Guest Post: The Collaboration Paradox
One of our long time friends, as well as a client at Kingbridge is Bruce Miyashita. In our discussions over the years his insights, perspective and provocative challenges have been stimulating and worth acting upon. Now he has evolved into a blogger so his thoughts can be shared more broadly. In the spirit of collaboration he has agreed to share his thoughts from time to time. The first one is a blog on an interview I did on collaboration with Forbes online.
The Collaboration Paradox
Posted: May 25, 2012 | Author: Bruce Miyashita http://xray-delta.com/2012/05/25/the-collaboration-paradox/
One of the people I’ve had the good fortune to get to know is John Abele. John is the retired Founding Chairman of Boston Scientific Corporation, Chair of the FIRST Foundation (a very interesting and successful program to engage young people in engineering, science, technology, and project management through the vehicle of robotics challenges) and the owner of The Kingbridge Centre and Institute, a conferencing institution whose mission is to research, develop, and teach improved methods for interactive conferencing: problem solving, conflict resolution, strategic planning, new methods for learning and generally help groups to become “Collectively intelligent.”
John holds numerous patents and has published and lectured extensively on the technology of various medical devices and on the technical, social, economic, and political trends and issues affecting healthcare. His major interests are science literacy for children, education, and the process by which new technology is invented, developed, and introduced to society.
Over the years one of John’s passions is understanding the nature of collaboration and how to foster it in various realms of human activity. Recently, John was interviewed by Saj-Nicole Joni for Forbes. The article, “The Crucial Quest for Collaborative Leadership: A Conversation With John Abele of Boston Scientific” was published May 7th, 2012.
There are a number of themes in the interview, such as the definition and nature of “collaboration” itself:
Saj-Nicole Joni: Wherever you look, Arab Springs are occurring—in emerging countries, in the Occupy movement, in health care, in business, in education. These democratizing movements are all powered by the Internet and mobile devices, which make connectivity and sharing instant. But begin connected is only the starting point. People everywhere must learn the deeper human skills of collaboration if we are to harness the amazing power of networks for greater good, in business, government, the professions, the arts.
John Abele: Agreed. And the first thing we need to recognize is that we have a lot to learn. Collaboration is a simple word, but it has many forms and is widely misunderstood and misused. What are you trying to accomplish? Command and control is important for defined tasks (you don’t want creative employees in a nuclear plant). Facilitated, self-organizing, adversarial, or even crowd-source collaborations may be appropriate for other goals. In every situation setting the stage makes the difference for harnessing collective intelligence versus just another meeting.
Saj-Nicole Joni: The biggest challenge in getting collaboration right is to achieve a ying-yang balance in several dimensions. What are the three most important areas of balance that collaboration leaders need to guide?
John Abele: Each balance factor is a paradox. You need to cede control in order to gain it. Socratic dialogue, asking great questions, can help establish a culture that does this. Second, you must be humble and confident at the same time, and you must make this the cultural norm of the collaboration. Third, you must be willing to not take all the credit, and yet be recognized for and respected for what you contribute. And you have to ensure that this kind of balance regarding the attribution of contribution pervades the entire collaboration, for everyone involved.
Think about the collaborations you are currently involved in, and ask yourself how balanced they are in terms of control, humility, and attribution. If you don’t like what you see, then there are the places to dig in.
You can see the full interview here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/05/07/the-crucial-quest-for-collaborative-leadership-a-conversation-with-john-abele-of-boston-scientific/
On the Kingbridge site (http://www.kingbridgecentre.com/) John has also posted a white paper (“The Collaboration Paradox”) that further elaborates on his thoughts about collaboration.
“From the time we start school and throughout our careers, we are taught and rewarded for the very traits that make it difficult for us to collaborate effectively. This situation is compounded by the way we teach leaders to rigorously assert control as often as possible so their authority is constantly being reinforced. Controlling people is the opposite of collaborating with them. As a result, most leaders of collaborations are doing exactly the wrong things when they bring people together to collaborate, and the other people involved in those projects are essentially programmed to derail or resist collaboration. After describing that, the central paradox of collaboration, I’ll analyzing several intriguing projects that have achieved the highest level of collaboration– the “Holy Grail” that many organizations strive for because of the phenomenal results that can be achieved.
