I had a great day on Tuesday exploring a Community of Practice that has formed within a NSW local government council. This group call themselves the green champions and 40 representatives across the council participate to make sustainability an integral part of every staff member's daily activities. The aim is to 'show by doing'.

Some of the reasons it works: the CEO and elected leader openly advocate the group and provide legitimacy for its activities. This encourages managers to support the involvement of their staff. There is a small core group that work to tap into and unleash the Green Champions' passion for sustainability. Members of the group spoke about how the Green Champions allows them to make a difference, how they learn about sustainability and can take that home and into their personal lives (such as the school sustainability committee). Some of them have the opportunity to apply their formal qualifications in water, waste, energy management etc. Members described some of the key success factors as the informal nature of the group, how it can avoid some of the internal red tape to get things done, their opportunity to contribute ideas and see them actioned and how every area of the business is represented. The group like it that they are a little edgy and can push the boundaries to get things done.

An example of how the group makes a difference:

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What if a single warrior could have the knowledge of thousands?

Two weeks ago I gave an after dinner speech to the Australian Army Knowledge Management conference. Just before the speech I was introduced to the guy that has responsibility for running the Battle Command Knowledge System, which hosts CompanyCommand along with fifty other forums, Colonel Charles (Chuck) Burnett. I was a bit taken aback as I had a copy of CompanyCommand in my hand and was intending to use it as an example during the talk.

I was fortunate to spend some time talking with Colonel Burnett the next morning and he was very generous with his time. I was particularly interested to hear that one of his greatest challenges is continually justifying the value of the forums like CompanyCommand to his chain of command. Not that having to justify the value of a community of practice is a new thing; its just that having to justify the value of one of the most visible CoP success stories in the world seemed remarkable.

To tackle this, he conducted a survey last year to collect examples of how the communities of practice were making a difference. There were 2500 responses; problems overcome, mistakes avoided, money saved ... lives saved. The collected stories are now a key part of communicating the value of the CoPs (we have previously blogged about this technique here and here).

I will finish this post with a quote from the CompanyCommand book:

It became clear to me...that CompanyCommand.com was not about the website. Rather it was about a community of professionals sharing and learning in a fast-paced dynamic operational context; the technology simply enabled the process. In fact, the more I thought about and observed the...forum, the more I realised that the core technology of the forum was the people and the conversations, not the computer.

Now, I just need to wangle an invitation to the US Army KM conference in October this year ☺

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Last week I started a new Making Strategies Stick project with a large IT company. The guys I'm working with are the technical sales folk and as we were working out their strategic story they mentioned that the passion that was once there for their products seemed to be waning among some of their technical specialists.

These guys work closely with the sales people. The way they work together, however, varies dramatically from being merely instructed by the sales people to do demonstrations of the product (they call this being demo dollies) to working collaboratively as peers with the sales people.

I asked whether those who showed a lack of passion were also the ones treated as demo dollies. Th answer was yes.

Dan Pink has done a good job in his latest book, Drive, to show that there are three important factors that affect our motivation: purpose, mastery and autonomy. It seems that in this case those treated as demo dollies were losing their autonomy (and also unable to apply their mastery) and were losing the spark for the product. Collaboration (where collaboration is when peers work together to tackle complex activities--see our paper), on the other hand, provided all three factors.

Another good reason to get serious about collaboration in your business.

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Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith

I’m often the technology steward for communities of practice (CoP). I create the Ning spaces and configure ‘em, I setup the email lists, I work out whether we should have a wiki or a blog or a discussion forum or some other combination of communication technologies. As you can see I’m quite a geek: I really do love it.

And whenever I get stuck I’ll contact my friends at CPSquare: Etienne, Nancy and John. And while I know they all have a deep understanding of CoPs I tend to ask Etienne the theory questions, Nancy the technology questions and John the group dynamics questions. Together they are a formidable team. Sadly I think their new book, Digital Habitats, will give them strong cause to suggest I should RTFM: Read The Flipping Manual.

Digital Habitats (DH) has a single goal: to help the reader understand the role of technology steward in cultivating a community of practice: what is it, why you would do it, are you are cut out for it, how to do it and where to find help. But it is not a shoppers guide nor a roadmap for technology selection.

There is a lovely photo of Etienne, Nancy and John in the preface and I feel that reading DH is like have a friendly conversation with them on a sunny balcony. They provide the context, a little theory, then lots of practical tips supported by real life stories to ground it and make it memorable.

For me there are three ideas in this book I have already put into practice with great effect.

Experience shows us that all know that communities of practice are different, and sometimes poles apart. DH introduces the idea of community orientations to help us understand where the emphasis might lie and therefore what technologies make most sense.

There are 9 orientations: meetings, open-ended conversations, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community participation, serving a context. With my engineering communities, for example, I’ve asked the members where they see their current orientation and then ask them to identify where they would like to be. A community might start off very content focussed but realise that the real benefits will come from providing access to expertise. By understanding this orientation gap the technology steward can start introducing tools to facilitate the future orientation needs.

The second idea I find useful is how my friends (I was going to say ‘the authors’ but it didn’t feel right) describe the range of activities a community might be engaged in. The axis range from informal to formal and learning from to learning with. This diagram helps me ensure I’m thinking about the full range of possibilities when helping communities members design their CoP.

DH envisages three types of readers: deep divers, attentive practitioners and just do it-ers. The just do it-ers are directed to chapter 10 which contains an action notebook. It is a series of checklists to help you think about the role of the technology steward. What I love about chapter 10 is that I can jump in and start learning about the role by doing things and then come back to the descriptions contained in the rest of the book when it is more meaningful for me. DH makes the job of finding the relevant descriptions in the other chapters easy through a multitude of cross-links from chapter 10 to the relevant book section.

There are very few practical community of practice books available (I can think of 3 others) and Etienne has already had a hand in writing one of them. So Digital Habitats is a valuable addition to this exclusive club. It’s highly readable and practical and will definitely help make a difference to the quality of your technology support for your community of practice.

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On Tuesday I worked with three new communities of practice in a government agency. Each group was quite different but in all of them we talked about the things the groups should do first. I promised to send them ideas on conversations they might consider early on. Here is what I have come up with so far.

• Purpose: an important discussion early on is to determine the purpose of the group - why it exists. While many groups will have similar descriptions of their purpose (learning, tap into the organisation's knowledge in the domain, solve problems faster, standardise practices etc), each group needs to have this conversation.

• Knowledge Market: this process encourages participants to identify things they can offer (specific techniques, documents etc) and things they need to learn or need help with. This process can be done face to face or via teleconference. It helps the group build relationships and to start sharing their knowledge and expertise.

• Community Orientations: a concept developed by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith and described here. In this activity groups discuss the areas they will focus mostly on in the short term.

• Discussion tables. This activity is designed to get groups talking about the things they can do to improve their practice in the selected domain. In this conversation useful things to think about are things that will make the biggest difference for the domain and things that will make their work easier/better/more enjoyable/more rewarding.

What others are there?

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Technology can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The two technologies I've managed to turn back into friendly allies are email and Twitter. Until recently I had my email and Twitter open all day. As a result I was being interrupted (and quite frankly would interrupt myself) checking email and Twitter and posting messages. My productivity was going down the toilet.

I think it's useful to have an analogy to explain how to use a technology. I think of Twitter as like my virtual tea room or cafe. It's the place I go to hear the chatter about what's happening. I will tend to sit down with some friends (using Tweetdeck) while also looking forward to meeting someone new. I'll share some ideas and resources and ask people for their help, experiences and opinions.

The problem was that I was in cafe (socializing) mode all day long when I should have enjoyed this social space like I use to when I worked in an organisation, at 10.30am and 3.30pm.

So my new regime has been to only participate in Twitter at 10.30 and 3.30 (for about 30 minutes at a time) and in times when I've decided I'm going to just have some fun (evenings, weekends). This doesn't mean that I'm going full pelt at Twitter in each session. It just means I have a read and participate during these times.

And the same rule applies to email with one variation. I'll send emails and read emails throughout the day as part of getting things done, but I wont retrieve new emails except at 10.30 and 3.30.

As a result of this new approach to productivity I spend more time in my task manager (OmniFocus) picking off the next task and knocking it off.

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In the second half of 2007, Anecdote worked with the Knowledge for Regional Natural Resource Management (K4RNRM) project in Land & Water Australia (LWA) to develop a methodology for the 56 NRM bodies in Australia to develop knowledge and information strategies. The output is documented in the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK), a wiki that is now being used and maintained by practitioners from the regional NRM bodies. Much of the methodology is licensed from Anecdote based on our experience in developing knowledge strategies.

The idea behind the RKRK is that regional NRM bodies can use it to develop their own knowledge strategies. Some initial training is provided to the staff that help facilitate the process in each region, otherwise it is pretty self explanatory.

The RKRK has proven extremely successful, with many of the regional bodies having completed their knowledge strategies. The most recent news is that funding has been provided by the South Australian government for the eight regional bodies in South Australia to develop strategies using the RKRK process.

We think this is a pretty good example of public and private sector collaboration and are proud to have been part of this great initiative. We are in the process of updating the RKRK to ensure it reflects current practice. For any RKRK users from the NRM regions, we would love to get any feedback on RKRK usability and ideas for improvement (mark@anecdote.com.au).

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I've just uploaded the video of the presentation where you will see the embarrassing larger than life size portrait of me in my undies. Please skip over that part quickly.

Building a collaborative workplace using stories from Shawn Callahan on Vimeo.

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Here's my presentation (with audio) that I delivered to the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network (VPSCIN) yesterday.

I'm still trying to work out how to sync the audio with each slide. The Slideshare slidecast tool failed me so any help would be greatly appreciated. The main problem was that the blue beginning and end markers didn't appear when I selected a slide.

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Alex Pentland is a Professor at MIT. He's a pioneer in computational social science and Newsweek named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.

When I saw this video I was reminded of the conversation I witnessed between two engineers and the honest signals (Pentland's term for all those things we do that we do to show we are interested, care, are speaking expertly, etc.) It's 8 minutes and well worth watching, particularly the concept of honest signals. The reality mining ideas, however, gave me the heebie-jeebies. All I could think of was marketers trying to find out more about my buying patterns. But his last idea about how high performing teams oscillate between discovery tasks that are mostly individual and integration tasks that are social and face to face is an important finding for developing collaboration initiatives. This oscillation ideas is described some more here. I need to find out some more.

Thanks to Stephen Bounds on the ActKM list for the pointers to Alex's work.

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I am giving a presentation at the actKM monthly meeting on Tuesday 3rd March. The location is the National Archives of Australia in Barton. Arrive for drinks from about 5.15 pm with the presentation going from about 5.45 pm till 6.45 pm. Details are on the actKM website.

The title of the presentation is 'Collaboration....takes more than wishful thinking'. It will focus on the practicalities of developing effective collaboration cultures and skills with plenty of illustrations from our work with public and private sector organisations, both large and small, local and international.

I will describe the urgent need to build collaborative cultures and skills. Not just for our success internally, but also to ensure success with stakeholders, clients, suppliers and partners. This is particularly true when times are tough and our focus needs to be on making the most of available resources. 2009 will mark the tipping point where organisations will move from emphasising collaboration tools to placing the effort on people, on their behaviours and capabilities. We mustn’t forget: it’s people who collaborate.

If you are in Canberra next Tuesday then you are welcome to come along. No RSVP required.

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On that day when Adelaide's temperature reached 46.7C I was running a workshop for the spatial modelling and drafting community of practice. Their ritual is to have a BBQ for lunch, which seems a little crazy given the heat but that didn't stop us. We all retreated to air condition comfort to chow down on our lamb chops and snags.

Into my third bite I noticed an animated discussion between two of the engineers talking about their love for motor bikes. They'd worked out they both had an interest in German classics and one was describing a fuel tank issue he was having. Mid-conversation one of them jumped up to retrieve a motorcycle magazine to illustrate his point.

Then in an instant the conversation morphed into a description the magazine-wielding engineer was having with a fighter jet he was working on. He was facing an intractable maintenance issue that was causing him technical and political pain. They delved deeply into the issue. You could see that there was trust and respect in the conversation and this trust and respect was at least partially developed while discussing their hobby.

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It's a simple idea: if you have more promoters than detractors you can expect your business to thrive. This is the basis of the Net Promoter Score, a metric to give you a sense of how well your business is going.

When I first learnt about this single-question metric I was sceptical but then I had a coffee with Jon Smiles who had just finished a role with Orica (Australian chemical and mining services company). Jon told me how they used Net Promoter Score to transform their business unit's culture. Every three months they would survey and calculate their NPS and this would get everyone thinking about how they could make the place more attractive and compelling to their staff so they would not hesitate to recommend their company to colleagues and friends. By having a single score they didn't fall into the typical survey trap of thinking the results directed them towards a particular solution. Instead they were encouraged to use their own judgement and local smarts to develop initiatives. Imagine what they could have done if they combined this approach with using business narrative.

So I thought, "hey, I could use this to assess the health of communities of practice." But I will need to ask the typical Net Promoter Score questions from two perspectives:

• How likely is it that you would recommend the Acme Community of Practice to a colleague?
• How likely is it that your manager would recommend the Acme Community of Practice to their staff?

So last week I asked 17 members of a CoP I'm working with these two questions and here are the results.

  

The NPS for the members was 35%.

The NPS for what the members thought of how likely the managers would recommend the community was -53%. You can see that there is plenty of work to be done getting the managers on board. Our approach in building this community was to get it done under the radar and get some runs on the board. We've done that now so our next step is to tell our stories to the mid level managers and above.

Calculating the Net Promoter Score

Here is how you calculate NPS.

Count the number of respondents who scored 9 or 10. These are your promoters

Work out the percentage of promoters in the whole group.

Count the number of respondents who scored 0 through to 6. These are your detractors.

Work out the percentage of detractors in the whole group.

Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to calculate your Net Promoter Score.

According to Fredrick Reichheld (2003) the median NPS from over 130,000 surveys across a range of industries is 28%. Yet some of the best businesses have NPS of 70% or more.

It's hard to say that 35% is a good score for this CoP but it would be good for other communities to do a similar activity and see if we can compare. Just from experience of working with lots of different CoPs I would say this group is highly motivated and engaged. Whether we can compare NPS scores between CoPs is not a necessity. Most importantly this will give the leaders of this CoP a way to sample the mood of their community and inspire them to try new and interesting activities.

Reichheld, F. F. (2003). "The one number your need to grow." Harvard Business Review 81(12): 46-54.

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In the previous two posts (Shawn's on his forthcoming presentation and Chandni's about collaboration between Google and P&G) have used specific examples to illustrate how collaborative practices can add value to an organisation.

In many cases, the value of collaboration is difficult to articulate using numbers. We (not surprisingly I guess) strongly advocate that organisations systematically identify, collect and communicate their collaboration 'success stories'. Our experience is that these stories are critically important when the inevitable question gets asked about why we are investing in collaboration. We have developed a CoP Health Check and stories are a key part of this process.

A recent article in the Washington post (via Seth Kahn and the Working Stories list) describes how an Indian company has a 'chief belief officer' who uses mythology to help managers make meaning of their roles. A quote from the article is very relevant given the way many companies are reacting to the global financial crisis

He likens layoffs to the slaughter of cows, which Hindus revere as symbolizing life. "The standard Western management principle is 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it,' " Pattanaik said. "In our ethos, 'if you measure it, you destroy it.' "

We have blogged previously about the fallacy of the 'if you can't measure it ..." mindset previously. But for those with roles related to collaboration etc this can be a nervous time as companies look to shed staff to save money. Word on the street is that some of our friends have already been 'made redundant'. It might look good on the P&L, but it can also be like draining the life-blood out of organisations.

