Via Patrick Lambe, a reference to a Matt Moore posting on implementing Enterprise 2.0. Matt uses the metaphor of how we help youngsters learn to ride bicycles by putting on training wheels that stabilize the bike. Eventually, the training wheels come off and there is an inevitable crash (or two or three) before that wonderful thing called balance emerges. Once we have learned to ride a bike, we never lose that particular sense of balance.

The “training wheels” for using Enterprise 2.0 technologies are also stabilizers: templates, governance models, moderators, and various artifacts that provide a sense of control that makes IT folks and executives a little more comfortable with allowing the social software revolution to slip into the enterprise. But these stabilizers must also at some point be removed if the true value of the integrated innovative enterprise is to be realized. But what, Matt asks, happens when the inevitable crash occurs? The organization has a choice, he says, between putting the wheels back on and keeping them there or letting the falls happen until the organization finds its balance.

This notion of balance in Enterprise 2.0 reminded me of the Davenport/McAfee debates in June 2007 and January 2008. In the first, the question centered on the need for corporate control of assets (Davenport) versus the benefits of opening the enterprise to emergence (McAfee). In the second debate, the argument shifted to the question of whether Web 2.0 was an evolution (Davenport) rather than a discontinuity (McAfee).  Davenport came a bit around last week to suggest that Enterprise 2.0 is the “new, new knowledge management.” (Thanks to David Gurteen’s newsletter for helping me catch up on the blogs I missed during vacation!)

The rapprochement is important, because it illustrates the many levels of learning to balance at work. We are learning to work with a new language, a set of distinctions that make us a bit wobbly in our thinking until we get them sorted out in our minds and speak more confidently. Emergence is one big distinction, as Davenport suggests: “Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance.”

Another big distinction that we need to come to terms with is “boundaries.” Despite the urge on the part of some to let loose these new technologies within the enterprise, we need to have some governance, some rules about privacy and confidentiality, and perhaps even a bit of hierarchy with respect to editorial norms and appropriateness. This is the balance that companies undertaking E2.0 must learn. And they must let themselves wobble and, sometimes, crash. But the crashes must be source of learning, and not an excuse for withdrawal.