If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original

Two things came together for me today. One I was reflecting on the E2.0 meetings that I attended last week and the 2nd was listening to a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on Education (thanks to those at weknowmore for posting this great talk).

In his talk Sir Robinson made the statement "if you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything new." As I listened to this I was struck by what I had heard last week from a group of 30+/- year olds who are working on E2.0 technologies in a large, innovative technology company. "If you are not willing to fail - you will never get anything done."

The group of 30 year olds were working to get tools like Yammer behind the firewall of this large tech company - and they were being quite successful. When I asked them what advice they had, based on their experience, for those that were just embarking on implementing E2.0 they said "you need to be willing to fail. So start small...if you are going to fail, you don't want it to be a big failure. And communicate, communicate, communicate." They could not emphasis enough the importance of making the work visible - and of explaining how it was relevant to the business and to the individual.

Lesson learned....when trying something new start small but tell lots of people about it and the benefits it can have for them and the organization....

Do others have stories and lessons learned about implementation of E2.0 technologies in their organization that they would be willing to share?