In the last post and post before that, I examined a real life case study of a team collaborating using Web 2.0 tools. Now I want to review the lessons learned from that experiment.

1. Many (most?) busy people working on a team with deadlines for deliverables will wait until the deadline is really close, and then focus intensely on the task to meet the deadline. When a new learning curve is introduced (in the case of this experiment, using a Wiki for writing, reviewing and ultimately, publishing a major report), the needs of the learning curve and the common behaviors of team members to wait until the last minute were not compatible. This team would have done better to force an earlier deadline, one where perhaps only a few paragraphs of content had been created. This would have forced team members into the learning curve sooner, and would have surfaced individual and collective team problems with the Wiki tool or process much sooner. Addressing these issues early in the report writing stage of this project would have been far more effective than trying to do so when the deadline for report was due.
2. Team members knew and trusted the traditional MS Word-based process forthis type of work. They knew there would be wrinkles to the process that would have to be ironed out for the Wiki-based approach. While one team member did a great job figuring out and addressing some of these wrinkles up front, he could not catch all of them. None of the outstanding wrinkles were, in practice, significant. But with a deadline to meet and a learning curve to overcome, there was a strong tendency among the more conservative team members to “stick with what we know and what works.” When you are in the thick of it, it’s impossible to know if the new wrinkle that just surfaced and was solved is the final wrinkle, or a precursor to a whole host of other wrinkles yet to be discovered.
3. New tools are almost always imperfect. While there were workarounds for issues such as off-line writing and editing, for the resistors, any and every impediment justified their feeling that the old way (MS Word, etc.) was just fine. And even the enthusiastic adopters admitted that some aspects of the Wiki and how it worked were frustrating and time consuming.
4. While the notion of “experiments” is important to innovation, it is a tricky proposition. Many years ago, I did a multi-year, multi-company study of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools and their use in projects. At the time, the conventional wisdom in transitioning to such a tool was, “Pick something not too small or not too large, not too complex, but not too simple. And, most importantly, pick a project that can fail without disastrous implications.” In practice, we found that this was bad advice, and people who followed this type of path typically ended with failed experiments. On the other hand, those who ignored the advice and picked a “must win” type of project, almost always were successful - no matter how big or complex the project! There is a danger that an experiment becomes “something to try and play with” or “how to prove the new approach will not work” rather than “how to figure out how to make it work.” This is a subtle point but an important one. This team’s “experimental” approach to using the Wiki did not establish the strength of sponsorship necessary to sustain it over the inevitable (though, in this case, relatively minor) hurdles that surface with a new approach.
5. Speaking of sponsorship, the “change agents” in the project team (those who strongly believed that moving to a Wiki would be well worth the effort) should have thought through the sponsorship issues up front - deciding who “had to be fully on-board” with the Wiki approach, and working one-on-one with them to get their full understanding and commitment.
6. Like most mature processes, people tend to confuse the means to the end with the end. The end is useful knowledge expressed in understandable content presented in a simple and useful way. The old generation means to that end was a written report that was designed to be read from paper. But to most on the team, the report was the end. To them, the utility of the Wiki was measured by how well or how poorly it led to the creation of the first iteration of the report. Since writing a report in MS Word was natural to them, and the Wiki didnt seem to offer any obvious advantage in the process of creating a report, there wasnt much incentive to change to the Wiki approach.
7. There are nearly always hidden issues that go un-discussed. (See my previous post on Unwritten Rules). Often in change, one common issue is that people dont want to feel incompetent or be perceived by others as incompetent. So they express their resistance in other ways rather than admitting they are fearful their incompetence will be revealed. Another common issue in change is control. In this case, one individual on the team always had final editing rights to a report before it is released. This individual is renowned for being a brilliant writer and editor. The old process gave him a sense of control that the Wiki approach did not. Like the issue of incompetence, the issue of control is often expressed in displays of resistance that mask the true source of concern.

So, was this experiment a success or failure? Clearly that depends upon your perspective and what you believe the going-in hypothesis was behind the experiment. I believe that in this case, it is a mixed picture - worth the effort, but not realizing the full success it could and should have been. The draft report was circulated as a MS Word document. It remains to be seen whether the tenacity of the main change agent - the team member who was formerly an Information Architect - is sufficient to keep the Wiki alive and, over time, to move similar projects to a Wiki-based approach. Once again, the challenge is human behavior, and the insidious nature of organizational change. In the famous words of Niccolo Machiavelli, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”