At this crucial juncture in history, where the world economy is seeking to rebuild itself, efficiency is more crucial than ever. Getting maximum value out of collaborations will help rebuild our economies more quickly. In addition, many of the most exciting new fields require collaboration on multiple levels and across several areas of expertise: These fields include nanotechnology, bioengineering, and alternative fuel development.
Too often, creative collaborations become a sham. With so many parts, players, and egos involved, simply managing the political aspects of such projects is challenging enough, let alone integrating the results into anything actionable. In the end, the organizers may make glowing reference to the long list of divas they assembled, but often they have little to show for that effort and almost certainly nothing really new has come from it.
What’s most surprising about this lack of success is that we have an ever-expanding array of tools that can enhance collaboration, such as Wikis, search engines, smart phones, and social networks.”
You can read the complete paper here: http://www.kingbridgecentre.com/images/stories/pdf/the%20collaboration%20paradox%20proposal.pdf
Judgement Calls
In the new Harvard Business Press publication Judgement Calls Thomas H. Davenport & Brook Manville discuss how despite the amount of data 
available to us today that many of the most critical organizational decisions made are still based on human judgement. More specifically a single leader is left to make the call.
In “Judgment Calls,” Davenport and Manville share twelve stories of organizations that have successfully tapped their data assets diverse perspectives, and deep knowledge of the people in their organization to build a robust organizational decision-making capability–a competence they say can make the difference between success and failure. This book introduces a model that taps the collective judgment of an organization so that the right decisions are made, and the entire organization profits.
Leigh Doyle in her Profit Magazine article Better Decisions through Collaboration summarized the 4 methods Davenport and Manville offer that support the development of this approach:
Build a participative process
Organizations need to create an iterative problem-solving process and engage in a more self-consciously participative approach, Davenport and Manville argue. The authors note that certain attributes support such a process: engaging less senior employees, tracking small failures, the ability to learn and rebound from mistakes and encouraging employees to speak up.
Leverage technology
Organizational decision-making involves taking advantage of technology and analytics to make smarter and more sustainable judgments. New technologies like social media and data mining are introducing robust new information about how employees and customers behave. This information also reveals undiscovered prejudices and hidden inefficiencies. Former reporting relationships are no longer sustainable as the sharing of more knowledge across new boundaries leads to greater collaboration and decision-making based on lateral information, rather than top-down orders.
Learn from the past
Davenport and Manville looked to ancient Greece for ideas on how to create a culture of collective decision-making. They discovered that the ancient Greeks based their decision-making process on “reasoned deliberation informed by facts.” This process brought together differing viewpoints and a broad range of knowledge that was sharpened by constructive debate and challenge. For the ancient Greeks, coming to a decision was seen as an explicit process that valued equality, fairness and transparency.
Get leaders to create the culture
While the old idea of one leader making important decisions may be over, leaders still have an important part to play. Leaders must set the decision in the right context, and give organizational permission to allow for a more participative and fact-based approach to finding solutions.
How are you making judgement calls in your organization?
Are you a Knowledge Worker?
The answer without asking should be YES. Reason being as Evan Rosen, author of The Culture of Collaboration and executive director of The Culture of Collaboration® Institute discusses in his Business Week article Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker “If you’re not soliciting input from the employees who haul boxes, assemble products, and drive delivery trucks, you’re missing out on profitable ideas”.
In this article Rosen differentiates collaborative organizations as those that recognize the importance of engaging all levels of workers in decision making rather than those with management teams that make decisions in a vacuum. The collaborative organization values all workers knowledge and leverages this information to improve produce, process and ultimately their success.
