Tag Archives: Collaboration

Collaborative Culture + Tools + Strategies = Value

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Creating value through organizational collaboration is much like baking a cake – forget a key ingredient and it won’t rise.

In today’s economic climate both inter and intra organizational collaborations are increasing, the potential benefits of which are undeniable.  The issue of course is finding the right recipe to successfully bake the cake.

In order for collaborations to work there are 3 key ingredients: strategy to follow, tools and technologies with which to execute the strategy and the organizational culture to support it. (Paraphrased from Evan Rosen’s “The Culture of Collaboration“.  Follow his blog )

A prime example of a successful (well, there were a few hang ups) foray into organizational collaboration is the creation of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  This futuristic aircraft began with Boeings desire to have only the best of the best working on it’s design.  Ordinarily, Boeing would house all the designers and engineers at their site in Washington.  However, with several international candidates in mind that was no longer a viable option.  So, without comprimising their desire to build the best aircraft with the best people Boeing embarked on a collaborative effort massive in scale and expectation.  Rather than simply outsourcing their parts they made several parts designers and manufacturers around the globe ‘partners’ in this venture.  With sites spanning several countries and time zones nearly every position was shared with others in opposing time zones thus allowing design and manufacture to occur 24 hours a day equalling a savings of a full year of production time!

Boeing introduced the Global Collaborative Environment (GCE), a set of computer and networking capabilities made available via the Web to every member of the 787 team, no matter what their location.  Cutting edge 3D CAD programs were distributed to all participating partners to ensure consistency in design, and regular virtual communication was built into the strategy from the start.  Most importantly however, a global culture of collaboration was initiated by having the multipe organizations involved in the 787’s development as co-designers and producers rather than mere suppliers to support the integrity of the process – every participant had a share in the sucess of the Dreamliner.

There were of course road blocks, including material shortages leading to delayed production that had better global monitoring protocols been put in place could have been avoided.  But, ultimately that is part of the process.  For a first attempt Boeing’s global collaboration effort has become a model for other organizational collaborations.

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Are You Leading Creative Collaborations?

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I just finished reading Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman and was impressed by the frankness with which they approached organizing creative collaboration.  So often when deconstructing successful collaborations the ‘needs’ tend to overshadow the equally important ‘need nots’.  Bennis and Biederman however extract a series of ‘take home lessons’ from several case studies of successful and not so successful group collaborations.

One of the stand out lessons highlighted in the summary of Organizing Genius is that “In Great Groups the right person has the right job.”  This lesson highlights the faulted belief of many organizations that people are interchangeable.  Bennis and Biederman spend a great deal of time detailing the importance of not assigning people with unique talents to positions that are not suited to these talents.  It is a cardinal mistake in organizing collaboration to try to fit people into roles they aren’t appropriate for just to satisfy an organizational need.

Included in this lesson is also the importance of having the right leader for the group.  This is not a unique notion as several works on successful collaboration and organizational structure have outlined the qualities needed to be a collaborative leader.  The distinction made in Organizing Genius is the exploration of several specific leadership qualities that squelch creative collaboration.

“Many projects never transcend mediocrity because their leaders suffer from the Hollywood syndrome.  This is the arrogant and misguided belief that power is more important than talent.  It is the too common view that everyone should be so grateful for a role in a picture or any other job that he or she should be willing to do whatever is asked, even if it’s dull or demeaning.  When the person and the task are properly matched, the work can proceed with passion.”

One of the fundamental rules of successful collaboration is transparency and Bennis and Berderman practice it to the letter in Organizing Genius.

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Gaming for Learning

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At Kingbridge we host conversation forums on collaboration topics with global relevance.  In 2007 we hosted Game Change a forum focused on immersive and experiential learning through emergent media.  We convened a community of interest including leading experts from academia, business and technology to accelerate the convergence of revolutionary technologies with the science of pedagogy. Gaming in  particular has proven to be a force of change in the way people learn today.  It has already proven effective in many technical and skill building applications such as surgical training, NASA education and even military training.

One of our partners in design and execution of Game Change was Anne DeMarle, Director of the Emergent Media Centre at Champlain College in Vermont.  Anne, in collaboration with the United Nations and The Population Media Centre, is now venturing beyond technical applications of gaming, towards gaming for behavioural change with the UNFPA Game to Prevent Violence Against Women project in Cape Town, South Africa (You can follow the project’s research and development through the team’s blog).

This shift in gaming for behavioural and social change will dramatically change the landscape of social learning.  Group dynamics training in the workplace and social change orgainzations across the globe will be able to adopt this new avenue for experiential learning.  Particularly, with computer based games the reach of the Internet will allow smaller groups to reach a much greater proportion of the global population resulting in a profound shift in awareness.

We will be watching for these advancements and keep you posted!

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Collaboration in Education?

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It occured to me today to do some research into what the public education system is doing to better educate children to be more collaborative.  Surprisingly – then again perhaps not – I found next to nothing!  There are a plethora of initiatives and papers written on fostering collaboration amongst departments and teachers but distrubingly little on educating students in this area.

The education system is highly individualistic.  You are rewarded for standing out, for being an exceptional individual and for personal achievment.  I’m not for a moment claiming that these are negative traits or that students shouldn’t be rewarded for their personal abilities, I only argue that there should also be some incentive to collaborate with fellow students as well.

