IdeaEconomy.Net » Collaboration

Why Collaboration Often Fails and What to Do About It.

John — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:32:23 +0000

Big Ideas:

Collaboration and creativity are big buzz words now but most businesses don’t really know how to collaborate or be creative.
Collaborative efforts often produce mediocre results because ego gets in the way.
A great team can produce amazing results, but finding those team members is not an easy task.

There is no question that the Internet has changed the way we work and connect with others. From a few people working on a shared Google document to thousands contributing to projects like Wikipedia or Linux, we are collaborating in unprecedented ways. When it works, collaboration is synergistic and amazing. The problem is that too often, real, meaningful collaboration is thwarted by an ugly thing called people.

As much as we talk about creativity and collaboration, most people don’t really know what those things mean. We are all human, so egos get in the way. We want to own, control and dominate. It happens with children playing together, in office politics and in volunteer or non-profit settings. Too often, it is more important to be right than to do the right thing. That is where collaboration fails.

Intuitively, we understand the benefits of co-working, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding or a great business team on our collaborative efforts, but most of us also have many negative experiences where team efforts get mired in bureaucracy and territorial silo building. It is pretty hard to create something amazing when team members are jockeying for control and recognition.

At least from my experiences, I believe that most businesses don’t understand collaboration. How many of your colleagues or customers are still emailing Word and Excel documents as attachments? If you are over 30 years old, chances are your business processes are still heavily influenced from the Microsoft dominated days of installed software more than two decades ago. The world is a different place now. There are plenty of examples of dynamic, young companies are prospering even when the partners are global dispersed, but they are still the exception.

For real collaboration to work, many elements need to be in place:

Trust. Great relationships take time to build. With the exception of old schoolmates or childhood friends, most of us don’t have those deep social connections anymore.
Talent. Each person has to bring some unique skill to the team. Partnerships quickly fall apart when there is even the appearance of a less than equal contribution.
Personality. There are some people you just can’t work with regardless of their skills. Finding people that you like AND are good is not easy.
Shared vision. All members of the team have to be pulling in the same direction for the collaboration to be successful.
Technological savvy. Everyone needs to buy into the tools to work together. There are talented geniuses who can seclude themselves from the rest of the world, but you need to embrace technology if you expect to really collaborate with a good team, regardless of where they are located.
Communicate. Information hoarding is a remnant of the industrial age. Remove all bottlenecks to effective and direct communication. Social capital is more valuable than financial capital.

Collaboration is Still King

Amazing things can happen if you build the right team. The problem is that you have to sort through many less than optimal candidates on your way. It is all a numbers game, work with as many people as you can to find the right talent. Results will be mediocre most of the time, but every once in a while you will find that diamond in the rough. Do everything you can to work with the diamonds and throw the coal back in the ground for someone else to deal with.

Action Items

If you haven’t already, move your business to the cloud. Everything from shared documents, online workspaces, project management and customer relationship management software can be done much better online where everyone has access to the same information in real time.
Deliberately start and join new projects with new team members. The only way to find great people to work with is to work with a lot of people.
Get really good at something. Talented people are not going to want to work with you if you don’t bring anything to the table.
Personality counts. You need to play nice with others if you want them to stick around.
Great businesses are built on great processes. Get organized and anal about how you do business, communicate and serve your employees and customers. Creative breakthroughs do not come from some unorganized eureaka moment. Real innovation is systematic and deliberate, and almost always the result of hard work, rich collaborative efforts and insights from outside sources.

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Occupy Wall Street – Grows to a World Wide Protest

John — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:46:43 +0000

Big Ideas

Tens of thousands are now involved with the Occupy Wall Street Protests worldwide
Web based platforms facilitate the coordination of mass gatherings and protests around the world
With online collaboration tools, a single leader or clear plan are not required.

You have undoubtedly heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been growing around the world. The short news snippets don’t really capture the magnitude of the movement. Protests are being scheduled in dozens of cities around the world and recently the Almalgamated Transit Union, with 190,000 members has given its support. This is a world wide phenomenon and it is growing quickly.

How Occupy Wall Street Started

The birth of the movement was a post on the Adbusters website on July 13th. Here is a small quote from that first call to action,

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

The home page of OccupyWallSt.org describes the movement as,

Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the World

Another website, OccupyTogether, has since been created to coordinate some of the scheduled protests and other activities in dozens of cities around the world.