In addition, to the collection and application of information from all level of ‘knowledge worker’ (those defined as such and those not!) is the idea of access. If you wash dishes in the kitchen do you have the opportunity to engage the VP of operations in a conversation, or to share an idea? If not, you should. Access prevents the chain of command, lost in translation transfer of information that has been proven inefficient and ineffective – particularly if creativity and innovation are primary goals in your organization.
The article culminated in a list of 5 steps any organization can take to desegregate the workforce and promote collaboration:
1. Institute information democracy. Give everybody access to the same data and information. While you may need to restrict access to highly sensitive information, such as HR records and product formulas, adopt policies that favor information democracy over denied access. Information democracy encourages sharing over hoarding and sparks collaboration across functions and business units.
2. Break down barriers among levels. Give everybody access to everybody else within the organization. If a worker on the factory floor needs to engage a senior vice-president, the organization encourages that interaction. If a business unit leader needs real-time information from a specific sales territory, that leader can directly engage a salesperson, without cultural fallout.
3. Use information technology to enable spontaneous collaboration. Adopt unified communications and enable one-click access from corporate directories, business productivity applications, and specialized applications so that every team member has immediate access to everybody else. Team members can then launch an instant messaging session and escalate that interaction to a voice call, Web conference, or videoconference. So everybody knows who all the players are regardless of their location—and they gain the ability to engage them.
4. Involve front-line people in decisions. Pay everybody to think. When people contribute to decisions, they have a stake in those decisions. And it works both ways. Often senior leaders are inhibited from engaging people on the front lines even though they need a front-line person’s knowledge in real time to make the right decision. His or her position may be three levels below that of the people making the decision. And there’s no time to go through channels. The executives never hear the front-line expert’s voice, and the decision suffers.
5. Recognize and reward broad input. Put the organization’s money where its mouth is by tying raises and promotions to gaining broad input. Include a module in performance evaluations to gauge whether managers are making decisions in a vacuum or in concert with people across functions and levels. Recognize leaders who tap the knowledge of front-line people and reward leaders for including input from across the organization in making decisions.
How does your organization measure up?
Gone in 60 seconds
Everyday we hear how much faster the world is moving than years past and how organizations need to be ahead of the curve, early adopters and innovative to succeed at this pace. Here are some staggering statistics compiled by Go-Globe.com that hit the message home just how quickly things change in our technology saturated world. Some of the most impressive statistics are the use of social media sites and downloads from independent Wordpress websites indicating just how much information is being shared and consumed by the minute! So, the question becomes: How do you keep up?
Collaboration in 2012
In a recent article in The Economist by Lucy Kellaway, proposes that the future will be to revert to the past. According to her, 2012 will require that white collar workers will at least have to look serious. This means “In 2012 the following will be back in fashion: the landline, the jacket, the commute, the handshake and above all the office itself. Out of fashion will be the virtual office in which employees sit hunched over laptops in their local Starbucks, joined to their colleagues by webcam and e-mail. Instead, working life will start to resemble its old self before the internet was invented. Employees will turn up to work at predictable hours five days a week, face-to-face meetings will be preferred to video conferences; ideas will be exchanged not by tweet, but by the coffee machine.”
Lucy’s logic for this step backward is that “The repeated shocks to the world economy delivered over the past few years will bring in a culture of corporate risk aversion: the focus will be more on accountability than creativity.” Her vision of the office of the future (2012) will be rife with gossip and insecurity, where women willing to behave like traditional men and put their families second will find themselves quickly promoted while those that don’t may find themselves dropping out of the work force. All the while the only one cracking jokes will be the boss… and you better laugh!
Although there is no doubt this will be a valid prediction for many organizatons the fact is that the world is continually being “shocked” and those shocks will just come faster and faster until all you have is “shock.” It is either adapt or die. If history has taght us anything it is that collaboration and innovation are the game changers. Those companies in denial will pull back and try to avoid risk, which will give the innovative companies an open playing field to advance.
How do you think your organizaton will behave in 2012? Will it continue to advance and move towards “The Future of Work” as described by Tom Malone or will it revert to the past where showing up on time and leaving late is the pathway to success?
