I've
been having a lot of conversations lately about how to help
organizations become more effective at enabling collaboration. The
people I know who have tried to do this keep running into three walls:
- What's
perceived as urgent in most organizations (i.e. what's keeping
management awake at night) isn't collaboration or innovation or
technology or worker effectiveness, it's cost reduction and risk
management. Nothing else gets any executive bandwidth.
- You
can't change an organization's culture (short of firing everyone and
starting over with new managers and staff). The best you can hope to do
is help people adapt to the existing culture in useful, valuable ways.
- Organizations
are, mostly, complex adaptive systems, so one-step needs identification
is futile. You have to let a full understanding of the organization's
problems and needs, and the solutions that address those needs, co-evolve.
By the time you have an intelligent answer, your understanding of the
problem is usually vastly different from what it was at the outset.
So
any methodology that hopes to help improve collaboration in an
organization needs to be very adaptable, modest in resource demands,
sponsored, and attuned to the complexity of collaboration challenges. I
think I've come up with a methodology that meets these requirements,
and it's illustrated above. Here's how it could work:
- The Champions Self-Organize:
I know you're used to me starting innovation process charts with
'needs', but in this case I think it makes sense to start with people. What I call 'champions' consist of three groups:
- the
organization's thought leaders – people who, regardless of seniority or
title, are considered innovative and 'ahead of the curve',
- current
users of web 2.0 applications – kids who use blogs and wikis and RSS
feeds and mindmaps and forums and people-finders and social bookmarkers
and all the other social networking tools, and can get the others up to speed on how and when to use them effectively, and
- what
I call 'respected sponsors' – people whose use of new collaboration
methods and tools will raise eyebrows and get others on-board for fear
of falling behind, and who will invest the time to use these methods
and tools continuously and regularly, not just during a one-shot
launch.
I think these groups need to self-organize,
rather than waiting for senior management to organize them or approve
their work. That means the champions must have the passion to invest
some personal time into this, and the courage, perhaps, to charge ahead
(intelligently) and ask forgiveness instead of permission. The
'respected sponsors' need to be coached, not only to deliver the
elevator pitch to others for new collaboration methods and tools, but
also to actually use these methods and tools effectively.
- The Champions Meet Face-to-Face:
I think it's asking too much for all the heavy lifting of new
collaboration projects to be done virtually, at least at first. No
question that the champions need to use the tools for their own
activities, but there is much work to be done up-front to understand
the opportunities and challenges, and some sleeves-rolled-up
face-to-face is needed to do this. These meetings should start with a
learning event to get those unfamiliar with the tools, the
applications, and the current state of the business, up to speed.
Brainstorming just to get a lot of ideas and possibilities on the table
should follow.
Most important
is understanding the current state: Things are the way they are (i.e.
not very collaborative) for a reason, and the team needs to know that
reason. - They need to
appreciate the tensions between hierarchy and networked processes,
between openness and security, between intermediated and
unintermediated etc., because these dynamics won't be changed easily.
- They
need to understand the aversion to change, to any risk, and to anything
new to add to the already heavy work burden, that is common and
understandable in many businesses.
- They need to know what's
keeping the executives awake at night (probably reducing costs and
risks), so they can appreciate and address lack of management
enthusiasm for any investment in collaboration or innovation.
- They
need to know which communities and groups inside (and reaching outside)
the organization are co-located (in which case face-to-face
collaboration probably makes more sense) and which are not (requiring
more virtual collaboration methods and tools).
- To get
front-line worker participation, they need to understand the
impediments to work effectiveness that are causing pain to the people
in the field and to their customers.
- They need to know where
the low-hanging fruit for new collaboration methods and tools may be
(e.g. which silos could be more effectively sharing product
information, processes and process information, work tasks, and
market/customer data; who's already 'publishing' newsletters in the
organization; who's struggling to coordinate communities of practice;
and which subject matter experts are information bottlenecks, too busy
to help others with what they know).
- And they need to know
what the capacity and cultural fit for additional collaboration is, and
work within that capacity and culture rather than trying to overtax and
change it.
