Thierry de Baillon

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

George Eliot

New technology is often disruptive, and social technologies make no exception. Today, quite everyone agrees on the necessity to focus on cultural change to help embracing the new behaviors they enable, and there is quite a consensus on the levers which might make the shift happen. Pilots, either as small scale projects or as fox-in-the-henhouse tools, are common practice, and integration into the flow of work is this year’s new black. Those are, in no doubt, pragmatic catalysts for change. But… are we really focusing on the RIGHT change?

And the pocket calculator hit the school system

Pocket calculators were banned from examinations for a long time after being allowed in the classroom. Then, gradually, they made their first official appearance as digital replacement for arithmetical and other...

From knowledge management to social business, nearly every framework or practical initiative tackling the human dimensions of organizational efficiency emphasizes on knowledge sharing. Most of social tools and features’ justification is grounded in the simple assumption that openly and transparently sharing knowledge is the best way to help workers achieving their tasks. So far so good, unless knowledge doesn’t want to be shared.

Most of the tasks we are trying to achieve in our daily job are either complex or complicated. They involve multiple steps, human-to-human or human-to-machine interactions, use of different tools, all of which require following procedures, navigating through -and sometime despite- hierarchical requirements and validations, mobilizing resources whose availability isn’t aligned to your needs, producing some outcome for clients, either internal or external, whose logic isn’t yours, all of that in a reduced time frame. Whether we run a home-based...

Every time I hear or read the word “brand” associated with “social”, I wince. Not because of the ballooned hype surrounding this kind of association, but because most of this hype reveals an outdated – and often damageable – vision of what “marketing” and “brand” mean in our highly networked context. I won’t hold forth about marketing, as Greg Statell (@Digitaltonto) recently thoughtfully and thoroughly nailed this coffin, but ‘brands’ have a story to tell, nevertheless quite different from what ‘social media marketers’ (sigh) are trying to teach us.

The evolution of branding

Even if brands existed long before, ‘modern’ branding is a typical emergence from industrial era and mass consumption. Mass consumption went de pair with mass production, and at that time, brands were a...

Our world is changing, so is the way we are thinking about it. The rise of online networks has not only modified our possibilities to connect and exchange knowledge with other people, but also has it given anyone with internet access a new, almost (not yet totally, but for how long?) unalienable, power. From charities to tyrannies, from companies to markets, a lot of this power is shifting to citizens and customers. Paradoxically, the more people gain access to it, the less we can think in terms of mass. Individuals, their diversity, their relationships, their interactions, matter more than the standardized bulk dynamics prevailing in the industrial logic.

To adapt to this change, organizations have to reinvent most of the ways they operate. Customers are no more passive buyers to target. Companies are no more fierce industrial strongholds aimed at infinite growth and bracing their back against long-term competitive advantages. Work is no more a clearly designed set of tasks...