On Oct. 4th, the date of this post, there were more than 39,000 followers for the @OccupyWallSt Twitter account, with many thousands more for city focused protests around the world. (@OccupyChicago – 7000, @OccupyLA – 5000, @Occupy_Boston – 3500, @OccupyToronto – 1600, @OccupyTokyo – 400, with many more for every major city on the planet.)

Lessons in Collaboration

We have learned from the middle east uprisings this spring that leaderless movements have the power to topple governments and really change the world. Occupy Wall Street is no different. There is no central organization or leader directing the movement, participants are connecting and coordinating with widely available web based platforms . There are groups like MoveOn.org, that are trying to co-opt the protests, but for the most part, it is a largely ego-less and egalitarian process. Even the demands of OccupyWallStreet.org have been community driven.

The Future of Collaboration

Whether you support the protests or not, there are many principles here to learn from. With the internet, and social media in particular, ordinary citizens can coordinate and mobilize on a large scale. Time, money and central leadership are no longer necessary for massive collaboration.

Consider some of these implications.

Motivating and involving a dispersed volunteer effort is starkly different than an employer – employee relationship. Try motivating people to take action without paying them.
A vision to do good in the world is far more powerful than any monetary reward. Is your company making the world a better place?
Large groups of people can be mobilized without central control or authority. What could your employees accomplish if given the freedom?
Democratic and egalitarian processes can formulate a unified vision. Direction doesn’t have to come from the boss. Give your employees the information and freedom to direct their own future.
Self-interests and ego gratification only serve to derail the process. Let the cause or vision be the focus, not a rock star executive.

Action Items

For your next project, try an egalitarian process where there is no leader and decisions must be made democratically.
Find a meaningful unifying vision for the project, and get out of the way.
Put trust in the process. You will not always get your way, but continued involvement by motivated participants is far more valuable than being in control.
If your company is not making the world a better place, than maybe it is time to adjust your priorities.

Links
OccupyWallSt.org
OccupyTogether.org
General Assembly for Occupy Wall Street
Reddit - Occupy Wall Street

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Share Office Space to Lower Costs and Increase Collaboration

John — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:55:01 +0000

Big Ideas: ShareYourOffice.com is a matchmaker for surplus office space.
Co-working is a great way to add creativity and energy into a work environment.

GigaOM recently wrote of a new service matching freelancers with office space; ShareYourOffice Wants to Be a Dating Site for Office Space.

ShareYourOffice is a new website that wants to act as a matchmaker for office space, hooking up people looking for desk space and companies that have spare space available. With a rise in the number of freelancers worldwide, coworking centers have become increasingly popular, but they’re not yet available everywhere. The idea behind ShareYourOffice is to create mini-coworking centers everywhere there are firms with spare desk space. The benefit to the company renting out its space isn’t only financial — in terms of helping to cover the cost of the lease — but also from the kind of network effects and synergies that can eventuate as resources and ideas are pooled, and companies collaborate on ideas together.

I love the idea of co-working type environments where freelancers and smaller businesses can minimize some of the costs of having an office, yet still get the benefits of a shared work space. There is a buzz and energy when you work around other creative entrepreneurs that is near impossible to duplicate when in cafes or at home. These benefits can be amplified if you take time to find a company that you might work together with or for. ShareYourOffice is a fantastic idea that I hope is really successful.

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Creative Decisions Can’t be Made by Committee

John — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:18:46 +0000

Big Idea: Crowdfunding is great to encourage fan involvement, but ultimately decisions need to be made by an individual.

Here is a great insight from TechDirt.

I’m all for interesting experiments involving compelling ways to connect with fans and give them a reason to buy, and I love finding out about platforms that enable such things. However, I have to admit that I’m pretty skeptical about the basic concept behind Crowdbands, which not only lets you “fund” an artist, but also vote on the creative decisions they make.

Years ago, in discussing “crowdsourced” efforts, I noted that they were especially good at digging out factual information. When it comes to things that involve insight, analysis or opinion, crowdsourcing tends not to work that well.

Do you think creative decisions can be outsourced?

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Gamestorming (Games + Brainstorming) – Fun, Creativity Techniques by Dave Gray

John — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:05:31 +0000

Big Ideas: Most companies are designed for efficiency not creativity.
Use games to brainstorm creative solutions to problems.

