Real collaboration results from a delicate balance between too little and too much control.  It works best when there is a high level of creativity in the group, a common goal, a sense of urgency and a certain amount of friction in the group.   However, even with these components collaboration will fail if the behaviours that result from the pressure and tension are not moderated appropriately.  The recipe for collaboration has many ingredients including design, leadership and environment.

Successful collaboration is often seen in times of crisis, when the common goal of a group is survival.  For example, the current mining disaster in Chile: 33 miners trapped underground for 17 days before being discovered managed to survive on 48 hours worth of rations.  This feat itself could only have been made possible through significant collaborative effort among the trapped miners.  All 33 were dedicated to a common goal, the sense of urgency profound, and any self serving behaviours moderated for the benefit of their collective survival.

We have all heard of the experience curve and the effects it has on reducing costs and time while increasing accuracy in product and service development- it’s logical.  However, the inherent flaw in the experience curve model for business is that once you reach a certain level of expertise the costs, time and accuracy continue to improve only marginally until a new innovation is introduced.  And it is with the collaboration curve that the innovation increases.

“We’re seeing the emergence of a new kind of learning curve as we scale connectivity and learning , rather than scaling efficiency”

The more participants you have working on a design or project and the more interactions between those participants in a carefully designed collaborative environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.  Essentially, because with continued collaboration comes continuous ideas that translate into continuous innovation.  It eradicates the lull in performance improvement that occurs in the experince curve model.

Take Apple for example.  They are experienceing a seemingly never ending cycle of expansion through the applications for their devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod etc.)  The reason of course is that they crowdsource.  Apple doesn’t think of the hundreds of application ideas and advertise them, they merely offer the platform and software neccessary for their users to develop apps based on their own ideas – and because of it the App Store is massive and Apple continues to gain revenue, reputation and offer continuously evolving product.

So I urge you to consider how you are applying the Collaboration Curve learning cycle in your organization?

What’s critical to any creative collaboration, is that it begins with a goal but no blueprint to follow, because much will be discovered during the process.  Each individual is expected to share any of his or her knowledge, opinions, and discoveries that will help to achieve the group’s common goal. What’s most surprising about the lack of success with these endeavors is that we have an ever-expanding array of tools that can enhance collaboration, such as Wikis, search engines, smart phones, and social networks.  The reasons that collaborations fail, however, involve those crucial soft ingredients—behaviors and mindset.

The most important point is that collaboration is a mindset, not a set of steps.   So, while I can recommend steps, and give examples of how they have worked, people will need to shoot for the mindset and try different approaches depending on the situation.

I like to call this mental attitude the “collaborative state.” Helping groups reach that state depends on the mix of people involved, the work done to prepare for the collaboration, and the characteristics of whoever is leading the effort.

The first feature that will decide whether a collaboration fails or succeeds is the choice of collaborators. Many people want the most prestigious and intelligent people they can find, but in fact, it’s more important to get a diverse mix of people who represent different perspectives, skills, and mindsets. Diversity reduces groupthink and amplifies the variety of input.

Then, to get that group to truly work together, the leader must create a unique environment of openness, trust, candor, risk taking, astute awareness, and of sensitivity to the various personalities involved. There must be a clear set of rules for how to act so that people feel safe about expressing their views.  But the participants shouldn’t feel too safe; in fact, it helps to keep them slightly off balance, even a bit uncomfortable, so that they are open to the unexpected and willing to be unorthodox if that’s what is necessary to get to the answers the group needs. The participants must be engaged from the beginning, and that requires a lot of preparation and “stage setting.”

Most importantly, the leader or moderator must have impresario-like skills, so that he or she can make certain that every voice is heard, that people are comfortable sharing all their ideas, and that the overall process maximizes the likelihood that the very best ideas will get approved— not just those of the most powerful participants. The leader’s most important tasks include managing divas and helping less well-known participants to shine.

Getting to the “collaborative state” takes a lot of planning and work behind the scenes, in clarifying the goals, setting the stage, drawing up the list of participants, grooming them for the process, and then overseeing the collaboration.  Many of the tactics that help create that environment are counter-intuitive.  For example, leaders need to cede control – in order to gain control – another paradox. They must also carefully manage the personalities in the group and set an example to show that everyone will be treated fairly and given a voice, and that creative ideas are welcomed. Group leaders must also work against “the system” to make it clear that in this particular setting bullying, patronizing, and relentless self-promotion are considered counter-productive.  If the right steps are followed, and a group does reach peak collaboration, amazing things can happen.   

We invite you to share with us:

What have your experiences been?  

Are you a collaboration leader? 

Would you like to participate in a collaboration forum?

