collaboration

  • 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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  • California Academy of Sciences Collaborates to Discover Mammals

    Collaboration requires long-term thinking. That’s where universities, libraries, museums, and research organizations often eclipse for-profit companies. Pressure to generate quarterly returns can compromise long-term value, particularly at publicly-held companies. With less pressure to deliver immediate results, research-driven, non-profit organizations can focus more on creating long-term value. Maybe it’s a new take on history or a scientific discovery. Regardless, the work product may remain relevant hundreds of years from now.

     

    That said, competition internally and within fields of study can prove more ferocious in the research arena than in corporations—whether it’s competing for limited grant dollars or for publishing articles in academic journals. Like corporations, the best research organizations mitigate unhealthful competition by thinking and acting towards creating long-term value. In this realm, long-term value can extend into eternity.

     

    Knowing the collaborative mindset of the California Academy of Sciences, I accepted an invitation to attend a briefing and preview tour last Thursday of the Academy’s new Extreme Mammals exhibit, which runs through September 12, 2010. For background on architectural collaboration in the Academy’s building design, see my February 17, 2009 post.

     

    San Francisco is the Extreme Mammals exhibit’s second stop after opening at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  Over tea and cupcakes, I had a compelling pre-tour conversation with Greg Farrington, the self-proclaimed “chief penguin” or executive director of the Academy. Farrington, a chemist, is the former president of Lehigh University. “You might think everything in the world has been discovered at least twice, but it hasn’t,” Farrington noted. Touring the exhibit confirmed Farrington’s point.

      
    Elephant-shrew
      
    The exhibit features extinct, living and recently-discovered mammals including the striped rabbit identified as a new species in 1999 and the gray faced sengi or giant elephant shrew discovered in 2008. Galen Rathbun,  
    a behavioral biologist at the Academy and Francesco Rovero of the Trento Museum of Sciences in Italy and other collaborators discovered the gray-faced sengi in the Ndundulu Forest in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains. It was the first new species of giant elephant shrew discovered in 126 years.

     

    Rathbun accompanied us on the tour and later took a small group behind several locked doors to view a collection of shrew specimens shelved inside fireproof cabinets in the Academy’s research collections. The collections include 26 million specimens of animals, insects, reptiles, birds, plants, fish and gems. Rathbun noted that several collaborating research institutions had loaned shrew specimens to the Academy for research.

     

    One participant asked birds and mammals curator Jack Dumbacher if we could look inside the special cabinet that contains extinct animals and so-called “type specimens” of newly-discovered mammals. Dumbacher obliged, and we walked down the aisle past many rows of cabinets until we reached a shorter cabinet set apart from the others. As Jack unlocked the cabinet, he unleashed a ripe odor along with a feast for the eyes of preserved birds, rodents, and bats. The treasures also include the largest egg in the world from the elephant bird of Madagascar. A model of the egg is on display in the Academy’s public area.

     

    Back to the public galleries and the Extreme Mammals exhibit. Scientists and administrators from global institutions have collaborated on the show, which the American Museum of Natural History organized. Collaborators shared knowledge, pieced together skeletons and gathered skulls, fossils and taxidermy specimens for Extreme Mammals. The result is a compelling experience for visitors who gain insight into the extreme variety of mammals and the awesome biodiversity of our planet.

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  • Breaking Corporate Rules to Collaborate

    What happens when team members want to collaborate, but command-and-control approaches and internal competition prevail in culture and processes? New research indicates team members are starting to “spoof the system” by flouting organizational guidelines and creating work-arounds so they can collaborate. The global study conducted by InsightExpress and funded by Cisco surveyed more than two thousand end users and a thousand information technology decision makers from ten countries. The study found that 52 percent of organizations prohibit the use of social media applications and 50 percent of end users admit to ignoring company policies at least once a week. “End users have started to take things into their own hands,” says Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise solutions.

     

    The study found that users most willing to break company policies are those in the United Kingdom and France. Respondents in China were least likely to violate corporate rules. Still, the survey found that companies in China and India had significantly higher adoption rates of collaborative tools than companies in the United States or the United Kingdom. This is likely because companies in these growing economies are relatively new, and therefore their infrastructures are by no means set in stone.

