Tag: Social Networking

The Peril of Perfectionism explained by the News Diamond.

Paul Bradshaw's News Diamond

We all know how perfectionism can paralyse. I suspect it can be more damaging for large voluntary organisations than smaller ones. David Brazeal writes about this as it relates to organisations and social media:

When you’re printing 5,000 slick handouts, it makes sense to write, and share with colleagues, and rewrite, and proofread, and rewrite again, until you’ve eliminated all potential mistakes. The trouble is that every rewrite by a different person in your organization sucks a little bit of the human voice out of the message. And eventually you’re left with something slick and shiny and pretty — but impersonal. New media tools don’t have to be this way.

His comments are off the back of a by Anna Farmery (direct links not working) in which she urges users to:

  • Be willing to try new ideas…test them, try them, see if they work – if not, you can always change it.
  • People love to be part of a company, a team that are willing to embrace new ideas, encourage new thinking….they can forgive imperfection, they rarely forgive slowness or apathy.
  • People who work with you want to work for a human being, part of being human being is making a few mistakes. As long as you own up, as long as you are honest…people will stay with you. Imperfection can be engaging!
  • When you are wanting to move forward, you will need to take risks. If you spend too much time looking for the perfect answer…then in the meantime, the question will probably have changed!

This is hard for bureaucracies but often second nature for small voluntary organsations and certainly community groups, both of which live on the nervous energy of habitual improvisation.

One way to help understand may be with the wonderful new work being done by Paul Bradshaw. He frames the future of information (journalism) as a diamond – but the most critical point he makes is that future news will never be finished, it will always be a fluctuating collaboration between public, editor and author.

It'll be alright.

This recent post on how attempts to create shared online platforms for community groups often founder has received quite a few comments. In it I argued that being open and generous are key principles for success online. David Brazeal has helped me identify another: optimism. Part of what I was driving at is how risk averse public bodies tend to over moderate and control their online efforts, to the extent that they suck out the openness and freedom which makes collaboration work (see also today’s story about whether companies should ban Facebook). David sums it up:

Here’s the secret to this — the negatives almost never happen. And when they do, they’re not a catastrophe — they’re no different than the bad things that happen to you in your everyday work life already. But the positives — those things you can’t even imagine yet — they happen all the time for people who simply make a commitment to participate in this online space. And with patience, those positives start spinning at them faster and faster, so that they can’t imagine having done their work without that resource.

And one more thing. Those people and organizations who are successful in the online space — who have thriving blogs or podcasts, or who use social networks to help their work — they are not any different from you in talent or time or personality. The difference is that they’ve jumped in when the negatives seemed daunting, trusting that the positives would follow.

See Uwe’ blog for the image which got David thinking.