Collaboration is one of those things everyone thinks they understand, but very few actually do. True, some types of collaboration are natural or easy to learn, but the highest, most valuable kind, where everybody in the group is thinking creatively and sharing openly is extremely rare.  Now, in the era of Web 2.0, a wave of new collaboration tools are being unleashed so that even more and bigger collaborations are being announced daily. But most people won’t get much value out of these exciting new tools if they don’t pay attention to the crucial soft ingredients — the behaviors and mindset — needed to make collaboration really work.

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.  This is The Collaboration Paradox.

In ”creative” collaborations, it is not just a matter of people pitching in what they know; the goal is to extrapolate beyond the group’s collective knowledge. As mentioned earlier, the skills we are taught to be the most important for success are actually collaboration busters.  In school, at work, and everywhere we are shown that success comes through self promotion and devotion to our own “kind,” whether it is a department, professional field, or political viewpoint.  Young athletes are taught to win at all costs and to celebrate “crushing” their opponents. There are precious few role models who celebrate victory without also celebrating “defeat of the enemy.”  When these same traits are allowed to dominate a collaboration, it becomes a very negative experience.  Only a few participants have any real say.  The rest feel intimidated or exploited, and as if their time is being wasted.  This type of “hollow” collaboration happens so much, that many people are very skeptical about collaborating. In particular, they may have the following fears, which inhibit them from really contributing:

•    Their best ideas will be stolen.

•    Their weaknesses will be highlighted.

•    There will be a hidden agenda.

•    The participants will have such different ideas that they’ll never agree on anything.

•    Certain individuals or camps will dominate.

Too often, creative collaborations become a pseudo collaborations.  They sound good, but are totally hollow.  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.

Check out today’s for an example of how collaboration and information sharing has lead to a recent breakthrough in Alzheimer’s.

Stay tuned – next week we will look at some tips and strategies to maximize the incredible potential of creative collaborations.

As was briefly mentioned last week, the issue is that out of the box software solutions all to often result in the organization changing the way they work to suit the software’s capabilities rather than tailoring the software to meet the organizations needs.

An impressive example of an organization that did it right is Goodwill Industries.  CIO Steve Bergman recognized that with so many decentralized non-profit operations throughout North America and the World that in order to effectively and economically facilitate a community of best practice he would need to introduce a collaborative technology solution.  He did his due diligence, testing the available corporate software solutions and found that none of them was the right ‘fit’ for what he wanted to use it for.  What her really needed was a system that could easilyadapt and integrate into the ever changing needs of his growing organization without breaking the bank! 

So Bergman changed tack, and found an opensource solution that was nearly what Goodwill needed and worked with the opensource programmers to create the collaboration portal MYGoodwill – a customized system that works for Goodwill Industries to satisfy their requirements and capabilities without causing a major restructure of process or requiring extensive training to operate.

I believe this story illustrates how we need to keep sight of the fact that technology is meant to work for us, satisfy our needs, and that often means customization to get it right.  Just as every person is unique so is every organization and their needs can’t all be satisfied out of the same box.

Watch a video interview with Steve Bergman

The recent influx of both commercial and open source collaborative technology solutions when used by knowledge workers has the potential to improve efficiency and add an element of quantitative metrics to measure success in an industry that has to this point been subjective.  There is potential for sizeable gains from even modest improvements of access to web 2.0 tools such as social networks, wikis, and video conferencing.  Both Cisco Systems and Procter and Gamble have employed this strategy with their international enterprise sales teams and have seen a significant improvement in productivity.

Now comes the important part -  in order to be really effective leaders must consider the behavioral and structural requirements of their industry first by understanding the capabilities their own knowledge workers need to increase their productivity, and not tailor their processes to accomodate the capabilities new technologies provide.  This may mean that out of the box solutions are not appropriate for your organization and require customization.  Like any other product or service; not all collaborations are created equal!

Click on the image to check out McKinsey & Companies interactive tool to assess what collaborative tools are most appropriate for each class of worker!
(Using technology to improve workforce collaboration, James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee, 27 October 2009)

As a result, transparency is a very sharp double edged sword.  Although it sounds simple and “honest” to “do the right thing”, it requires enormous delicacy and skill to describe events or actions in a way that can be understood objectively by all.  Emotional baggage colors our understanding of all news and information.  And, of course, “news people” are trained to put a spin on things.   They can interpret in imaginative ways and generally create a news item out of something that fits the ideology of what they are trying to promote.   Whether that is distortion or objective reporting may depend upon the politics of the reader as well as the writer.  “Transparency” today may better refer to the fact that it is much more difficult to keep anything secret.   Ubiquitous camera phones document events that governments and businesses would have rather kept private.  With a bit of creativity they can  also be used to mislead and misinform.  These are collaborations of a different sort…no less complex than truly newsworthy ones, but  frequently with a self serving goal in mind.

