I am struck by how many different associations are brought up by the term 'collaboration'. We are even beginning to wonder if this is the wrong term with which to label our platform, GroupMind Express, just because it has so many different connotations. Our platform is for working together, gathering colletive input, making decisions and converging on shared value. Yet there are many things it isn't: screen sharing, document work flow, prediction markets.... The fact is that there are more and more things that can be labeled collaborative, and that is all for the best. The key is how you get an organization to use these ideas.

Take a look at the bigger picture, from the director at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence.

It seems to us that the last six months have brought forth a higher level of recognition across most businesses that it is both possible and necessary to engage in more collaboration at work. Painting with a broad brush, this recognition shows up as:   

• more adoption and awareness of collaboration tools, especially social networking
• willingness to connect people through technology, rather than just have face meetings
• understanding the possibilities embedded in web-based planning and shared notes

Some of this new thinking seems to be a result of exposure to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Google Docs, whether from friends, children or colleagues. More of this new willingness is the result of a need to maintain connections across stakeholder groups in the face of reduced travel budgets. There is also growing awareness of the positive result possibilities in sharing information through organized crowd-sourcing.

We see what amounts to a perfect storm of conditions that are leading to a sea change in proactive thinking by business leaders. Budget constraints, information overload, dispersed teams, connecting to external experts or stakeholders, multi-step processes, digesting collected data, referring back to previous decisions, encouraging input from various points of view.... all these trends drive team leaders toward the use of online collaborative tools. Such tools provide an interactive platform, an archive of previous work from various constituents, an always-available resource, an opportunity to engage in iterative planning, a minimum of paper notes, a chance to build in transparency for more stakeholders.

Let's consider some current stories in the press. The Iowa Electronic Elections Market predicted the outcome of the last presidential election with more accuracy than did the polls or the pundits. Companies are having to develop workplace policies on friending bosses on Facebook. It is now possible to announce a contest for a logo design, offer $300 and receive 40 diverse, professional entries from graphic designers all over the world, to which you give reactions and don't-likes by comparing different treatments, and within the week, you can choose a refined version from your designated finalists. There are simple systems to have a large audience vote their preferred options among your presented choices, using text messages from their cellphones, and display the immediate results on your powerpoint presentation. Three teams can work separately on a design template, review each others' presentations, evaluate their shared 'must-dos' and 'stop-doings', prioritize these and then develop the dependencies for the top issues, all in one day.
Employees participating in the GE’s “Imagination Market” trade or buy “ideas” based on how closely they believe an idea is aligned to the business objectives, how an idea compares to other alternatives, and if the idea is operationally feasible. Most often, these ideas represent new technology or new product ideas.

Looking out into the new year, we can make a number of 'predictions' for business processes related to collaboration:

• Managers will be more skillfull at holding short check-in meetings. Most of the work will have been done and updated online, so the meetings will be for review and go/no-go decisions. This will alleviate a lot of meeting paralysis and boredom.
• Meeting tools will become more interactive, so that the audience is drawn further into dialogue and participation -- both with the presenter and with each other.
• Teams will become more facile with keeping notes online, even during conference calls. This lets everyone append comments and corrections, and there is one record immediately available.
• Quick surveys -- for checking confidence and clarity on initiatives -- will be commonly used, in order to clearly identify the state of the team on contemplated product, policy and strategy changes.
• Many more people will learn to write an idea once, online (rather than making notes on paper, transferring these to a Word documnet, and finally publishing the idea out to colleagues.) More employees will be (comfortably) members of various online sites which enable them to interact, gather information and connect to others with similar research interests.
• There will be more connection to customers and outside vendors, as workers become more comfortable with collaboration sites. Communication and inclusion are key issues for effective work, and online interaction sites make this much more available to everyday people across the organization.

My partner here at GroupMind sent me an interesting article the other day: the author proposes looking at collaboration platforms within organizations in three modes (by "platforms" he is speaking about sets of practices and systems):

• exploration
• experimentation
• execution

It is written by Satish Nambisan for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He says,

"Collaboration platforms can help dismantle the long-held barriers between government, business and non-profit sectors. They also speed the cross-fertilization of innovative ideas and solutions throughout the sectors."
"To be effective partners in social innovation, organizations need a deeper understanding of these three platforms so that they may develop the necessary skills and resources."

