Persistence Pays

Persistence pays ... when applied correctly.

We all know someone who just keeps at you like a battering ram until you throw up your hands and agree to whatever they are asking. This application of persistence is not dissimilar to the modus operandi of many three-year olds. It may provide short-term benefits, but it invariably takes a toll on relationships and may well jeopardize long-term gains.

By contrast, there is the story I heard recently of how a friend of mine (a knowledge manager at another law firm) obtained the cooperation of the head of his firm's technology committee who had become a roadblock to necessary change. At issue was integrating into a single user interface the firm's intranet with an enterprise search tool. My friend made his case to the partner and asked nicely for cooperation. It was not forthcoming. So, my friend waited a while (presumably checked his own assumptions to confirm they were correct) and then went back a second time. No dice. My friend is famous for his persistence, so he went back a third time and was successful.

What made the difference? Here are my observations: It wasn't a typical battering ram approach. Rather, between the second and third visits, my friend worked on his relationship with his colleague. In a natural (not manipulative) way, he got to know his colleague better. And, his colleague got to know him better. As a result, when that third conversation occurred, each had a deeper understanding of the other's concerns and in the process put more capital in the bank of their relationship. This foundation allowed the partner to step aside and permit the proposed change, despite his own misgivings.

When seeking collaboration or cooperation, it is not enough merely to be persistent or to impose your views through sheer determination. By doing so, you undercut the very ground on which collaboration is based. Rather, take the time to establish understanding and trust with your proposed collaboration partner. We've heard time and again how critical trust is to collaboration. It's equally important for good professional relationships which, in turn, are critical to your success.

So be persistent ... at building trust. You'll reap the benefits sooner than you imagine.

Innovation is a Team Sport

A recent New York Times article touted the benefits of collaborating to innovate. Debunking the myth of the lone genius who creates in solitude, the article suggests that the best innovation comes about through collaboration -- where many people and perspectives intersect to create and refine ideas. However, it isn't enough just to put a group of people in a room and ask them to brainstorm. In fact, according to the article, brainstorming is not nearly as productive as we'd like to believe. Instead of asking folks to "solve a problem" or "devise a new strategy" (favorite brainstorming topics), the better path is "systematic inventive thinking" in which the participants are asked to identify products and processes that work, break those down into their components, and then think about how those components can be put to other productive uses.

When I read this description of systematic inventive thinking, I realized that it appeared to share some of the principles of appreciative inquiry, which encourages us to build on our strengths. What a difference from the traditional approach of focusing on what does not work! (In a prior post I talked about the benefits of asking What Went Right rather than What Went Wrong?) Further, when you ask a group to focus on what's good, you stand a better chance of avoiding some of the negative dynamics that emerge in problem-solving sessions such as refusing to speak up out of fear of failure or a desire to hoard ideas.

Whether you attempt innovation in solitary confinement or through a group process, research has shown that innovation isn't a flash in the pan. According to Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company .... Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.

So what would it take to build innovation into the culture of your company? Sawyer believes that even the lone genius is part of a wider web of ideas and people -- the people the genius talks to, the people who write the things the genius reads, etc. This suggests that a company that wants a robust innovation culture has to build robust social networks that facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas.

How can knowledge management help? KM knows all about social networks and social media tools. KM knows how to reduce information silos and enable information sharing. KM knows how to foster collaboration. We've often said that the whole point of knowledge management is innovation. With this focus on group genius, it's becoming clearer how the things that knowledge management does well can be deployed to build a vibrant culture of innovation within every company.

[Thanks to Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog for pointing out this article.]

Collaboration -- All or Nothing?

In my prior post on Culture and Technology, I talked about the need to match carefully the social media tools you are offering in your law firm knowledge management program with the organizational culture of your firm. Now we need to go a little deeper. Many discussions on this topic treat collaboration in a binary fashion -- either you've got collaboration or you don't. And, if you don't, you get a free pass on deploying social media tools. In reality, your choices are not just wide open collaboration or nothing. As Andrew Gent points out in his post, The Alternatives to Collaboration, there are several ways of working that result in productivity. We need to be sure we take account of all of these and provide the appropriate tools.

