Gerry McGovern's latest piece touches on something that I've been peddling for about 5 years now; the fact that a corporate website honestly represents the organisation that builds it. He says, Websites Reflect True Face Of An Organization
A website shows the true face of the organization as never before. A website is increasingly the place where customers get that vital first impression.
Spend a few minutes on the websites of most large organizations and you will learn a lot. You will learn how they really are, how they really view you, the customer.
You will learn if they are self-centered or customer-centered. Is the website structured so as to solve your problems fast, or is it based on some internal organization structure? Is the language second person and focused on the benefits to you? Or do headings and sentences constantly start with the name of the organization?
What he doesn't talk about, but I do, is how they get that way and why it is so hard to fake it.
I did a review of a site a while ago and delivered the report. It said, "this website gives the very strong impression that the organisation is very hierarchical, self centred, exclusionary and controlling"
I talked to a staff member a bit later and she said to me, "you've never worked in this place, you've only visited twice, how do you know so much about it?"
The answer is dead simple, it is written all over your website. It's not in your mission statement, its not in your language, but it is encoded in everything about the site, from its layout and design to the tools you offer and even in the way you implement those tools. The processes that you require users to go through, from registration to adding content, right down to the interface, tells me how you think.
Here's the bad news, it is impossible to fake a website. You can fake a brochure, you can fake a TV or newspaper advert, because, as one-way information channels they are dead letters, I can accept or reject them, but I can't interact with them so i can't find out anything about them.
But a website is not a publication, Gerry's contentions notwithstanding - actually that tells me a lot about Gerry, a website is a tool for doing stuff, for achieving a task, and just as you can pick up one tool for doing a job and find it great, and another that feels wrong, so a website either fits or it doesn't when I interact with it.
The real problem is how how a website gets to be the way it is, and that's where the Tao comes in.
A site is nothing less than a set of decisions made by people authorised to do that by the organisation. They either like or dislike the layout and design based on a massive complex of inputs that are cultural, personal, institutional, learned from teachers. They are either comfortable or nervous about the amount of control and influence they share with their users and they will make decisions about how a that control is implemented that will either facilitate or hinder that shared control in ways that arise from their fundamental beliefs about ownership, authority and so forth.
But wait, there's more. There's some research (can't recall where I saw it now) that shows that employees in general have something like an 80% grasp of what the hierarchy of the business actually wants, as distinct from what they say they want. The staff then, unconsciously most of the time, provide whatever it is the management really wants to see, hear or experience.
The result is personal advancement, which is why I have never had a career in anything; I figure that if you pay me and ask me for my opinion it is my job to tell you honestly what I think. I don't mind being wrong, but I wont just tell you what you want to hear because that is fraud. But I digress, end of anti-sales pitch.
What this means is that the hidden agendas of the organisation, the Tao that you can't see, are already embedded in the decision-making processes to such an extent that, for example, a website developer wanting a contract will not even offer a site that is at odds with the underlying philosophy of the organisation, regardless of whether those alternatives would offer a better deal or would even enhance the organisation's business; because when we interact with the people who commission the work, we will be infected by their Tao.
We sling off at the "dark ages" for their ignorance and closed minds and superstition etc, but we do so from a shaky perch, I think modern corporations have mostly lost the ability to hear things that they don't want to hear. Corporate structures and processes are probably inherently incapable of dealing with alternative or dissent, which is what makes their assertions that they are interested in "Innovation" and "disruptive business models" such a load of crap.
Even the most benighted monarchs of the dark ages had a jester whose job it was to speak truth to power, he had a license to disrupt, to innovate, to criticise, to mock and bring down; for the simple reason that the medieval mind understood that the Tao ran the court and the courtiers existed to lie to the king.
If nobody can tell the truth, or even put an alternative perspective, the kingdom is in danger.
There's a reason psychiatry is conducted behind closed door; because we reveal a great deal about who we are and what we are not only by what we say and how we say it, but by the things we choose to talk about, and the things we avoid talking about, and the way we avoid talking about them.
But a website is a public couch and everybody gets a chance to psychoanalyse the organisation lying (in both senses of the word) on it.
And blogs are couches on steroids. Let the shrinking begin.
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