Stories help us communicate value when things can't be measured, and they are powerful tools in persuading people and changing their minds. As an example, some time ago, Rio Tinto produced a video on one of their success stories and made it publicly available (I notice it is now available on YouTube). We have used this video extensively as it provides a concrete example of how collaboration creates value and how communities of practice can operate. In late November, I met with a CEO who had been tolerating the creation of communities of practice in his professional services firm. I showed him the Rio Tinto video and his face lit up and he said "I get it. That's what I want. Why didn't I get shown this video years ago?"

So, if you have lots of metrics but not many examples it might be time to sniff out and articulate a few success stories.

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For years software vendors and consulting firms have been developing SAP software components for NSW government agencies and on-selling the same software to numerous other NSW government agencies. These practices are only possible in an environment where the government agencies do not collaborate. In 2008 these agencies got together to share how they were using SAP and worked on ways to collaborate on new government-wide developments. In the first few days of collaborating a tiny piece of code to change how invoices were handled was shared across multiple agencies—each of the receiving agencies saved $5,000 by sharing rather than reinventing. And some of the developments cost millions to develop. The potential benefits are staggering.

When times are tough it’s important to make the most of available resources. Organisations of all shapes and sizes have spent millions of dollars on ‘collaboration’ software yet the level of sophistication in the way we collaborate hasn’t improved dramatically. It’s time to be more systematic and effective collaborators and this starts with understanding what it really means and not fretting over the functionality of communication software, regardless of how alluring the latest web 2.x version looks. We need to build collaborative cultures and skills.

This presentation describes why collaboration matters now more than ever. It paints the picture of what we are up against but shines a light on what’s possible. And by understanding the different ways of working together and the different types of collaboration we can create a new mental model as our collaboration foundation.

Most of the presentation, however, will focus on the practicalities of developing effective collaboration cultures and skills with plenty of illustrations from our work with organisations like NSW Government, Rio Tinto, BAE Systems, and a sprinkling of examples from around the world.

The foundations are there. The software is available. The need is clearly here. 2009 will mark the tipping point where organisations will move from emphasising collaboration tools to placing the effort on people, on their behaviours and capabilities. We mustn’t forget: it’s people who collaborate.

When: Monday March 2, 12:00 - 2:00pm

Where: Treasury Theatre, Lower Plaza, 1 Macarthur St. East Melbourne

Light Refreshments provided

To RSVP click here

You might like to read our paper on collaboration as pre-reading.

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Google and P&G are both known for their innovation capabilities and strict internal policy. Driven by market forces, they made an exception. They swapped about two-dozen staffers who spent weeks dipping into each other's staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. This is terrific example of purposeful collaboration delivering results.

The Wall Street Journal reported that about a year ago, P&G's then global marketing officer, Jim Stengel, was concerned that one of the biggest initiatives in the company's laundry-soap history -- a switch to smaller bottles with a more concentrated formula -- didn't include enough of an online search-term marketing campaign. Google, on the other hand, was interested because they were keen to get a slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual ad pie. (Read full article here.)

The opportunity to collaborate generated many tangible benefits for both companies. And that's not surprising because a collaboration experience can improve the level of conversation, energise teams and have a positive impact on the bottomline. This example illustrates three ways that companies can profit from a simple collaboration program.

1. Identify missed opportunities

In April, when actress Salma Hayek unveiled an ambitious promotion for P&G's Pampers brand, the Google team was stunned to learn that Pampers hadn't invited any "motherhood" bloggers -- women who run popular Web sites about child-rearing -- to attend the press conference. "Where are the bloggers?" asked a Google staffer in disbelief, according one person present. ...With mommy-bloggers, Pampers was quick to follow Google's advice. After failing to invite any to its April Pampers press conference, in July it invited a dozen or so to visit P&G's baby division in Cincinnati. The bloggers claim to have drawn anywhere from one-hundred thousand to six million visitors to their Web sites.

2. Learn how to embrace change

The big question that P&G grappled with was "How does a brand morph from one-way to two-way communication with the consumer?"

One of the first results of the collaboration was an online campaign inviting people to make spoof videos of P&G's "Talking Stain" TV ad and post them to YouTube... In the end, of the 227 spoofs submitted, a handful were deemed good enough by P&G to air on TV. The campaign was successful enough that Tide plans to use more consumer-generated content in the future, P&G says.

3. Understand each others' language

Google job-swappers have started adopting P&G's lingo. During a session on evaluating in-store displays, a P&G marketer described the company's standard method, known as "stop, hold, close": Product packaging first needs to "stop" a shopper, Mr. Lichtig said. "Hold" is a pause to read the label, and "close" is when a shopper puts the product in the cart. Google's Ms. Chudy gasped. "This is just like our text ads," she said. The headline is the "stop," its description is the "hold" and the "close" is clicking through to the Web site. "This is going to get so much easier, now that I'm learning their language," she said.

External collaboration can have many advantages. The biggest being that it allows new ideas and disciplines to enter the organization, some (or most) of which challenge the status quo of practices, processes and the way the industry works.

Something to think about:

• How can you profit from collaboration?
• Who are the people you can invite to collaborate with?
• What will be your first step to getting started?

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When I was at IBM leading the software services group in Melbourne I suggested in one of our leadership meetings that we should introduce a set of group-based incentives. I was howled down and accused of being a communist. I'm not kidding. While I know fact, data and rationale alone cannot persuade someone to change their mind (and if not used carefully can reinforce the status quo - see the confirmation bias), I'd wish I'd known about this study described in Keith Sawyer's book, Group Genius.

Sawyer, K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York, Basic Books.

Wageman, R. (1995). "Interdependence and Group Effectiveness." Administrative Science Quarterly 40: 145-180.

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The beginning of the year is a good time to take stock of where things are going and try and get a handle on the macro trends affecting our work. For me that means enterprise collaboration in all its forms. Here are six major trends that will encourage leaders to take action and help their organisations to be even more collaborative.

Six global trends that encourage enterprise collaboration

1. Global financial crisis. Customers are tightening their belts in preparation for a tough year. Companies are looking for ways to reduce costs, and importantly for collaboration, this also means getting the most out of what they have already invested in. Sometimes this investment is in collaboration technology, which to my mind mostly under-performs because it's often implemented without supporting practices and processes. Mostly, however, the investment is in the salaries paid to their people who could become more productive with a systematic approach to team, community and network collaboration
2. Increasing speed of business. Things will continue to speed up and it looks like, despite the GFC, economic growth is likely. This means opportunities will appear and disappear in a flash. Competitors will appear from nowhere and only the fleet of foot will survive. But organisations cant move fast enough by merely building their own capabilities. They'll need to partner and collaborate to create new products and services faster than their competitors.
3. Rise of Gen Y. By some accounts Gen Ys make up a third of the population and are pouring into our workplaces. These guys expect to learn, to change, to have responsibility and they are already using a range of communication technologies to collaborate and expect similar capabilities in the workplace.
4. Information explosion. This trend has been in play for sometime and it doesn't look like slowing down. It's a fact of life: we will never know everything and the percentage of what anyone knows is diminishing. At the same time, as our next trend describes, problems are getting trickier, more intractable. The only way we will be able to make progress is to combine our collective intelligence to nut these tricky problems out.
5. Increased complexity. The world is getting more connected in all sorts of ways. We know more people, we visit more people, organisations are partnering, flights are increasing, information networks are getting more joined up and so it goes. When we increase the connections in a network things become more unpredictable. Small things in one part of the network can have a disproportionate impact in another part. There are no single rights answers in these situations. But groups of people can come together and work out initiatives to make progress. When things get complex, collaborate.
6. Outsourcing to Asia. Dan Pink observed that outsourcing to Asia is a solid trend. Last week I heard a good example of collaboration directly related to this phenomena. Sony has been outsourcing some of its customer service functions to a range of outsourcing companies in Asia. The people in each of the outsourcing companies thought it would make sense to get together to share what they knew about being a Sony customer service representative, so they establish a community collaboration initiative.

Are there other macro trends that will encourage or discourage collaboration?

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On January 16, 1920 the National Prohibition Act came into effect in the United States and all intoxicating liquor was banned, and so began the black market in alcohol. Even before the ban was set in place I'm sure racketeers had plans to take drinking underground and at the same time any chance of the authorities having influence of black market alcohol consumption evaporated.

Like the 1920s US legislators, organisations that are still deciding whether to allow of not allow applications like Facebook are harbouring the misguided belief that they can control the use of these technologies. There is a good chance that for any large organisation that hasn't already sanctioned the use of Facebook (or any of its social networking cousins) there are already a variety of Facebook groups about their company established, hosted and actively engaging their employees.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Kirsty Areki, who is the Global Collaboration Manager for Mars. Kirsty told me about a recent flight she had had and how the person sitting next to her managed a large call centre. The call centre manager felt he had to watch everyone like a hawke and things like Facebook would be just a terrible time waster. Kirsty suggested that for a mundane and stressful job like working in a call centre access to something like Facebook to keep in contact with family and friends would be a tremendous benefit. The most important step, Kirsty said, was to engage the call centre workers in deciding the rules of how Facebook could be used. That way the staff police themselves and pull into line anyone who abuses the benefit. No one would want to lose a perk like Facebook.

Mars support the use of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wikis. Some are official groups set up by the company. Many are generated as the need has arisen by whoever has the need.

There is one slight worry about the overuse of social software which was brought to my attention by Susan Greenfield this morning (podcast listening), which is encapsulated in the aphorism, "use it or lose it." We get good at what we practice (according to some it takes 10,000 hours of reflective practice to become expert in something) and the more time we spend online the less time we have to practice face-to-face dialogue, reading the emotions, dealing with difficult conversations, dealing with second by second uncertainty without time to craft a considered response. My feeling is that we are a long way off for this to be a problem and for me my online life only creates more opportunities for interesting face to face encounters. But I wonder about our children and how much time they are spending in front of computer and video screens.

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If you haven't discovered Twitter yet, here's a good introduction from the Common Craft show.

I've just started using Tweetdeck to keep track of the Twitterers I'm following. So far it looks great.

A few thoughts on Twitter.

It's a mistake to think Twitter is only for reporting the minute detail of one's life, which by the way is an important activity because it helps up create stronger social bonds. Twitter is also effective for asking questions and getting answers, sharing useful links on the web and getting those frustrations out when things are driving you nuts. But probably the best use of twitter, especially from a social bonding perspective, is for gossip. Now I don't mean malicious gossip but gossip used in its strictest sense of the term which means talking about someone when they are not in the conversation. This is much harder to achieve with Twitter because the convention is to refer to other Twitterers using their @userid, and this enables them to see what you have said. But I think this type of transparent gossip is a healthy practice and one I'm going to apply in my upcoming tweets.

If your looking to follow me on Twitter just follow this link.

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Today we've started to convert our whitepapers from pdf to their plain text equivalent so you can see the whole paper without downloaded the pdf version. The first one is Building a Collaborative Workplace .

You can now bookmark it with Delicious, annotate it with Diigo and we have also added the ability for any Anecdote post to be added to your Facebook, just click on the Facebook icon at the bottom of this post.

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Do you have a community of practice with members distributed around the country? Is your community deeply technical and use a suite of technical software tools to get the job done? So how do you keep track of who is doing what, or more importantly, who has done what, so you can get in contact with a fellow community member when you are about to embark on something similar?

A group of engineers I met yesterday had a simple approach. Each month the group's co-ordinator sends an email to all members asking them to write a short paragraph on the simulations they are working on, what parts of the software suite they're using, the type of modelling technique they're employing and when they expected to finish. Most importantly they include their name.

The report is sent to management creating the impetus for everyone to contribute. It's sent to all the members. The members store the reports in their email and when they start a new project they search through the reports to see who's done something similar.

I suggested they might create the report in a wiki and tag each entry with the type of modelling etc. so new members can see the history of reports they day they arrive. This valuable information is currently locked in people's email inboxes. The other advantage of using the wiki is that the co-ordinator can open the new report page in the wiki at the beginning of the month and members can start populating it with what they are doing, and by the end of the month the report is finished. This is also a great way to do newsletters.

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Is it collaboration when you’re sent the yearly performance review spreadsheet and instructed to assess your staff’s performance? Absolutely not; it’s an act of co-ordination. Everyone is working separately to achieve the overall goal of conducting the performance reviews. Only a modicum of trust is required (trust in the system) to get the job done.

So, is it collaboration when you meet with your team to work out the performance review process? Not quite. Here we are co-operating with our colleagues to deliver a task that we all know needs to be done. When we co-operate there is often a medium level of trust involved (trust in each other’s competencies and character), the value of the activity tends not to accrue directly to the participants co-operating and, in most cases, someone else is driving you to do it. [1]

So what is collaboration then? It’s when a group of people come together, driven by mutual self–interest, to constructively explore new possibilities and create something that they couldn’t do on their own. Imagine you’re absolutely passionate about the role that performance reviews play in company effectiveness. You team up with two colleagues to re-conceptualise how performance reviews should be done for maximum impact. You trust each other implicitly and share all your good ideas in the effort to create an outstanding result. You and your colleagues share the recognition and praise equally for the innovative work.

The important factor is mutual self-interest. When people create things they really want to create, and it is also good for the company, it energises and engages people like nothing else. Just ask Google, who have institutionalised collaboration by giving every engineer 20 per cent of their work week to spend on any project that takes their fancy.

Today most commentators conflate co-ordination, co-operation and collaboration under the single banner of ‘collaboration’. All three types of working together are important, but creating environments where collaboration (as we have defined it) happens creates a spark that will truly transform an organisation. The important skill is knowing when to collaborate, co-operate and co-ordinate.

When is the best time to collaborate?

When thinking about good times to collaborate, it’s useful to start with a simple model that helps us understand the nature of the types of issues we might encounter in an enterprise. Here I’ve illustrated the Cynefin (pronounced cun-ev-in) framework which categorises organisational activity into four domains [2]:

Simple: this is when there is a clear relationship between cause and effect. When you do X you always get Y, and no matter how many times you do X you get the same Y result. Organising the performance reviews is a good example. You can predict with confidence the end result of the activity. In these cases co-ordination can be used to great effect.

Complicated: this is when there is still a relationship between cause and effect but you have to put effort in working out that relationship and there is often a range of possible answers. This is the realm of experts who put in the effort working out these cause-and-effect relationships. Co-operation is effective in this domain because there is often a clear end goal in mind but you need the combined forces of a range of people to achieve it.

Complex: this domain is characterised by causes and effects that are so intertwined and intricate that things only make sense in hindsight. You hear people saying: “Ah, the reason that happened was because ...”, but if you rewind the tape of what just happened and play it again, you get a different outcome; rewind and play again, and yet another outcome. This phenomenon occurs because in complex situations everything is so interconnected that a small change in one part of the system can have inordinate impact somewhere else, and vice versa. The system is unpredictable in detail, yet we can discern patterns. Designing and implementing a new performance management approach is complex because, regardless of how much analysis we do before putting it into practice, we won’t know how it’s going to work in detail. It is in these complex situations that collaboration comes to the fore.

Collaboration works well for complex situations because the style of working collaboratively matches the nature of the issues that complex situations pose. Complexity is unpredictable, and collaborating is adaptable; complexity is messy – it’s difficult to work out the question, let alone the answer – and collaborating involves bringing together a diversity of people and talents to improvise and test possible approaches, all learning as you go. Complexity offers unique and novel conundrums, and collaboration draws on a deep foundation of trust to that fosters creativity and delivers innovations.

