of this may presently be invisible to leaders.

7. Knowledge can be triggered and new learning built by seeding the conversation at these interfaces to stimulate discussion and capture insight. Because it is real-time and direct, this may be the most potent workplace learning opportunity we’ve yet seen.

8. When the conversation that guides social knowledge management becomes a driving creative business force, it will reshape the organisation itself and inform decisions about who gets hired and for what they are rewarded.

9. In companies that outperform the change that confronts them, the conversation that drives effective social knowledge creation will become an increasingly important, differentiating resource and a target for more focused management attention and investment.

10. The evaluation of companies’ effectiveness in harnessing social knowledge management’s forces for change will become an important barometer of organisational well-being and of future prospects for investors and analysts alike.

So far, we’ve seen the tools of the social media revolution manifest most publicly as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Tomorrow, their forces will be transforming the way knowledge is shared throughout the organisations in which we work.

This change will be fast and thorough. How prepared is your organisation? Are your business models robust? How effectively will your strategy unfold in the face of fundamental, discontinuous market change? Let me show you a strategy to strengthen your business against what is coming.

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