Here's how he identifies two different modes of working that are alternatives to open collaboration:

Conspiring is very common among senior contributors within a team. Conspiring is simply a form of collaboration where the"community" is limited, usually to select members who the contributor trusts. Rather than speak out or agree during meetings, this individual will seek out others who they feel will understand and appreciate their contribution and work with those people to flesh out their ideas. They may even strategize privately about how to bring the rest of the team "around" to their way of thinking. (This is the conspiratorial part of the equation.)

[...]

Competing, on the other hand, happens out in the open. Competing is founded on two basic assumptions:

• Ideas reached by consensus are not necessarily the best ideas. Rather, they are ideas that sound most agreeable or that provide the least resistance to current conditions (in other words, ruffle as few feathers as possible).
• By openly pursuing multiple approaches in parallel, you can test more possibilities and (the key to competing) inspire each group to reach farther and develop a more complete and creative solution.

If you have wide open, top to bottom collaboration, then you're closest to the internet model of social networks and should be able deploy the standard tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, distribution lists) with minimal adjustment for the realities of corporate life. If you have a significant number of productive "conspirators" then you need tools that allow wide open collaboration within this very small group of trusted colleagues (e.g., IM, limited access wikis and blogs). For competitors, you need to provide a forum where they can battle their way to victory (e.g., open access wikis, microblogging).

By acknowledging that collaboration may not be possible for all, you give yourself permission to identify other productive ways of working within your law firm. Once you understand how these other methods work, you're better placed to introduce effective social media tools that fit neatly with established modes of working. This requires moving from a monolithic view of organizational culture to a much more nuanced one. Done correctly, this should result in higher adoption rates within the various sub-groups that exist and thrive within your law firm. Do this with enough sub-groups and you'll have reached enterprise 2.0 nirvana.

Getting Serious About Collaboration

A large number of professionals in knowledge management appear to have drunk the kool-aid regarding the value of collaboration. And now, collaboration is the latest buzzword tripping off the tongues of academics, activists, reformers, consultants and web 2.0 vendors. That many people can't be wrong, can they?

Perhaps it's time each collaboration advocate put their money where their mouth is. Now is the time to collaborate on a project worth doing. And what is currently the most critical BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) we could address? How about finding a viable way to achieve a sensible bailout of the US economy? (Is that big enough for you?)

There has been a complete failure of leadership in Washington. Given where we are in the US political calendar, it will take a great deal of leadership and goodwill for politicians of both parties to abandon any perceived election year advantages to help each other (and the world) to a sensible solution. Unfortunately, it's hard to be optimistic about this after the empty theatrics of the last week.

So how could the rest of us model good collaborative behavior to address the economic crisis? We could, for example, create an "open source" solution for a Better Bailout. How about a wiki to collect and refine the best proposals for reforming and restoring the US economy? What if anyone with a positive contribution to make were able to participate? Could we harness the energies and intellect of a world-wide community to solve this problem?

Clearly, not all of us have the training to conceive effective solutions to the complicated problems presented by the current economic crisis. However, I've got to believe that somewhere in our respective social networks, we have friends or acquaintances who could add value to such an effort. Perhaps those of us who did not get past Economics 101 could make our contribution to the solution by recruiting to the effort capable people with the requisite integrity, training and freedom from partisan rancor to make a meaningful contribution.

If you're happy with the job your representatives are doing in Washington, feel free to sit this out. If, however, you'd like to see a solution that deals honestly and fairly with the US taxpayer who has to foot the bill, now is the time to get involved. And, if you really believe in the power of collaboration, now is the time to prove its value.

[If you'd like to participate in A Better Bailout, e-mail BetterBailout@gmail.com.]