The last domain of the Cynefin framework is chaos. This is where it’s impossible to discern a relationship between cause and effect. The best approach in this domain is simply to take action. Paradoxically it really doesn’t matter which group style is used here, as any way of working will either create opportunities in the complex space where collaboration can take effect, or push the situation into the simple domain where a co-ordination approach is effective.

With the Cynefin framework as a guide, we can better align the type of group work with the nature of the issue at hand. Collaboration is not the best approach in every situation and let’s not fall into the trap of thinking of it as a panacea. Sometimes it’s simply more effective to issue a direction to get the job done when the job is simple or complicated. It’s when things are truly complex that collaboration is most effective, and the reality is that the world is becoming more connected, faster moving and therefore more complex by the minute. Collaboration will have a growing role to play in every organisation.

References

[1] Economist Intelligence Unit (2008). The role of trust in business collaboration.

[2] Snowden, D. J. and M. E. Boone (2007). "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making." Harvard Business Review November.

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Organizational silos can often become one of the biggest barriers to collaboration. You may have all the right intentions, collaboration could even be a strategic goal but something still prevents it from happening. Embedding the idea of collaboration as early as possible can make it really easy to build a collaborative culture. SEI seems to have taken that idea seriously.

When a new employee joins SEI, they are given a map and sent down to a storeroom on the lower floor of the main building. There, the employee is issued a chair and desk, both on wheels, with a computer and phone on the desktop. The map shows where in the complex of nine barn-like buildings on the corporate campus in Oaks, Pennsylvania, the new hire will initially be located. The employee then rolls the desk through the buildings, into the oversized elevators designed for this purpose, and past hallways filled with a provocative (and sometimes shocking) collection of contemporary art. In a large, open room (filled with similar desks on wheels), the employee finds the spot on the map, nudges neighboring desks aside and pulls down a thick, red wire that snakes down from the ceiling, containing computer, phone, and electrical connections. Once this “python” is plugged in, the company computer recognizes the new employee and routes calls or visitors to the location. Welcome to work.

The message from Day One is clear. This is an organization that is flexible, creative, and ready for constant transformation. The company is open and not hierarchical.

Desk-on-wheels is a small thing in workplace design which can have a big impact on how people think about teamwork. This case study identifies two excellent benefits of collaboration:

• Flexible teams can break the traditional silos and bring together the diverse players needed to spark creativity and execute innovations.
• With greater interaction of employees, decisions can be made more quickly, which increases efficiency and effectiveness.

West A., Wind Y., 2007, Putting the Organization on Wheels: Workplace design at SEI, California Management Review; Vol. 49 Issue 2, p138-153.

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Humans have a strong sense of fairness. If two people are given a sum of money and one is asked to divide it and offer the other portion to their partner, if it's not a 50/50 split the partner is most likely to refuse offer, even if this means that both parties loose everything. And of course when it's hard to really to split something exactly down the middle (like a piece of chocolate forest cake) then the you-cut-I-choose method is the only fair approach. Interestingly if a computer makes the split people are most likely to accept whatever proportion that's offered. We don't expect computers to be fair. So don't fall for the lame excuse of, "the computer says no." They're just playing with your psychological foibles.

This sense of fairness has a strong bearing on how we rate our satisfaction with our collaborators, and therefore the collaboration's long-term success. We care more about the process of fairness than the outcome. In one study of car dealers and their relationship with the car manufacturer, the biggest factors in satisfaction were not the transactional details of inventory quality or how good a deal they were getting but how the manufacturer behaved towards the dealer. Did they take the time to learn about their unique operation and market, were they treated with respect, were they polite and well mannered?

Small things can make a big difference. In the middle of this year we started a project for a client and like for all of our clients we offer a 10% discount if the full amount is paid before we start (it usually happens about the same time as we start). This client took advantage of this discount but somewhere along the way our invoice was lost in their system and we were a month into the project without payment. I mentioned this to our client and he was embarrassed and immediately offered to pay the additional 10% because his company didn't fulfil their end of the bargain. Immediately our rapport was strengthened.

Treating everyone fairly is not just the right thing to do, it will determine the long-term success of your collaboration.

I was reminded of the money splitting experiment this morning reading Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behaviour. They also tell the car dealer story. It's an excellent little book. Here are the papers describing the research.

Guth, W., R. Schmittberger, et al. (1982). "An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3: 367-88.

Kumar, N., L. Scheer, et al. (1995). "The Effects of Supplier Fairness on Vulnerable Resellers." Journal of Marketing Research 32: 54-65.

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Scientists in Iowa recently reported a breakthrough discovery. They successfully identified the gene (PRICKLE1) which when mutated causes epilepsy. There's two things amazing about this discovery

• PRICKLE1 is unique in that it has never been associated with any other disease.
• The project involved two dozen institutions across 6 countries and collaboration played an important role.

Dr Bassuk (the lead author) found that whether on-campus or international, collaboration was essential to the success of the research study.

"By sharing and analyzing data sets, we realized there was a common mutation in the PRICKLE1 gene in the family members with this form of epilepsy," Bassuk said.

To verify that the mutation might be related to the epilepsy, the team needed to test it in an animal model. This next step to find a suitable animal model involved a surprising coincidence: Bassuk, who had only recently joined the UI, realized through online research that the PRICKLE1 gene in zebrafish had been previously identified by another University of Iowa researcher, Diane Slusarki, Ph.D., associate professor of biology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"I walked across the river to Diane's side of campus, and we designed an experiment to test the human mutation in the zebrafish," Bassuk said. It was 'Iowa luck.'"...

"We never could have done, or could continue to do this type of research, with just one person thinking about it," he said. "From the clinicians who found and took histories on the study participants, to antibody testing at Stanford University to DNA shared from colleagues in Japan, the study required a lot of collaboration and coordination..."

Read full story here.

What is it that makes it easy for scientists to collaborate?

• Passion or an area of expertise they are identified with
• Dealing with the unknown - so you know you don't have all the answers
• Knowing who would be interested/can be contacted
• Ability to connect easily - they all have profile pages these days and publish their work

Are there other factors?

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Last Friday I ran a workshop for a client on collaboration. I emphasised collaborative practices and behaviours and at one point I introduced the idea of gaining agreement from their team to "call me on it." As I was describing this idea I noticed a woman sitting up the back shaking her head, her face flushed with annoyance. So I stopped and asked if she would like to make a comment.

"There is no way in the world I could ever call my boss on anything, let alone his behaviour," she said. "Can you tell me exactly how you would do that?"

Before I could answer she continued by saying, "I once told my manager he was behaving badly and in the end I had to resign."

At the end of the workshop I was thinking about what this woman said and how one memorable experience created a belief so strong that it precluded a set of strategies for better collaboration. She was describing what Umberto Eco calls our background books: the stories we tell ourselves that enable and disable us.

I could see where she was coming from and I imagine that her encounter with her manager might have been like my equally unsuccessful one with a branch manager a decade ago. I was working for a management consulting company in Canberra and was one of the first eight employees in the branch. We grew in size and when the first set of leadership roles were announced my name was missing from the list. I was furious. I dwelt on it for about a week without mentioning my fury to anybody at work until one day I was in the office kitchen and the branch manager waltzed in.

"I can't believe was you did. Don't you think I'm good enough for a leadership role?" I blurted out.

And before he could answer I stormed out of the kitchen.

I'm not proud of what I did. And it did spell the end of my time with that company. But looking back at that incident I realise now that I wasn't equipped with the skills to have that conversation. I was unaware of how to conduct a meaningful dialogue and keep the conversation going. Happily things have changed and now I have the privilege of helping others learn these fundamental collaboration practices.

Here is a story told by Umberto Eco illustrating his point about background books.

"All medieval tradition convinced Europeans of the existence of the unicorn, an animal that looked like a gentle and slender white horse with a horn on its muzzle. Because it was increasingly difficult to come upon unicorns in Europe (indeed, according to analytic philosophers, they do not exist, although I am note sure I agree), tradition decided that unicorns were living in exotic countries, such as the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia.

When Marco Polo travelled to China, he was obviously looking for unicorns. Marco Polo was a merchant, not an intellectual, and moreover, when he started travelling, he was too young to have read many books. But he certainly knew all the legends current in his time about exotic countries, so he was prepared to encounter unicorns, and he looked for them. On his way home, in Java, he saw some animals that resembled unicorns, because they had a single horn on their muzzles, and because an entire tradition had prepared him to see unicorns, he identified these animals as unicorns. But because he was naïve and honest, he could not refrain from telling the truth. And the truth was that the unicorns he saw were very different from those represented by a millennial tradition. They were not white but black. They had pelts like buffalo, and their hooves were as big as elephants’. Their horns, too, were not white but black, their tongues were spiky, and their heads looked like wild boars’. In fact, what Marco Polo saw was the rhinoceros.

We cannot say Marco Polo lied. He told the simple truth, namely, that unicorns were not the gentle beasts people believe them to be. But he was unable to say he had found new and uncommon animals; instinctively, he tried to identify them with a well-known image. Cognitive science would say that he was determined by a cognitive model. He was unable to speak about the unknown but could only refer to what he already knew and expected to meet. He was a victim of his background books."

Eco, U. (1998). Serendipities: Language and Lunacy . London, Phoenix. pp 71-72.

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One of the things people find most valuable about our Building a Collaborative Workplace workshop is that it gives them a good solid understanding of what makes collaboration possible and some practical ideas on getting started.

Most people are web 2.0 savvy. They use or know someone who uses a set of tools to share information - social bookmarking, google docs, blogging, wikis, and so on. Yet there are the few for whom communication starts and ends with email.

Here's a list of 9 collaboration tools you can introduce your colleagues. These Common Craft videos make it easy to explain and so much fun to watch. And people really get it.

• Blogs
• Podcasting
• RSS
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Media
• Social Networking
• Google docs
• Twitter
• Wikis

Some more ideas:

• Here's a list of the top 100 learning tools available so you have more choice


• If you have a tight budget and minimum IT support, try Collab.io. It's quick and easy to use.

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Google is considered synonymous with innovation. How do they create the conditions for people to do great work? It can't simply be a result of this.

I saw Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) talk on the Nature of Innovation. Excellent 3 min video.

It's interesting that at Google, people do not sit in business units silos. The environment fosters innovation through cross team interaction. What he said toward the end sums up quite well the conditions necessary for innovation.

"If people understand the values of the company, they should be able to self organize to work on the most interesting problems. And if they haven't, or not able to do that then you haven't talked to them about what's important. You haven't built a shared value culture."

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Organisations need simple ways to create a common understanding about what needs to be done. Our collaboration framework aims to provide two perspectives: the dashed oval represents the collaboration environment—the container that enables (or disables) collaboration within and between organisations; and a simple process reminding us that in business we must collaborate with a purpose, starting with business needs and resulting in outcomes.

I'll leave the elements of the collaboration environment for another post but let me describe the process.

Business needs—it's easy to say yes to collaborations. At first blush they are exciting and hold tremendous promise. Successful collaborations, however, require considerable effort from all parties (if this is not the case you are probably co-operating or co-ordinating) and for this reason you must be confident that the effort supports your strategy. Having a strategy helps you say 'no' and for those collaborations you create ensuring they're aligned with your strategy (personal and/or business) will create confidence that the effort will be worthwhile.

It's also important to know whether your potential collaborators have a strategy and that the new collaboration is aligned to it because if it isn't there is a good chance that when things get tough they will abandon ship.

Find—Effort is required finding collaborators which means seeking them out and helping them find you. Your ability to find collaborators has a lot to do with your personal network and probably the simplest technique is to tell people what you are interested in and that you don't have all the pieces of the puzzle. You friends, colleagues and acquaitences will suggest collaborators—business matchmakers setting you up for a blind date. So networking is a key skill. The flip side involves doing things so people can find you and what you are interested in. Can people find you on Google? Is your work well known? Are you doing good work that will attract collaborators. Do you have an attractive demeanour?

Connect—You have to spend time getting to know your collaborators beyond the superficial understanding of title, career highlights and business ambitions. Eating together seems important. And sharing experiences beyond what's merely required to get the job done. You need to know your collaborators care about you. A few weeks back I started a new collaboration with a graphic facilitator Jock MacNeish. He was heading off on a trip to Italy with his wife and before he left I mention that my wife had to spend a couple of days in hospital. A week after Jock left for Italy I received a postcard from him passing on his best wishes for Sheenagh and hoping all was well. It was a small gesture that meant a lot.

Create—This is where value is created from the collaboration: when you create something together. During this time a range of personal skills are needed: how to keep the collaborators in dialogue even when the conversation is tense; how to break out of established patterns of thinking and behaving to create something new; how to apologise when you stuffed up (here are seven personal skills I think are important for collaboration).

Business results—Finally how do assess the impact of your collaboration? This will depend on what you are working on. In some cases you will have the benefit of being able to measure your impact in terms directly relevant to the business (increased revenue, lower cost, lower risk, greater profit) but in many cases you will need to take an indirect route. Narrative techniques such as Most Significant Change or our Three Journey's approach can be applied as effective evaluation techniques.

Lynda Gratton from the London Business School recently conducted an investigation of 55 organisations to learn about the behaviours that made the greatest impact on building a collaborative culture. In her Harvard Business Review article she and her co-author list eight. There were two that stood out for me:

• Leaders who modelled collaboration had collaborative organisations
• HR departments had the biggest impact on collaboration if they provided skills training in collaboration and fostered informal learning communities

We are seeing Gratton's findings playing out here in Australia in that we are currently busy conducting collaboration skills training for organisations, mentoring leaderships teams and continuing our work to foster communities of practice.

Gratton, L. and T. J. Erickson (2007). "8 Ways to Build Collaborative Teams." Harvard Business Review November: 101-109.

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Collaboration is often hard and it takes time—time to build the relationships, time to clear up misunderstandings, time to listen and time to get things done. We do it because collaboration enables us to do bigger and better things.

So in selecting a partner to collaborate with (this could be an individual or an organisation) you will want to make sure there is sufficient energy and persistence to invest the time needed for the collaboration to work. One way is to understand your collaborator's business strategy, starting with whether they even have one, and ensuring your collaborative effort helps them achieve their objectives while achieving your own.

In the euphoria of a new collaboration, however, everyone will tell you what you want to hear, so seek out evidence of their business strategy rather than merely rely on what you are being told. And be totally open and honest about these things at the outset because getting your objectives aligned will provide a solid foundation for all the great work you will be doing together.

And if you really want to inject some reality into the partnership from the outset, try running a pre-mortem.

Thanks to Frank Wyatt for sparking these thoughts in our conversation this morning.

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Last week Mark and I agreed to each develop a plan detailing how we were going to meet our targets. I opened up Excel and created a spreadsheet showing the number of days I was working with each of my clients. Mark opened Word and eloquently wrote how he was going to achieve his objectives. We both knew what a plan looked like. We just had two different visions of what plan looks like. We lacked common ground.

Patrick Lambe's recent blog post set me off on this train of thought about how effective teams share common ground. Team members must have a good understanding of what their colleagues mean and a good idea of what they will do. Both comes from working with our colleagues, asking questions and requesting examples that illustrate what is meant. In fact this propensity to second guess our colleagues and infer their motives (sometimes called Theory of Mind) is a signature characteristic of humans that is likely to have resulted in our species collaborating in the first place and through this collaboration outsmarting our stronger, faster and more deadly predators.

