Concepts

  • MIT Technology Review Featuring The Culture of Collaboration

    Technology journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Gomes and I had a thought-provoking chat earlier this week about collaboration. Lee was interviewing me for a question-and-answer style profile in the MIT Technology Review. The Review was capping off a series of stories about collaboration with the interview on The Culture of Collaboration book. I’m glad that the editor accurately summed up my perspective in the headline: "Collaborating Takes More than Technology."

    You can read the article here.

    Lee did a good job playing devil’s advocate. Among the issues and questions he raised: “Command and control might not be pretty, but it gets things done. Couldn’t an overemphasis on collaboration paralyze an organization?" I responded this way:

    "What paralyzes an organization is when management compromises value by failing to tap ideas, expertise, and assets. What also paralyzes an organization is when requests for decisions languish in in-boxes rather than hashing out issues spontaneously. Paying a few people to think and paying everybody else to carry out orders creates far less value than breaking down barriers among silos and enabling people to engage each other spontaneously."

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  • Changing Education

    Businesses face challenges in becoming collaborative partly because traditional education systems often discourage collaboration. These systems condition workforces and organizations to operate in command-and-control mode. Now there are promising signs of an educational upheaval that mirrors shifts in business and government. Many universities are seeking to reinvent themselves to preserve their relevance.

    In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the shift in the role of the professor from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.”  Driving the shift is the decline in credibility of professors. In an era of rapidly changing information,  students can search online for ideas more quickly than teachers and professors lecture about them. “Students don’t really believe their professors,” is the way David Edwards put it during our conversation last week.

    David Edwards, who’s the Gordon McKay professor of the practice of biomedical engineering at Harvard, has collaborated with colleagues to update his university’s role in educating students. David shares my view that both universities and businesses must provide physical and cultural space to spark and collaboratively develop ideas.

    David is the author of The Lab (Harvard University Press, 2010). This compelling book chronicles the growth of Artscience Labs, an international network of idea labs David and his colleagues have developed. The labs spark “idea translation,” a process of repeated experimentation, exhibition, prototype critique and team evolution. The book delves deep into emerging approaches to innovation growing out of these interconnected labs which include Le Laboratoire in Paris, The Lab at Harvard, and similar labs at other universities and high schools. Many ideas incumbated and nourished in the labs have become commercial products. These include everything from edible bottles to inhalable chocolate.

    The growing Artscience movement draws inspiration from the Bauhaus school that flourished in Germany during the Weimar period after World War One. The Bauhaus concept was a “total work of art” bringing together all arts including design and architecture. Bauhaus emphasized “rationality, functionality” and the need to free art from Bourgeois influences.  The labs break down boundaries between arts and sciences to accelerate learning. This mirrors silo busting and curing Silo Syndrome in business and government that I write about frequently here and in The Culture of Collaboration book. Results of Artscience efforts range from new designs and art to new companies and humanitarian organizations.

    Edwards believes institutional boundaries have hampered education at Harvard and elsewhere, and he agrees that similar boundaries plague businesses. Technology and culture shifts have curbed “our ability to curate information and give it any meaning,” David notes. He compares overly-curated art with overly-curated information. Why is it, Edwards wonders, that there are thousands of works in a museum like the Louvre, but that art “experts” and books focus on only a handful of “important” works? Not to mention, I was thinking, all of the art–some of it excellent– that never makes it into the collections of the Louvre and other museums.

    So, a new cultural model is necessary. And guess what this model involves? “Nothing gets done without intense collaboration. We can no longer ignore it,” David insists. Amen. Some design firms advocate a formal process for brainstorming and ideation. In contrast, the approach to collaboration, innovation and ideation practiced in Artscience Labs is decidedly less formal. “I’m very skeptical about rules for ideation or idea development,” David says. Freedom to take risks and make mistakes is key, and so is the ability to realize mistakes and quickly develop a new idea or approach.

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  • Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker

    Management consultants, technology vendors, and human resources departments often segregate workforces into “knowledge workers” and everybody else.  In a collaborative organization, every worker is a knowledge worker. Every team member contributes, shares knowledge, and participates in making decisions, whether he or she is loading crates, designing products, servicing customer accounts, creating tactical marketing plans, or determining long-term strategy.

    My current column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com entitled "Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker" describes how organizations can desegregate the workforce. You can read the column here.

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  • Video Driving Enhanced Collaboration

    “Like television archives, stored desktop videoconferences can potentially provide a legacy of our meetings, presentations, and collaborations. These video anthologies may follow us through our careers and personal lives.”

