Yesterday I was thinking about a scene in a recent book I read by Virginia Woolf. The novel is To The Light House written in 1927 and considered to be one of her best novels at the height of her exceptional writing. It’s about a family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye talking about whether or not they’ll get to the light house the next day or whether it will be cancelled because of rain. That’s it. That’s the plot.

For those who have read this book, they would know of the brilliant scene that closes the first third of the book where all the characters are seated around the dining table eating a beef stew.

What Woolf does so cleverly is that she writes the perspectives of each of these characters as the scene plays out.

While on the surface, they talk about the beef stew, the real emotion, the real tension is seething in each of the character’s minds and actions.

It’s an enthralling read because it personifies to me how apt this is to explain how enterprise social networks in organisations simply miss the mark.

How people use enterprise social networks are exactly alike that dining room scene. They share the superficial trivialities of what would “look good” to others online or what would be “acceptable” in other’s eyes to write or share.

I want to write about this observation in a work context and how, if we share superficialities like this in a work context, we are not really addressing possibilities of solving work problems, having frank and fearless dialogue of how to improve our work and how to make our organisations resilient because we aren’t sharing mistakes, we aren’t learning, we aren’t opening ourselves up.

Sure you can share photos of your food or talk about yoghurt flavourings but if you’re not mentioning that workshop you were in for the last couple of days where there were some tense moments about how we could change our processes to help our people work with our clients as trusted advisors, or to look at how we are changing our business model them you’re not really opening up.

You’re continuing with the superficial trivialities of work. You need to do something different, take a risk, be vulnerable and get what you’re thinking and feeling out there at times.

I’m going to be presenting a session for Microsoft on Tuesday morning on how to use the new Storylines and Story features in Viva Engage (or as it’s known Yammer, an enterprise social network) and I’d like to use Woolf’s dining table scene as a metaphor of what I’m seeing companies and leaders do a lot more nowadays – the sharing of superficial observations without dealing what we all crave for – getting to the deep heart through constructive dialogue of what truly matters in our work so that we can all use it as a basis for learning and growth.

As in Woolf’s novel, it was all about facing up to our fears. We talked about the beef stew without talking about why we actually feared getting to that light house and what that really means for us and our organisations.

We need to get to that light house rather than just talking about it.