But concrete understanding of concepts like 'common ground' or 'planning' is unlikely to emerge from an abstract explanation of the terms. It comes from first hand experience, and when you can't get that, from stories, examples that illustrate in detail what's meant.

Patrick points out that common ground must be cultivated or maintained, much like my grandfather's obsession with keeping his carrot patch weed free. Periodically teams must work to repair or re-establish common ground because people change, views change, and what's happening around us shift and warp.

Did you know that US fighter pilots decide whether to follow the instructions of their weapons director based on how competent the weapons director sounds as they barking commands on the communication channel? Common ground can be a life and death proposition. Bringing this idea back to business, have you ever thought how you come across in a teleconference? How competent do you sound? This concept of common ground has been well thought through by Gary Klein, the famed psycholgist and decision making specialist and in this video Patrick interveiws Gary (I was impressed by the two camera production and editing). They not only explore the concept of common ground but I suspect they are also creating it for themselves (this video is 20 minutes).

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One of our clients is a large engineering firm (perhaps Australia's largest) and I've been working with them over that last 12 months helping to establish some communities of practice. Our first one focussed on technical draftsmen and is off and running well. Their domain is well defined, they have good participation and have developed a strong rhythm of activity. From the outset I've encouraged them to collect their stories of success such as the one about how the members designed and delivered a three-hour course on diagram naming and part number databases (to the uninitiated this sounds prosaic, but part numbers is a massive issue for engineers). They've run it three times and it has been a resounding success.

The other community of practice has a sprawling domain: engineering. I tried to advice against such a broad domain because it fails the basic identity test where I ask whether people stand up proudly and say, "I am an engineer." It turns out they are more specific than that. They are mechanical engineers, print circuit board engineers, or electronic simulation engineers, to name just a few of the possibilities. So this CoP has limped along and today the core team sat down to redesign the approach.

After a good discussion we identified two technical sub-groups in the engineering community that we could focus on: print circuit board designers and another group that uses a particular systems analysis tool. The third group was role based and while we didn't pinpoint the exact engineering role to focus on we recognised that there were roles like project engineer and engineering manager who might value learning from their colleagues. This role-based community also enables the broader engineering-related issues to emerge while also keeping the conversations lively and relevant to the participants.

This might be obvious to the many CoP experts out there but we learned today that you can overly focus on technical groupings to establish CoPs and forget about role-based groupings. In this case there's still a strong desire to maintain a broad engineering-wide domain but we will foster the CoP by focussing on specific sub-groups and over time look for ways to connect these groups.

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It's easy to talk about what collaboration is or is not or the types of collaboration. What's difficult is to change your practices (read behaviours) to improve your chances of an effective collaboration. Here are seven personal skills that we all need to master to give collaboration a chance.

1. How to apologise
2. How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator's feelings
3. How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue
4. How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator
5. How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action
6. How to tell and elicit stories
7. How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration

What are some of the fundamental characteristics of a great collaboration? And how does my list of seven stack up against your experience?

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New research has shown that we notice popular people and don't notice unpopular people. OK, so we probably didn't need research to tell us that but Cameron Anderson and Aiwa Shirako were investigating how reputations form and Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily describe the results this way:

It turns out that your reputation for cooperativeness is only affected by your behavior if you're already popular. If you're not popular, it appears that no one takes notice of your behavior, so it has no impact on your reputation. People with lots of social connections can build a good reputation -- or a bad one -- with much more ease than people with few social connections.

So for those people doing social network analyses spotting all the connectors you should also be providing these hubs with a warning: it's true you are in a great place to build your reputation but also equally good place to tear it apart.

Cameron Anderson, Aiwa Shirako (2008). Are individuals' reputations related to their history of behavior? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (2), 320-333 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.320

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Lend Lease has pretty good lineage when it comes to innovative practices on the KM front. Their iKonnect program started in 2000 and is a great KM success story. I chatted with some of the KM folk at Lend Lease late last week and wasn't surprised to find that they are still coming up with the good ideas. Our whitepaper on collaboration suggests that collaboration can't be left to chance and that someone (a collaboration coordinator?) needs to be responsible for it. It turns out that Lend Lease put in place a role called 'Knowledge and Collaboration Manager' long before we articulated it in the whitepaper. Their building is also pretty cool - featuring a four storey sandstone wall integrated into the building design. The photo shows the ground floor and its meeting areas (more photos here). The Lend Lease floors feature open work spaces, meeting pods that jut out into the atrium for communal activities and shared kitchens, and a chill/meet zone on the perimeter for quieter meetings and activities. The design emphasised sustainability, heritage conservation, energy efficiency and collaboration. There was also really good feel to the place.

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Today I have a short column in SMH on the theme of team and community collaboration for small to medium enterprises.

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Our recent whitepaper ' Building a Collaborative Workplace' is generating some interest. An edited version was published in BRW last week and last night I had a new experience when interviewed live on Sky Business Channel 'Money Makers' program. I haven't seen the interview yet (other than experiencing it live) and am looking forward to finding someone who taped it.

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A couple of years ago we helped the Australian Army establish three communities of practice around these domains: doctrine, urban warfare and air manoeuvre. In the process of intentionally helping these communities get established we created the conditions for an unexpected community to arise: a community of spatial modellers.

The spatial modellers created massive simulations of combat forces and were a group of people distributed around Australia. It was difficult to share their models however because of restrictions places on the Defence email system. So when we made available a Lotus-based collaboration environment available they discovered they could use it to share their models. It started with model sharing and then online discussions started and before we knew it they were an active community of practice.

I was reminded of this experience reading Clay's book and his story of how Meetup (something I have been using for a number of years) works to create new Meetup groups. Members can search for a topic, such as storytelling, and express an interest in joining a group when it exists. When enough members show an interest someone might be inspired to create a new group.

Organisations should take a similar approach. Yes, keep developing intentional communities of practice and use them to also create the conditions for new communities to emerge on their own. You might be surprised to find that the emergent ones being more successful, but of course in a complex space there is no way of knowing which ones will succeed of fail. Just don't kill off the opportunity of good things happening under their own steam.

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Today a modified version of our paper on collaboration appears in the BRW (Business Review Weekly). I'm pleased to see the mainstream business press is taking collaboration, in all its forms, seriously.

If you have discovered Anecdote for the first time and want to learn more about our views on collaboration take a look at the following:

• our expanded paper on collaboration
• a paper on community collaboration
• a plethora of links to things we have written on collaboration
• how we tackle change--getting collaboration happening in an organisation is a change project

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Cory Doctorow made the observation,

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

I was reminded of this insight, which I gleaned from Clay Shirky's new book, on this morning's conference call with my CPSquare pals. We were talking about the Web2.0 and Communities workshop we just delivered and towards the end of the conversation I suggested we should pose the question, "What would our workshop be like if we didn't use teleconferences?" with the thought that a provocative question might generate conversation. It did. Bev Trayner jumped in straight away making it clear that asking a question like that was old thinking. Bev had previously made the excellent point that the tools we use to design the workshop would be most likely be the tools we would get the participants to use but somehow this segued into thinking I was being overly focussed on getting the design right rather than jumping in and just doing it (I didn't think I was being prescriptive). Hopefully Bev will see this post and eleborate on her perspective because I'm sure I didn't understand fully and I sense Bev was making a tremendously important point.

I agree with Cory and Clay, content such as questions, video, pictures, opinions, stories are both triggers for conversation and part of the conversation and it's the conversations that create value. That's where the new ideas emerge, the improvements are made and relationships are forged. Conversations create capacities. So that's why I get frustrated when companies latch on to the idea of capturing content but are unwilling to foster conversations around it. It's not like we don't know how to do it. There are some terrific models on the web such as Channel 9.

Last year I posted about Channel 9, which is a site for Microsoft technologist to watch videos featuring Microsoft employees talking about their products and then thousands of community members conversing online about the videos. Just having a look this morning this site has grown and now offers other community tools such as a wiki, forums and places for members to try things out.

And of course, we can even have conversations without technology.

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I've mentioned Howard's work before but I thought you might enjoy his TED video.

It is worth noting that one of our commenters, Cathy Wilkinson, points to some research that shows that the tragedy of the commons scenario (a topic in Howard's talk) is not the inevitable result multiple parties using the same resource without rules to share it.

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Collaborative conversations are characterised by people building on each other's ideas, one idea sparking another. I saw a good example last week while helping a group design some small interventions they could experiment with in their organisation to improve communications. The conversation went something like this:

"We could do a 10 minute spot at the Friday afternoon drinks."

"Yeh, good idea. Could we do that in Melbourne and Hobart?"

"They don't really do drinks like the Sydney guys."

"Perhaps we could video the presentation."

"And then we could put that on our intranet. Everyone could see it then."

"In fact there are lots of things we could video. What about the CEO's blurb at the induction."

So what started out as a presentation at Friday night drinks ended up being an initiative to collect useful things for people to watch on video on the intranet. And this idea is destined to evolve as they try it out and adapt. This is the essence of making progress in complexity.

But collaborative conversations can run into a brick wall. When ideas dry up we need a new way of thinking about the topic at hand. This is where analogies (and metaphors) come in handy.

First a quick reminder of what we mean by an analogy. An analogy is when we say something is like something else. For example, this organisation is like a summer holiday, everyone is relaxed and has fun (I have to admit to never having the opportunity to use this analogy). A metaphor is when you infer a comparison by describing something else. This organisation is a summer holiday is a basic example. Saying a conversation hit a brick wall is another example of a metaphor.

In collaborative conversations an analogy provides a new frame for thinking about a problem. Take our mini conversation about videoing things to put on the intranet. Someone might say the idea is a bit like a short film festival (an analogy) which in turn might get the group thinking about showings in multiple venues, judging panels, film genres, producers and directors. All these features of a short film festival can provide new ideas for the intervention.

So to be a good collaborator we need to have a repertoire of analogies at our disposal. So how do we do it?

The first thing is to increase the variety of experiences you have. A short film festival analogy will lack richness or might not even occur to you if you've never been to one. But simply doing heaps of new things is not enough because you can't do everything. So the second best way to is to hear, read, experience stories. History is full of great analogous source material. Business models and ways of doing things in other industries is another tremendous source. I guess the simple advice is to be interesting. Russell Davies has some good ideas.

But you can't stop there. Experience without some form of mindfulness is unlikely to stick with you in a way that you might remember when grasping for an apt analogy. If you want to remember something, tell yourself a story about it that you can picture in your mind, smell, taste and hear.

This idea of an analogy repertoire is a new thought for me and I'm still working out how one might expand this capability. Any suggestions out there?

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Smart people hate being told what to do. In many of our projects we see the 'head office pattern' where HO is seen as a sort of 'Big Brother' (in the Orwellian sense) and not really trusted. This can often be caused by HO wanting to control things and, often unintentionally, alienating the very people they are seeking to influence. "We want people to work more collaboratively, and here's how we want you to do it!" Of course, if HO wants to see more collaboration across the organisation, they must behave in a collaborative manner and not impose their will in the expectation of compliance.

The following is a microcosm of the HO pattern.....

In 2005 I was working in a change project. The project team were the 'head office' representatives. One of the team asked for my feedback on a meeting agenda he was putting together for a group of key business stakeholders. I read the first bullet point on his PowerPoint slide and told him ... "if I received this from you I wouldn't attend".

He was taken aback till I explained that his first bullet point was 'to agree on the XYZ model' and that he had obviously made up his mind what he wanted to do and he appeared to be planning to spend the meeting trying to convince people that what he had already decided was correct. I suggested he change the agenda item to read 'discuss the pros and cons of adopting the XYZ model'. He immediately understood that this creates an entirely different mindset and he later reported that the meeting was quite productive.

To tackle the head office pattern we need to be constantly aware of our language, motivations and most importantly, our behaviour. Get your messages proof-read, 'call' the 'head office mindset' when you see it and think about what you are trying to achieve and whether it is genuine. If it isn't genuine, be assured that your stakeholders will notice even though they mightn't say anything about it.

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They are all written by single authors. Is it too difficult to write a book collaboratively?

By the way, the first and third books are excellent. Evan Rosen promises to talk about culture but spend most of his time talking about technology.

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"Not that old chestnut" I hear you cry.

We have written a whitepaper on this subject and blogged on it a few times. It keeps the KM list serves across the planet pre-occupied for a few months each year.

I recently had coffee with a client to get an update on the implementation of the knowledge strategy we did for them a while back. The client described good progress in many areas but highlighted one of the things holding them back was the continuing confusion/uncertainty about the difference between information management and knowledge management. This was despite an extensive education campaign to get a consistent 'language' in place across the organisation on order to minimise the roadblocks to implementation.

This reinforced to me that we should just stop 'pushing the proverbial up a hill' on this one. My suggestion to the client was to stop talking about knowledge management. It is much easier to grasp concepts like 'better information management' on the one hand, and 'improved collaboration and learning' on the other. This conception makes it much clearer that there is a big 'people' and 'process/practice' component to the task.

Knowledge strategy = Information Management + [Collaboration and Learning]

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A few weeks ago, about the time of the 2020 Summit, I met with Dave Pollard at the Athenaeum Library on Collins Street. Dave was visiting from Canada. I've been a long-time reader of his blog and was excited by the prospect of finally meeting him face to face. As serendipity would have it Michael Sampson (Sharepoint collaboration guru) was also in town (from New Zealand) and joined us.

When you meet a person for the first time and you know there is plenty of things to talk about, the standard one hour meeting makes no sense yet I'm surprised how few people make time for longer conversations. Dave, Michael and I talked for 3-4 hours and it was only in the last couple of hours we got into the juicy topics. Yeh, yeh, I hear everyone saying, "We're soooo busy," but you know what, you need to make time for great conversations. The time excuse is our defence mechanism so we can say no to requests. How many times have you seen people greet each other with the words, "how're going? Real busy! Me too. Do you want to get a coffee? Sure?"

Well, I see something we talked about inspired a new post from Dave on his vision for how we might work in 2020. I'm glad to see it is filled with stories and concepts of collaboration.

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One of our regular commenters, ken, has directed me to an interesting article in the Washington Post equating Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton's race for the Democratic nomination to the classic tragedy of the commons scenario. That's when the individual actors operate to maximise their self interest and in the process ruin things for the wider group.

Here's how the tragedy of the commons (TOTC) scenario played out for a group of people playing the role of timber companies.

He asked volunteers to play the role of timber companies in a forest. The volunteers were told they could harvest a certain number of acres each year, and were also told how quickly the forest could replenish itself. The question was whether volunteers -- thinking on their own and without discussions with other volunteers -- would restrict themselves to taking less than half the timber that they were allowed. If everyone did this, the forest would replenish itself in perpetuity, creating the greatest wealth in the long term.

But because the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists -- and the forests perished anyway.

Unfortunately TOTCs are played out in organisations everyday, especially by managers who haven't worked out that their role is to help their staff succeed. And this problem is being exacerbated by the trend of people moving from one job to another and only sticking around for the short term. This is a problem because TOTCs are only avoided if people are working for the longer term.

the only way to prevent tragedies of the commons is to set up structures in advance that reward long-term thinking and punish short-term selfishness. This happens mostly among competitors who share long-term interests and have social relationships of trust (emphasis added): If you and I are Maine lobstermen, we are likely to agree to set up limits on the overall catch each year because we see our future, and our children's future, inextricably linked. In the absence of trust and long-term relationships, the only way to prevent these tragedies is to have an outside regulatory agency step in to establish -- and enforce -- limits.

