Bertrand DUPERRIN’s Notepad

I often say that even when change seems promising, it’s important to keep our feets on the ground and to go step by step. Excess often lead to another excess in the opposite direction and organizations rarely benefit from what seemed to be so promising.

If we consider companies will have to change, two solutions are possible :

- going quietly, in order to be ready when the “old” model will be out of date. It supposes to start early in order to have time to find one’s own way, since “magical recipes” don’t exist.

- jaming on the brakes and accepting the risk of facing violents changes later. Some, like Gary Hamel, think since change isn’t in corporate DNAs, this is what will happen.

But when it’s time to migrate to management 2.0, enteprise 2.0 or to adopt social computing tools, more than the fear of change, trust is essential. 

As Ross Dawson says, companies that don’t want their employees to organize themselves into informal networks and use the available platforms (facebook, linkedin etc…) do nothing but demonstrating an obvious lack of trust. Everybody understands how a wise use of this kind of tools can improve business agility, so the refusal only means companies think employees can’t use them wisely.

It’s also neglecting the very nature of organizations that have been living on and because of their informal networks for ages but now fear tools that will allow those networks to officially exist.

Any indivual who can’t act the same way at work than at home doesn’t only say “I can’t use tools that would help me doing my job”, he also thinks “they don’t trust me”. And since people feel they’re not trusted by their organization, how do you want them to trust it ? It also have effects on motivation, involvement, membership feeling and shared values…

And what about Archimedes ? “Any individual immersed in a trustful environment gives back to this environment as much trust as he receives”.

A good question would be: is the price to pay when you don’t trust the organization higher than when you trust it wholly, even if some aren’t trustworthy.

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