Like it or not, the smallest unit of work is the individual task. People’s workday is made of achieving tasks, and even in the context of group or collaborative work. A group only delivers the sum of the tasks achieved by its members. That’s why coordination matters. We can even say that, how ironic, knowledge work makes individual tasks even more important : if it’s possible to achieve a physical task through a joint effort, thinking jointly is impssible. We think individually and group work implies increased interactions to stay coordinated and consistent. Ten people can push a car together but they can’t think as one to solve a problem : that’s why it’s important to exchange to share task statuses, update, get coordinated.

Now, let’s guess how an individual does when they have a task to achieve.

If he can do it by himself, it’s alright. And what if he can’t ? He reports to his team to ask for help and sometimes the problem solving is assigned to the group. What implies a new individual task for members even if the numerous interactions makes it look like a collectivce task. By group I mean a formalized set of people that have been assigned an objective, would it be a department or a project team. This situation looks very usual but some “2.0″ practices may improve things as it may help to deal with a lot of informal signals aiming at making everyone’s work status more visible, avoiding an heavy,time consuming and poorly responsive coordination. But what happens when the group reaches a dead-end ?

In a traditional system, the group would be in big trouble : the solution to avoid being block would be to throw a bottle into the sea. But how to find the right people out the human structure one is used to work into ? At this point, a 2.0 approach becomes very valuable : people rely on their network, on communities where discussions on this specific topic take place. If a similar problem has already been solved, it’s ok. If not, it’s possible to find the right people/communities and submit the problem. People are easy to find because their social activity enrich their profile…

A first conclusion has to be made at this point : people start from themselves, then go to formal groups they’re part of and to networks and communities. They start with an individual work, then a coordinated work in a defined geoup and, at the end, unstructed  interactions within fuzzy-boundaries groups. Things happen in this order and in not other. That’s nothing but logic : from the nearer to the most distant, from the known to the unknown, from the certain to the uncertain.

This is a very “in the zflow” approach. Here, the 2.0 dimension favors visibility, micro-coordination and quick problem solving. In the other hand, people don’t have to expose themselves, to do more than their jon, to engage more. The group efficiency is improved and people can even go and find answers out of it. This is an organization oriented approach : social practices are built around a process or a workflow to increase their bandwith.

But it also need another factor : to push the logic to its end, vibrant and relevant communities are needed, making it possible for people to swith in a network mode when the group reaches its limits. This is a more “social” approach. This communities are made of people who naturally share their experiences, their thoughts on a given subject, to go one step beyond their job description and their assignments, to put a little bit of their soul into their work. In this casen people expose themselves more because they share more than knowledge : they give opinions, propose things. This is clearly about “over the flow” activities, with a participation depending on people goodwill. This is what we can call pure 2.0 : conversations, communities that form and die, soft collaboration, informal, unstructured, unpredictable, with a hudge human component because it relies on people’s will to share, learn, connect to people they would never have met otherwise. This is nearly often what people think about when thinking about enterprise 2.0.

This brings things back to the distinction I already made a few months ago.

Now it’s time to go to the point.

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