Alan Cohen Nov 23, 2008

Ori:

Thanks for the inquiry. 

There is a definite psychology and culture to building a collaborative work style.  And it must, interestingly, have support from the top. 

Senior executives must make a conscious decision that the benefits of the group are stronger than the benefits of the individual in various forms of resource allocation and decision-making.  In addition to the journey at Cisco, we are seeing companies in various stages (from studying collaboration to fully-embracing it) of this journey.  In many cases, the CEO is the lead change agent.

The citation of Evan Rosen’s work, above, is worth exploring

Thanks,

Alan

mimetz Nov 24, 2008

Relating technology-supported business collaboration to the collaboration of Kearn’s “team of rivals” is an intriguing idea. In Kearn’s wonderful book it’s clear that successful collaboration in the Lincoln administration came from top down leadership, which is a requirement to make business collaboration work too. Obama seems to have bought into both aspects of collaboration, first hiring Hillary, second as an effective user of the technology which supports business collaboration (and election campaigns too). Alan calls out “process” as a critical piece in successful collaboration. Lincoln made this happen thru his personal interactional style. Let’s hope Obama’s interactional style can be as effective in government collaboration as it was in his campaign.

Alan Cohen Nov 24, 2008

Mike
I think you actually raise the issue of executive style/approach as well as process.  The President-elect, perhaps because of the economic and world environment, appears acutely attuned to getting people to collective and creative solutions.
My thesis: if it can happen in politics, it can happen in business, Alan

Ted Schadler Dec 1, 2008

Great post, Alan. One of the things most often overlooked in the collaboration toolkit is that it must support *all* kinds of interactions—among close co-workers, prickly peers, arms’ length partners, and distrustful adversaries. And certainly a team of rivals.

Of course, the collaboration platforms themselves are still fairly generic, which makes configuring them for a team of rivals a bit challenging.

I think it will take us years to get to a truly humanizable collaboration toolkit, particularly for extranet collaboration, but we can take some cues from the physical world:

1. Allow circles to trust to be created and visualized. This happens in personal settings all the time, but usually unnoticed. For example, a trust circle in a town hall meeting typically comes from placement in the room; in an executive team by history with the CEO; in a multi-company project by previous relationships and barring that by school or professional society affiliations.

2. Place control in the hands of the individual WITHIN the boundaries established by the designated authority. For example, as a participant, I may wish to opt into a preferred area with additional technical content, but the project manager sets up what I can opt into.

3. Allow the circles of trust and access to change over time. This one’s a hairball for extranet collaboration, where today’s partner is tomorrow’s competitor. But it’s critical. This is solved in the real world with corporate email addresses and passkeys to buildings. Got any ideas on how to solve it in a collaboration platform? I’d love to hear about it!

Cheers,
Ted

Alan Cohen Dec 2, 2008

Hi Ted
Very thoughtful response.  I think there are two short-term technology solutions emerging to items 1 & 3 of your thoughts

1. The most humanizing element of collaboration, of course, is live interaction, face-to-face.  Barring the issues of travel and time, we see Telepresence and such solutions emerging to re-humanize the experience.  There is no—LOL, :->—replacement for body language, especially as business globalizes

3. As you will see in the next few days in a blog post, we see Policy as a critical enabler of trust and capabilities that allow for “flash” collaboration among various parties on an inter-company basis, across companies, technologies and security regimens.  We are now at the point where we can insert governance policies into collaboration and, I believe, this will grow significantly over time

Alan

Maribel Lopez Dec 2, 2008

Dear Alan,
This is a well written, thought provoking piece. As I read your post, I am struck by the similarities/linkage between innovation and collaboration. Many of the things you discussed, such as the ability to partner outside of your company, are the main principles of successful innovative companies. In fact, companies that practice customer- led and customer tested innovation like P&G are already examples of this at work. But these companies are few and far between today.

