Tuesday, 1 January 2008
The fate of a web prophet
Prophets are not always welcome. It can be difficult to make a great idea stick. In the 1990s I spent years trying to point out to writers and other individuals that the Internet and particularly the Web, was a great place to interact and could revolutionise the way they worked if they just experimented a bit. Mostly people just didn’t seem to “get it”. Yet today, business people, academics, even writers, are online, using the internet and the Web in many ways.
Web guru Don Tapscott started linking computers together in networks in the 1970s and had a vision of a network of managers who would use computers to revolutionise their working lives. However, he says: “The big objection, for years, was that managers would never learn to type … For years, with all these profundities and great visions, my entire life was reduced to me making the case that you can learn how to use a keyboard.”
Yet managers learned how to use keyboards, and in most organisations staff wouldn’t dream of not using email routinely. Change can take some time but it has to happen in the end, and even the most resistant can be brought to see that change can be positive and worthwhile. I really believe that, or I couldn’t do my job.
Ref: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D, Atlantis Books, 2007
Labels: change, change management, learning futures, prophets
posted by Helen Whitehead 4:37 PM