     

    Ironically, the study found that 77 percent of IT decision makers plan to increase spending on collaboration tools this year, while team members say corporate policies are constraining collaboration. Investing in collaborative tools makes little sense if an organization lacks the culture and processes to support the tools. The result is a schizophrenic organization in which some team members break rules, others operate by the book, and most team members get confused by mixed messages. Considering the study results, a prime opportunity exists for leaders to think and act collaboratively and for organizations to adopt collaborative culture.

     

    Cisco will gladly sell you any and all of its more than 60 collaboration products. But buying these products or those of any other collaboration tools vendor will produce limited results unless your organization makes a fundamental commitment to collaboration. This shift includes moving away from command-and-control, internally-competitive culture and processes and replacing the pass-along, serial approach to work and decision-making with spontaneous, real-time models. I address this in the introduction to The Culture of Collaboration book.

     

    Intercompany Collaboration: Focus on Culture and Processes

     

    On another note…outmoded culture and processes can curb collaboration and compromise value—whether we’re talking about within a company or “outside the firewall.”  As vendors and standards groups resolve intercompany collaboration technology issues, there’s a temptation to conclude that intercompany collaboration is “good to go.”

     

    About three weeks ago, I participated in a discussion via TelePresence with Cisco senior vice presidents Tony Bates and Barry O’Sullivan. The company was discussing details of its new Intercompany Media Engine, which extends unified communications among companies. So, a supplier can easily view the availability or “presence status” of a customer, connect via instant messaging, and easily escalate the interaction to a voice call, web conference, or telepresence. You can view video of a demo call here. Meantime, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on an open standard for telepresence and unified communications so that people can interact regardless of technology vendor. This has particular relevance for business partners with different installed telepresence brands. Ultimately, the challenge for intercompany collaborators goes well beyond the technology. Organizations must focus on adopting collaborative culture and processes and integrating them across organizational boundaries.

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  • Mayo Clinic Enhancing Collaboration

    The Mayo Clinic, founded on the principle of collaboration, is taking collaboration and innovation to the next level. With a mission nothing short of transforming how healthcare is experienced and delivered, Mayo’s Center for Innovation integrates emerging collaborative tools into processes and culture. The Center for Innovation includes Mayo’s innovative S.P.A.R.C. design lab.

     

    While writing The Culture of Collaboration book, I conducted on-site research at S.P.A.R.C. and throughout Mayo. Now it’s time for an update. The catalyst was a recent conversation with Chris Yeh of PBworks, which offers a hosted wiki-oriented business collaboration platform with newly-added integrated voice conferencing. Mayo is piloting PBworks along with other online collaborative spaces. “We call it a sandbox where people can figure things out,” Francesca Dickson of Mayo’s Center for Innovation told me yesterday during a Skype video call.

     

    Francesca and Beth Kreofsky of Mayo’s Center for Innovation provided an inside view of how Mayo is evolving, and we talked about the role of tools. Aside from PBworks, Mayo is also piloting “ideation” tools that let team members share ideas and build on them based on “focused questions.” One such tool is Jive.

     

    Besides asynchronous social tools, Mayo is now piloting instant messaging in several departments including nursing and radiology. Paging, a precursor to instant messaging, is deeply engrained in Mayo’s culture. Anybody can page the CEO and expect a prompt call back. Hierarchy is muted at Mayo, and the CEO is always a practicing physician. Mayo’s culture is ripe for IM and unified communications through which people can connect spontaneously through IM, voice or video regardless of level, role or region.

     

    Meantime, paging persists at Mayo. The Center for Innovation’s mission is to keep Mayo, well, innovating. So the Center is demonstrating to the organization that IM offers a clear advantage over paging.

     

    Video is another tool that’s part-and-parcel of Mayo’s culture. Mayo was an early user of videoconferencing to encourage collaboration among its three campuses. Mayo has already piloted Cisco TelePresence with a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. And beginning in April, patients in Canon Falls, Minnesota will receive consultations from Mayo specialists via TelePresence.