Dave Gray of Xplane shares some of the ideas and techniques of his latest book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers in this UX Week 2010 conference video (below).

Gamestorming combines games with brainstorming. Gray explains that most corporations are designed like factories with a focus on efficiency rather than creativity. He suggests that we need to move from “factories to collaboratories or environments for collaboration.”

The video below demonstrates several games and activities designed to engage and stimulate creative solutions to difficult problems. All the games use only commonly available office supplies so that they are easy to implement.

Gray says, “design problems aren’t static. That’s where game storming helps us move faster. ” He further explains the,

“Paradox of Discovery
You find things your not looking for when your not looking.
But if your not looking for something then you won’t find anything.”

The video is a great introduction to what I am sure will be a fun and inspiring book. I can’t wait to read it.

UX Week 2010 | Dave Gray | Gamestorming: Design Practices for Co-creation and Engagement from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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Do Businesses Understand Collaboration?

John — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:09:16 +0000

Big Ideas: Many companies still don’t understand the benefits of online collaboration.
Collaboration is not just about productivity, major creativity and innovation gains can also be found.

Despite the wide spread use of social media and collaboration tools like Google Docs, I still see many people working with email processes. Email works, but for most work, online collaboration is much more effective. Here is a very simple comparison of two ways to work together on the creation of a single document.

The Old Way of Collaborating

In the past, when multiple people were working on a single document like a marketing proposal, website copy or business plan, the only option was to email edits, comments and suggestions back and forth. The problem, of course, is that each person saves a different copy and several different versions start getting passed around.

For example, a manager asks an employee for a blog article. The manager will give a brief overview of the article with some guidelines and then emails an employee to write it. The employee writes the article and then emails it back to the manager. The manager opens the email, reads the article and makes some comments and edits. This new version is then emailed back or printed out for a face to face discussion of changes. This can often go back an forth several times, with a new version saved each time.

Imagine what it would be like if 10 or 20 or 100 people were working together on a project. You would almost need a full time team to coordinate every individual’s contribution. The more people involved, the more essential it is to collaborate.

This is exactly the problem that was encountered by the free online encyclopedia then called Nupedia. “Despite its mailing-list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.^“ (History of WikiPedia.com) When the collaborative wikipedia.com format was introduced in January 2001, more than a 1000 articles were created in the first month. The rest is history.

A Real, Online Collaborative Process

With an online application like Google Docs, there is only one document shared by all that is updated in real time so that everyone always sees the same content. It is always possible to go back to an older revision if you don’t like recent changes, but with some basic protocols on how edits and suggestions should be handled then there shouldn’t be too much conflict with different contributors.

Let’s look at the previous example with a more collaborative mindset. This time the manager creates a new Google document and writes the same overview and guidelines right on the document and within Google Docs an email is sent instructing the employee what to do. The employee writes the article on the same Google document and sends another notification email within Google Docs to the manager and everyone else interested. If there are any problems, the manager can directly make the edits and/or make some suggestions on the exact same document. After that, the employee can be emailed again to make a final proofread. When this is completed, a final notification can be sent to the manager and to the webmaster to upload it to the website.

I have heard many people say that when there are only a few people involved in the process, email is still more effective but it really isn’t. It is like having a meeting by leaving voice mail messages. Bear in mind, that this is an very simple example. There are huge productivity games possible when more people are involved, when dealing with off site workers and when clients need to be included in the work process.

In a large scale application like Wikipedia, the shear number of people involved will tend to keep the quality high. In smaller teams, real magic can come when a synergistic team can feed off of each other’s work. I think we can all think back to incredibly productive and invigorating teams we have been on. That energy can be even more focused online.

Online collaboration is not only for the creation of documents and spreadsheets. It is even more vital to collaborate when sharing contacts, calendars and files and in the managing projects and the sales process. This might seem obvious for many younger people who have lived their teenage lives on social media but for the older of us, online collaboration can still be a foreign concept.

Collaboration for Creativity

Collaboration is not only for productivity gains. Sure work processes can become more efficient, but the real value is that bigger and better things can be accomplished. Real collaborative efforts unleash creativity that is difficult to realize with linear processes like emailing back and forth. Companies waste so much time on administrative procedures that add zero value to clients. Online collaborative efforts can greatly reduce the bureaucracy to shift the focus to servicing clients and getting work done.