    This observation is from the book, Personal Videoconferencing, published in 1996 by Manning/Prentice Hall. It so happens that I wrote the book. Recently, I’ve been re-reading the book, articles and columns on collaboration that I wrote in the mid-1990’s to assess how collaboration has progressed over the last fifteen years. This exercise is particularly relevant, because I’m currently writing my third book on collaboration. And to know where collaboration is headed, it’s essential to understand its evolution.

    There’s no need to pre-empt my forthcoming book here, but I feel compelled to share some thoughts about the role of video. In 1996, video was the most controversial aspect of collaboration. Engineers, marketing people, and senior leaders were divided on the value of video. Videoconferencing on desktop and notebook computers was emerging and so was non-video web conferencing. Many technologists insisted that people primarily wanted to share documents, spreadsheets and electronic whiteboards rather than see one another. Inside Intel, which was developing an early conferencing system called ProShare, a debate raged on whether to include video in the product. Ultimately, the video proponents won that debate.

    In the mid-1990’s, audio conferencing people dominated the conferencing industry and felt threatened by video. So, video was defending itself from assaults from two groups of naysayers: the legacy voice people and the early non-video web conferencing crowd. Essentially, many people with entrenched interests felt uncomfortable using interactive video, disliked how they came across, and lacked vision regarding video’s role in business. In short, they felt threatened by the emerging medium. Their attitude was similar to that of “serious” print and radio journalists towards television news when that medium emerged in the 1950’s.

    Fast forward to 2011. The age of YouTube, reality television, and Skype has conditioned us to embrace video. We’re comfortable seeing friends, relatives and colleagues when we communicate at a distance and having them see us. It’s no longer a stretch to accept that video creates an emotional connection second only to an in-person exchange. Nearly every collaborative organization I’ve encountered and almost all of those I feature in The Culture of Collaboration book have not only adopted real-time, interactive video, but also have integrated video into their cultures and business processes.

    A few years ago, I gave a speech in London at the Tandberg global sales directors’ meeting. Tandberg leaders sensed a shift in how their customers were making purchase decisions for videoconferencing systems. Increasingly, business unit heads or senior leaders rather than telecom or IT people were calling the shots. So, video was moving from an equipment sale to a consultive sale involvement business processes. I was in London to give sales leaders some pointers about winning in the shifting environment.

    Having acquired Tandberg, Cisco is nudging enterprises to adopt video throughout their operations. And Cisco offers a broad portfolio of video products ranging from telepresence to WebEx to Flip video cameras. From a sales perspective, though, Cisco still struggles with some of the same issues that plague other telepresence and visual communication vendors including Polycom and HP. Namely, it’s easy to slip back into pushing boxes of products. The challenge is to collaborate with customers to create value by integrating tools into their cultures and processes.

    Ilan Kasan and Grace Kim of Cisco recently demonstrated for me a new version of WebEx. The new version, dubbed the WebEx High Quality Video Experience, offers Active Presence, which is a “film strip” of video feeds showing everybody on a call. Cisco TelePresence offers the same capability, and now people can join TelePresence sessions via WebEx. Plus the new version enables the Apple iPad with WebEx.

    Marketing departments of technology vendors are typically bullish on customer adoption forecasts. Cisco is no exception. David Hsieh, Cisco’s vice president of emerging technologies marketing, tells me that within twelve months, 36 percent of Cisco’s top customers will roll out telepresence and video collaboration across their entire enterprises. That percentage climbs to 46 percent in over two years. David and his colleagues believe this, because Cisco gathered its top customers in a room and asked them about their purchase plans. However, my experience with this type of survey is that customers are more likely to reveal purported purchase plans when they are surrounded by other customers—and therefore the results from the customer gathering may be skewed towards greater adoption.

    Nevertheless, Cisco believes the survey results indicate something significant. “This represents a major shift in the market. Cisco is going to put a major stake in the ground,” according to David. There’s a difference, though, between rolling out systems and actually integrating tools into workflow, processes and culture. Cisco, Polycom, HP and other visual communications and collaboration vendors must devote greater time and resources to integrating tools into workflow and processes. This approach will create far greater value for their shareholders and salespeople than simply moving products. As customers see other customers creating value  through extending and enhancing collaboration, adoption becomes more viral.

    Clearly, the debate has advanced from whether video is necessary in business to how video can be used most effectively to create value.

    Real change happens when the culture shifts and tools, including video, become part-and-parcel of how an organization collaborates and does business. Tools rarely create collaboration, but they play a critical role in extending and enhancing collaboration. Sold and used effectively, video is the tool that can enhance collaboration like no other.