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Hugh Macloed is a master with social objects. He draws at the back of business cards!

Here's two of his recent creations, so cleverly done for Microsoft.

It's a fun way to get people talking about collaboration.

And this one brings out the importance of a good conversation and good storytelling skills. We're all human after all and that's what brings us together.

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After writing our paper on collaboration there were several things we wanted to explore that just wouldn't fit into the original work. We are interested in when it's unhelpful to collaborate, examples of when collaboration has failed, and how collaboration differs from similar terms such as co-operation and co-ordination.

So on the question of cooperation vs. collaboration I decided to phone a friend, well Skype chat some friends, and get their gut response to the question:

What do you think is the difference between cooperation and collaboration?

Now please remember that each person had no time to consider their response. It's right off the top of their heads. Despite that caveat I think we got some excellent insights.

Here are the responses.

Mary Alice Arthur

Cooperation = working together so both of our needs get served. Collaboration = working together to create something/a higher outcome together.

Luke Naismith

Initial gut reaction is that cooperation is more shallow / surface level than collaboration which is a bit deeper - more about a shared meaning and purpose with smarts, more strategic / tactical rather than (co)operational. Other gut reaction is that it involves using technology - synonymous between web 2.0 and collaborative technology. never hear of cooperative technology. Sort of like the difference between wiki/blog shared conversation (KM) and supply chain logistics and e-commerce (IM). Fuzzy boundary though.

Dave Snowden

I think the only thing that I would add on reflection that collaboration implies that there a a "product" of some type at the end (and not an abstract one)

However as I said (and as is implied in the paper on a skim read) I think there is far too much emphasis placed on the individual and individual behaviours when people talk about this, and not enough about relationships and interactions per se. Social Atomism v Communitarianism, its one of the basic divides

Jim Benson

Amino acids cooperate to break down meat in my stomach.

I cooperate with a bunch of people in del.icio.us to create a massive pile of tagged information.

But I would collaborate with you on tagging specific documents for a book project.

Wilfulness and focus are key factors

Cooperation costs $125 an hour. Collaboration costs $350 an hour.

Victoria Ward

Some loudthinking. My daughter and I try to cooperate with each other about leaving the bathroom clean. I need her cooperation in certain respects and she needs mine. We are about to collaborate on arranging the financing for her university arrangements. Collaborator of course has undercurrents in other languages (French for example) of helping the existing regime in a morally corrupt or sleazy way. Cooperative has a good twang in the UK because of the cooperative movement which resulted in co-owned supermarkets, funeral parlours etc with some sense of community and collective investment and return. The cooperative society - http://www.co-operative.coop/ It went through the doldrums and then has resurfaced and took some good moral ground in banking terms a few years back. As I write it feels to me more emergent. Individual morals, ethics and practices collect to create cooperation but it always stays individual somehow. Collaboration must, perforce, be a collective construct throughout. Or in the case of the wartime collaboration, the authorities, or those in power, created conditions in which individuals collaborated. I'm going round in circles here but I'll write both words up and think about them. I suspect the only way is not to theorise but to think of actual circumstances in which one uses the word, both in public and in private life, and then see what the emergent definitions are. We could start a little trial space for the collection somewhere? I've a feeling I'd only use collaborate in a work context whereas I'd use cooperate much more in a private context. This is likely to mean cooperate has more meaning for me as a real word.

Patti Anklam

This is tough. I think we cooperate when we agree not to work at cross-purposes, and have an intention to help each other as need arises. Collaboration, to me, is always in view of a result -- something we both want to create.

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Our white paper on collaboration is now available. It was a pleasure working with Mark and Nancy White on this one. We're hoping this document creates a new conversation within organisations where people responsible for fostering collaboration (line managers, business units leaders, CIOs, HR directors) not only realise that they must look beyond the technology implementation but consider ways to introduce and support collaborative practices. The need to effectively collaborate is only going increase because the world is becoming even more complex and we will need more people banding together to create solutions by bringing their different perspectives to bare. We also look at a new type of collaboration, which we've called network collaboration, where the rules of how we work together are being re-written.

Nancy, Mark and I would dearly love to hear your thoughts on what we've written and in particular what additional advice would you give to supplement our ideas?

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Improved collaboration is a business imperative - to develop and implement strategy, to leverage existing capabilities and knowledge, to innovate, be more resilient in a rapidly changing environment and to reduce costs. Creating communities of practice is one of the key ways to build collaboration, but there are other important dimensions leaders and managers need to know to systematically build a collaboration capability.

If you're in the business of business, whether in the public or private sectors, you need to know about collaboration. Collaboration activities are ongoing in every organisation. Yet according to a recent Economic Intelligence Unit survey most collaborative activities are not completely successful because collaborators fail to establish a deep sense of trust among themselves. Then there's also lack of clarity on roles, support etc. There's a whole gamut of things one needs to pay attention to. Unfortunately, this is not an area they cover in business school.

We've learnt a lot about collaboration techniques in our journey and are keen to share some ideas about how organisations can make their workplace more collaborative. Given this, we are pleased to announce a new workshop called Building a Collaborative Workplace. The workshop is running in Canberra on 28 April and four other capitals later in the year. Go here to register.

We'll be discussing issues such as:

• the various types of collaboration
• roles required to foster and sustain collaborative behaviors and practices
• getting the most from your collaboration tools
• starting and sustaining communities of practice
• helping leaders foster a collaborative culture

And, of course, we will be providing many examples and stories to illustrate these issues.

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Here's an event you might like to attend. It's been organisation by Ralph Kerle from The Creative Leadership Forum.

Conversations That Create—An International Thought Leadership Programme

May 7 - 9, 2008

Venue: Centre for Leadership, Building 18, Chowder Bay Road, Mosman, Sydney NSW, Australia 2088

The Forum Challenge: "How can leaders in organisations lead generative conversations"

With International Thought Leaders

Shawn Callahan, Founder, Anecdote, Melbourne. Australia

Pavan Choudary, CEO, Vygon India, author and executive coach, Madras, India

Ralph Kerle, Chief Executive Officer, The Creative Leadership Forum, Sydney, Australia

Professor Kirpal Singh Ph.D, Singapore Management University, Dean of Economics, Arts, and Humanities, novelist, poet, Singapore.

and Session Leaders

Sandra Kay Lauffenburger (Laban), Dr Louise Mahler (Vocal and Choral)

A 2 1/2 day leadership programme designed to explore, develop and produce new thinking and learning around the way conversations occur to produce creative outcomes..

"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so." Doris Lessing

The Forum Preamble

The hard assets of all organizations tend to constitute the primary value of the organization but they are useless if not for the human asset and specifically the resourcefulness of that human asset to organize and utilize the hard assets. And one of the essential elements of this human resourcefulness is that of imagination and creativity. But these two elements remain dormant without the generative contexts to draw them out and generative contexts are established and maintained only by the right kinds of conversations. If the output of a musician is music, the output of a playwright a script, the output of a sculptor a piece of visual art, then the output of a leader is creative conversation because it is the leader's job to organize and focus the energy of human resourcefulness. It is the job of the leader to create and maintain the conversational 'spaces' that trigger the imagination and apply that imagination to creative work. The majority of conversations that people have at work do not readily lend themselves to creative action. What is the case in your organization?

Conversations that Create will explore and develop how to create and maintain the necessary generative spaces and have the kinds of conversations needed to move individuals and teams into creative output. Participants will learn and practice practical ways of having conversations for possibility and opportunity, for engagement, commitment and creative action and for creating the necessary relationships for sustaining a generative space.

Click on www.thecreativeleadershipforum.com

Event Fees and Conditions

The cost to participate is $880 incl GST. All meals are included in the cost. Accommodation is excluded. Click here for full details of the venue situated on Sydney Harbour. The Forum is limited to 30 people. All presenters will be participants as well. This is not an academic conference, rather a peer to peer practice led information exchange with participants drawn from business, government, academia, the arts. Particular regard will be paid to the balance and mix of participants.

If you are interested please email Ralph Kerle on rk@thecreativeleadershipforum.com or call direct on 0412 559 603 in the first instance.

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A while back we talked about three types of collaboration: team, community and network. So here's a quick quiz to help you understand just how collaborative your organisation really is. This little quiz is part of our upcoming article on Building a Collaborative Capability by Mark, Nancy White and me. If you want to get a preview copy just sign up for our newsletter if you not already a subscriber.

Answer true or false to the following statements.

Team

• You enter into collaborations as peers with each person playing a valued role. True/False?
• Teams are recognised and celebrated as a unit. True/False?
• People enter into collaborations with a feeling of promise. True/False?
• There is someone in your organisation you can turn to to learn more about effective collaboration approaches. True/False?
• You have access to relevant and useful collaboration technologies and are encouraged to use them. True/False?

Community

• There are other people in the organisation who have similar interests and passions who you connect with regularly to learn from each other. True/False?
• Your organisation actively supports communities of practice. True/False?
• The conversations your community is having are engaging and help you do a much better job. True/False?
• Your community is coordinated by a passionate individual who is supported by a small group who really care about the community. True/False?
• Managers see the value of participating in your community and activity support your attendance. True/False?

Network

• More than half the organisation are using social book-marking approaches and tagging web pages. True/False?
• People can recount stories of where they have found information from someone else's book-marks, blogs or wikis that made a significant contribution to their work. True/False?
• New communities have formed based on the realisation that people where interested in similar topics. True/False?
• The organisation actively supports the use of network collaboration technologies such as social book-marking, blogs, wikis, tagging and RSS. True/False?
• Senior leaders are using network collaboration technologies. True/False?

Give yourself 1 point for each time you answered True. Add up your points.

15 points: Collaboration nirvana. If you like working with high performance teams, communities or networks, never leave this organisation.

14-11 points: Damn good, keep it up. Lot's of opportunities to tackle complex problems and achieve tremendous results.

5-10: So so. Things are getting better and the signs of life are there.

1-4: Dismal effort. Most of the time the hero sweeps in on their white stead and saves the day receiving all the glory despite all the hard work everyone else actually did.

0: Collaboration hell. If collaboration is your thing why are you still there?

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When we start on a major change project we will often run a number of workshops with the leadership team to really get them to own and define the project. A big part of this activity is getting this group to collaborate and work as a team. In the past we have run sociometry exercises, anecdote circles and future backwards activities to get this group to gel. But I have a much better way now thanks to Seth Kahan's jumpstart storytelling technique.

How to run a jumpstart storytelling session

• Divide the participants into groups of 6
• Ask everyone to provide a concrete and specific example in response to a story eliciting question that is related to the objective of the workshop or project. Most recently I ask a workshop participants to recall when they have been proudest of the work they or their colleagues have done?
• Each person gets 90 seconds to tell their story.
• When everyone in the group has told one story ask the participants to remember the story that was most powerful for them; what resonated the most. And ask them to remember who told that story.
• Get everyone to switch groups to there is as many new faces as possible in their new group.
• Ask everyone to retell their story they have just told. Because this will feel a little weird I suggested they observe how their story changes and improves in the retelling. Again 90 seconds per story. At the end of everyone retelling their story reassess which story you think is most powerful and remember the storyteller.
• Depending on the size of the group you can switch groups again.
• Now the fun begins. Ask everyone to remember the person who told the most powerful, relevant, engaging story and go over to them and place your hand on their shoulder and keep it there. After a while a network of people forms and clusters appear revealing the high impact stories. Invite the people the group chose to retell their story to the whole group. Lead the applause at the end of each telling.

The energy goes through the roof with this technique and people get to hear stories they have never heard before. Most importantly the group gets to know each other at a deeper level. There is one more advantage as well if your project is narrative based: the leaders experience the power of narrative in the first 5 minutes of the project.

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I've decided to open up my Twitter so anyone can follow my tiny tweets. Before I only let the Anecdote team follow alog but I started to realise that there was a much wider network that could help each other out. So feel free to check out my Twitter page and if you think I should follow you let me know why. I love following people who point me to eclectic bits of information and ideas.

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Have you invested in the latest and greatest in collaboration technology but still feel people are still not collaborating? How many Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM Quickplaces remain relatively untouched or only used by the organisation's technorati? I think it's a big problem because this narrow view of collaboration starts to get the concept a bad name: "yeh, we did collaboration but no one used it." And then there the issue of the vast amount of money wasted and opportunities lost. We can't afford to loose faith in collaboration because the external environment is moving in a direction that mandates we collaborate. The problems we face now and into the future will only increase in complexity and it will require teams of people within and across organisations to solve them.

At the heart of the problem is collaboration culture. Does the organisation have a culture that supports collaboration? And if not, how do you change your culture to be more supportive?

Creating a more collaborative culture

In helping organisations develop collaboration cultures we've confirmed what Edgar Schein noted a decade ago: cultures are largely created and modified by the actions of the organisation's leaders. And here we view leadership in its broadest sense as someone who people take notice of and follow their lead. There are a relatively small set of things leaders do that affect culture:

• What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis
• How leaders react to critical incidents and organisational crises
• How leaders allocate resources
• Deliberate role modelling, teaching, and coaching
• How leaders allocate rewards and status
• How leaders recruit, select, promote, and excommunicate

The short-hand for this list is, “How do you get ahead around here?” And if you get ahead by working as a loner, shafting your team mates, taking the recognition when others were clearly a part of the success and having reward mechanisms that reward individual pursuits above all else, then your culture will be the antithesis of what's required for collaboration to flourish. So how do you turn it around?

Steps to foster a collaborative culture

Here are some of the steps we help organisation to implement to move from the state of the 'individual is king' to one where collaboration is activity encouraged. Of course this is not as simple as this list might suggest but it gives you an idea of they types of activities required. A full explanation is coming soon in a white paper Mark and I are writing with Nancy White, so here is the expurgated version that mainly links to other posts we have written.

A. Appoint a collaboration co-ordinator

If there is not a resource appointed the capability is unlikely to be implemented. Someone has to be responsible for moving the activities forward.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/02/developing_a_co.html

B. Create a network of collaboration supporters

The collaboration co-ordinator can't do this on their own so they need a network of supporters across the business lines. How you create this network and who is included is vital to your success.

C. Help people understand the process of collaboration

People will need to know what the organisation means by collaboration and how to collaborate.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/01/collaborations.html

D. Ensure the Collaboration Co-ordinator reports regularly to senior leaders

Find stories of success and take every opportunity to informally tell them to the leadership. Then have data and good reasoning to back up your stories.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2006/04/the_role_of_sto.html

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/finding_success.html

E. Get the most from your collaboration tools

Make sure you are getting the most from your current investment in collaboration tools. Learn the techniques and practices that will make these tools truly valuable.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2006/09/why_people_dont.html

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/01/seven_ways_to_g.html

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/10/technologies_fo.html

F. Start communities of practice

Perhaps I'm biased, but CoPs is a mode of organising that takes collaboration to the next level above team based approaches.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/06/nancy_white_and_1.html

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/01/starting_a_comm.html

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2006/12/actionoriented.html

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2006/02/will_the_commun.html

G. Promote good collaborators and hold back bad collaborators

No sense talking up collaboration then promoting the worse collaborator in the business. This one is simple and will have the biggest impact on the culture. Promote good collaborators and let everyone know they are being promoted partly because how they collaborate.

H. Practice collaborating for when a crises occurs

When the shit hits the fan we watch our leaders intently and we learn about their character and what it takes to get ahead around here. If you want collaboration to flourish have a plan to collaborate when a crises occurs. Demonstrate that the leadership team collaborates. A crisis is a vital moment in an organisation's cultural development.

