Late in the planning stages for a new University a landscaper was asked to design the pathways to be paved. Rather than second guess he took a novel approach. He just planted some grass. Three months later he created pathways on all of the barren areas where the students and staff had decided where they wanted to walk.
The book Wikinomics describes communication in a high growth service business called Geek squad.
The CEO built an elaborate internal wiki to aid communication as the organisation grew from 60 to 12,000 employees in just three years.
The wiki was slow to takeoff – how come ?, Geeks love wikis.
It turns out that the guys had already found a way to talk to each other.
The CEO discovered that they all play Battlefield 2 online. They could have up to 128 people simultaneously fighting each other in a virtual environment. The CEO explains. “The employees taunt each other. Hey, I see you behind the wall. But then, you know, whilst we’re running along with the squadron with our rifles in our hands, one of the guys behind me will be like, “Hey, how do you reset the password on a Linksys router ?”
So – while the CEO had spent a lot of time and money to build a wiki, the team had self-organised using their own online collaborative tool !
How are things really working in your business ? Maybe you just need to support the good stuff that is already happening.
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