Human Nature and Corporate Culture

Had an interesting lunch time discussion with some colleagues today on the future of collaborative environments. I was arguing for and predicting the decline of e-mail as the primary tool for collaboration in favour of richer and more controllable environments such as Groove (www.groove.net). My primary arguments were:
- Richer toolset
- Built-in anti-spam (invitees only)
but most of all that it allows you better to model your personal environment to align with the many roles that you plays while not interfering with other peoples freedom to do the same (this is one of  the tenets of personal freedom). I like grooves ability to let me be IT architect, father, music fan, friend and bilateral "him" hater as I want in the ways I want, and if I want to go really public I can blog.
Although we all agreed that the developing corporate cultures of sharing or protectionism had little to do with tools, it was suggested that Groove might be counter productive in an environment where we were trying to share as much information as possible in that, by default, Groove is closed group (much the same as e-mail is, but more flexible.

This was a new angle for me and I could see the point but I strongly disagree. I think groove will encourage openess BECAUSE you know exactly who you are talking to. I think it is against human nature to be fully open if we think the whole world might be watching. The impression I want to give in my blog is quite different to that I try to give in a group with, say, just my peers or the guys that work for me. This doesn't make me two faced (my personality comes through in both situations) or fickle, I think that is acting appropriately in a given situation. Something most adult humans are very good at.

It was suggested that a more free flow of information might be encouraged through an open mailbox environment where by default everything you wrote was accesible and searcheable. I believe this would have the opposite effect in that people would become over cautious in what they wrote in case what they said was misinterpreted or taken out of context, not to mention who would look in this rat's nest. People need a space where they can go to have a moan about that really annoying co-worker
As Richard Dawkins noted in "The Selfish Gene", we humans (as all other species) are selfish right down to our Genes, and that apparent acts of altruism and overtly social behaviour don't contradict that.  John Harsanyi and John Nash's work on game theory show how humans interact apparently as teams to win as individuals even when they don't know the intentions of the other players.


Somedays I wish lunch hour would go on all afternoon..