9/11 and Knowledge Management

It's cloudy today here in New York City. Even though the sky is not the bright, sparkling, optimistic blue it was early in the morning of September 11, 2001, there are plenty of other reminders of the events of that day.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we learned that the government in fact had much of the information that it needed to be aware of and counteract the 9/11 plot. However, some of that information was located in silos and protected by departmental rivalries. According to the 9/11 Commission's Report:

The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities.
...
The missed opportunities to thwart the 9/ 11 plot were also symptoms of a broader inability to adapt the way government manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. Action officers should have been able to draw on all available knowledge about al Qaeda in the government. Management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide. ... The U. S. government did not find a way of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the planning and assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving entities as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the agencies involved in homeland security.

If there was ever an instance in which knowledge sharing and collaboration could have made a difference, that's the one.

If we are fortunate, we'll never again have to face so grave a test of our government's knowledge management capabilities. If we are wise, we'll take the lessons to heart and do something to increase the culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing within the government and within our own enterprises.

Since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, some have spent time thinking about how to improve knowledge sharing and thereby improve our ability to respond to disasters and emergencies. David Bray, a doctoral candidate at Emory's business school, is one such person. On 9/11, he was the information technology chief for Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In that role, he saw first-hand the KM failures within the government. This experience deeply informs his research. Here is a glimpse at what he is studying, as reported in Knowledge @ Emory:

“I saw several instances where this workforce of 1.2 million government workers, not counting contractors—which is probably another 800,000—had significant disconnects. In fact that’s what the 9/11 report specifically comes out as saying: the United States did not connect the dots across multiple agencies,” explains Bray, currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “There were times with our program where we knew something at the trench level, tried to pass it up the hierarchy, but unfortunately it never got anywhere. Events like Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, anthrax, occur in part because organizational structures in which we trust, particularly for government—but also for most large businesses—aren’t built to respond quickly to turbulent environments,” contends Bray. “And now, in part because of globalization and also because of technology, things can change so quickly half a world away.”

In his paper “Exploration and Exploitation: Managing Knowledge in Turbulent Environments,” Bray, along with Goizueta co-author Michael J. Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management who also researches responses to disasters, develop a theoretical model about knowledge management in organizational hierarchies. Bray extends an existing model of exploration and exploitation to consider the context of multi-tier hierarchical firms faced with environmental turbulence, and then considers whether a knowledge management system that enhances knowledge exchanges across the organization alters the ability of the organization to match the conditions of a turbulent environment. Bray’s model considers different management approaches, such as a bottom-up cultivation strategy or a top-down command-and-control strategy.

“We wanted to explore whether having a top-down or bottom-up strategy would help or hurt organizational hierarchies when faced with environmental turbulence” says Bray. “We specifically were testing the idea that while top-down hierarchies may be great at command and control and maintaining internal control and reality, they’re bad at addressing a changing outside environment; a change in the marketplace, a change in competition, or an emerging national security threat.”

Bray’s research finds strong evidence that top-down hierarchies that stress command and control are ineffective in managing knowledge in turbulent environments because they decrease a hierarchical organization’s ability to maintain accuracy with its outside environment. [Emphasis added]

The work of David Bray and Michael Prietula suggests that bottom-up collaboration and knowledge sharing is the most effective way of keeping knowledge silos and human rivalries from hoarding critical information in times of change. And, because of the culture of collaboration, this sharing allows us to make better decisions and respond more effectively to the unexpected.

On the anniversary of September 11, 2001, it's good to know that we've actually learned something and are headed, albeit slowly and fitfully, in the right direction.

Do You Have What it Takes to Collaborate?

Basic web 2.0 allows us transparency, a window into another's life. Multiplied over many people, web 2.0 helps them connect with each other and strengthen an existing or emerging social network. Providing these connections is helpful, but it isn't collaboration. True collaboration is more than just getting along. It's working together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, in this world of competitive achievers, it's hard to find someone who really knows how to collaborate.

Like many other things, collaboration is an orientation as well as a set of skills. Deciding to be more intentional about collaborating is a good first step, but it takes more than that. According to Shawn Callahan at Anecdote, there are seven critical personal skills necessary for effective collaboration:

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"

Based on this list, collaboration requires more than mere technical knowledge. It requires drawing on sometimes dormant interpersonal relationship skills -- listening, empathy, consideration, etc. These are skills that have been undervalued within businesses for far too long.