I think Mr. Nambisan has pointed our a valuable framework for thinking about what we are doing with collaboration. You see a lot of "cool" widgets out there -- the real issue is to understand the overall context for initiating collaboration within a department or across the organization. What are the larger goals we are connecting?

By making this framework explicit, the organization gains some clarity for the practices it promotes with its call to collaboration; the designers of the processes get a more specific context for their processes and the sponsors have a clearer expectation for outcomes. The users, of course, can still do whatever they want, but hopefully the fledgling enterprise has focused the efforts of all involved at the very start.

For those considering adding collaboration capacity for a project or a part of an organization, I see this framework as providing a useful guide in thinking through various aspects of the idea:

• tools
• metrics
• involvement of stakeholders
• timeframes
• goals

If you look at several collaboration projects you know about, consider whether applying this framing would have helped to clarify what should have been going on. I believe there is a rich vein to be mined in understanding many social innovation tools through these glasses.

Here is an interesting set of pictures, playing with perception.... (from www.neuromarketing.com) . One take away from this is a reminder that it is possible to have differernt people see the same thing in different ways. Seems to me it is also possible for me to look at something again, and then see it differently. How do we build this possibility into our decision and planning processes? How many times do we check for another view (how many strategic planning cycles are affected by first impressions, or the strongly held views of a few key people?)

Find more photos like this on Neuromarketing

Even though we have amazing new leadership (witness Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya as his first interview) we know by now that we are in for a rough ride, as we work through the issues of the depression and the deflationary spiral we are being sucked into.

It is a time where communication is even more important, both at a national leadership level and within each organization. Writing on the HBR site, John Baldoni gives key reasons not to cancel that corporate meeting. He cites issues such as building trust, the importance of telling stories, of updating with customers.

Yet we know that many budgets are being cut, and travel and big meetings are certainly good targets for shrinkage. Consider your ability to stay connected, both with virtual meetings, but more importantly, with those issues Baldoni discusses -- sharing stories, catching up with the issues that are important to diverse stakeholders. You should be doing this with an online site anyway! He says:

"Meetings are far more than a collection of speeches or talking points. They are an opportunity for people of similar interests to come together and share their stories about how they are coping as well as what they are doing to increase business. Customers need to mingle with executives and employees and vice versa. People need to hear each other out."

Set up an area on your interactive pages where everyone in the organization can hear these different voices -- how they are coping, what they need from management, what management is doing to address the additional stresses that are affecting the enterprise.

In Aperian Global's latest newletter, they cite some suggestions for involving team members in specific communications processes, in order to maintain true collaborative and creative integration of work, rather than dispersed and separated individual work:

1. Creating an environment of trust within the team – particularly to foster team members' trust in each others' skills; and
2. Strategically developing work design approaches that promote a creative process.

Challenge conventional thinking, encourage dissent, recognize progress.... these are more themes from another post of Baldoni's on January 23. Think how you could put these ideas into an online forum, and encourage some focus from your people's grouped intelligence. From my perspective, you will need to think carefully about the focal question, to stimulate the most effective input; but you don't need to wait for a meeting to do this.  Aperian talks about documenting processes and bringing closure to team project steps. Do some gardening in your online workspace! Be structured enough to be effective, and be interactive enough to leverage the shared knowledge and creativity of the team.

There are a lot of web 2.0 offerings out there -- many of them enable some form of social networking. Many provide specific help for some customer relationship management. These are good things. But if you look at business as a whole, there has not been a revolution to move us toward working together online. (This has happened much more in the music and shopping arenas, and in sites like Facebook and Linkedin.) We rate things and build communities around favourite bands or products, but our customers share their thoughts about us a lot more than we share our thoughts about what we are or ought to be doing.

The organizational world needs more interaction. People work in remote relationships much of the time; large organizations need to gather opinion from diverse elements -- in order to get closer-to-the-customer information and in order to generate innovation. They also need to make sure that there is sufficient connection and exchange of thought so that there is alignment of purpose and understanding of critical issues. One U.S. motto, e pluribus unum, means 'out of many, one.' That is, from our diversity may we make a single entity, or take unified stance.

 In order to generate this strength as teams evolve into dispersed geographical webs, we need to have mechanisms for channeling the flow of ideas and the direction of effort in such a way that the many contribute to and understand the one. This is why it is necessary to connect the different parts of the organization or team in a way that encourages ongoing, neural exchange of critical ideas. I'm thinking of both formal structures like online meetings or task lists, and of informal gradually-developed work areas for sharing emerging issues.

