IdeaEconomy.Net » crowdsourcing

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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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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How Web Videos Power Global Innovation – Another Great TED Video

John — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 09:30:37 +0000

Big Ideas: Web video is driving innovation around the world as we all copy and improve on each other.
Quality and skills levels are constantly increasing as we all innovate.

TED videos have been watched hundreds of millions of times and get translated into dozens of languages to reach a massively global audience. TED’s Chris Anderson has had a front row seat as the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference becomes a household name. Anderson presented on How Web Videos Power Global Innovation.

Here are some highlights from the video.

TED speakers often prepare for months to make an 18 minute presentation, raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers.

Cycles of improvement are driven by web video.

Web video drives emulation and innovation in what Anderson labels Crowd Accelerated Innovation (CAI). Here are the three components of CAI

1. Crowd – The bigger the crowd the more potential innovators there are and they also occupy other roles like commenters, trend-spotters, cheerleaders, skeptics, mavericks and superspreaders.

2. Light – Clear open visibility as to what people in that crowd are capable of.

3. Desire – innovation is hard work, It requires hundreds of hours of research and practice.

Innovation emerges from groups. The idea of a lone genius with a eureka moment is misleading.

Online video will allow the world’s talents to be shared digitally.

Our brains are uniquely wired to decode video. So many things can’t be communicated through words effectively.

JOVE is a site where scientists publish their findings on video. Scientific experiments and procedures can be clearly and easily demonstrated on video. Showing is much better then just describing.

Reading and writing are relatively recent inventions. Face to face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution.

What Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication.

One person speaking can now be seen by millions.

My Insights
Video conveys much more information than text.

While many people, myself included, prefer text, video is the future. Video is a far richer medium to convey information. In the video, Anderson shows how dancers can share new moves with a global audience. Trying to explain dance moves with text just doesn’t have anywhere near the same effect. The same can be true for almost every field: guitar lessons, computer tutorials, travel videos, cooking or yoga classes, sports, etc.

Global Skill Levels are Rapidly Increasing
Average quality levels in every field are rapidly improving. You truly have to be a world class talent if you want to excel. Anderson’s video shows a six year old who has mastered break dancing moves, wait until that child is a teenager.

The problem with most homemade video now is that it is often very low quality. A blogger talking to his or her computer doesn’t convey much extra information compared to just text. That will change as video software continues to get easier to use, we improve our video skills and we start adding animated graphics.

The Future is FREE
Video has the potential to reach a global audience if it is unique, interesting or good enough. This desire to attract attention will keep fueling increasingly higher quality free content. As much as we want to make a living for our online efforts, the future is free. Trying to charge for online content just ads friction that limits the audience exposure. We are already starting to see that real world contact is where opportunities lie. (Musicians like Trent Reznor give away music to sell concert tickets. Consultants blog or give away ebooks to sell one-to-one consulting. Authors lose money on books to do seminars and consulting.) TED would remain a small elitist conference if the videos were not available for free to a global audience.

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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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Crowdsourcing Business Docomuments

John — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 03:18:08 +0000

Spudaroo.com is new site allowing companies to crowdsource business documents like copy writing, resumes, brochures and business plans. Now you can have writers compete to create documents and companies can choose the best among many submissions. This is following crowdsourcing design sites like 99Designs and CrowdSpring, but will it work for documents?

The site is new so there is not much activity yet, but I suspect that many companies will not want their business plans and company documents out in the public before they are officially used. Or maybe it doesn’t make a difference?

I will definitely be following this start up to see how it develops.

The Guide to Crowdsourcing

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The Guide to Crowdsourcing

John — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:15:28 +0000

Crowdsourcing is a big idea, but many companies still don’t get it. Having the general public co-work on projects together just doesn’t make sense. Yet, it works and sometimes it works better than anything else.

The best example has to be Wikipedia. The idea of having volunteer writers create the content and edit the world’s largest encyclopedia must have seemed ludicrous to many. It probably still seems crazy. How can it work? Yet it does. In fact, it couldn’t have been as successful any other way.

Now sites like 99Designs an CrowdSpring are allowing companies to open up design projects to the world. Instead of having one person or company create your logo, you can have dozens of people competing for the chance to win your business. As the buyer you only pay the best choice, yet you can get ideas and designs from many different vendors.

Content is Dead

Sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, iStockPhoto, Flikr and virtually any rapidly growing web business have proved that user generated content is a fantastic business model. Why pay to have content created when users will do it for free? The value is in the platform. In fact, if you want a truly scalable business model you have no choice but to have user generated content.

Is Crowdsourcing always the best idea?

Edward Boches has a good post called, Should you crowdsource even if you’re only gonna get crap?

A talented company or individual can often, but not always outperform low cost crowdsourced alternatives, but there are other reasons to crowdsource. Boches talks about the importance of getting your fans and community emotionally involved with your brand. What better way for your customers to show their love for your product then to have them create their own videos or mashups?

Further Reading
The Rise of Crowdsourcing – Wired.com

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Forget Social Media, Business Need Results

John — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:38:18 +0000

Edward Boches of Creativity_Unbound has a great article framing social media into real business objectives.

I don’t talk to clients about Social Media any more.

He has five ways to reframe the questions.

Want to improve your organic search results?
Start a blog.

Looking for a better way to conduct real time qualitative research?
Listen in on ongoing conversations on Twitter and Facebook.

Would you like more out of your advertising creative ideas?
Try a crowdsourcing contest.

Interested in stretching your media dollars?
Use embedded YouTube videos and encourage sharing.

Looking for ways to increase positive word of mouth?
Introduce all of your customers to each other, on your site, on Facebook and on Twitter.

Collaboration Through Social Media

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Collaboration Through Social Media

John — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:37:31 +0000

Here is a great video discussing the shift from the institutional control of ideas to opening them up to the world. Clay Shirky mentions examples of Flickr and Linux and how the users or community freely contribute to large projects without any material rewards. A particularly cogent example, is how mobile phone ubiquity has greatly reduced the need to pre-plan and organize in favor of real time communication. We don’t have to plan exactly where and we meet up with people. We can rely on our collaboration tools, the cell phone, and just say, “I’ll call you when I get there.” Planning can largely be eliminated in a world of constant communication.

The sheer quantity of the contribution can not be matched in any corporation or institution. It is impossible to create plans, structures or incentives to deliver what open source or freely collaborative environments can.

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. Collaboration

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