This morning’s #esnchat led by my Change Agents Worldwide colleague and change management expert, Jennifer Frahm involved a vibrant discussion about how to launch an ESN quickly. A strong theme of the discussion was that collaboration takes time to build and you should take care not to rush that development. The Value Maturity Model above is founded in the growing sense-making and culture change in a community that surrounds that community’s embrace of new ways of working.
Launch Quickly. Succeed Slowly
In part the question is not the real issue. Launching a social collaboration solution of any kind is not the problem. Launches can be put together in days or weeks depending on your passion for chaos. Send some communications, enable the network, have a fancy launch event and you are done. Launch is complete.
However, a successful launch, even with a high level of engagement, is not the point of collaboration in your organisation (this article was pre-reading for the #ESNChat discussion). Your organisation and your employees work to create business value. Until your collaboration platform is sustainably creating that level of business value your job is not done. The Value Maturity Model describes some of the key steps to that growing maturity over time.
What if you don’t have the time?
We don’t always have the stakeholder support to take time. Many organisations want or need to get going quickly. Launch dates become fixed in the calendar before organisations understand why they are seeking to launch a collaboration platform. The key issue in my experience is that the same organisations who want to go quickly are usually those who think that going fast will make their collaboration network cheaper to launch and run.
The value of a purposeful, strategic & vibrant collaboration community is that it becomes self-managing. The community begins to develop the value and the engagement that drives its own future success and growth. The community becomes the example to all new users as to ‘what we do here, how we do it and why’. Over time that self-managing, self-promoting and self-correcting characteristic of successful collaboration platforms is what reduces their cost to operate and accelerates their value creation.
Setting up a community to become purposeful, strategic and vibrant takes time and money. If you want to do that quickly, it will cost you more money up front in the planning, leadership and communication, not less. You will also need to invest more money over the life of the community to manage the higher risks of failure and to sustain the community after launch until it becomes self-sustaining.
Community managers often bemoan the continued focus of business leaders on the costs of their work. Many organisations seek to continuously cut budgets and resources for community management over time. Let’s be clear that organisations decrease investment when they lose confidence in the returns from an activity. Community managers are the agents and architects of strategic value in collaboration. They need to embrace the challenge and justify their ongoing investment in their growing returns.
Given there are many platforms in the market that promise fast engagement (& with good evidence to support it), the issue is not how quickly you engage in use of the platform. The key challenge for any user and any organisation is how quickly their use of a platform becomes a self-sustaining contributor to the fulfilment of purpose and sustained value creation. When clients ask me why the investment in developing their community using the Value Maturity Model is required, my answer is that they can skip the work, but they risk skipping the value. The value of a clear strategy and an effective approach is that it accelerates the value of strategic collaboration. If you want to go fast, you need to plan for more costs, now and later.