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  • Enhancing Products with Collaborative Services

    Last Wednesday, I stopped into Rosetta Stone’s splashy event in a trendy nightclub in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Company officials were on hand to demonstrate Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe. Chris Spiller, executive producer, demonstrated the Spanish version of the popular software for learning languages.

    Chris and I discussed how immersing oneself in another culture is by far the best way to learn a language. And we shared stories about the overemphasis on grammar in high school foreign language classes.  It turns out that cultural immersion is exactly what Rosetta Stone had in mind when developing Version 4 TOTALe. “We looked at what are the pieces of that experience we can recreate through technology,” Chris explained.

    Rosetta Stone has recently transformed its offering into a hybrid product/collaborative service. This means that no longer must customers learn a language in a vacuum. They can now collaborate with other learners globally and can also learn from language coaches who interact with customers through one-way video and two-way audio. Adobe provides and hosts Rosetta Stone’s video and audio through its Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service Platform. Incidentally, today Adobe is releasing version 8 of a related web conferencing product called Adobe Connect.

    Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe includes Rosetta Studio, which involves live, interactive coaching. The bundle also features Rosetta World, which lets users collaborate with fellow learners. There are lots of activities and games that geographically-dispersed users can do together while talking with each other in the language they’re learning via voice over IP (VOIP) and text chat. Other activities pair learners with native speakers who are, in turn, learning their partner’s language. This collaboration among customers accelerates learning and creates value.

    Getting customers to collaborate with each other can turn a maturing product into a virally-adopted habit. Smart companies realize that collaboration is more than customers participating in discussion forums. It’s about getting customers to create value using a product or service together in real time. Depending on the product, collaborating among customers may involve creating, learning or playing.

    Besides enhancing learning, the collaborative service lets Rosetta Stone enhance its business model and presumably its revenue. The software includes three months of access to Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World, and customers can then buy more access. I suspect that this hybrid software-as-a-product/collaborative service model is a prelude to a pure software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering.

    While Rosetta Stone officials say the company has no plans to expand offerings beyond language software and services, this collaborative approach to online learning could apply to subjects ranging from history and geography to algebra and physics. A user in India and a user in Germany could collaborate to learn the geography, history and culture of their respective countries.

    The big picture is that companies in many industries can create value by encouraging customers to collaborate with each other. This produces greater stickiness by building interactive communities around products with the potential of generating new revenue streams.  And this goes well beyond software. Take a product like a motorcycle. With a 3D model of the motorcycle plus interactive audio and video, enthusiasts can collaborate on maintenance, diagnosing problems, and doing repairs. Collaborating among customers could also apply to furniture. Using a 3D model of a home or office and choices of virtual furniture, customers could exchange ideas and collaboratively design spaces for living and working.

    Collaboration among customers can build brands, increase marketplace stickiness, and create new revenue streams.   

     

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  • Taking Collaborative Risk at The State Department

    Shifting from command-and-control to collaborative culture involves what might be termed collaborative risk, but some organizations are realizing that there’s greater risk in clinging to old ways of working.

     

    State Department Logo One organization that is recognizing the need for taking collaborative risk is the United States Department of State. “We’re a very risk-averse culture,” notes Duncan MacInnes, principal deputy coordinator for the Bureau of International Information Programs. State Department professionals fear that misstating policy or saying the wrong thing could become a diplomatic crisis. This parallels the fear in companies that trade secrets or market-moving information could leak. Nevertheless, the State Department has determined that the benefits of collaborating internally and externally outweigh the risks of resisting work style change.

     

    Change agents across the State Department are guiding the culture towards embracing collaboration. These change agents have wisely realized that eliminating disincentives to collaboration is as important as creating incentives. Therefore, the Department has updated its policies to eliminate disincentives to taking collaborative risk. “People will make mistakes, and those who have made too many mistakes have not been dinged for it,” according to MacInnes. This approach is critical to shifting the culture, because people must feel that the organization values collaborative risk and will provide the cover for them to try new ways of working.

     

    Externally, the State Department enables embassies to broadcast their own events including speeches by ambassadors on the Web with input from the public. The State Department uses ConnectSolutions Podium high-definition webcasting, which lets users ask live text questions, text chat with each other about the event, and leave video comments. The ConnectSolutions Real-Time Collaboration Platform enhances and extends Adobe Connect web conferencing. Embassies are also using the tool to collaborate internally. At first, embassy staff resisted the shift. “We’re showing them a new way to work, and we’re meeting in the middle,” says Tim Receveur, a foreign affairs officer coordinating global use of the tool.