So take a close look at this list of necessary skills and then take a closer look at yourself. Do you have what it takes to collaborate?

[My thanks to John Tropea's Delicious links for alerting me to Shawn's blogpost.]

Knowledge Management's Secret Sauce: Trust

Fortunes have been made in the food industry through the development and use of "secret" sauces. These are the seemingly-magic ingredients that chefs use to elevate a simple food item into a must have (or must eat).

Knowledge management has a secret sauce -- it's trust. Trust is the magic ingredient that reliably increases user participation. Where there is trust there is a perceptible decrease in anxiety. With that reduction of anxiety comes a willingness to create, contribute and collaborate.

Knowledge managers have always known this. It drove our KM 1.0 efforts to build large databases of vetted content. In a web 2.0 world, trust is even more valuable because we are asking users to create, contribute and collaborate in a more unmediated way. This permits access to a wider range of content more quickly, but it may also be perceived as risky if the content doesn't have the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" that comes from the vetting built into KM 1.0 business processes.

Neil Richards (Knowledge Thoughts) provides an interesting analysis of the critical value of trust with respect to wikis. In his post, How trust & risk affect wiki adoption, he takes the concept of trust one step further and discusses the "trust threshold, " which is the point at which trust and risk intersect. Here's how Neil describes it:

Trust thresholds! It’s not just about trust; it’s also about risk of each task. You need to earn enough trust to overcome the risk. Therefore, wiki use is dependant on how much a user trusts the content. ...when using a wiki to execute a task which involves risk, the trustworthiness of the wiki needs to exceed the risk of it being wrong.

Neil goes on to suggest ways of increasing the level of trust so that lawyers in your firm can get comfortable working with wiki content. If you've got a trust deficit in your law firm, also consider implementing some of the suggestions for increasing trust in the workplace contained in Shawn Callahan's recent post, Trust creating behaviours.

Trust may be the most valuable asset a knowledge manager has. Take the time to develop it in your workplace and then guard with your life!

Collaboration and Equity

In his recent discussion of Charles Heckscher's book, The Collaborative Enterprise, Larry Prusak notes that while collaboration may be the latest buzzword (with all the attendant shallow writing and commentary that regularly accompanies business fads), Hecksher's book is a material improvement over most of the other available analysis of collaboration. One striking observation is reported by Prusak in the following way:

[Heckscher] knows well that collaboration depends on trust, and trust depends on a sense of shared equity within the organization. In situations of gross disparities of power and compensation how can one expect collaboration? The real class conflict that exists within most organizations strongly inhibits real collaboration.

These notions of "shared equity" and the perils of "class conflict" raise some interesting issues for law firms, which tend to be highly hierarchical and often lack a sense of shared equity between the partners and their employees (including associates and the non-lawyer staff). If Prusak and Heckscher are correct, will it ever be possible for law firms to develop a true culture of collaboration?

Setting Limits on Collaboration

Collaboration is the business buzzword* du jour. As with any other fad, it's tempting for business leaders to say that everything they do is collaboration. Resist this temptation.

As aptly pointed out in a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report and discussed in this Wikinomics post, if we define collaboration so broadly as to cover virtually everything we do, it loses meaning. With that loss of meaning comes the inability to actually identify and measure the effects of collaboration within your organization. Above all, if you define collaboration to mean anything and everything, it becomes such an unwieldy tool that you can no longer use it with laser-like precision to actually improve processes and outcomes within your organization.

True collaboration is more than just doing something with someone else, more than just cooperating. Several have tried their hand at explaining the difference between collaboration and cooperation. Here are some samples of their conclusions:

- From CSCL: collaboration is a mutual engagement in coordinated effort, while cooperation is a division of labor where each person has responsibility for a different portion of the work.

- From the AASL Collaboration Brochure (1996): see a great chart showing the differences among cooperation, coordination and collaboration.

- From Dave Pollard's blog How to Save the World: another great chart explaining cooperation, coordination and collaboration.