I think we will all agree that group projects were a dreaded proposition in school.  You were assigned a group, assigned a topic and told to go to it and the entire group regardless of who did what was given the same grade.  The individualized point based system does not offer any incentive to collaborate in this situation- especially for the overachiever in the group who inevitably does everything.  As we have discussed in past posts, for collaboration to be effective (at any age) there are conditions that need to be met to make it work, you can’t just throw an assignment at a group and say collaborate – poof!   It just doesn’t happen that way.

Perhaps we could avoid our current situation of needing to ‘teach’ our organizational leaders how to collaborate in an increasingly ‘flat’ world if the education system was designed to reward collaborative behaviour in addition to individual achievment.

I would welcome any comments or insights you have on this topic.

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Ideas, Ego, and Collaboration

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I recently received a ‘weekly thought’ from my friend and organizational consultant Rich McLaughlin containing this quote:
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“One of the main risks of seeking acceptance is that it drives intellectual diversity and independent thought underground. Group applause and universal harmony don’t make for the best decisions unless there’s been vigorous debate and differing points of view – which, if done well, is likely to have included some disagreement.” David Marcum/Steven Smith, Egonomics

When you say collaboration the average person thinks it means teams having a nice conversation and everyone agreeing about what needs to be done, which is synonomous with the idea of seeking acceptance above. When collaboration is of course something dramatically different. As Don Tapscott so accurately describes in Wikinomics “Collaboration is the process by which human skill, innovation and intelligence are harnessed efficiently and effectively.” Because this condition inherently requires a range of ideas and candid feedback in order to reach the best possible decision, it rarely occurs without debate.

So the question is “How do we keep our ego separate from our ideas?”

This problem is what stimulated Ury and Fisher to write Getting to Yes. Separate the idea from the individual. Mark Gerzon’s Leading Through Conflict provides another perspective on the same issue. Candor requires the ability to “agree to disagree”. The collaborative leader creates an environment that encourages a diversity of perspectives. Effective whole system thinking needs participants who are really good at asking questions and do not have an ego investment in the answer. The collaborative leader celebrates that critical thinking skill and honours and rewards people who do it well.

The paradox, of course, is that looking at all the alternatives can be viewed as indecisive. How much is enough? At least part of that answer is the extent to which the group believes that the process was effective and fair. The bigger challenge will be to execute the decision effectively and that will occur only when the people in charge trust their team and how the decision was made.

Some questions Rich posed and great questions for all of us to consider when trying to collaborate effectively in the workplace:
“Am I willing to examine, and better yet, be transparent about my thinking and beliefs?
“Can I recognize that my pushback to a colleague is from a past grievance and says more about our relationship than the idea being considered?
“Can I recognize any of the above when it is happening and bring it to the attention of the team in a helpful way?”

Sign up for Rich’s weekly leadership thought

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Building a Collaborative Culture

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Early in my career, I had a mentor that I didn’t know very well.  I worked in the laboratory equipment business and our companies went to the same trade shows.  We met, but I don’t think he ever remembered who I was. His name was Jack Whitehead.  He was a mentor because I was fascinated by how he built a business that created a field (lab automation).  

The company was called Technicon.  It was a small business started by Jack’s Dad that made pathology processing equipment.  Jack had come across a physician inventor who had developed an automated process for handling liquid samples.  The inventor had tried to interest a number of the big companies in the laboratory field, but had been turned down by all of them.  “There’s no market” he was told.  Jack liked the guy, and the feeling was mutual…and he made a deal.  He didn’t go through the now-familiar due diligence routine, nor did he engage in market research.  His company was private so he didn’t have shareholders who were going to sue him if his next quarter’s results were not up to par.  It was a classic “gut” decision and, as it turned out, a pretty good one. <a style="color:white"

It was what he did next that fascinated me.  There were excellent patents on this novel technology.  And despite the fact that “no market” existed, the inventor had a number of enthusiastic “early adopter” friends who were anxious to use the technology for their specific applications.  So Jack took some orders for his early products…we’d call them prototypes today.   But he had some conditions he insisted on:  you had to pay in advance, you had to spend a week at the factory learning the details of your instrument and you had to help build it.  As you can imagine, to pull that off Jack had to be a great salesman and a fun guy to be with.  The early groups of customers worked like the devil during the day and had a hell of a lot of fun at night.  Jack wasn’t just training customers, he was building a family. 

It was cool to be an early Technicon customer.  You were not only a black belt Technicon user, you were an applications engineer, a development engineer, a marketing manager, a salesman and a public relations person.   You were tolerant if there was a problem with your early machine.  And you helped solve it.  This was viral marketing long before the term came into use.  But it wasn’t just a gimmick.  These people cared: for the technology and the field, for each other, for Jack and for Technicon.  Jack was the steward of the process.  Sure, he benefitted enormously from the help of his disciples, but he understood his role as he shepherded the process and the higher goal of advancing the field and the benefit it provided scientists and patients.  He even organized a scientific forum for the presentation of papers on the applications of his technology.  It was heretical at the time for a company sponsored event to earn the credibility and credentials of an academically sponsored meeting, but he did.  It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it that counts.  And he did it right.nike free run 2 women

Obviously I’ve glossed over some of the things that didn’t work so well, but the lessons to me were powerful and long lasting.  I’ve watched other companies create similar cultures, and I tried to do that at Boston Scientific.  It’s not so much a specific set of actions as a mind set.  <a

Who do you admire who has built a collaborative culture?

John Abele

 

 

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