A crisis can create interesting dynamics for public and private collaborations. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, then collapsed and began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the disaster quickly escalated into one of the worst environmental accidents in history.  As the company worked feverishly to plug the gusher and clean up the oil spreading around the Gulf, a “Deepwater Horizon Response” Facebook page was established, garnering tens of thousands of members within weeks.   While becoming a member of such a group usually means you are a “fan” or “friend”, the Deepwater Horizon Response page featured comments from more people who were incensed by the spill as “supporters” of BP.   While it may have seemed like a risky strategy, BP may have gained points for creating a public forum, and for allowing both “pro” and “con” participants.  And it let BP know how people were responding to the myriad of news from many sources.  Transparency is often regarded as extremely risky, but in this new age of camera phones and social media, secrecy may be much riskier.  Don’t forget, though, it’s not what you do that counts so much as how you do it.

Aaron Saenz, editor of “Singularity Hub” a  blog and news network covering the latest in man’s journey towards the singularity (the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations by “partnering” with technolgy to initiate an intelligence and information explosion) observes that while IQ scores are only advancing at a snail’s pace decade to decade, CI is expanding exponentially — thanks to Web 2.0 and its wealth of information aggregation services and has as such made IQ an obsolete factor in aquiring new knowledge.

Although it is undeniable that the capacity to gain knowlege through collective intelligence networks is staggaring and there is little doubt that humanity will indeed reach the singularity, the notion that individual intelligence no longer matters seems misguided.  There are many levels and varieties of intelligence, each contributing uniquely to the knowledge of the collective.   The proposed obsolescence of individual intelligence suggests that the contributions of a world full of people with homogeneous intelligence could collectively come up with the same (or superior) advances in knowledge as a population with heterogeneous intelligence.

The theory of collective intelligence as defined by James Surowieki requires 4 factors to be effective: Independance, Diversity, Decentralization and Aggregation.  In other words, the individuals in the collective should have varied levels of intelligence and expertise, be able to speak out and not fall victim to group think and then have a way to aggregate the resultant inputs.  

It would seem that varied individual intelligence is a key requirement to achieve optimum collective wisdom and advances in global knowledge.

What do you think?

And the answer of course is: it depends on the conditions.

One of our Kingbridge Meeting Design Advisors recently encountered an example of this while running a collaborative technology session with a group working on their strategic plan.

For the first half of the meeting the internal facilitators had worked with a core group to do the preperatory analysis prior to the idea generation phase where they would utilize decision support technology to leverage the collective.  When the idea generation phase arrived so did a few additions to the group represented by some very high level and influential members of the company. 

It quickly became apparent to both the comany’s facilitators and the Meeting Design Advisor, who was guiding the use of the technology, that one of the new group members had a very dominant personality and was unintentionally stifling the creativity and openess of the group. 

In this instance the facilitators turned to the Meeting Design Advisor (MDA) to help get the group re-engaged.  As an unbiased and unconnected member of the group the MDA was able to intervene.  When the dominant personality would begin to pontificate the MDA respectfully interjected with “So if I am hearing you correctly, you believe that………….. and that the correct course of action would be to…………”  Once the statement had been approved and the speaker validated that their point was clear, there was then a focused opportunity to engage the rest of the group. 

The moral of this story is that there is a reason why the first step for planning an effective meeting is to “know the audience” and plan accordingly.  When there weren’t any dominant personalities or pontificators in the session to stifle the creativity the internal facilitators were able to channel the group effectively.  However, you throw a few senior staff members with strong personalities in the mix and the challenge of moderating conversation often becomes more difficult for internal team members than an unbiased outsider.

So, next time you are planning a session consider your audience, not just their positions but their personalities and the way they react under the pressure of a difficult conversation.  Only then will you be able to answer the question of whether ‘to facilitate or not to facilitate’.

My passion for continuing to research how collective intelligence can give way to collective capability that brings about significant change inspired me to purchase The Kingbridge Centre as a laboratory and resource for pursuing this effort.  My vision for this centre is to create a neutral place where leaders from diverse sectors with different backgrounds can mutually explore effective experiences as well as doing post mortems on unsuccessful ones.

I believe the most significant advances in healthcare will require collaborations between business, government, non-government organizations and academia to improve individual and collective efforts for evolving health systems nationally and globally.

I would like to begin to build a community of collaborative minded professionals by hosting/sponsoring a few interactive forums at Kingbridge this year.  If you are interested in being a part of these forums and have a past successful or unsuccessful collaboration experience to share please contact me either through a comment on this forum or at institute@kingbridge.com.

John Abele