Schein, Edgar H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2004.

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One of the best ways to illustrate the value of Community of Practice efforts is to find stories of success and to use them. We previously posted on the publication of 'Stories from the Coal Face', a booklet produced by Rio Tinto's coal division that communicates many of the ways that CoP have added value to the business. Rio Tinto has made a short video on one of the stories and this is publicly available on their website. Well worth checking out and using as an example of how collaboration can make a big difference in unexpected ways. I particularly like how the video engages the product group CEO and sends a message to the organisation about moving to a more collaborative culture using both the people and technology aspects.

Thanks to Mark Bennett for the link and for his perseverance in achieving the production of the video.

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I caught up with Julie Perrin yesterday. Julie is a storyteller and performer and we got talking about the dangers of spin in teaching people storytelling. Julie made the important point that any storytelling effort must start with good intentions and be told with authenticity.

Then it dawned on me: in a complex world many outcomes are largely unpredictable and so while our intentions might have been sound at the outset, the result might unexpectedly cause pain to someone. Consequently the ability and willingness of people to apologise is a fundamental business skill. I wrote this post a year ago on ways to say sorry to rebuild trust.

This thought was prompted by radio discussion yesterday morning about the impending apology the Australia government will give to Aboriginal people for the past practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and putting them into foster homes. Tomorrow will be a historic day.

One radio listener sent a message into John Faine (the radio announcer) and said something like: "Saying sorry is the first step when a mistake is made in order to maintain a relationship regardless of the intention" (she said it much better than that. Please let me know the actual wording if you heard it). The many relationships at work are important because they have such an impact on how we feel and our ability to do a good job.

The ability to say sorry sincerely is also important in the growing number of collaborations we are now seeing in business.

How to say sorry¹

1. recognise and acknowledge that a violation has occurred
2. determine the nature of the violation—that is, what ‘caused’ it—and admit that one has caused the event
3. admit that the act was destructive
4. accept responsibility for the effect of one’s actions
5. offer some form of forgiveness, atonement, or action designed to undo the violation and rebuild the trust
   

1. Lindskold, S. (1978). “Trust development, the GRIT proposal, and the affects of conciliatory acts on conflict and cooperation.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 772-793.

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I heard Marshall Goldsmith say this on my ipod this morning:

"So many people have spent a lifetime for preparing themselves for technological skills yet have spent no time training themselves on how to influence people so the technical skills make a difference."

The same is true for collaboration. So many people have spent countless hours preparing themselves for collaboration technology skills yet have spent no time learning how to collaborate so the technical skills make a difference.

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The ability to collaborate is becoming an essential capability for innovative organisations (actually, for any organisation). Imagine getting any big project done without collaborating. Here’s what scientist and Australian of the Year, Fiona Wood, said on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope TV show about collaboration:

“I haven't got the intellectual capacity or the time or energy to actually manufacture all these pieces of jigsaw, but I know where I can find them. I go and I see amazing science being done, I think, ‘Whoa, can we work together? Because that is one of the pieces of the jigsaw, I can see that it will fit and I can see I can help you with maybe a little bit of yours but you can help me with mine.’”

The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a fairly hit-and-miss fashion. Some people are naturals but many of us are clueless. It’s no wonder then that developing a collaboration capability is often the number one priority in the work we do to help organisations develop their knowledge strategies.

Establishing a collaboration capability requires someone to foster its development. People would think you are crazy if you suggested a company establish a sales capability without sales people or a human resources capability without a HR team. Yet, we have seen organisations wishing for a collaboration capability without identifying or resourcing people responsible for developing it. Wishful thinking is not enough.

The role of the collaboration co-ordinator (evangelist, manager, specialist; the title doesn’t really matter) would include:

• ferreting out good collaboration practices and tools and keeping up-to-date with the field
• finding situations in the organisation where better collaboration would make a difference to the quality of products and services, the speed of delivering these products and services to clients, and the ability to use a diversity of ideas and approaches to innovate
• helping people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools
• collecting stories of how collaboration really works for the times you need to justify the role
• connecting people and ideas so new collaborations might flourish

Those organisations that move beyond wishful thinking and commit resources to establishing a collaboration coordination role can often face the frustrating dilemma of wanting the job done but are unable to free someone to do it. We’ve seen this situation a number of times now and have offered an Anecdoter (one of our consultants) to do the job while a suitable permanent staff member is found. Whether the role is filled in house or my a services organisation is immaterial. The important point is that the organisation is signalling to everyone that collaboration is important and that they are serious about enhancing their collaboration capability.

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Your teleconference system is one of your most important KM technologies.

Here are 7 things a facilitator can do to improve teleconference experience.

1. Encourage everyone to be on time . Unlike f2f meetings where people can sneek in and catch up, arriving late at a teleconference meeting seems to be doubly disruptive.
2. Introduce everyone. When you walk into a room you can do a quick scan of who's there. That's not so easy on a teleconference so ask each person to announce themselves on arrival (some systems automatically provide announcements) and when everyone is ready to start do a quick whip around of names starting from the person closest to Greenwich then move west. OK, you don't need to do the Greenwich thing but it's quite fun in a global group getting people to work out their longitude.
3. Remind everyone of who's speaking. When you have a dozen or more disembodied voices on the line it can be hard to work out who's talking. Get people into the habit of prefacing what they say with their name, for example, "Shawn here, to get our community of practice going ..."
4. Reduce background noise. The more people you add to a teleconference the more likely someone will have a noisy background, noisy typing as they take notes or some other annoyance for the rest of the participants. Point out the mute functionality of the system or the handset they are using and asked people to turn off any other device that might interfere with the call (such as mobile phones).
5. Rotate start times to be fair to all timezones. If you plan a regular get together on the phone and your participants are scattered around the world, don't leave one geography to do the graveyard shift.
6. Use IM or a chat room to increase richness. This is probably the most important suggestion. Encourage everyone to join a chat room of group instant messaging (such as Skype) and as the call proceeds urge everyone to jot down what they are hearing, share urls, and create an artefact of the meeting. You can use it to jog your memory latter and during the call see what people are getting from the session. I was introduced to this approach by my colleagues at CPSquare and John Smith and I have written a practice note on how to do it.
7. Record the call. For those who can't make the meeting simply record the call and share the audio file.

There are a range of other practices you might want to include such as employing additional technology to share screens (I was part of a fascinating teleconference today where one participant shared his screen and showed us how to design sheet metal components using engineering drafting software), share presentations, online voting, whiteboards. You might also want to practice ensuring everyone can be heard especially when there are a group of people in a room sharing a teleconference phone.

So I would love to hear the tips and tricks you've seen work. I'm sure we are going to see and be part of many more teleconferences.

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One tragic example [of mis-coordination] is recounted in Peter Denning’s article about HFN [hastily formed networks], in which he describes analysis of the disaster response efforts after the attack on the World Trade Center: New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopters that had been monitoring conditions by circling the towers had observed signs of structural collapse in the north tower and immediately issued an emergency evacuation order to all police; however, they failed to inform the firefighters, who, having had no warning, were not evacuated.

Huston, Tracey. "Enabling Adaptability & Innovation through Hastily Formed Networks." Reflections 7, no. 1 (2006): 9-29.

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BusinessWeek picks up on the move to collaboration in the creative and sometimes ego-driven world of product design.

"Just as forward-thinking engineering firms have worked to team up with design partners to offer a holistic output to clients, many design consultancies have responded to the seismic shifts in technology and culture by adopting a radical, collaborative approach—in stark contrast with the magician/know-it-all designer type of old."

I did pick up one of the common misconceptions about collaboration in this article. That is, collaboration means big teams. But at the same time collaboration is not universally good. This quote sums up both ideas.

The process-driven, collaborative approach does have its detractors. "The danger is that it becomes very flat and very unemotional," says Yves Béhar, founder of Fuseproject in San Francisco. "You need personalities and points of view, and points of view come from people, not processes," Sapper adds: "You do not need big teams to create innovation; as a matter of fact, big teams often act as brakes to innovation."

[via CPH127]

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Everywhere I turn recently and I hear people talking about the need to collaborate as if the idea was new. Why has collaboration become the capability organisations must have? And why now? I think I have an inkling.

About 20 years ago a lot was being written about collaboration (this was just the growing snowball crunched together and bowled down a hill by Emery and Trist in 1965). People were getting interested in new organisational forms, talking about flattening organisations and linking firms. The issue of how firms might collaborate arose and we had a flurry of academics and practitioners proposing how it might be done. One of the most cited authors of that time on collaboration is Barbara Gray, who defines collaboration as a, "a process through which parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible." [1] I like it.

Emery and Trist sparked the idea from an organisational perspective and made the vital observation that collaboration is essential in turbulent times. Gray elaborates and also states that collaboration is most useful when we face complex and seemingly intractable problems. Now think of what we face today in the 21st century. Information volumes are exploding (by one estimation it's doubling every 4 years [2]), decisions are faster, things are more connected. No wonder people are screaming for collaboration now. It 's a way to progress in today's complex environment. The problem is that most organisations don't know how to do it.

Unfortunately, about 10 years ago, we were led up the garden path a bit in our search for collaboration solutions. And I have to admit I was part of the problem because over the years I've worked for the large IT corporations like IBM, Oracle and Sybase who promised us new collaboration technologies assuring to deliver a new way of working. Actually, some of the technologies were great stuff and today there are many useful technologies we can use. But the technology alone doesn't give us collaboration. You would be forgiven for thinking it does. Today if you search on the term 'collaboration' the majority of results will point to technology solutions.

Thankfully, back in 1989, Barbara Gray offers us some ideas which take us beyond the technological and in particular she proposes a process describing how collaboration happens. This is important because it gets us thinking about the types of things we can do in an organisation to foster collaboration. Gray's process has 4 phases (updated more recently from the original three):

1. problem setting phase: "getting people to the table"
2. negotiation phase: "reaching agreement on what to do"
3. implementation phase: "ensuring the agreement is carried out"
4. Institutionalisation phase: "building a long-term relationship"

Getting people to the table

Sad as it might sound, when I was in IBM, a common first question I 'd ask a colleague whom I was seeking a collaboration with was, "so what do you need to achieve this year?" If our objectives were interdependent I knew we had a chance of successfully collaborating. Then we could sit down and really nut out the purpose of our collaboration and make the commitment to work together to deliver something useful. On larger collaborations one or more leaders emerged. The best collaborations were when the leader was the natural selection based on their capabilities rather than the ordained choice based on organisational hierarchy.

Reaching agreement on what to do

The gentle art of conversation is the starting point (personally I disagree with the adversarial approaches, such as debate, as a useful approach to collaboration). Bohm called it dialogue and it involves listening, suspending judgement, being open and honest and working together to build on ideas. These types of conversations then lead to questions of what will be the next actions of the group, how do we divide up the effort, what will good look like and when we deliver our bits? We also need to work out how to reach agreements and ways to solve problems. There are many techniques that are useful at this phase including world cafe, pre-mortems, open space, story-spines, most significant change, and the bevy of ideas in Getting Things Done. It's also important to agree the ground rules for your group and most importantly decide what will happen when the ground rules are transgressed.

Ensuring the agreement is carried out

The most powerful way to ensure agreements are kept is to get everyone to commit openly and clearly to the whole group but in the full knowledge that the world does change and adaptations will be required. Public commitments need to be revisited on a regular basis not left for months and months only to find that an important commitment has slipped away. Keeping seeking feedback from those you serve through your collaboration and continue to seek good ideas and good practices as a standard way of working.

Building a long-term relationship

The best collaborations result in long-term relationships and I'm certain the strongest relationships go through the hardest times. The difference between and strong relationship and a broken one is what happens when the times are tough. One of the best set of techniques I've seen to handle the tough times is in a book called Crucial Conversations. It guides you through what to do when things turn dark and shows how you can keep adding to the pool of meaning as a way to work things out. Essentially these means keep talking and making it safe to talk.

Collaboration is important more than ever because of the nature of the world we live in. The problem, however, is that we not taught collaboration in organisations. It happens through necessity and success is mostly by chance and experience. Organisations wishing to develop a collaboration capability more systematically will need to thinking clearly about the process of collaboration and how they can support that process.

[1] Gray, Barbara. Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989.

[2] Lyman, Peter, Hal R. Varian, K. Swearingen, P. Charles, N. Good, L.L. Jordan, and J. Pal. "How Much Information 2003?" http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/.

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John Smith and I worked together last year using Google Docs to create this practice note on ways to get the most from conference calls.

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There are a whole bunch of useful concepts used by organisations to focus their community of practice and knowledge management programs. Some of the more useful and memorable ones are listed below:

• Learn Before, Learn During, Learn After - the concept used by BP and described by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell in 'Learning to Fly', which remains an excellent practical reference on communities of practice and KM in genel
• Connections, Conversations, Content - the core concept of the US Army CompanyCommand Professional Forum as described in the book 'CompanyCommand' by Nancy Dixon et al. This concept is described as "a network of company commanders who connect in conversation about relevant content to advance the practice of company command" (page 3).
• Discover and Adopt, Discover and Adapt, Develop and Share - the CoP mantra developed and used by the communities of practice within ExxonMobil
• Ask, Learn, Share - used by Shell International to provide the focus for their community of practice program. The 'Shell Blue Book' remains a fantastic example of collecting and presenting CoP success stories and we previously blogged about it here.

We have been working during the year with Mark Bennett, who is the steward of Rio Tinto's extensive communities of practice program. Mark has been looking for an appropriate concept to use within Rio Tinto and while liking the concept of ask-learn-share, its linear nature didn't sit right. So Mark has designed this concept and is testing its utility in simply describing the focus of their CoP initiatives.

Rio Tinto's coal division here in Australia recently published a booklet called 'Stories from the Coal Face' and, inspired by the Shell Blue Book, it describes how CoP have contributed to the business. Mark Quinn (yes, another Mark) is the driving force behind this booklet and behind the CoP activities within the Rio Tinto coal business. It is an internal publication so you might have difficulty getting your hands on a copy, but well worth it if you can.

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There are many ways to encourage collaboration in an organization. Using Web 2.0 tools is a great way to start a collaborative discussion in under 5 minutes.

I came across an interesting collaborative concept recently www.thepoint.com

Launched in September 2007, The Point is a community where people can come together to solve the problems that are too big or time-consuming to solve alone. The Point is a groundbreaking way to use the Internet that helps groups of like-minded people get things done. How? No one is obligated to do anything unless a campaign reaches its "tipping point." At the tipping point, everyone springs into action, knowing they have the numbers to make a difference.

Great way to get people involved to test an idea or get a democratic vote before leaping into a decision (and avoid email overload)!

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Collaboration brings with it change and complexity and uncertainty. How are we going to do this? What will happen next? Why should we work like that?... are some of the questions that mark the beginning of a collaborative project. It’s all a state of mind! A matter of perspective.

I’m Chandni and I’m new at Anecdote. My first blog is about my experience in managing collaboration and change and an interesting technique - a 10-second test!

To pursue my passion for knowledge, narratives, complexity, people, culture, and change, I’ve flown all the way from UK (where I did my MBA) via Mumbai (India, where I am originally from) to Canberra. My journey at Anecdote started on October 22 and I’m having a great time doing what I really love.

In my previous roles (as Chief Knowledge Developer and Head of the Knowledge Initiative at an ITeS company), I always thought that bringing about change in the culture was a simple thing. Our workforce was young and spirited and we were innovative and had an open working environment…what could be difficult about that?

