Connecting the Dots (or Everything I Needed to Know about Social Media I Learned from Church Work)

I’ve been putting off making this blog post for about a week, in efforts to make it perfect.  Perfect ain’t gonna happen, so here’s what I’ve got.

I, like many others, watched Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford Commencement address.  While I don’t disagree with some critiques of the speech, I actually thought it was pretty good (after all, aren’t commencement speeches supposed to be lofty and inspirational, who wants a commencement speech who’s theme is “well, kids, it a long hard slog from here?”).  The part most relevant for me was his recognition that sometimes your life experiences only make sense in hindsight.  As you live your life, apparently disconnected experiences can connect to create some pretty interesting combinations.

Such has been the case with me.  Before I became a Professor at Boston College, I spent 12 years working full-time as an ordained clergy person in the United Methodist Church (actually, I am still ordained, I just work full time as a college professor now).  When I tell people what I used to do professionally, I usually get interesting reactions because on the surface the two careers look so completely different.  The reality is a bit less interesting.  I had always wanted to be an academic, I just ended up finding business to be more interesting and a better academic career.

The unusual bit has been the connection between this past life and my current research emphasis on social media.  I am surprised at how well this previous experience has prepared me to understand this phenomenon and how well the leadership lessons translate.   As I have thought about it more deeply, perhaps it is not particularly surprising.  Churches are non-profit volunteer organizations.  Its members often have a shared vision/ mission, and they want to communicate this vision to others.  But, those members may frequently have very different understandings of what that vision actually means, and they join/participate in the organization for very different reasons.  There are often formal and informal leaders, but those people only have so much control over the organization.  You can’t always pick who you work with, those people are often dysfunctional, but somehow you are often able to make it work into something pretty remarkable.  And, lest we forget, most churches (or the ones I worked in) are primarily social organizations.

Much of what I learned about leading and managing in a church environment translates pretty well into the social media environment, but this environment is very different than most traditional corporations.  As such, I expect that most companies may have difficulties adapting social media for internal knowledge management initiatives, because the capabilities that these tools enable don’t mesh well with most existing corporate cultures.  Management in a church is about inspiration (you aren’t paying most of the people to work), about providing guidance (volunteers don’t have to do what you tell them to), and it is often alot messier and more fluid than most managers are comfortable with.  On the other hand, one often finds that the you can accomplish goals that one never thought possible (because people are following their passion not a paycheck) or that you never thought of at all (because new ideas spring forth from the chaos).  It’s not better or worse than traditional organizations, it’s just different.

So, what does all this mean for social media in traditional organizations?  There is a sense that social media could be ushering in a new and different type of organization never before seen.  On the contrary, I would argue that we’ve seen and experienced they types of social organizations enabled my social media for decades, in not centuries.  In fact, these types of social organizations are  actually much older organizational forms than modern modern corporations are.  Just as social media is re-enabling elements of a pre-modern culture (because it forces people to have a single identity across many different roles and groups, rather than being different people at home, work, and play), so may it also be re-enabling elements of pre-modern organizations.  Organizations choosing to adopt social media within their organizations may not need to reinvent management in this new 2.0 world, it might just need to turn to other sources for insight on how to organize and lead in those “new” organizations social media enables.

One of these days, I’m going to write that article “everything I needed to know about social media I learned from church work” which chronicles these insights in more details.  Until then, however, all you get is this.

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