In yesterday’s post, Beth was about to facilitate a discussion that she titled ”Creating a Culture that is not Afraid to Fail.” She wrote,

I’m defining failure as a social media strategy or program implementation that wasn’t perfect or didn’t work as well as you expected especially the first few times you did it.   This happens quite frequently with social media, especially in the early stages.

We set unrealistic outcomes, don’t have a methodology for learning or sloppy strategy implementation.  We get poor results.  We’re quick to proclaim that social media doesn’t work, feel some shame, and drop it.  We look at the wrong measures or unrealistic outcomes. We don’t value the learning and use that insight to improve the social media strategy the second or third or fourth time around.

Like riding a bicycle or a horse, you can’t call it failure the first, or second or third time you fall off. You only learn to ride either of them by getting back on and trying again. Some of this persistence must live in the organization’s culture. If its social foundation isn’t strong enough, the first failure of a social media initiative may lead to abandonment. In an organization where social learning is recognized as precious, failure is regarded as part of a learning process. New approaches – maybe new tools – will be tried. There will be patience for social changes to adapt to the technology and sharing of observations.

On Facebook and on Twitter, Beth posted this query: ”How do you create an organizational culture that is not afraid to fail? “

Read her blog post for the details, but in summary the responses suggested the following:

(1) Must come from the top: reward learning

(2)   Unpack the fear of failure through internal discussions

(3)  Make learning the norm

(4) Emphasize what works

(5) Start small, early, and reiterate

I’ll probably be commenting on his writing from time to time because – on a much greater scale than mine – Suarez is going about the same task – supporting better organizational use of social technologies.

The current article has an irresistible title: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.  I’m in complete alignment with Suarez when he says:

To me, social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.

He’s talking about the culture of organizations and how they are changing to adapt to the evolution of business, technology and culture beyond the organization. This is the Big Shift I refer to on the Context page of this site. Suarez posted his thinking about “how collaborative your corporate culture needs to be in order to embrace these social tools. ”

As he tends to do, Suarez uses his writing to lead to someone else’s article or paper or video presentation, which you may or may not find as enriching as he does. But his truth in this case is that social computing and the culture of the organization will have more impact on strategy than the other way around. So when an organization talks about putting together a social media strategy, their starting point should be a frank assessment of their culture and its compatibility with what the strategy would have them do.

DIYeL (pronounced “dial”) is a project of the GuildSmiths. DIYeL means Do-It-Yourself eLearning, but we don’t build or install eLearning systems. Instead, we help you build, install and master your own systems, blending media that already exists with media you create — and putting almost all of it in the public commons. Sound counter-intuitive? Step and and chat with us. Sound great? Contact me; we’d love to help you build your own eLearning systems.

Could it be we have too much time on our hands? I’ve got nothing against leisure; I’m not a throwback to the Puritan work ethic. And I’ve spent enough of my life immersed in community to appreciate the value of maintaining relationships. But the proliferation of digital gadgetry for the sole purpose of informing others of the trivial events that fill your 24-hour, 7-days-a-week life just looks to me like someone’s not paying attention to what’s happening in the world at large. Missing the forest for the trees seems like an apt metaphor.

The trees are the countless hours and creative juices that go into “Hey, look at me! I’m looking at you looking at me!” The forest is “Can we summon up the time and creativity to figure out how to solve these important global problems before they collapse our toy-based lives around our ears?”

One lifestream that screams out for notice (and yes, it does get a lot of notice on at least a superficial level) is the advance of climate change. I happen to be plugged into that stream, and there’s plenty of news to follow. It changes every day, but the one constant is that we’re not making nearly enough progress in dealing with it. It’s like following a stream of information leading up to a car wreck but without being able to get the driver’s attention. “Hey, slow down! Pull in to the other lane! At least take your foot off the gas!” And like a bad dream, you witness the progression of events and scream at the driver, but no sound is coming out of your mouth.

We’ve got plenty of very capable communications tools to spread the word, to engage in global conversations about the situation, to share information and knowledge…it’s not a lack of good enough apps that is to blame for our lack of effective action. A better Facebook or Twitter is not the solution for global warming – and at least those two examples have merit in having been adopted by huge user bases. But the heavily funded industry for crazy social gizmos that barely add any new functionality appears to me (IM ever-so HO) to be a fucking waste of good time and resources.

Maybe – hopefully – the adolescent target audiences of these silly applications will move on quickly to a consciousness that includes the planet and environment in which they will mature and grow up. I do have some confidence that people in their 20s show awareness of the world around them and their place in it. Maybe it’s us older generations that are still stuck in the world of venture capitalized pap.

If we’re really interested in “community,” we should be engaged with the people who comprise our own in ways that will make the most positive difference in their welfare. The conditions that allow our communities to exist and thrive are not guaranteed. Indeed, many of those conditions are under threat of destruction. Today might be a beautiful day wherever you live – as it is here where I live – but what are you doing to insure that such beauty will endure?

I’m big on blogs. To me, they’ve become the “anchor app” for everything else – social net platforms, wiki, twitter, IM/SMS. They anchor around a point of view, a personality or a topic while most other applications serve as peripheral communications channels.

At this time, I’m finding the smartest, most concise information in blogs. They allow good and intelligent individuals and small teams to get the exposure they deserve. At the same time, they are also the soapboxes for the most inane and insane voices on the Web. You make your choices…