Well, I was obviously very wrong and spent a few years figuring out why some people share what they know quite easily, some literally ‘find’ obstacles and put them in the way or some simply don’t want to be disturbed. So I divorced the explicit aspect and started exploring the social aspects of knowledge-sharing behavior, and in talking to people I discovered that narratives have a unique power that often remains untapped. Aligning the right technique to the right situation, that’s where the trick lies. I’m guilty of missing target too!

Let’s change that.

At Anecdote, we continuously seek and design techniques to deal with the complexity within organizations by understanding the ‘story behind the story’. What stories are people saying about an event or experience in their workplace?

Now, (this is my MBA talking) a lot has been said about how denial is the first stage in change management. And collaboration initiatives are a big change for people sometimes. BUT the more important aspect is that there are reasons and stories that form this denial in people’s minds.

Here’s an interesting technique I stumbled upon on Ken Thompson’s blog. He has some good collaboration techniques listed, but this one is a great insight. He calls it a 10 second test to assess people's reaction to change.

How can you quickly find out what each team member's number one concern is about working in this scenario?

Dr Lewis recommends you get each of them to repeat the following 5 words out loud without thinking about it too much:

"We can’t do that here”

Listen carefully to which of the five words they stress – if its:

We – they are worried about their Identity

Can’t – they are worried about their beliefs and values

Do – they are worried about their skills

That – they are worried about their behavior

Here – they are worried about the environment

It might then be useful to probe the domains the participants seem most concerned about using anecdote circles to collect stories about the concerns that in fact may be the cause of their resistance or concern.

When you try it out, let us know how it went for you. We’d be happy to hear your story ☺

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I was sceptical whether Twitter would be a useful business tool. I heard it was addictive so decided to keep away until I worked out how it might be useful. There are six of us in Anecdote and we all work from home. Three of us are in Melbourne and three in Canberra. One of the problems with working from home, or out at client sites, is the feeling of disconnection that builds without hearing the chatter that would surround you in an office. Twitter provides this chatter.

We started using Twitter a few weeks ago and already I can feel the difference. I have closed down access to my Twitter feed to the world so only Anecdoters can see my twits. That way I can share all the things I might say if we were in an office together. This is a valuable service for our business but I couldn't measure this value. It's the value of contentment, sanity, fun, and a smile when you hear Robyn has just baked some muffins, Daryl is wrestling with Zahmoo, Mark is updating his iPhone, Krista is writing an anecdote for her business card and Chandni is getting her mac working.

I noticed Tom Davenport is writing off the business value of social networking applications like Facebook and MySpace. He might be right but being social is essential to our work. So if Twitter is a social networking applications I can say it delivers us business value but don't ask me to put a figure on it.

PS. It is this type of hard the measure business value that Most Significant Change and Zahmoo is designed to assess.

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I was having a conversation last week about how easy it is to rob people of the permission to collaborate. Examples were provided of how 'bosses' don't even need to say anything: a disapproving look is enough to communicate that a chat while making coffee isn't considered 'working'.

The conversation reminded me of an experience during one of our projects. The client representative couldn't find a meeting room and took us to this fabulous collaboration space in their new(ish) building. This new building was designed to enhance collaboration. An atrium runs along one entire wall and is filled with secluded nooks for private conversations, with areas where groups can get together and with cafe areas where people can have 'chance meetings'. I was surprised that our little group was the only one in there and asked why. Our host explained....

Early on, this place was used all the time. I loved it and brought my team here for regular meetings and, with the shortage of formal meeting rooms, I had lots of my smaller meetings here as well. The place always had a great 'buzz' about it. But the design had a big flaw, the executive offices were all positioned overlooking the atrium. One day I was called into the office of an executive who told me they considered I was spending too much of my time in the atrium (collaboration space). Apparently others had similar experiences. Nowadays hardly anyone comes here. We feel we are being watched.

In complex environments we know that little things can make a big difference and in this case the impact is obvious in the low usage of this great space. The conversation also remind me of the powerful impact of managers in their day-to-day interactions. Every interaction is an opportunity to build or to erode engagement....and collaboration. It could have been a very different outcome if the executives had said 'its great to see you using this area'.

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There's been a lot written on this topic; probably too much because if someone asked, “What technologies should I be thinking about to do knowledge management?” you would be hard press to find a simple answer. Of course the answer is, “It depends.” But that's unhelpful. If I were asked this question I would say, consider the following:

• Telephone and conference call capability
• Email
• Intranet
• Search & social search
• Email distribution lists
• Document management
• People directory
• Video - YouTube style
• Wikis
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• RSS
• Tagging
• Instant messaging
• Collaboration tool (group calendar, discussion threads, file sharing)

Have I missed any biggies?

Technorati Tags: technology, tools

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The guys at Cogdogroo have documented 50 web2.0 applications you can use to tell a story.

http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools

It's a wiki so you can help them improve their resource.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

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Have you ever wanted to create a timeline? Well there is now an online application call xtimeline that can help you out. The interface is well thought out and lets you explore all the events.

Technorati Tags: timeline, tools, web 2.0

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We are lucky to have many terrific clients that we love working with. Here's an example.

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I'm hoping everyone who reads our blog is reading it by subscribing to our RSS feed. Now if that sentence made no sense to you, check out this Common Craft explaination of RSS and how to use it.

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One of the new practices that will be essential at a time when information volumes are exploding is social bookmarking. That's because with social bookmarking you are getting help from your colleagues, community members and practically any one else who's doing it. Problem is, it's not the easiest thing to explain. So we are lucky to have Common Craft's 3 minute video that anyone can understand.

As readers of this blog you are probably already in the know about things like social bookmarking, weblogs and wikis. So your job is to let your colleagues know about this practice so we can all benefit from people using this tool. Just forward this post to them so they can see this cool video.

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Last week I was lucky enough to go along to the Intranets '07 forum in Sydney and had the opportunity to see what a number of organisations in Australia are doing in this space.

One thing that really struck me is that most organisations seem to view wiki's and blogs (and all things 2.0), to be a natural extension to their Intranet projects. The pressures to adopt the latest trends are certainly there, and doing something inside the firewalls seems to be on people's agendas, so it makes perfect sense to use the teams and infrastructure that are already in place.

However, I'm not sure that they know what they're getting themselves into. Adopting these new collaborative and social tools will require a paradigm shift from the current thinking. Let me explain ...

In my notes, I wrote that there seemed to be a real dichotomy in the language being used. On the one hand speakers when describing their Intranets were talking about standards, compliance, custodians, approval, reviews, structured, efficiency, control, and 'single source of truth'. Yet on the other hand, they mused that intranets were about 'people, people, people' and that they were trying to improve collaboration, increase knowledge sharing and foster networks.

I put this down to what appears to be a lack of or poor understanding about the differences between information and knowledge. It seems that many organisations still have a mindset that knowledge management is about trying to codify explicit knowledge - finding it and sticking it in a database, which will in-turn improve sharing and collaboration. However, in doing so, they are ignoring tacit knowledge and the social aspects of learning. Organisations face big challenges to bridge this nexus, and to do so they will need to also consider the 'human' aspects of social software - that it is enabling, empowering, emergent, organic, action-oriented and open. I'll end with a quote, which I think sums it up pretty well ...

" ... viewing knowledge as a duality means that both perspectives are needed and both must be taken into account in any attempt to manage knowledge." 1

References
1. Hildreth, P.J. & Kimble, C. (2002). "The duality of knowledge"Information Research, 8(1), paper no. 142 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html]

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I'm giving a presentation to the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers (AIPIO) conference in October so I'm keeping my eye out for relevant news items. Here's one passed on to me by Nerida Hart. Any other pointers would be appreciated. The topic is narrative approaches to knowledge retention.

Young feds bring intell changes: A workforce bought up to use collaboration tools is making the CIA Web 2.0-savvy

“How do you transform analysis?” asked Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). “One word: attitude. For people to collaborate and bring new and vital skills to the intelligence community, we need to change our attitude.”

Technorati Tags: intelligence

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I flew from Newcastle to Melbourne last night and had a fantastic two-hour chat with the lady in the next seat. By the end of the journey I felt like I had a new friend. She posed three questions to me that helped us build a relationship in a very short time. Give these questions a try and I suspect you will surprised at what happens. I was.

What is the best piece of advice you can give me?
What has been your most profound experience?
What is the greatest gift you have ever received?

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Today I worked out a neat hack to get our blog posts from Ecto into our wiki without having to reformat.

• Simply view the html of the blog post. In Ecto this mean clicking on the < > toggle at the bottom of the screen.
• Copy the html.
• Paste the html into HTML::WikiConverter and click “Convert HTML to wiki markup” and hey presto the wiki markup version appears.
• Copy the wiki markup version into your wiki.

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One of the most useful books I own is Gary Klein's “Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do”. Gary takes the mystery out of intuition and explains it as tacit knowledge we develop through experience. What I really like about Gary's books are the practical techniques and so I thought I would share this one with you which is a process for communicating executive intent, or to put it more plainly, how to give directions without telling people how to suck eggs.

In this case Gary Klein is building on some advice Karl Weick's gave on giving directions:

• Here's what I think we face.
• Here's what I think we should do.
• Here's why.
• Here's what we should keep our eye on.
• Now talk to me.

Klein translated this script into the acronym, STICC: situation, task, intent, concerns, calibration.

Situation. (Here what I think we face) Start with providing the context for the task. What has happened that lead to this need? Grab their attention in the telling. Use all the ideas described by the brothers Heath best seller, Made to Stick. It's important that the person taking on the task understand its importance and how it fits in to the bigger picture.

Task. (Here's what I think we should do) Keep it short and to the point. You can elaborate later. When describing the task avoid describing how it should be done and keep focussed on what needs to be done. People hate to be told how to do their jobs.

Intent. (Here's why) Here is where you describe the purpose of the task. Why the task/project need to be done. If you have a picture of what the end point looks like this is the time to share that vision. In a complex and unpredictable environment the best you might be able to do it describe some of the characteristics of a successful completion.

Concerns (Here's what we should keep our eye on) Chances are you have had experiences in these types of projects and you know the sort of thing someone should keep an eye on. If you don't you might want to get someone in the meeting who does have that experience. Running a mini pre-mortem could be useful.

Calibration (Now talk to me) This is the essential step. Now make yourself available for questions and follow up discussions. As soon as someone on a task new questions will emerge and patterns will arise. This might lead to tremendous insights and accelerated accomplishment or lighting fast pursuit of a white rabbit down a long and dark hole. Being open to get together during the task helps you act as an effective guide while enabling the person doing the task to keep on track to deliver a quality result.

Technorati Tags: karl weick, gary klein

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Nancy White and I have been working on a project to help our client enhance their collaboration practices. In the process we've identified three types of enterprise collaboration. Love to hear what you think of the idea. Nancy is riffing on this topic too and has added a bunch of other cool resources in her post.

Collaboration is the act of working with people to get something done. We can look at collaboration at three levels within the enterprise.

In Team Collaboration, the members of the group are known, there are clear task interdependencies, expected reciprocity, and explicit timelines and goals. To achieve the goal, members must fulfil their tasks within the stated time. Team Collaboration often suggests that while there is often explicit leadership, the participants cooperate on an equal footing and will receive equal recognition. An example is a research project to develop a prototype for X in five months with six team members and a set of resources.

In Community Collaboration, there is a shared domain or area of interest, but the goal is more often learning, rather than task. People share and build knowledge, rather than complete projects. Membership may be bounded and explicit, but periods are often open or ongoing. Membership is often on an equal footing, but more experienced practitioners may have more status or power in the community. Reciprocity is within the group, but not always one-to-one ('I did this for you, now you do this for me“) An example might be a community of practice that is interested in the type of research mentioned in the team example above. A member of that team may come to her community and ask for examples of past projects.

Network Collaboration steps beyond the relationship centric nature of team and community collaboration. It is collaboration that starts in individual action and self interest and accrues to the network. Membership and timelines are open and unbounded. There are no explicit roles. Members most likely do not know all the other members. Power is distributed. This form of collaboration is driven by the advent of social software, a response to the overwhelming volume of information we are creating. It's impossible for an individual to cope on their own.

An example of network collaboration might be members of the team in the first example above bookmarking web sites as they find them. This benefits their team, possibly their related communities of practice but it also benefits the wider network of people interested in the topic. At the same time, they may find other bookmarks left by network members relevant to their team work. This sort of network activity benefits the individual and a network of people reciprocally over time. The reciprocity connection is remote and undefined. You act in self-interest but provide a network-wide benefit.

Originally posted on 29/11/06

Technorati Tags: nancy white, social software

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Lynda Gratton at MITSloan has written a short article of some factors that might affect the performance of a distributed team. I'm a little sceptical of what Gratton calls “10 golden rules for making virtual teams more productive” because there are so many factors that influence how well a virtual team will work and I thought we had done away with rules when dealing with complexity.

I do agree, however, how important it is to consider time zone issues. I'm three weeks into a new virtual team and I'm surprised by the lack of awareness of team member time zones. For example, when calling for people's available time for the next meeting my colleagues in the USA often volunteer to have meetings between 10am and 3pm which generally equates to midnight to 5am Melbourne time. I think if you work in a global virtual team you need to become mindful of your colleague's time zones and avoid suggesting meetings at 2 in the morning.

Appreciating time zones comes with experience and one of the organisations that seem to really understand this is CPSquare—John Smith and the other community practitioners who run a plethora of online events.

Here are Lynda's 10 golden rules.

1. Invest in an online resource where members can learn quickly about one another
2. Choose a few team members who already know each other.
3. Identify “boundary spanners” and ensure that they make up at least 15% of the team.
4. Cultivate boundary spanners as a regular part of companywide practices and processes.
5. Break the team's work up into modules so that progress in one location is not overly dependent on progress in another.
6. Create an online site where a team can collaborate, exchange ideas and inspire one another.
7. Encourage frequent communication. But don't try to force social gatherings.
8. Assign only tasks that are challenging and interesting.
9. Ensure the task is meaningful to the team and the company.
10. When building a virtual team, solicit volunteers as much as possible.

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David Pollard offered for anyone on the net to join him is a joint collaboration project using Writely. The topic: Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused?

Dave lists 8 reasons and I jumped in with a number of other points answering a set of questions Dave posed. Interestingly only a few people got involved and the discussion hasn't progressed much over the last few weeks. Hmmm, perhaps collaboration requires a strong need to work together.

Here's Dave's list:

1. Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns.
2. Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
3. The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they're awkward.
4. Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don't solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
5. The training materials for these tools don't match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
6. Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren't online.
7. Often we don't even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we've discovered who the right people are, we're likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
8. We are not accustomed to learning with others. Traditional schooling rewards individual effort (e.g. you take the test by yourself).

Here are my additions and some answers to specific questions posed by Dave:

When faced with the choice of learning new technology and chatting to colleagues on the phone and email to get a job done, if it can be done with what they already know they will go with that.

Collaboration tools work best when your collaborators are geographically distributed and in other time zones and I wonder how many teams have that as a situation? Sure, globalisation is spreading and small, nimble operators are connecting using these tools, but how many large corporations are active users? I know IBM is and I would imagine technology firms would be at the vanguard. I was surprised however when PriceWaterhouseCoopers consultants arrived in IBM because there were unfamiliar with collaboration tools and disinterested in using them.

It works best when all the collaborators are equally enthusiastic and capable in using the tool. It just takes a handful of influential members of a team to stop using the tool for the tool to be abandoned.

