It's an Enterprise 2.0 collaborative world..are things getting worse?

I know this is a month old, but I've been thinking about it a lot over the last couple of weeks for some reason.

On 10 June, Sean Dennehy gave a briefing at the Enterprise 2.0 conference about Intelink and how the DNI is providing tools to the US Intelligence Community and the US government in general to break down the barriers to communication and collaboration.

As part of the brief, Mr. Denehy brought up a recently declassified doc from OSS titled, "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" to help WWII occupied Europeans grind their organizations to a halt to reduce their contribution to the Axis' bottom line. Some of the highlights are:

• Insist on doing everything through "channels". Never permit shortcuts that would expedite decisions.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications.
• Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments.
• Question whether a decision lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

I bet we all work with people that are like this. How many of us work in organizations where the above is standard operating procedure for the whole organization? I bet there's more than a couple people even in the small number of people that read my lil blog.

There are a lot of good, smart people at great organizations that really get this Enterprise 2.0 stuff. There are also a lot of organizations full of good smart people that totally don't get it and I don't think they even realize it.

I don't have any real data to back this up or anything but when I talk with friends and family about work issues, it seems to me that in a lot of ways things are getting worse instead of better. Happy success stories of technology enabled collaboration seem to be few and far between.

I'm going to try to be more conscious of this and make more of an effort to go out of my way to help people break through barriers to openness and sharing where I can. Will you? Maybe we can make a difference...

Update: Corrected the timing of the E2,0 conference. It was on 10 June. I meant to post June but somehow it came out as January. Commenter John Lierdal pointed this out to me.