Jasper Westaway's Blog

Are you open to failure or closed to success?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking at the Butler collaboration symposium, to an IT management audience drawn from an enterprise and government background.

I argued that we need to enable employees to have conversations about their work because it increases their productivity. I provided as examples, the need to:

• Let users employ the conversation tools they want (e.g. their preferred IM client)
• Provide mechanisms that allow employees to ‘discover’ other employees, follow their status and enter conversations

The audience response was schizophrenic. Lots of heads nodded at the premise and argument but remained still at the conclusions. I interpreted this to mean that they agreed, per se, but that in practice they did not believe it was sellable internally.

The implication is that enterprise culture is closed to this approach.

This reminded me of something I’d been saying a lot recently: there are profound consequences in the distinction, being default open (e.g. Twitter) versus default closed (e.g. Facebook). Enterprise culture is default closed: If you cannot think of a good reason to make something open then don’t.

Companies would rather not do something that might make them 15% more productive if there was a danger that it might make them 5% less productive.

There are of course scenarios where we need to strictly manage/control information and conversations. But typically, these are a significant minority of scenarios and when we are default closed, we are closed to success. If you want your business to thrive, become default open and open to failure.

In practice, organizations never fail because they are too open; they fail because they are too closed: just ask the banks! Are you worried that competitors might see your roadmap? You should be worried about whether your customers can see it, and whether you are in a meaningful conversation with them. It is so easy today, if you’re not, your competitors will be.