[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb3XnWZhLfo&w=560&h=349]
"We should not allow failure to define who we are," said Kevin Jones, a consultant who spoke at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California. Jones had just stepped off the stage where he gave a keynote presentation about the acceptance of failure, how you should learn from it, and how you can do your best to prevent it. Jones' ultimate advice is to separate yourself from your failure. It's not a definition of who you are. During his presentation, he provided a huge list of the different ways you can fail. Some of the ways are very specific to launching an enterprise-level collaboration project, the rest are universal. He said if you set up your project with these parameters, you will have a high propensity to fail:- Go cheap
- Reach
- Give them another option
- Expect users to know what to do
- Focus on stats instead of stories
- Treat it like an IT project
- Focus on the masses and forget the individual
- Don't manage expectations
- Ignore those who have done this before
- Work in a culture of low trust
- Underestimate the political landscape
- Think you are in the social business
- Make enterprise 2.0 an extra thing to do
- Make policy ugly
- Assume this about the tool
- Assume this isn't about the tool
- Forget about the human experience
- Assume increased age means less usage
- Make this your project
- Don't do ROI
- Rely too much on ROI
- Work as you always have
- Count on it going viral
- Act as if enterprise 2.0 will solve world hunger
- Do this by yourself
- Don't be bold
- Allow failure to define you or your work
