I have thought a lot about the challenge of encouraging/freeing people to work outside the formal hierarchical frameworks that have traditionally guided enterprise activity. In particular, I have long wondered how to explain the slow adoption of collaborative practices, particularly in knowledge based firms where the potential benefits seem most obvious (at least to me), as the various approaches different firms are using don't seem to be working very well.
This article from Headshift briefly discusses, among other things, a 'Trojan mouse' strategy. Apart from liking the name, the approach the article discusses also seems to fit with how many individual employees (like me) are finding their own ways to interact with like minded colleagues across their enterprise and self-teaching new ways to collaborate. These individuals often use readily available tools - we use Yammer - to do outside the enterprise what their managers profess they would like to see done within it but for which they fail to provide the tools or, more importantly, support the culture to make it happen.
Conceptually, I like the Trojan mouse approach because I suspect it will come to be seen - in a few years time - as how enterprises will have watched from a safe distance the gradual absorption into enterprises of the principles underpinning these tools before adopting them. The only alternative I have seen discussed is an entirely more disruptive approach, calling for the deliberate destruction of corporate hierarchies - something that might well happen from 'without' as part of a creative destruction process but which I can't ever see happening from 'within'.