Once they
understand the current state, they can start to identify feasible,
small-scale experiments that have the greatest chance of success, and
select appropriate tools to implement them. They should then self-form
into one or more peer-to-peer steering groups to monitor and oversee
the implementation of the experiments. To do this they will need
patience – the initial pre-conceptions about the opportunities for
greater collaboration are likely to be largely wrong, and it will take
time for real, new sustainable collaboration successes to emerge, and
with them, a better understanding of the real collaboration problems and needs of the organization. - Design & Create Experiments:
Then, with this knowledge and some inexpensive 'infrastructure' in
place, the organization can start launching, and encouraging, the most
promising collaboration experiments. These should meet five 'design
rules' (and while lots of experiments should be encouraged, those that
defy these rules should be questioned at the outset, since they are
more than likely to fail):
- Participation should be easy (or
else new collaborators will get discouraged quickly), intuitive (or
else collaborators will go back to using e-mail and other ineffective
methods), open (to participation of any employee or customer who wants
to contribute), and voluntary (the quickest way to kill enthusiasm for
a new idea is to make it mandatory).
- The collaboration process
should extend and build on existing relationships and conversations.
Social networking and web 2.0 are all about strengthening relationships
and capturing and sharing the learnings from conversations. This
relationship-building and these conversations are occurring anyway, so
rather than forcing them to occur a different way, collaboration
experiments should encompass and help capture, facilitate and improve
this knowledge and learning without interfering with how it occurs now.
- The
new collaboration processes and tools should be integrated with
existing processes and tools like e-mail, PDAs, CRM, IM, HR and other
systems and collaboration tools and 'spaces' that are currently being
used (with varying degrees of effectiveness) to collaborate. Rather
than trying to prohibit e-mail and IM for collaboration, for example,
link from them to wikis, mindmaps, forums and other tools that more
effectively capture and facilitate collaboration, to wean e-mail
addicts painlessly away.
- The experiments should be
self-managed. Let the people who stand to benefit from new
collaboration methods and tools figure out how to use them, and for
what. They will need to learn and practice, and you can't do that for
them.
- You must build in personal 'what's in it for me'
attractors. People want to do their jobs more effectively, but not at
the expense of working harder or longer. Give them their own personal
space (e.g. through a blog or personal web page that hosts
collaborations or conversations) that offers 'pride of ownership'.
Don't forget that 'commons', even collaborative virtual ones, will
usually suffer from the tragedy of the commons.
- Run the Experiments:
Give them time, space and nurturing, but don't get in the way. Be
patient. Focus on the learning. Give people the opportunity to practice
safely using the new method or tool, until they become confident and
proficient using it. A great way to do this is to show a wiki or
mindmap evolving in real time
on-screen at the front of the room during in-person meetings and by
'sharing your screen' electronically during virtual conferences. Let
people see how these tools capture the essential learning and consensus
from a meeting. Let them practice using them, until using these tools
in all collaborations, face-to-face and virtual, becomes 'the way we do
things'. And be sure to grant permission to fail -- many collaborations
will turn out to be unsuccessful, but they're still valuable learning
opportunities.
- Monitor and Celebrate Success:
Identify the attempted collaboration experiments that just aren't
working, for whatever reason, and kill them. Don't force people to use
a collaborative method or tool that just frustrates them. Instead,
watch for successes, and craft stories
that explain how and why they worked, in the context of your own
organization -- these will be the models that will spawn other
successes. Leverage learning and successes, and steer people to the
methods, applications and tools that have worked in similar situations,
using the story as your 'selling tool'. It works!
Some
of my collaboration colleagues believe the champions should work to
break down barriers that are preventing successful uses of
collaboration methods and tools. I'm ambivalent about this: I prefer to
trust the judgement of the self-managed collaboration team to break
down barriers as they see fit. I'm not sure we need a 'Chief
Collaboration Officer' out there doing that job.
I should note that this methodology is just intended for web 2.0-enabled collaboration projects. There are other
types of collaboration (peer production and idea markets most notably)
that organizations may benefit from as well, that would perhaps require
a different approach.
I'm going to try this methodology out in the
organization I'm currently doing contract work for. The opportunity
there is great, but the cultural barriers are high and a sense of
urgency is lacking. Even with these challenges, I think it could work.
I'll keep you posted.
I'd like to thank New Paradigm
for facilitating a workshop today, and also the bright participants in
the workshop from a couple of dozen organizations, who helped
crystallize my thoughts on this. I'd also like to thank my online collaboration colleagues and the members of my Toronto KM breakfast club, for their contributions to these ideas.
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