     

    Aside from real-time collaboration, the State Department is also chalking up results in collaborating asynchronously. Over 3500 State Department team members have contributed some 12,000 articles to Diplopedia, an internal online encyclopedia based on Wikipedia. You can view an amusing video on Diplopedia here. The Department has also seen compelling growth in the use of an ideation tool. Ideation means developing and refining ideas so that people can make their organization better. The tool, dubbed Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board, is based on a blogging platform. The tool lets people across embassies, bureaus, regions and levels of leadership brainstorm, make process improvements and create value collaboratively.

     

    In the last eighteen months, people have contributed 1800 ideas. “What in the past would have been water-cooler conversation that went nowhere is now [getting results], because the person who can make it happen is part of the conversation,” explains Richard Boly, director of e-Diplomacy. The ideation tool lets a person hired locally who’s working in a small West African consulate to collaborate, brainstorm and develop communities of interest with counterparts globally.

     

    One success factor for Richard and his team as they guide the work style shift is focusing on “the how rather than the what” for starters and saving the “thorniest issues” for last. By thorniest issues, Richard means U.S. policy and diplomacy. Meantime, he and his colleagues are encouraging culture shift and emphasizing use of collaborative tools for brainstorming improvements in “how” policy can be crafted. As the culture warms to the new way of working, the change agents believe diplomats will more collaboratively create policy itself.  

     

    Private industry is now looking to the State Department for clues regarding how to engage people effectively through corporate ideation tools. Increasingly, companies collaborate through ideation tools with their customers, but lag in collaborating internally. A big factor is fear. Companies often fail to give people cover so that they take collaborative risks. In this case, the Federal government may clear a path for business.

     

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  • Collaborative Law

    Competition, arguing, and maneuvering defines law as it’s traditionally practiced. Now, though, a collaborative law movement is gaining traction globally. I had a compelling conversation the other day with J. Kim Wright, a collaborative law practitioner who runs the site CuttingEdgeLaw.com. We discussed Kim’s new book, Lawyers as Peacemakers: Practicing Holistic, Problem-Solving Law (American Bar Association, 2010).

     

    “We have not in recent history been very collaborative folks. We are the people to avoid in society,” Kim began. I knew instantly this conversation was going to be interesting. Kim was referring to lawyers who, she says, graduate from law school with “no heart and no soul.” Kim had read “Smashing Silos,” a column I wrote for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. And she insisted that law is all about silos. “We are taught to compartmentalize everything.” These silos include specialties and sub-specialties of law.

     

    Collaborative law begins with the premise that people work out their differences towards the common goal of resolution rather than compete and fight through litigation. This is different from the various forms of court-ordered and pre-court alternative dispute resolution (ADR) such as mediation, because ADR often begins with the premise that if the parties are unable to resolve their differences, the case will proceed to trial. Mediation, for instance, often involves “shuttle diplomacy” in which the mediator runs back and forth between both parties and points out the weakness of each side’s case in hopes of avoiding a trial.

     

    In contrast, collaborative law involves an acknowledgment from both parties that litigation constitutes failure to achieve goals and places a premium on preservation of relationships. Divorce and family law practice has been faster to adopt the shift to collaboration than many other specialties. In such cases, collaborative divorce and family lawyers sign contracts committing to resolve cases rather than litigate. If they fail to settle, the contracts require that the lawyers withdraw from the case.

     

    Collaborative law grew out of a movement in Minneapolis developed by Stu Webb and others during the late 1980’s and quickly spread to northern California and beyond. The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals based in Phoenix brings together lawyers, mental health professionals, and financial professionals to resolve divorce and other conflicts.

     

    One barrier to collaborative law is that many lawyers embrace tradition. “Lawyers hate to be on the fringe. They’d prefer to die than be weird,” Kim explained, adding that her goal is to embrace the fringe. Kim focuses on spreading collaborative law across specialties including corporate law. Too often, corporate agreements encourage conflict and ultimate litigation.  In her practice, Kim abandons “boilerplate” or standard contract language and instead writes agreements in plain language designed to anticipate and prevent conflict. “When a conflict comes up, we’ve actually already talked about what to do if there’s a conflict,” she notes.

     

    Like corporations, lawyers are waking up to the value collaboration creates both for practitioners and customers.

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  • Incenting the Intelligence Community to Collaborate

    Instilling collaborative organizational culture often requires changing the recognition and reward system. But internally-competitive entrenched interests will undoubtedly resist changes to how the organization pays and promotes people. Also expect resistance from people who believe there’s no reason to incent people, because they should do as they’re told.