Check out Edward Boches 10 Rules for Modern Collaboration for some inspiration.

You Won’t Know Until You Try

Try it for yourself, no one understands the real value of collaboration until they do it. Set up a simple Google Document for your next project. You could also try the popular PBworks.com. I personally use Norada’s Solve 360 because it combines customer relation management (CRM) with project management (PM). It is integrated, yet simple to use.

Business Processes

All companies have business processes for everything from ordering business cards to manufacturing products. The problem is that the assumptions and available technologies when the process was started might no longer be valid. Always question everything. “Why are we doing it this way?” “Can’t this be better with a collaborative process?” “Do we even need to do this anymore?”

What is your favorite collaboration tool?

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Abundance Anxiety: The Problem of Having too Much

John — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:47:42 +0000

Big Ideas: We live in a world of great abundance.
“How do you choose when the constraints of geography, income and circumstance disappear?”
The former world demanded relentless fixity of purpose and quick-handed snatching at opportunity; the new world demands the kind of self-knowledge that comes from quiet, mindful introspection.

We no longer live in a world of scarce resources, this is a time of great abundance. Our economic constraints are being completely flipped around. It is not a dog eat dog world where everyone is fighting for their share of the pie. There is enough to go around and the more we collaborate and share, the more there is.

Abundance makes it incredibly difficult to choose or focus. We have so many great options that it is becoming near impossible to narrow down our choices. This inability to commit is the source of much of our anxiety and stress. I have covered this topic several times in previous posts and animations: Abundance Breaks More Things than Scarcity, The Most Important Skill in a World of Information Overload and Focus is More Important Than Knowledge.

Author Cory Doctorow writes about his struggles with abundance in the self-publishing of his books on The Guardian, The Internet Problem: when an abundance of choice becomes an issue.

My internet problem is the one so many of us struggle with: how do you choose when the constraints of geography, income and circumstance disappear? What goes in a playlist when all the music ever recorded is one click away? Which experts’ thought processes should you tap into when tens of millions of them are on Twitter? How do you choose a book from the millions that you can discover with a Google Books search?

Once upon a time, the questions of which books, music, experts and experiences you should try were largely answered by circumstance. Which books to read? Which ones can you afford, which ones are on the library’s shelf, which ones are in the shop, which ones can you discover? The pool of experts was limited to people who lived nearby or those to whom your immediate circle could introduce you. Half the problem was solved by default – the cost of seeking out a very rare book almost always exceeded the value you’d get from reading it.

But as hard as it is to navigate the infinite universe of potential input, deciding what to do with all that information is even harder.

But more than ever, I’m realising that the old problem of overcoming constraints to action has been replaced by the new problem of deciding what to do when the constraints fall away. The former world demanded relentless fixity of purpose and quick-handed snatching at opportunity; the new world demands the kind of self-knowledge that comes from quiet, mindful introspection.

An abundance of opportunity is a funny kind of problem to wrestle with, but it is a problem – and a hard one, since abundance manifests itself as noise that must be ignored in order to stop reacting and start introspecting.

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Goodbye Facebook, You won’t be Needed in the Future

John — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:40:59 +0000

Big Ideas: The future of social media will not be application specific, it will be built in to the operating systems of all the devices we use.
Some sort of ‘Social IP’ address will connect all of our interactions, rather than applications like Facebook and Twitter

Stowe Boyd has a fascinating article discussing our social future.

Here are some highlights:

I believe that Facebook represents the high water mark of social networking, as we understand it today, a time dominated by social networking applications, as if our social interaction is something best managed in a single enormous database, whose rows and tables are designed by a small group of developers in one company.

Facebook is the new AOL.
Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.

As a result, actors like Google, Apple, the Linux community, and Microsoft — as well as upstarts that don’t even exist yet — will be the implementers of the next generation of social web, with social interaction built into its DNA.

Imagine that I will turn on my next generation iPad, a few years hence, and I’ll be presented with various applications that show views over the streams of information finding their way to me based on my social relationships. But those relationships are not based on application managed information, but related to my device connecting to the web, like getting an IP address today. I would get a social IP, and ping out to all the other entities online, so that information from those that I follow would find me, just as email is routed to me today independently of what email application I choose to use.