At GroupMind, we think of interaction as participating in building a larger intelligence. Every little piece adds more shape to an emerging whole, that only becomes clear through the swarm of various bits of information and viewpoint, sticking together so that the group can make sense of it.

 

I saw a phrase in a blog comment recently: "If you can't see how people react to an action, you won't know how to improve." We talk a lot about setting up the conditions to find out what people are really thinking. --- I'm just wondering... are these the same issue?

The impetus for this musing is my digestion of the Web 2.0 issues that are all around lately. I take web 2 to mean not the cool bells and whistles, but rather the ability of the group to add value to the content. This means many things: the accrrual of ratings on books or CDs at Amazon, tag clouds or tag sites (deli.cio.us), group accuracy and curiosity over time on Wikipedia, prediction markets, etc.

In our work, this is not so much a public capability as a structured reflection by a selected group of knowlegeable stakeholders. With such a group, we want to get at what they really think about certain key issues. This gets back to that first comment: in order to improve (...the product, the strategy, the work culture) you have to know how people react.

I just did a day-long conference for the Project Management Institute of Silicon Valley .. the issue was the maturity of the field. So one key action of the day was to gather the major challenges from the various participants about what they face in their various organizations. There were 12 tables of members, and each table entered their top issues into the software. We came up with 88 issues, and categorized these into 10 or so major theme areas. We got the tables to prioritize these themes and then to work for a while on one issue from one theme area, and enter their solutions into the respective section for one of the top 4 themes. We ended up with 15 specific ideas for addressing the top challenges from the group.

So this is the idea of gathering what the group is thinking about the key issue of the conference -- the main challenges in developing project management maturity, based on the combined real-world expereiences in many SIlicon Valley organizations, and focusing down on developing some shared solutions to the major issues. Using the collective intelligence of that diverse group to drive the improvement of the field... and doing this through interaction, iteration, drilling down to specifics that came from the group's thinking.

Collective intelligence plays out in the insect and animal worlds, and is described by swarm theory. How bees make a decision on moving to a new home, how ants determine who will do what jobs on a given day, how caribou deploy to move the herd away from a predator wolf -- in all these situations there is no leader or command center, yet the actions of each individual contribute to the survival and effectiveness of the group.

It is the collection and coordination of individual data and action, and interactions through a series of simple rules that give a group its intelligence. See the article by Peter Miller in National Geographic. And there are parallels to our work with collaboration.

Miller ties swarm theory to the use of collaboration for group intelligence, noting that collective processes in which brainstorm-and-voting or prediction markets are used result in accurate election predictions and effective search strategies (Google's ranking.) The wisdom of the group is wider and faster than just a group of "experts" (when the process is set up well.) He quotes Thomas Malone of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence: "It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago," says Malone. "No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we've been able to tap so far."

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. "None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign."

What can be done to work changes across whole systems?  How can change agents work with issues such as Dispersed Organizations and the Problem of Involvement, Working in Polarized and Politicized Environments, Working in Communities with Diverse Interest Groups, Working Cross-Culturally? These are titles of chapters in Bunker and Alban's Handbook of Large Group Methods.

A conference in late March at Bowling Green State University will address these challenges, using innovative formats for encouraging interaction among the 300 or so participants. Many Organizational Development thought leaders will be there, including Peter Block, Harrison Owen, Juanita Brown, Marv Weisbord, Diana Whitney, the above mentioned authors Barbara Bunker and Billie Alban... as well as many of the 60 authors of the Handbook for Change, edited by Peggy Holman, Tom Devane and Steven Cady.

The NEXUS for Change conference has an online website, which is built on GroupMind Express, so that collaboration can be built into both planning and publicity for the event. Check it out at www.nexusforchange.org.

There is a section on the site where we hosted a 90 min. conversation among thought leaders (Tom Atlee, Jean Bartunek, Nancy Badore, Peter Block, Harrison Owen and Marv Weisbord) and captured audience reaction, as well as graphic recording and blogging of the themes. You can even listen to the PodCast of the discussion.

 

Until February 26, you can download a free copy of Harvard Business Review's survey of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 here. It includes how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why, in an age that touts accountability, we need to beware of “accountabalism.”

The article includes research on tipping points and a review of issues involved in building successful networks.