Beth Kanter is one smart cookie:
Interpretive dance, is when a dancer (or dancers) often improvising (though sometimes it is choreographed) a dance to another medium. Technology adoption is part choreographed, part improvisation. The point of that Hinchliffe makes about best practices for adoption of Enterprise 2.0 (or social media for inward facing work) is that there aren’t any best practices. You have to improvise!
According to Hinchcliffe “Organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways and therefore what may work for one business may not work for another.” And if you’re talking about organizations working together with other organizations, that is also unique.
So, we should try to avoid at all costs asking this question first “What tool should we use?” Stop thinking that adopting social media or social software or online collaboration tools is a matter of selecting a tool off a menu. There is a process that requires understanding the space between the tools and the people and having someone who knows that space so well they can an interpretive dance between the technology and the users.
Beths Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: The Interpretive Dance of Social Media Adoption.