Actions like following, liking, posting, and reposting have become the core of our social existence. And these core activities should be core to the platforms, not peripheral.

My Thoughts
Predicting the demise Facebook is probably not so prescient. All large companies fall from grace sooner or later (except maybe Google), so it is not hard to imagine that Facebook will lose out to some new start up or new standard of connecting to one another. Surely, there are better things coming in the future than Farmville.

What is most interesting to me is the concept of a “Social IP.” Widely accepted protocols, just like IP addresses now, take away control and power from companies and make access ubiquitous. It is common standards and protocols that have made the internet so universal. Imagine where we would be if Microsoft, IBM, Sony, Samsung, etc. each had there own proprietary version of the internet.

Sites like Facebook or Twitter shouldn’t dictate our social interactions. We need universal standards that connect everything we do to everyone we want to connect with. That is a powerful idea.

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Crowdfunding is Much More than Just Raising Capital

John — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:26:33 +0000

Companies are flocking to social media and crowdsourcing platforms in the hopes of finding cheaper or more effective ways to market their wares. This is understandable for we all need to make a living, however, I think the real promise of social media is bigger than just a financial transaction. People give their time and money for reasons above and beyond financial gain.

Crowdfunding site Kickstarter is a great example of non-financial motives for giving. Kickstarter is a platform to fund creative ideas. It is not investing, project creators retain complete ownership of their projects.

“Project creators inspire people to open their wallets by offering products, benefits and fun experiences.”

The great thing is that people do fund projects for “fun experiences.” There are many people completely willing to part with a little cash in order to play a small role in a community. And yes, each project is a community because like minded individuals are connecting around a single idea.

At the time of writing this post, Bud Caddell has attracted $6377 in funding from 88 backers for his book project, The Bucket Brigade: How Everything in the Attention Economy Actually Works and 10 Rules to Profit from it. Pledges of $25 or more get their name and URL in the book. More than $100 earns editorial membership. Backing of more than $500 gets “special attention from me (Caddell) far beyond the production of this book.”

Think about that for a moment, if you donate more than $100 you also get to edit the book for free. Caddell’s successful funding proves that money isn’t the only motivator. I think this is a positive and very powerful cultural advancement. Some professional connections and engagements are more valuable than a mere financial exchange.

That to me is the real power of social media. We are connecting around ideas and beliefs and not only trying to sell each other something. As we develop as societies and continue to climb Maslow’s Hierarcy, money is becoming less of a motivator.

Caddell was only asking for $5000 in funding, which is not a lot of money to write, edit and publish a book. Clearly it is not only about the money for him either. Lumi Co. on Kickstarter said,

“Kickstarter is an incredible platform. Its obvious purpose is funding, but we find ourselves gaining so much outside of collecting pledges. For us, Kickstarter has been a powerful tool to connect with a community passionate about our work.”

Many of us blog, upload videos and pictures, contribute to open source projects like Wikipedia and Linux with little or zero financial benefit. There is definitely more to life than money. Being part of a community and connecting with fellow humans has value in and of itself. We really are putting the ‘social’ into social media.

Thanks to Edward Boches for inspiring this post.

Abundance Breaks More Things than Scarcity

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Build a Company in Two Days: Speed in the IdeaEconomy

John — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:16:10 +0000

With inexpensive access to technology and a talented team, the costs and time required to build a new business from nothing are essentially zero. Here are two recently examples of companies conceived and developed in a weekend.

Mingly

ReadWriteWeb recently wrote about the universal address book startup Mingly.

In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles. They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers.

Two months later, the company was invited to Twiistup to present to potential investors.

Dr. Hue by 24-hour Startup

IanSanders mentioned a similar story that happened in London called 24-hour StartUp. The team conceived of, designed and built a web site to later be auctioned on eBay. You can watch a time lapsed video of the entire 24 hours with either link. The start up they built and sold was Dr.Hue.com, a shopping by color site. The final price was only $5100 but the project generated a lot of press. Not bad for a weekend’s work.

The key point is that big ideas can be taken to market very quickly with the right group of people. The world is getting faster and smaller. Instead of trying to be the next Facebook or Amazon, maybe entrepreneurs should focus on quick and big gains like these? What do you think?

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