Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

DEALING WITH “STUPID”

One barrier for the early phases of an ESN is the belief of a number of organizational members who think they can be a good judge of what questions, posts, or comments might be “bad” and which ones might be “good.” If you have people in your organization that feel that way and are in a powerful position, they can really drag your platform down and stifle any type of open conversation.

Very often when people talk about “stupid questions” they see it from their own position, state of mind, or experience; but from the perspective of the person asking the question, the world might look quite different. Let’s take the example of asking the same question more than once. While the person judging the question quality might think it has been asked and answered many times before, there might be a range of reasons why the asker has never seen an answer, let alone the question in the first place. Another quality element of a question is sophistication. What might be a really easy or even seemingly irrelevant question to one person might be very important and central for someone else.

One advantage of an ESN is the broad direction of many questions, which is slightly different than that seen in mailing lists, where there is more of a defined audience. An ESN’s wide audience represents different levels of sophistication, and chances are that an answer will come not from the super-expert who deems the question “stupid,” but from a person who just recently found the answer, ...