     

    By integrating new collaborative tools into its already collaborative culture, Mayo will likely enhance healthcare delivery and create greater value.

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  • Telepresence Enhancing Travel?

    Videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have traditionally marketed their products as a replacement for travel. This is shortsighted in that real value creation comes from integrating real-time video into business processes. Using telepresence so that people can come together spontaneously and design an airplane or develop animation or create a 24-hour healthcare delivery service produces far greater value than travel savings.

     

    Considering the obsession with marketing real-time video as a travel replacement, you might think hotels would be lukewarm about videoconferencing and telepresence. But there was nothing tepid about Mary Casey and Bob Hermany’s view of Cisco TelePresence as they announced on Tuesday Starwood’s roll out of public TelePresence rooms. The first two Starwood properties to offer TelePresence are the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Australia and the W Chicago. You can view the announcement video here. Incidentally, Mary is Starwood’s vice president of global corporate sales and Bob is Starwood’s senior vice president of operations.

     

    Starwood will also install Cisco TelePresence at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, the Westin Los Angeles Airport and the Sheraton Centre Toronto during 2010. Later, the hotel chain will adopt TelePresence at properties in San Francisco, Dallas, Brussels and Frankfurt, among others. In my October 15, 2008 post, I wrote that Cisco and its partner, Tata Communications, were introducing public TelePresence rooms and that the first hotel chain to participate was the Taj Hotels.

     

    During a TelePresence call linking several global locations, Sean Hunt, a Starwood executive who manages the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney positioned Australia’s first public TelePresence room as both a travel benefit and alternative. “The problem is we’re isolated from the rest of the world, so this is a great alternative to long-haul travel.” The point is that rather than replace travel, TelePresence lets somebody outside Australia who may never have taken the flight get face-to-face with colleagues and partners.

    Aside from marketing and public relations advantages, there are potentially tangible benefits for hotels that adopt TelePresence. Besides renting rooms at rates that can approach $500 a day, hotels can charge $500 an hour for TelePresence. That’s the rate at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. Australian dollars, of course.

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  • Collaborating with Salespeople Provides Unfiltered Information

    Hierarchy dies hard in many organizations, so breaking down barriers among levels can prove particularly challenging.

     

    Team members must feel it’s culturally acceptable to engage senior leaders on the fly, and likewise senior leaders must feel culturally comfortable reaching out across the organization to connect with front-line managers, factory workers and salespeople. This gives leaders access to real-time, unfiltered information. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the Dow Chemical Company’s collaborative culture and the collaborative leadership approach of Dow CEO Andrew Liveris. In a compelling interview by Susan Daker  in the Monday, January 25 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Andrew describes how Dow taps its salespeople for real-time intelligence about customer needs.

     

    Wisely, Dow recognizes that the role of salespeople goes beyond addressing customer needs and closing deals.  Dow salespeople collaborate with Research & Development and senior leaders to ensure that products meet customer needs. This may sound like a no brainer, but countless salespeople from many companies have told me that marketing, R&D and senior leaders have little interest in their customer insights. In such organizations, an “us and them” attitude develops between salespeople and management. And therefore the organization loses opportunities to gain real-time intelligence that would otherwise create value.

     

    For years, salespeople have been underutilized. After all, they’re the eyes and ears of an organization. They can also be an early warning system for market shifts and product issues. Good salespeople understand their customers’ businesses, challenges, and industry trends. Isn’t that information important to R&D and senior leadership? Absolutely! In fact, companies pay dearly for similar intelligence and information from consultants and researchers.

     

    In a collaborative organization, senior leaders reach out to salespeople for unfiltered, real-time information and input into decisions.  Salespeople, in turn, engage and collaborate across leadership levels and across functions, business units and regions. Presence-enabled tools enhance this by letting people find each other and collaborate in real-time, enabling salespeople to share intelligence with senior leaders, R&D and others. But tools can only enhance and extend collaboration. For salespeople to contribute to product development and strategy, the organizational culture must support informal, spontaneous interactions regardless of level or title.

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