Business processes and outcomes are affected differently by the level of cooperation, coordination or collaboration applied to them. Savvy business leaders will use each of these tools separately, understanding what each can deliver and then applying them strategically. That's how you avoid becoming a business "fashion victim" and become known as a effective leader. It's your choice.

*For an amusing set of definitions of current business buzzwords, see Slacker Manager.

[Thanks to John Tropea (at Library Clips) for pointing out this Wikinomics post via his always interesting tags.]

Collaboration and the Golden Rule

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the "Golden Rule" and it may be a key to collaboration.

If the basic sense of fairness underlying the Golden Rule set the terms of collaboration within an organization, it might in fact be possible for otherwise competitive co-workers to begin to collaborate. Adherence to the Golden Rule allows participants to work together and to share their insights knowing that they will have access to the best work of colleagues and will receive fair credit for their own contributions. This is a first step for people who are not yet convinced of the benefits of collaboration and are fearful of the potential loss of competitive advantage as a result of collaboration.  

For those who have moved beyond the simplistic belief that merely providing web 2.0 tools will create a collaborative culture, there has been a further challenge to identify the necessary preconditions for a collaborative culture. In my earlier post on Creating a Culture of Collaboration, one critical precondition mentioned was trust. More recently, in his interesting post, Reflections on the Nature of Collaboration, Shiv Singh talks about how essential trust is to collaboration.  That trust is built on a foundation created from evidence within an organization that a participant will be treated fairly.

However, achieving an adequate level of trust is easier said than done. Developing trust is incredibly difficult in an organization that fosters constant competition amongst its employees. Trust also is hard to sustain in an organization that isn't scrupulous about insisting that true teamwork be honored and that the contributions of individual members of a team be recognized. And trust may well be impossible in organizations where the guy tooting his own horn loudly drowns out less pushy colleagues. At the end of the day, most people need to know that to the extent they make useful contributions, those efforts will be noticed and rewarded.

Yet, in the absence of complete trust, it may still be possible to begin an effective collaboration provided there is a basic agreement on the part of the organization and its employees that fairness matters. This is where the Golden Rule or the Ethic of Reciprocity comes into play. Even if you aren't entirely comfortable with the notion of collaboration, and you don't completely trust your colleagues to do the right thing when left to their own devices, management support for the Golden Rule should go a long way towards creating an environment within which collaboration is less risky and, therefore, possible.  

Personality and Law Firm Knowledge Management

In the hype about web 2.0 and social networking, you'd be forgiven for thinking that all you needed to do was purchase the perfect silver bullet (i.e., whatever technology the vendor of the day is hawking) and your organization would be transformed into a hip, reflexively-collaborative, effortless knowledge sharing, 21st century knowledge management heaven.

But what if your organization happens to be a law firm???

In Neil Jordan's 1992 film, The Crying Game, we hear the story about the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion wished to cross the stream, but had no obvious means of doing so himself. So he asked the frog if the frog would swim across the stream, carrying the scorpion on his back. The very pragmatic frog declined because he couldn't be sure that the scorpion would not sting him. When the scorpion reasonably pointed out that to sting the frog was to risk the death by drowning of both the frog and the scorpion on his back, the frog relented and agreed to carry the scorpion across the stream. Just before they reached the other side of the stream, the frog felt a sharp pain and realized the scorpion had stung him. When the frog asked the scorpion why he had behaved so badly when they both knew that the scorpion's action would cause the two of them to drown, the scorpion replied, "I can't help it, it's in my nature."

Is it in the nature of lawyers to be collaborative? By collaborative, I mean more than simply working with others to get a job done. By collaborative, I mean a mindset or tendency that favors sharing intellectual resources with others over individual hoarding, that understands that the work of a group can be so much more powerful than the work of an individual, that prefers to work through problems with others in the belief that this process leads to better solutions. Does this sound like many lawyers you know?

Ronda Muir, a senior consultant with Robin Rolfe Resources, specializes in "the organizational and personal dynamics issues that are unique to law firms and law departments." In her article, The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers, she discusses the personal style, personality attributes, emotional intelligence and conflict resolution strategies of lawyers, as revealed by psychological testing. These results bear consideration in the context of knowledge management.

