BIF-3 Story: Meet the Feisty Web 2.0 Troublemaker

Euan Semple will be taking the stage at our upcoming Collaborative Innovation Summit. The Scotland native is best known for his anti-bureaucratic style while head of knowledge management solutions at the BBC. During his tenure, he launched talk.gateway, an online social network for all 30,000 employees on the BBC network.After spending more than two decades inside the BBC, Euan decided he needed to break free because he was feeling increasingly “uncomfortable” in mainstream media.

What I like about Euan is his ability to create metaphors to help explain complex ideas and he can spin a good yarn to boot. One of my favorites is an analogy of building online social networks to trying to build a collection of Cotswold villages with lots of footpaths between them. “You know where the pub and church are, you’re comfortable in the environment and you can locate yourself,” he told me. “Corporate systems tend to be more like Milton Keynes. On the surface they’re efficient with lots of straight lines and signposting, but you get lost because everything looks the same.”

Euan can be irreverent at times which is certainly part of his charm. To keep the forum he built at the BBC simple and accessible to all, he didn’t bother getting the OK from upper management and he didn’t seek any assistance from the information technologists at BBC. Instead, he wanted employees to take responsibility for what was said in the social environment and for it to develop its own ways of working.

“It became clear to me that to build a new world, we would need to do it without the leaders of the old one,” he said. To get the job done, Euan resisted ‘corporateness’, studiously avoided ‘real’ meetings and advised his peers to seek forgiveness after the fact, rather than permission beforehand.

From the internal bulletin board grew blogging sessions and wikis, which allow people to work collaboratively on a project. Today nearly 23,000 of the 30,000 BBC employees on the network use the system Euan created, yet no one owns the technology and no one—other than the users themselves—manages the community.

Today, he's a one-man consultancy preaching the gospel of Web 2.0 and helping other companies develop social networks. “What is actually happening is a more profound societal change,” he said of employees using technology to connect with one another. “We are moving from a Cartesian split to becoming aware of connectedness to each other and the planet. The role of intermediaries is changing fundamentally.”

Euan told me he is proud of what he did at the BBC. He also believes that businesses which flaunt innovation jargon and include it as parts of their mission statements are often the same businesses that stifle it. While some at the BBC see the forum as a waste of time, others have seen it as the best way to find knowledge, connect with colleagues and get things done within an organization.

“If you make systems too serious or too business like, people won’t use them. But, as a consequence of blogs and networks, it is possible to connect your brightest and best people with each other and with their organizations. Business is based on relationships, and this way you actually talk to the people you want to talk to.”

Don't Miss Euan Semple at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 10th and 11th.
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