     

    James Clapper Tuesday, during James Clapper’s confirmation hearing as director of national intelligence, Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) asked Clapper why it’s necessary to incent the intelligence community to collaborate. Levin was referring to Clapper’s pre-hearing questionnaire in which he apparently wrote that, if confirmed, he would achieve progress in information sharing by the “disciplined application” of incentives—both rewards and consequences. “Why do we need incentives,” Levin asked “Why don’t we just need a directive from the President by executive order, for instance? Otherwise, why do we need incentives, rewards and consequences?”

     

    Clapper responded, “One way of inducing change in culture is to provide rewards for those who collaborate and, I suppose, penalties for those who don’t.” He added, “And obviously directives are effective too.” You can watch Levin’s questions and Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Community on C-SPAN here (counter 1:37:06). Incidentally, collaborative organizations achieve more with the carrot than the stick. Penalties for failure to collaborate are anti-collaborative in that they spread fear. Instead, reward and recognize collaborators; then others will get the message and start changing their behavior.

     

    Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the intelligence community has struggled to shift from a culture of competition and information hoarding among agencies to a collaborative culture in which people share data and information. For background on this, see my December 30, 2009 post. I have advised senior leaders of the intelligence community about the transition. On the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I gave a speech to the community sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

     

    In the speech, I highlighted four areas. One was aligning recognition and reward systems to encourage collaboration. ODNI, the entity formed after September 11, has been driving collaboration among the sixteen agencies that comprise the intelligence community. Some agencies have balked, ostensibly for security reasons, about sharing their data across the community. While security concerns are valid, perceived loss of control and inter-agency rivalry also play a role.

     

    The leaders whom I’ve advised implicitly understand the value of collaboration in developing better intelligence and thwarting terrorists. They also understand institutional resistance. James Clapper currently serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and formerly served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). This multi-agency intelligence background gives Clapper an advantage in guiding the shift in the intelligence community’s culture in that an insider committed to change has more credibility than an outsider does. Clapper must draw on his alliances and relationships across the community to help break down barriers among agencies and adopt collaborative culture.  

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  • The Much-Maligned Meeting and Collaboration

    The “M” word creates more outbursts of opinion than practically any other word in business.

     

    I’m referring to the word meeting. Almost everybody has a—usually negative—gut reaction to the notion of meetings. Plenty of people would prefer being stuck on a tarmac than stuck in a meeting. Even though water and snacks are often available at meetings, our time belongs to others. On the tarmac, there’s no guarantee of refreshments, but at least our time is our own. In fact, meeting-bashing has become welcome break-room conversation.

     

    Nevertheless, technology vendors have invested huge resources in meetings. So, it’s not just employers who want to load up our schedules with meetings. There are vendors with vested interests in making meetings even more integral to our work than they are now.

     

    Last night on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Larry asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates his opinion of the Apple iPad. Gates responded, “We’re all trying to get to something that you just have to take to a meeting and use.” He added, “It still isn’t the device that I would take to a meeting, because it just has no input.” You can view the video clip here. So, one way Bill gauges the effectiveness of the iPad and similar devices is whether we will want to take them to a meeting. Bill—and by inference, Microsoft—apparently remains focused on keeping us in meetings. In reality, it’s more important whether the iPad and any similar device fits into our lifestyles and work styles than whether we’ll want to bring it to meetings.

     

    Are meetings collaborative? There’s nothing inherently collaborative about an in-person or virtual meeting. That’s right. Using virtual meeting tools is no guarantee that we’re collaborating. Joining a web conference, using telepresence or IMing the day away creates little value unless these tools fit into collaborative organizational culture and practices.

     

    If we compete with colleagues and our teams and organizations reflect “star culture”, do the tools we use make us collaborative? No. It takes more than tools to make collaboration happen. If we fill our ranks with millennials and send them to meetings with devices loaded with collaborative capabilities, will those meetings automatically become collaborative? Don’t bet on it.

     

    The biggest beef about meetings is that they’re a waste of time. In other words, they fail to create value. If we come together as a group and we’re working together to create value, we’re collaborating. So, we’ve essentially transcended the notion of a meeting and instead we’re in a collaborative session. Organizations and vendors should seek to remake meetings as collaborative sessions.

     

    In the final chapter of The Culture of Collaboration book, I note that “Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.” As collaborating in the same room starts seeming awkward, that’s the new frontier. But organizations and technology vendors take note: it’s about creating more value through collaboration rather than better meetings.

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  • Creating Collaboration Takes More than Technology

    Decision makers often think collaborative tools will create collaboration, and they're perplexed when results elude the organization. Technology extends and enhances–but rarely creates–collaboration. My current column for BusinessWeek.com describes what organizations need besides technology to make collaboration happen. You can read the column here.

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