A friend shared with me a fantastic story that emphasizes the lesson from my recent post, though in a very different way than I originally put forward.  If you missed it, here is the general take-away from that post:

When norms, policies, and institutions fail to evolve and stay relevant, people develop new norms and institutions that align with their needs and beliefs and compete, often "illegally," with the established frameworks.

My friend works for a corporation that has been struggling to understand and leverage social networking technologies within the company in order to build a stronger sense of community and facilitate information-sharing.  They have tried a few officially-sanctioned tools, but nothing has really worked due to lack of adoption by the employee population.

Recently, however, a rogue group of employees began to build a company community using another, free and publicly available technology that works much like Twitter for the enterprise. Perhaps not surprisingly, people took to it. 

The community grew rapidly, reportedly with over 10% of the company's employees opting in over the course of less than a week. The growing popularity of the tool, however, and the fact that it was not controllable by corporate IT, created a stir. Within days of catching the wind of the non-sanctioned corporate community, the company blocked access and threatened to take action against any employees caught using it in the future.

Amazing. Textbook, in fact. Relating it back to our above lesson, you can see how Corporate IT (i.e. government) failed to keep up with employee needs to communicate and share information, and provide tools that employees found relevant and useful (i.e. norms and institutions), and so employees went outside the system to have their needs met. In this case, however, "illegality" was not left to fester and produce long-term negative dynamics/norms. Nor did institutions adapt.  Instead, the corporation apparently had the means, at least in the short-term, to enforce existing policies and quash the "illegality."

Certainly, it will be interesting to hear how this develops. Will the norms and institutions developed by the employees prevail?  Stay tuned!

I just finished Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge.  Though my enthusiasm faded a bit as the book wore on, I have to admit that the concept of choice architecture that they explore is one of the most exciting ideas that I've encountered in a long time.  So exciting, in fact, that I would consider making a career of it (in some ways I already am). Enthusiasm aside, as I finished the last chapter on "Objections" tonight, I was struck by one of the authors' comments.   They discuss the objection that policymakers should always attempt to be neutral.  Well, the premise of the book rests largely on the fact that many of us are choice architects, even though we may not realize it.  We are involved in designing the environments in which people make decisions.  Therefore we influence decisions, whether we like it or not.  So we might as well be intentional in how we go about our design. What struck me about the neutrality discussion was the assumption that neutrality somehow denotes innocence.  For some reason, as a society we forgive neutrality and punish or reward intentionality (depending on how things turn out).  So if I kill someone unintentionally - in a car accident, for example - I am treated differently than if I kill someone in a premeditated fashion.  The first is likely to somehow be a result of negligence, while the second is a result of something much more insidious.  In this way, they are different.  Yet, both result in the same outcome.   Along the same lines, choice architects who drive us toward stupid decisions unintentionally are somehow innocent.  Yet, those who drive us toward bad decisions intentionally are somehow evil because they game the system.   This seems a bit strange to me.  Maybe it shouldn't.  But  I would prefer a set of cultural norms that places slightly greater emphasis on personal awareness and responsibility.   If you drive, you drive safely.  If you nudge, nudge intentionally.
From liccle_minx's photostream