Among her findings are the following:

* The psychological profile of lawyers is "strikingly different" from that of the general US population.

* While over 70% of the US population are Extraverts, the majority of lawyers are Introverts, according to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. This means that lawyers prefer to work things out for themselves rather than to work through things with others. Further, since people tend to distrust those with a different personality style, "Extraverts tend to be suspicious of people who are not as instantly forthcoming with their thinking as they are, whereas Introverts may find off-the-cuff brainstorming dangerous and unprofessional."

* According to Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of the school of Positive Psychology, optimism is a critical attribute for success and happiness. His testing regarding the correlation between personality attributes (such as optimism) and career success revealed that only lawyering exhibited a high correlation. And that correlation was between success and ... pessimism!

* In the Caliper Personality Profile, the highest scoring personality trait for lawyers is skepticism, with a score of 90 as compared to the general population's score of 50. And, since people tend to use their highest scoring traits in other areas of their lives, lawyers have a hard time suppressing their natural skepticism in interactions that rely on trust and collaboration (e.g., personal relationships, team relationships, partnership relationships).

* Lawyers score high in a sense of urgency (which may be expressed as impatience) and they relish autonomy/independence.

* On the emotional intelligence front, lawyers are badly handicapped, scoring below the national average in the Mayer Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test.

* As for conflict resolution, lawyers "have strong preferences for competing and avoiding, the two least cooperative of the strategies" outlined in the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode. According to Ronda Muir: "The upshot of this preference is that lawyers tend to either engage in an all-out war over divisive matters, with the intent of `winning,' or they walk away. "

Taken together, these attributes create a person who prefers autonomy and thinking things through privately rather than working things out with others, brings a high level of pessimism and skepticism (and a low level of trust and collaboration) to every facet of their life, finds "off-the-cuff brainstorming dangerous and unprofessional," and has a strong preference for competition and conflict avoidance, which are the two conflict resolution strategies least compatible with collaboration.

While the wonderful success of web 2.o and social networking may be entirely consistent with the psychological profile of the general US population, I wonder if they will ever enjoy the same level of success with the lawyer population. To achieve similar levels of collaboration, lawyers would have to act in ways that are contrary to their natures. If the tale of the frog and the scorpion is true, this will never happen.

Collaborating for Fun or Work or Both?

In his post, The Muddle in the Collaboration Middle, Tom Davenport sets out what he views as the two viable uses for collaboration and collaborative technologies in the workplace:

* Fun -- collaboration for purely social purposes

* Work -- collaboration for narrowly-defined business purposes

He goes on to say that businesses fail when they try to use social media for any purposes that lie somewhere in the "muddled middle" between work and fun. He continues,

Where organizations get in trouble is when they venture into the muddled middle between these two options. They throw out some collaborative tools—either new-style social media like wikis and social networks, or old-style tools like Notes or Sharepoint or ERoom—and say, “go forth and be collaborative.” They don’t insist on a collaborative objective or business benefit, but they still somehow expect business value. They seem to assume that just because a technology is available, it will lead to collaboration, and that the collaboration will yield an ROI. I’ve seen countless instances where this hasn’t worked, and very few where it has.

While I'd be the last person to argue against his warning about relying solely on tools without sufficient thought for the business objectives, there may be a nuance here that we ought to consider: using social media for fun at work may be a critical precondition to using these tools successfully for just work. In my post on Creating a Culture of Collaboration, some of the necessary prerequisites of a truly collaborative culture listed there are: building trust, and creating space and time for informal connections among colleagues. These are exactly the sorts of things that social media can help with. It may be that through the implementation of the right tools, an organization can focus and strengthen its bent towards collaboration by making collaboration easier. Once that culture of collaboration is deeply rooted within an organization, collaboration for strictly business purposes will be a natural outgrowth of the existing social interactions.

So have we been unfair in our expectations of social media? If we put the work cart before the fun/social network horse, should we be surprised when there is disappointing user adoption? Perhaps it's time that we reordered things: first build the trust and social networks, then recruit those networks to engage in specific business projects. That's when we'll see the true power of collaborating for fun AND work together.

