Author Archives: Stuart G. Hall

About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Conversations, complexity and business change

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For no reason except I was trying to help Shirley figure out the week ahead I started thinking about the value of conversations, specifically using online communities to full effect, as part of a practically-minded ‘complexity’ approach to business. Then I did a Google search on complexity and conversations and came up with Dr Patricia Shaw’s book on the subject, with the following customer recommendation which is a useful starting point for further thought:

At last, recognition that real change doesn’t happen purely because of top-down, management dictats, but is embodied by real people having real conversations that are not structured by clear objectives, goals and processes. Inherently scary for all those who rely on management as a control process in their organisations and change as a corporately-guided process, this instead looks at the informal organisation and how creating spaces for conversations between like-minded change agents can be the most effective.

This veers slightly too far into complexity and informal processes only for me – I believe that a balance is required between formal change and informal conversations, but this is still an important broadening of the discussion on corporate change.

Britannia takes on wikipedia

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Interesting news on how Brittannia is taking on Wikipedia by allowing users to contribute contribute for the first time in its history. Especially like the fact this will feed through to the printed version of the encyclopedia – which is published every two years:

In effort to compete with Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica company is opening up their online version to editing by contributors everywhere. Unlike Wikipedia, however, all changes will be reviewed and edited before being posted.

The new website features will enable the inclusion of user generated content, and will be available on the site within the next twenty four hours.

Encyclopedia Britannica is a 241 year old publication, and they are making these changes to their site to encourage more community input, more use, and – most importantly – to increase their rankings on search engines.

Unlike Wikipedia updates, all of the additions and changes made on Britannica will have to be reviewed and edited before the changes go live on the site. The company has set a 20-minute turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing articles – though with the popularity of Wikipedia, this may not be possible if the service takes off.

The concept behind user generated content is that much of it will eventually appear in the printed version of the encyclopedia – which is published every two years.