A little over a year ago, we published our founding blog post, in which we asked “what comes next?”, now that social business has become mainstream. Specifically, what do we do with it, how will business and society adapt in response, and how can we accelerate this process?
Since then, we have worked with the very talented and growing Post*Shift team to develop, test and validate our early thesis through several client engagements, as well as with many industry leaders and the wider market.
Based on this, we remain convinced that the process of evolving companies into truly social businesses (as well as shaping startups to avoid the mistakes of their more established cousins), requires a significant amount of focus on developing a decentralised organisational structure and collaborative culture, facilitated by the right social technologies, to accelerate the journey towards Twenty-First Century Business.
At the same time, and despite almost a decade of ‘social’ in business, the starting point of this journey for the majority of companies remains the need to plan and execute a sustainable social business strategy (as opposed to multiple ‘social marketing’ campaigns, which generally do little to change the organisations themselves). In some cases, there is actually still a need to experiment with social technologies as a first evolutionary step towards social business — which is precisely the type of work we pioneered as Headshift.
So, having recently re-acquired the Headshift name and content, we have decided to make publicly available, as a web archive, what we believe remains an interesting (and personally cathartic!) trail of blog posts, experiences and case studies spanning a full decade of learning how, when and with whom social technology can be implemented inside organisations to humanise and improve their operations.
If you enjoy reading this archive, please let us know and get in touch to find out how we are building on the first phase of social business technology to create new structures, culture and operations in large organisations.