9 Types of Collaborators
The collaborative software company CentralDesktop, recently did a survey that concluded there were 9 types of collaborative personas ranging from the Stealth Ninja to the Dinosaur.
Click on image to enlarge
To find out what category you fit into and how you work with others, take the quiz below and let us know what comes out – you may be surprised!
Be like the Bee
Sometimes we forget that collaboration isn’t just something people do at work. In fact, it’s not unique to people at all. And some of the best collaborators out there in the world are not people. Bees, for instance, are amazing collaborators and they don’t require advanced technology to do it.
People are studying bees to figure out how we can improve our collaboration. The Biomimicry Institute “promotes learning from and then emulating natural forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more sustainable and healthier human technologies and designs.” Pretty amazing stuff.
They have all sorts of studies, but among them is one that looks at the behavior patterns within groups of bees when they’re making decisions – like deciding where to put a new hive and forage for pollen (buying a house, where to go grocery shopping!)
They’re also looking at how ants and bees respond when threatened. If you’ve ever come across an ant nest in the garden, you’ve seen how quickly an entire colony will pick up and high tail it to a new location. It’s not chaos at all, it’s very intelligently organized. The individual ants have roles and share a common purpose and plan. When there is a natural disaster in downtown New York how intelligently organized is it?
The more you consider how the world around you works, the more opportunities you have to identify different ways to collaborate. Step outside and watch the bees, or kids playing soccer, or any number of things that don’t relate at all to PowerPoint presentations, e-mail or management objectives. Then bring those observations back into the workplace and take advantage of collaboration tools to put those observations to work.
It’s not the technology that provides the answers – it’s the technology that enables people to collaborate more effectively. The tools today are designed to create a more natural interaction and productive environment between people – to be a little more bee-like.
Collaboration: A double edged sword for leaders
Today Harvard Business Review posted an article entitled “Collaborations Hidden Tax on Women’s Careers” which explores how many women in leadership roles have an advantage in one respect due to a predisposition to collaborate and cooperate, while a disadvantage as this predisposition often leaves them short in the decisive ‘call the shots’ department.
What I found most interesting about this article is that although it was written about female leaders there are many key points highlighted that can apply to anyone attempting to wield the double edged sword of collaboration in their organization.
Posted on Harvard Business Review: November 11, 2011 9:21 AM
A few years ago we hosted a seminar for 150 businesswomen. The topic for the morning was “Power: Do Women Really Want It?” Just imagine the noise level when that many smart and engaged female managers debated the pros and cons of wielding power. As the session came to a close we asked for a tally of how the breakout groups had answered the question. Their response was unanimous yet equivocal. Do women really want power? “Yes and no.”
Many of these women already held senior leadership positions in large companies. The others were in the room because they had been identified by their organizations as high potentials. Still, they could not fully come to terms with their ambition. One of the big reasons these women cited for their wishy-washy perspective? They strongly preferred to collaborate and cooperate rather than brazenly call the shots.
In our coaching sessions, we’ve worked with countless women who are exceptionally collaborative leaders. They have a talent for establishing buy-in. Still, the art of consensus can sometimes slow women down and diminish their leadership credibility. Over the past decade, we’ve interviewed over 1,700 people to find out how women can be more successful at the highest levels in leadership. One thing we’ve heard again and again is that collaboration can be a double-edged sword in terms of being perceived as powerful.
It’s easy to make the case that collaborative leadership is the wave of the future: Technology makes decentralized decision-making and flat organizations more feasible than ever. The problem is that an overemphasis on consensus can be viewed as weak. We’ve seen collaboration go wrong for women on the following occasions:
Asking for permission. We teach children to ask for permission, but when that behavior occurs with regularity as an adult it is seen as overly deferential. Asking permission can be perceived as avoiding responsibility or an unwillingness to make the tough decisions. Even beyond the negative perception it creates, a need for approval means you can’t act as quickly as other colleagues who are confident enough to proceed without hesitation. Leaders need to be willing to take the risks and make difficult decisions independently.