Building a Collaborative Workplace

Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk and Nancy White have just published an Anecdote Whitepaper entitled Building a Collaborative Workplace. They summarize their whitepaper as follows:

This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay out a series of steps for developing a collaboration capability. We finish the paper with a simple test of your current collaboration capability.

The authors are very clear about the role of technology in collaboration. And given my past comments on technology in the context of collaboration and knowledge sharing, I'm delighted to be able to quote these kindred spirits:

Of course technology plays an important role in effective collaboration. We are not anti-technology. Rather we want to help redress the balance and shift the emphasis from merely thinking about collaboration technology to thinking about collaboration skills, practices, technology and supporting culture. Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen.

How Collaborative is Your Organization?

Shawn Callahan at Anecdote has posted a thought-provoking quick quiz to help you determine how collaborative your organization really is. Once you tally your results, you'll find out whether you work in "collaboration nirvana" or "collaboration hell."

For those who would like to move out of collaboration hell and closer to collaboration nirvana, take a cold, hard look at what is required to create a culture of collaboration. Clearly this is something that demands tremendous leadership, consistent follow through, access to sensible tools, and careful hiring. In other words, it's a big project that cannot be accomplished unless it is a high priority for your organization.

All of which leads me to wonder how many true collaboration nirvanas exist in the workplace?

Creating a Culture of Collaboration

Collaboration is all the rage. Proponents of web 2.0 tell us that it's just the way we work naturally. However, for far too many years corporate culture has often emphasized the benefits of individual achievement and competition over collaborative efforts. This suggests that some folks are going to have to be retrained before they can rediscover their inner collaborator.

So how do you create and nurture a culture of collaboration? Once again, KM4Dev has found an interesting resource on collaboration: Seth Kahan's article entitled "5 Guidelines for Creating a Culture of Collaboration." He proposes the following guidelines:

1. Build engagement in the workplace. This means creating an environment in which employees feel that they have a stake in the outcomes of the enterprise -- that their contribution matters.

2. Increase trust through emotional intelligence. It's hard to collaborate with people you don't know or trust. So this means creating opportunities for people to get to know each other and learn to rely on each other. This also means providing emotional support in difficult times and times of celebration.

3. Create space for connection. Provide physical places where people can gather informally. An interesting question is whether virtual spaces are as effective as physical spaces for these purposes.

4. Condone connection time. Let people know that the organization supports their efforts to get to know each other. This, of course, sets up an interesting tension in organizations like law firms which count every minute since they depend on the billable hour for their livelihood.

5. Favor flexibility. Acknowledge and support diversity, not only in terms of physical attributes, but also in terms of work styles. Having this variety makes the organization more adaptable and less rigid.

In his book, The Culture of Collaboration, Evan Rosen notes that collaboration thrives best in organizations that promote informal, non hierarchical relationships within a culture that encourages innovation. He has identified 10 cultural elements of collaboration:

- Trust
- Sharing -- as opposed to hoarding
- Goals -- everyone pursues the same group goals
- Innovation -- the culture emphasizes the value of innovation
- Environment -- the physical and virtual environment facilitates collaboration
- Collaborative Chaos -- permitting the unstructured exchange of ideas
- Constructive Confrontation -- learning to disagree about and discuss concepts and issues
- Communication
- Community
- Value -- the point of collaboration is to create value for the enterprise

In thinking further about creating a culture of collaboration, Rosen notes that a critical element is ensuring that everyone has access to and ease with collaborative tools. In his post Too Old to Collaborate? he debunks the notion that younger generations are naturally more collaborative than older ones. In his work he has found that the thing that often divides the generations is the ease with which they pick up and use collaborative tools such as IM, web conferencing and video conferencing. But merely providing the tools is not enough to create collaboration. You also have to provide the training so that everyone can use the tools comfortably.

So is collaboration our natural mode of work? Possibly -- if we work within organizations that make it a priority to create and maintain a culture of collaboration.