I’m fortunate to work in a space (social technology) that is at the forefront of facilitating the changes in the way we work. But social technologies, especially enterprise social networks (ESN’s) that I work with, are just an enabler and far from guaranteed to succeed as many recent reports have shown. Still they do allow a company’s culture to be laid bare and made transparent. The sad fact of why so many initiatives fail is that what ESN’s embody (openness , sharing, creativity, etc.) is so counter to most cultures. Cultures formed largely through past modes of work practice and the efforts to conserve them. So in my experience what we are fighting is not tech adoption or engagement when we try implement these tools (as much as they drive change), nor culture per se, but rather the status quo, industrial thinking, entropy, etc. This is my take of where the battle lines are drawn, essentially between the creative and industrial world views as I see it. (more…)