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Recenty Escaped a Borg Collective belongs to nGenera Product Management  by Steve Elmore on May 08, 2008 - 05:41 PM read 3646 times |
Steve Elmore's old employee picture
We are (not) Borg
"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." The Borg provide a wonderful metaphor for the groupthink that occurs in many organizations. I have worked for a number of Borg collectives and recently escaped yet another. My role was to launch the collective's first external facing wiki. There were a number of technological challenges, but the most insidious challenge was overcoming the Web 1.0 mentality that was so pervasive throughout the collective. And despite a stated value of "no technology religion", there was exactly that.
How do we defeat the Borg that exist in organizations? Picard and others found that virally re-introducing one's ability for self-expression could disempower specific collective mindsets. Ironically, the Borg is fundamentally collaborative, but without the opportunity for individualism. And while individualism is valued in North American culture, it is resisted in many organizational cultures in North America.
From an application development perspective, we have to consider that from time to time we will have run-ins with a Borg mindset (symbolically, the Borg live in a box, so we must encourage out-of-the-box thinking), both internally and externally. There are challenges and solutions to overcoming groupthink (see Abilene Paradox), but one must first recognize its existence.
We should consider the Borg potential in our encounters and how our product architecture will address them.
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re: Recenty Escaped a Borg Collective
a reply to Recenty Escaped a Borg Collective
by Brittain on May 09, 2008 - 10:12 AM read 98 timesI like it. I particularly like how you left your Borg unnamed! :- )
BTW SteveE, welcome aboard ... personally I'm excited for the real world experience with introducing these kinds of technologies to enterprises you bring to nGenera.
fyi, I removed the nGeneraLock from your conversation. IMO, your experience and prospective seems relevant to the world.
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