I agree with the three ares of change that you mention. I also agree with Ted’s comments on the time it takes to change in a meaningful fashion. Collaboration is of course not a new idea or term. We have been progressing towards this stage for some time as was mentioned with Extranets.  The technology is getting better but still has not hit that transparent level that allows anyone to securely interact with the right people over the best available methods. One thing the iphone did extremely well was to prove that consumers would do more if they understood how to access and use the available.  This is one challenge that must be tackled even for a company’s internal use. The second is accessibility across companies. The third as noted is the ability to create ad hoc communities. There are also numerous nuances of which modes people will use and how to match the different modes (i.e. I like IM but my boss likes voicemail.  Do we translate his voicemail to IM and how does that get set up?)
One big difference that I am seeing now is that we have several human and technological “forces” combining that are helping businesses move toward cultural change. The availability of social networks is changing the way both old and young interact. This has changed the expectation of what can be possible in terms of ease and accessibility of communication. Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis are also breaking down knowledge silos. While this is a good start, it will take time for employees and managers to build new corporate protocols. We need to address several questions in the process aspect, such as how employees are evaluated and compensated in a "collaborative" world? How is IP maintained or is it more of an open source model?

Also on the technology side, Telepresence is great but suffers from the ghosts of past video systems. Much like Tivo, you almost have to experience it to see the difference. If you have not seen it, you believe it is simply another slight enhancement to what was an amazingly poor video experience. I believe one way to solve this is to have more carriers offer it as a service that is collocated with data centers. (Similar to the go to Kinks conferencing model but with a company that has space and accessible bandwidth.)
Just a few thoughts

Enrique Valdez Dec 6, 2008

Alan
Your company is very unique in how it governs.  Most companies are more traditional.  They are more hierarchical.
How do you implement collaboration in this type of environment

respectfully, Enrique

Alan Cohen Dec 8, 2008

Maribel
Let me try to respond to your excellent post.
The main ingredient is human software replacing human middleware.  What I mean by this is the experience is dictated by the end user, increasingly including the creation of the app (in a Web 2.0 environment).

I think the TP/Video is a “being is a believing” situation.  As more users experience TP, just as they experience Facebook, they will want to use it more and more.  This is simply time and the user universe is ramping rapidly

Look forward to these discussions at C-Scape

Alan Cohen Dec 8, 2008

Enrique
Collaboration is a TOP-DOWN process. :->
I will explain that in my next blog. Alan

Blair Dec 11, 2008

Excellent piece.

Re your comment about "bringing companies together to collaborate requires change in three areas," I think "people" should have also been listed here. At first I thought culture covered people, but then I realized that people have specific work styles and it’s important to take the individual worker - their job, needs, goals, styles, preferences, etc. into account. There’s the corporate culture and the individual work style - both need to be taken into account.

Also, I think the idea of dynamic teams and workgroups needs to be mentioned - you may be competing with someone on one project, and partnering with them for another. Teams will be built up and torn down dynamically based on the situation - whether it’s putting together a dream team for a specific project, or partnering with competitors for another. I think the idea of teams being fluid is an important one that ties in with many of your points, but wasn’t specifically mentioned.

That’s my two cents.

Charles Amico Dec 13, 2008

Alan, I would like to draw your attention to the following excerpt: “And as Evan Rosen notes in his book and blog, The Culture of Collaboration, the biggest cultural change comes from building a new trust model for business.”

Trust, or lack of trust, resides at the individual level, I would claim, not the organizational level and is determined by all the experiences of one’s lifetime. It is why I agree with the comment that collaboration must have sanction from the top down as it is the leadership giving both “permission and protection”, as a therapist would in order to facilitate transformational change in their clients. When you said, “And it means looking for leadership at all levels of an organization - not just your own and not simply at the top.” I agree, but the leadership must lead by example and encourage others to do so as well. Many leaders ARE the problem, and they have no clue they are.

Real collaboration is a creative process which often can generate the unexpected. Collaboration within boundaries, such as working on one product family and not another product family, because of possibly competing with each other, can be confusing for some based upon their level of trust they won’t get hurt of they can’t keep those boundaries clear.

Very interesting comments here, as well. Thanks.
Charles

David Chao Jan 6, 2009

Collaboration can truly transform a business and more importantly transform the way companies communicate with their customers and partners. Take a look at technologies like WebEx.

In order for collaboration to be successful it has to come from the leadership team. It must be TOP DOWN. If their is zero sponsorship at the management level, success across the entire organization is very difficult.

Thank you for the read, well written blog!!!
http://davidchao.typepad.com

web development company Oct 14, 2009

Humm… interesting,

the title alone inspired me, the thaught of a team of rivals would increase productivity and there would be a sense of competition improving practicaly everything, thanks for the post,

Keep up the good work