Imagine using a wiki and the collective editing of a whole community to write the perfect love poem. Of course you couldn’t. For some types of problems, adding more contributors does enhance the output. This is one topic of conversation at (the excellent) Wiki Tuesday event on, er, tuesday this week. Why don’t marketers use wikis? it’s such an obvious tool for engineers, why don’t other people, what’s “wrong” with them?
My answer, you have to consider the nature of the task. Wiki’s or other collaborative editing forms are great for solutions to problems that are convergent. When there is a “right” answer and it’s just a matter(or a necessity) of collecting up all the pieces of the answer from variety of contributors. Wikis are a quantum leap in making this type of process more efficient.
However, other (and important) problems are what i’d call divergent and here is where wiki’s are not most suitable. Creative works, strategic visions, or the expression of opinion are best or only conducted as a conversation (blogs, comments, threaded discussions) rather than the collective soup of a wiki.
When we think of Enterprise 2.0, “the document” is still a valuable paradigm and one tool in box, but increasingly we need also to be thinking about the conversation.
The conversation is what makes possible making the right decisions when there is no clear right answer or in the face of incomplete information. In essence, the heart of real business strategy.