Appearing indecisive. There are plenty of instances when a decision requires careful consideration, conversation and analysis. However, there are also many other times when you need to give yourself the green light to proceed. Making the tough calls on your own and getting closure quickly means you need to be comfortable delivering bad news or taking the opposing position. It’s acceptable to be the dissenter or to play the devil’s advocate as long as you have the ammunition to make a good case. If you can do so in a firm, non-emotional way, people will respect you for your decisiveness and expediency.
Failing to assert a strong point of view. Countless times we’ve seen well-meaning managers dilute their authority by failing to emphasize their perspective or corral an important discussion. Collaboration gone bad can mean your executive oversight and guiding perspective gets drowned out in the din. Suddenly, decisions are being made by committee. If you are not setting a clear agenda, considerable time and resources may be wasted in meetings and initiatives that are circuitous. The best collaborative leaders are able to maintain their executive presence — they articulate a vision, provide inspiration, and then give their teams enough latitude to creatively and effectively work toward a defined end that suits the organization.
Being a collaborative leader is a tremendous asset in balance. Women who can retain this core ability, while at the same time acting decisively to make things happen, will have the skills and demeanor to thrive in the future.
Crowdsourcing the News
Crowdsourcing for experts to support stories such as those using Help a Reporter Out and open forums for news reporting such as CNN’s iReport have grown in popularity recently. However, The Guardian, a national British newspaper, will be one of the first national papers to implement a major editorial change with plans to crowdsource aspects of its editorial policy, which could be the starting point of change in the way national news is reported.
The idea is to publish a carefully-selected portion of the national, international and business newslists on a daily blog, and encourage people to get in touch with reporters and editors via Twitter if they have ideas.
The crowdsourced participation comes with some inherent problems such as the Guardian will not list all of their exclusives or embargoed content, and need to be particularly sensitive about legally sensitive or unsubstantiated stories. The Guardian, like so many others is focused on maximizing its resources and may have found a way to do just that.
Crowdsourcing may also provide the newspaper with much more diverse information than could be generated by a handful of primary reporters. The potential is huge for newspapers across the globe and is bound to be intensely scrutinized by other national editors. It is possible that a whole new approach to editing may be needed to fully utilize the input generated through crowdsourcing as we put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.
How Designers are Changing the World
At TED 2011, Autodesk launched a new book that celebrates the impact of design. Featuring the work of dozens of leading designers, many of them TEDsters, Imagine, Design, Create tells stories of how technology is transforming the very nature of design.
Edited by Autodesk Fellow Tom Wujec, Imagine, Design, Create explores the innovative thinking behind the work of a wide range of companies and designers, ranging from the world’s largest and most established companies to new and emerging designers. The book includes hundreds of beautiful images and illustrations, as well as interviews with industry leaders and innovators using fresh design approaches and new design capabilities to create buildings, products and entertainment experiences.
Wujec explains that “design has become a transformative force in the world. In fact, an organization’s capacity to design — not just in the sense of ‘styling,’ but of discovering new solutions, creating real value and producing innovative solutions — has never been more important. Advancing technology is now changing how people design.”
Tom Wujec is renowned for his ability to transform ideas into images that enhance clarity and engagement.
TEDGlobal 2011: Tom Wujec on visual note-taking from TEDTalks on Vimeo.
BOOK EXCERPT
“The growth and rapid change in technologies such as 3D printing, network connectivity, bioinformatics, genomics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, and mobile computing, among others, will accelerate the evolution of design in the coming years. Fundamental shifts in how we work together, already emerging in our always connected, socially networked lives, are also altering the practice of design… Our world will increasingly be shaped by the degree to which designers are able to create smart, effective, and elegant solutions that improve what that world looks like, how well it functions, and what it’s like to live in it. The future surely will transform design—but it’s just as certain that design will transform the future, by visualizing, optimizing, giving shape to, and ultimately creating a world that, for now, we can only imagine.”
The full pdf of Imagine Design Create is available for download on the Autodesk website.