The majority of people in organisations are baby boomers (I'm not sure this is true) and haven't been brought up in environment using collaboration tools. I was in a pub the other day meeting our complexity group and I overheard a small group of people in their 20s and 30s talking about their MySpace interactions. These people already know how to use the tools and will expect them in the workplace.

To answer to Dave's question: Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?

I think we need to make tools that operate in ways we are familiar using. People are all learning to use browsers so our tools should be browser based. I think we should stop encouraging people to use a new tool and just send them a URL and say, we are going to share our documents here, feel free to update the calendar and let people go for it. By saying “it's a new tool that will make your life better” people respond by putting up the shutters; “I'm too busy to learn something new.” Yet learning something new is fun.

To answer to Dave's question: Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?

Content volume kills collaboration tools. I've used Lotus Teamrooms, Groove, Basecamp and in each case when the volume of the content becomes unwieldy the users stop using it. Considerable effort is required to clean out the material, archive it, highlight what's important and bring to people's attention the key things to notice. At the moment I favour web-based tools like Basecamp because of their keep it simple philosophy and the fact it's browser-based.

To answer to Dave's question: What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?

In addition to listening, I think knowing how to craft and ask good questions that encourage people to converse is essential. I like asking questions that elicit stories such as “What happened?” or “When was the team at its best?” Guy Kawasaki suggests people ask good questions, then shut up. Great advice.

To answer to Dave question: What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better collaborators, and how would we do this?

Focus on the practice of collaboration and only introduce tools when the need arises. For example, a research group might think of new ways to harness energy from heat and see the idea as a promising research project. They start off chatting on the phone, sending emails to one another and then someone says: “It would be good if we could track the versions on this document we are creating.” That's the point a tool could be introduced. I would run a poster campaign in an organisation with the title “Avoid using collaboration tools for as long as possible” and then use the rest of the poster to describe the signs the team should look out for to introduce effective tools. Put practice and process before tools.

Originally posted 21/09/06

Technorati Tags: tools

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Luke Naismith sent me the link to this presentation. And after a quick look it's immediately recognisable; it's how we work at Anecdote. If you are interested in working here too, check out this.

Technorati Tags: enterprise 2.0

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Nicholas Carr has written a thought provoking piece in Strategy+Business on the limitations of open source approaches. In a nutshell, open source approaches work best when people are refining something that's already been created and where the problem can be divided into chunks so lots of people can work on it at the same time (e.g. fixing bugs in Linux). Creating the idea in the first place is best done by an individual or small group.

Technorati Tags: open source

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Just watched Malcolm Gladwell give a talk to the New Yorker Conference—2012: Stories From the Near Future (lots of interesting videos to watch). The topic of Malcolm's talk is 'genius' and he contrasts two extraordinary men: Michael Ventris, who deciphered the ancient Mycenaean script know as Linear B, and Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who developed a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem (If you are interested to learn about the story of how Wiles accomplished his proof I recommend you read Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem).

Gladwell makes two good points in his talk:

1. persistence and collaboration might be more important personal traits than lone genius in a complex and changing world; and
2. a person needs to invest 10,000 hours of concentrated and reflective practice to achieve mastery—this amounts to about 10 years.

I was also impressed with how Gladwell told his stories from the point of view of the level of detail he provides—i.e., lots. He's not an emotional storyteller but one who is effective in sparking interest in an intellectual idea.

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A New York Times/CBS News poll from July 1999 revealed that 63% of people interviewed believe that in dealing with “most people” you “can’t be too careful” and 37% believed that “most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance”. If you assume that this is representative of the people you wish to influence, your first job is to let people see that you can be trusted. How? The same study gives us a hint. Respondents also revealed that of the people that they “know personally,” they would expect 85% of them to “try to be fair.”  Hmmmmm. Could it be that simple? Let people see who you are, help them to feel like they know you personally, and your trust ratio automatically triples? Think about our language: “he’s okay, I know him” or “it’s not that I don’t trust her, I just don’t know her.”1

Our blogs regularly mention the issues of trust and relationships and their importance in the workplace (examples are here and here). The quote above reflects the importance of relationships and why people who are connectors and hubs in social networks are more effective: they have more relationships and more people ‘trust’ them.

1. Annette Simmons, The Story Factor, Basic Books 2006, page 7.

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A simple tip last night from the actKM discussion list contributed by Ivan Webb who provides a ‘strategic job description’…

…that will change the culture of most organisations and leads naturally to knowledge management being embedded in the organisation’s activity. It is everyone’s job to:

• know what is happening
• work with others to improve what is happening
• make it easier for the next person to do their work well

I like the simplicity of these statements and the guidance for behaviour they provide. In some situations they might contribute to improved knowledge sharing behavours. They are also interesting because we know that little things can make a big difference.

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Everyone in knowledge management acknowledges the vital role trust plays. “Trust is the bandwidth of communication” says Karl-Erik Sveiby. When talking about trust I mostly hear people say “we need to build trust”. But I rarely hear people discuss the issue of what to do when trust is broken and needs to be rebuilt. See below for a process for rebuilding trust. At the core is an apology.

I was reminded of this issue by a post by Seth Godin where he lists 10 apologies from the weakest to the strongest.

• “You can always take your business elsewhere.” (1): Thank you, I will, and so will all of my friends.
• “It’s not our fault.” (2): This is a non-apology, where you are not seeking to redress the issue, nor evincing any sort of sympathy for the injured.
• “We’re sorry that you feel that way.” (3): This is also a non-apology, which roughly translates into “It pisses us off that you feel that way. If you didn't feel that way, we would be happy.” It also doesn't take any responsibility for the problem, and places all of it onto the injured party. Be careful of any apology that starts “I’m sorry that you...”
• “We’re sorry if we did something wrong.” (6): This is getting there, but doesn’t really accept responsibility either. You are not acknowledging that you did anything wrong; you're still hoping that you haven’t. You are offering an apology for appearances sake.
• “We're sorry that this occurred.” (7): You are sorry, but as a matter of principle you’re still trying to insist that it wasn’t really your fault.
• “We’re sorry that we caused this problem.” or “We’re sorry that we have let this happen.” (9): This is a full apology, and is what the customer needs to hear. Frankly, it doesn’t matter that it was really the post office’s fault, and not yours; the customer doesn't care. Most people hearing this cannot help but respond with some sort of graciousness, such as “Well, all right then, these things happen. What are you going to do to fix it?” This is the target level that you want to hit for your customer service. But for the record, there is still one level to go. The complete apology is:
• “We’re so sorry that we caused this problem; we are really distressed over this. Please know that we take this very seriously. This is a huge oversight on our part. I will immediately notify my supervisor, and we will review our procedures to ensure that this cannot happen again. In the meantime, that is no consolation to you for our lack of service! What can we do to regain your trust? We will be sending you a little surprise as a token of our appreciation of having you as a customer.” (10) In truth, this little speech goes on until the customer interrupts. And it is followed by a few more apologies as the conversation closes, as well.

In my search for ways to help organisations rebuild trust in groups, I discovered this interesting paper and process which came from work in reconciliation in South Africa. The author suggests a five step process in rebuilding trust. The process requires actions on both sides of the relationship: from the violator of the trust and the victim (this is language from the source material).

Actions of the Violator

• They must engage in a series of steps that identify, acknowledge, and assume some ‘ownership’ for the trust destroying events that occurred.
• recognise and acknowledge that a violation has occurred
• determine the nature of the violation—that is, what ‘caused’ it—and admit that one has caused the event
• admit that the act was destructive
• accept responsibility for the effect of one’s actions

This very much looks likes apology 10 above.

Actions of the Victim

• The victim to request (or the violator to offer) some form of forgiveness, atonement, or action designed to undo the violation and rebuild the trust

Lindskold, S. (1978). “Trust development, the GRIT proposal, and the affects of conciliatory acts on conflict and cooperation.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 772-793.

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There is something peculiar going on with Melbourne’s trains. A couple of years ago we received a new fleet of brand new Siemens trains and everything worked fine. This year the same trains have a mysterious and serious problem: they don’t stop when and where the driver wants them to. The brakes seem to have a problem and no one can pinpoint the difficulty. According to The Age, there is a glimmer of hope but the resolution is dragging out. Experts have been flown in and the best people are working on the issue, so why is it taking so long to resolve?

What increases my befuddlement is the apparent nuts and bolts characteristic of the problem (at least that is how it appears). A train is a system (admittedly complicated) you can pull apart, analyse each component, make a diagnosis and put back together and you still have a train. So the solution, therefore, can’t be just a simple malfunction of equipment there must be something more complex occurring.

Could it be that they just don’t have the right people working on the problem, that the true experts on maintaining Siemens trains are yet to be engaged? I think this is unlikely given the concern and inconvenience the absence of these trains is causing Melbourne commuters, Connex and the Victorian Government. Could it be that this type of problem hasn’t been encountered anywhere else in the world and the engineers are simply not equipped to handle the problem? That’s hard to believe given the number of these trains working diligently on so many tracks around the world. While the problem might not be identical, if it were a purely mechanical issue the mechanics would be able to spot it and fix it.

But any issue involving people is never purely mechanical. When people are involved in problem solving we need to consider how knowledge is flowing from one person to another; from one group to another; from one organisation to another. Here are some possibilities that might be hindering the resolution of the unstoppable train problem.

The people responsible for the day to day maintenance of the trains in Melbourne (I’ll call them the mechanics) don’t know the experts that well from Siemens (I’ll call them the engineers). Knowledge will only flow between these groups after a relationship has developed and trust formed. If the first time they have ever met is in the heat of resolving a high profile issue, then tempers are likely to be frayed, finger-pointing occurs and communications stop. In the future, prepare for emergencies by ensuring the experts know the people on the ground.

Mechanics tend to be practical, concrete thinkers. Experts like to work with abstractions. Engineers like to work with drawings and designs. When there is a problem, go back to the drawings to figure out what is going on. Mechanics like to try things out. Get another part, replace an old one, see what happens. The two groups speak different languages. One solution is help both groups become bi-lingual and show more empathy for the others’ approach. And mechanics and engineers wont be the only groups involved who speak a different professional language. The policy folks from the department, the politicians and the rail safety regulator will have a way of talking that will be different again.

While the absence of pre-existing relationships and the lack of a common language among experts will slow the flow of knowledge, there are a myriad of other possibilities and it’s impossible to predict which one will help resolve the problem. The key point is that a complex problem like this requires the team to try things, make educated guesses and see what happens, while ensuring the public is kept safe and services are maintained as best as they can.

The unstoppable train problem is unlikely to be a mere mechanical fault. It sounds like a knowledge problem: an inability to find and access the right knowledge when it is needed. But don’t be fooled in thinking this knowledge resides in a database somewhere. More than likely it is contained in the experiences and stories of groups of people around the world who don’t even realise they have the answer or that anyone is looking for it.

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I was over at David Maister’s blog the other day and he was requesting tips on how to better manage your boss. I made a suggestion: match your boss’s communication style. I see David has expanded on this idea in his latest podcast: Managing Your Boss - new careers podcast episode

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I met John Smith and Bev Trayner face-to-face for the first time last year in Florence at a CP2 dialogue. I’d known both of them for years before this meeting. Before Florence it was an online and Skype acquaintance. My face-to-face meeting made a huge difference on how I viewed my role in our community: I’m more involved, I can see the core team, I can really hear the language.

John and Beverly have just published a paper on how they have brought communities together using a combination of online and face-to-face interactions. In each case the face-to-face part consists of an event. Online interactions are used to ramp-up and then ramp-down before and after the event.

They conclude their paper with six heuristics:

1. Design for learning using CPD model is productive
2. Spending time on social processes
3. Using different media to negotiate language as part of a larger process
4. Creating new possibilities: subgroups and outside experts as resources
5. Demonstrating leadership roles in different media
6. Provoking shifts in "comfort zones."

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Nancy White and I have been working on a project to help our client enhance their collaboration practices. In the process we’ve identified three types of enterprise collaboration. Love to hear what you think of the idea. Nancy is riffing on this topic too and has added a bunch of other cool resources in her post.

Collaboration is the act of working with people to get something done. We can look at collaboration at three levels within the enterprise.

In Team Collaboration, the members of the group are known, there are clear task interdependencies, expected reciprocity, and explicit timelines and goals. To achieve the goal, members must fulfil their tasks within the stated time. Team Collaboration often suggests that while there is often explicit leadership, the participants cooperate on an equal footing and will receive equal recognition. An example is a research project to develop a prototype for X in five months with six team members and a set of resources.
 
In Community Collaboration, there is a shared domain or area of interest, but the goal is more often on learning, rather than task. People share and build knowledge, rather than complete projects. Membership may be bounded and explicit, but periods are often open or “ongoing.”  Membership is often on equal footing, but more experienced practitioners may have more status or power in the community. Reciprocity is within the group, but not always one to one (“I did this for you, now you do this for me.”) An example might be a community of practice that is interested in the type of research mentioned in the team example above. A member of that team may come to her community and ask for examples of past projects.

Network Collaboration steps beyond the relationship centric nature of team and community collaboration. It is collaboration that starts in individual action and self interest and accrues to the network. Membership and timelines are open and unbounded. There are no explicit roles. Members most likely do not know all the other members. Power is distributed. This form of collaboration is driven by the advent of social software, a response to the overwhelming volume of information we are creating. It’s impossible for an individual to cope on their own.
An example of network collaboration might be members of the team in the first example above bookmarking web sites as they find them. This benefits their team, possibly their related communities of practice but it also benefits the wider network of people interested in the topic. At the same time, they may find other bookmarks left by network members relevant to their team work. This sort of network activity benefits the individual and a network of people reciprocally over time. The reciprocity connection is remote and undefined. You act in self-interest but provide a network-wide benefit.

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Social searching is the next big step in helping you get the search results you need. This is how it works. Someone in your community creates a community search engine for your group and then everyone in the community starts using it. When the results appear you add value by telling the engine which results don’t belong and which ones should be promoted to the top of the list. The more the community uses the engine the better the results. 

I’ve created three social search engines using Swiki from Eurekstar:

• people issues related to knowledge management
• evaluation of hard to measure initiatives
• meaningful organisational change

If you are interested in these three topics please bookmark these links and use the search feature as much as you can. We can then see, as a community, how we can improve our searchability.

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Here’s a great video describing how a collaboration between Rob Fulup and Michael Schrage (author of Serious Play) hit a low point but got back on track with assistance from Bernie DeKoven. There are a couple of reasons why I liked this clip: the information is presented as a story where Rob and Michael recount their poor collaboration experience and how it was turned around—it makes the 8 minutes compelling; and, the use of a facilitator and a communication tool to somewhat depersonalise their ideas so the collaborators (antagonists) could focus on content rather than each others’ failings (as they saw them).

In one of my first blog posts (Back again bemoaning the limitations of text), three blog-sites ago, I made the observation that communication tools and artifacts (perhaps related to boundary objects) are important devices for co-creating meaning. Back then I was particularly interested in the role of diagrams.

The ability for collaborators to sketch diagrams as a way to create and communicate ideas has considerable advantages over collaborating using a discussion forum approach that relies predominantly on text . The key difference lies in the fact that a diagram is co-created and its meaning is developed through the interchange between the collaborators. The meaning of words, however, are generally predefined and significant effort is required to convey accurately what you mean.

In the case of Rob and Michael they used a software tool that enabled them to capture and prioritise their ideas and project them on a wall. Nothing new there. Mindmanger could be used, for example. I think the real transformation was facilitated by Bernie as he asked questions, rephrased statements and gently guided the conversation.

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