Emergence May Need Help

The problem of emergence: This is simple but necessary point about the “emergence” trend that everyone is talking about these days (including me — see this post for an explanation of emergence and how it applies to your intranet).

The point is that things that work in the marketplace might not translate to the enterprise, and there’s a class of users that need some top-down structure, at least to get the ball rolling. Emergent behavior can still be observed and accounted for, but it might need a little help to get started.

Appropriate scaffolding and careful seeding of content will prove more useful. A complete taxonomy, for example, may overwhelm a small set of potential early adopters. On the other hand, an empty tagging system will prove too much of a blank slate for users more accustomed to the structures of conventional systems. Providing a sample of suggested tags or categories coupled with some live content can point users in the right direction.

I’ve referred to this in the past as the “dance floor syndrome” or “the wiki waiting for its first page.” Some users don’t want to be first and they don’t want to think up the structure — they’d feel more comfortable as part of a process, not the definition of the process.