Emergent Behavior and Your Intranet
I’ve become interested lately in the concept of emergent behavior in intranets. I read Andrew McAfee’s seminal white paper “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” (available here), and it struck a chord with me.
A lot of intranet planning is done in two dimensions:
What someone wants users to do.
What someone thinks users will do.
What’s missing here is what users actually do.
If we acknowledge that the best intranet is one that supports how users want and need to work, then it seems simple. However, predicting how they work is difficult. You can interview people beforehand, but oftentimes you don’t get the whole story from them, something gets misinterpreted, or your own desires for your ultimate intranet color your findings.
Enter emergent behavior. Wikipedia defines it as such:
[…] the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.
An ant hill is an oft-used example. An ant colony is what’s known as a “complex system” — there are thousands of ants, each of them operating independently, yet a specific behavior emerges. Ant colonies manage to build ant hills. Ant hills emerge from the complex interactions between thousands of simple ants.
Such is your intranet. You have many users all acting independently of each other, and their emergent behavior is what your intranet needs to support.
Sadly, it’s relatively impossible to predict what this emergent behavior will look like. You can make some guesses, but users will always surprise you, and as a group they’ll usually always do things a little bit differently than you expect them to.
Your other option: give your users a wide-open playing field, and see what they do with it. Give them a sandbox, and see what behavior emerges.
You’ve probably heard the apocryphal story about the sidewalks at a new college. After building the new campus, the president told the contractor not to build sidewalks between the buildings right away. Instead, they waited for a year, then built sidewalks over the worn paths in the grass made by students walking from building to building. The dirt paths were the emergent behavior of thousands of trips and they demonstrated exactly what behavior the sidewalks needed to support.
McAfee’s paper discusses this, terming it “Enterprise 2.0.” He says:
[…] the technologists of Enterprise 2.0 are trying hard not to impose on users any preconceived notions about how work should proceed or how output should be categorized or structured. Instead, they’re building tools that let this aspect of knowledge work emerge.
This is a profound shift. Most current platforms, such as knowledge management system, information portals, intranets and workflow applications, are highly structured from the start, and users have little opportunity to influence this structure.
Back in 1999, my team was tasked with writing a Web-based project management tool. We dug in with fervor, defining things like projects, tasks, milestones, etc.
At a certain point, however, I realized that we weren’t developing a tool, we were developing a process. Rather than us saying, “This tool will support the managing of projects like you do today,” we were saying, “You will manage your projects in the method which this tool supports.” The tail had begun to wag the dog.
While the idea of supporting emergent behavior is clear, the wrench in this machine is that users don’t take well to wide-open, undefined systems. If you give users a blank wiki, for instance, they probably wouldn’t do anything with it. There’s a lot of self-consciousness involved — creating the first wiki page in your company is like the first boy venturing across the empty dance floor to ask a girl to dance.
Systems like wikis or discussion forums need to start small and be seeded by a receptive group of people — it’s much easier to walk across the dance floor when there are 100 people on it madly shaking their tail feathers.
Additionally, users need to be well trained so they know all the possibilities the new systems provide. Given a sufficient depth of training, users have a level of comfort and control with the system that lets them think outside the lines, imagine what is possible, and have new behaviors emerge as a result.
In his book, “The Search,” John Battelle writes about “The Database of Intentions.” This is the collected search and traffic history of everyone on the Internet. No matter what people say they did online, The Database of Intentions was what they actually did. It was the behavior that emerged.
The users of your intranet are your greatest sounding board. The Database of Intentions they create as they use tools designed to let them be creative and designed to support how they actually work is the dirt path over which you need to build your sidewalks.