Originally posted on Forbes.com

“We need better collaboration”  That phrase is hard to deny in any corporate setting but what exactly does it mean and is it any more important now than it was in the past?  Here are several reasons why I believe collaboration in business today is more of a survival trait than a buzzword:

The supply chain of work is getting longer.

Getting any product or service into the market is the result of a much larger set of people, organizations, places and processes than before; a dizzying number of interfaces with people who all seem to speak a unique dialect – even within the same company: finance, legal, HR, engineers, marketers and so on.   They are quite independent in how they see and speak about the world and yet wholly dependent upon each other to get anything done.      The more moving parts required to get work done, the more chance there is of creating confusion, rework, variance and other inefficiencies.   The only known remedy is structured communication (aka collaboration) across the supply chain.

Communication increasingly requires insider knowledge.

A business used to do the bulk of its internal communication via the meeting room and memo, its external communication through print and television – technologies that were static over decades if not centuries.   No longer.  Some examples of the questions organizations are asking:

• How does the wiki we are using to write our job descriptions work?
• How do Facebook pages function so that I can market there effectively?
• What type of programming skills are needed to develop the iPad application we are building?
• How does the new calendaring system work when booking meeting rooms?

This list is expanding daily.  This type of knowledge is buried within your organization (or suppliers) and getting at it quickly is a matter of connecting the right people at the right time.

Teams are global, the workplace is virtual.

The more multicultural, multilingual, multinational you are, the harder it is to achieve knowledge exchange and timely decision-making.   You may not be in a global organization but telephone, email, telepresence and real-time messaging have allowed the under-one-roof workplace to diffuse into a loosely-joined workforce.  Even when in close proximity we may not be together.  How many of us send email to a colleague down the hall?.  As our organizations slowly diffuse across timezones and space, collaboration is a glue to keep people together.

The world of the future will not be served by the organization of the past.

The delineations that allowed us to have very separate functions within an organization (R&D, Marketing, PR, Product Development, Customer Service etc.) and across the entire value chain of stakeholders begins to break down when the customer’s view of your company becomes the prevailing reality.  With the customer’s new-found communications power that is exactly what is taking place today.   Any weakness across the complex customer relationship is potentially exposed to the world.   You may have a brilliant marketing campaign but if the product is a loser – you are lost.  You may have a brilliant product but if your customer support is appalling, your potential buyers will be forewarned.   Therefore any planning exercise in one silo will necessarily require collaboration with the others to have any chance of success.

While the drivers that make collaboration vital are technical, the solutions are not.  Collaboration is, at its root, a social activity.  It is founded on generosity, sharing and openness.   As such collaboration begins in organizational culture.

Thanks to everyone who attended today’s webcast.   As promised, I wanted to put some supporting materials online for you.   If you have any questions I will answer them here in the comments area.

There are two big reasons to get started creating a set of guidelines

1. The massive proliferation of so called “social” technologies means that our employees are WAY more engaged with each other and the “outside” world.  Most of this is a net plus but it does have its downsides – as the line between personal and professional can get seriously eroded and conflicts or misunderstandings are made totally public.   This extends well beyond just how you reach your customers – inter-office communication can also create serious issues such as workplace bullying.  Expect a new raft of laws in the near future similar to sexual harrassment laws.  It is good to get ahead of these problems.

2. As with any social group – the social web is full of communities that are bound by a common set of norms that guide behavior and denote inclusion in the group. The social web is all about identity and authenticity - and that is why violations of this compact are so eggregious.  This is why Walmart was so punished when they went out with a fake blog: Walmarting Across America

There are four pieces you need to consider when putting together your guidelines:

Your Industry – Regulations, known liabilities, standards of conduct etc. These can be very specific – A Financial Services firm has totally different considerations than, say the YMCA.

Your “as is” Culture – value is created in social systems through sharing, soft leadership, natural hierarchies – some work cultures are much more amenable to this – others less so. Every company can take steps – but it is good to have a realistic understanding of your “as is” culture

Your Employees’ Social IQ – In the same way that we design solutions based on the affordance of our customers (are they online, do they use these technologies etc.) we should always understand the behavioral profile of your employees

Your Employees as co-authors – Consider having your employees help you create your guidelines. You can do this by creating a small guidelines committee and setting up a collaborative wiki where your employees can help you refine the document. You will be killing two birds with one stone – establishing clear guidelines with employee buy-in baked in and getting some experience with collaboration.

Whatever you do, Engage every key department.   This harkens back to understanding your industry (regulatory, ethical codes etc.) as well as general issues such as expectations of privacy, code of conduct for inter-office interactions  etc. – but also in understanding that Social Media cuts across the whole company – HR and Legal are obvious – but also Customer Service, Customer Insight, Marketing etc. Often you will find these engagements begin with marketing but – b/c of the two-way nature of social communication – the information and exchanges that start with marketing have direct impact on other groups.   Be sure that you can follow through — if marketing people begin receiving customer service inquiries (and they will) are they prepared?
Design for Possibility – Then Design for Risk
Disclosure of sensitive information is usually the biggest fear that companies have around social media. Really, this is not a new problem – email and telephone pose the same risks and are harder to monitor.
I talk a lot about beginning from a position of trust – While there are possible negatives involved in having employees on the social Web, most employees have common sense. Begin with a set of possibilities first.  These should be tied to business objectives (increasing awareness, improving customer service, gaining customer insight and so on) then draw up a list of worst-case scenarios (bad mouthing the company, inappropriate language, leaking IP, to name a few). Modify the guiding principles for your employees below to help mitigate the risks you’ve identified.    If you get everyone on board first imagining what is possible — you will enroll them in helping you move forward.   Often I find that IT / Legal (the people charged with lowering risk)  are not engaged in any planning — just given a program that scares the heck out of them — and they they do their job:  tear it down because it is risky.  Engage them early and often in your planning.

Resources:Here are some of my favorite guidelines:

IBM:  My favorite set is here.   IBM wrote these in collaboration with a broad set of employees — To me even the language in these feels distinct and genuine.   Best section: “Don’t forget your day job”

Intel:A very healthy set of guidelines that harken back to an Intel Code of Conduct.  Best section, “If it gives you pause, pause”

Dell has been a leader in social media – from innovation hubs to using Twitter.

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great set of guidelines around safe blogging.

SAP is another company that developed their guidelines in collaboration with employees.

Laurel Papworth did a massive rundown of guidelines if you want more.  Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing me to these.
Lastly – this flowchart from the Air Force made the rounds a while back – Though it is focused on how to respond to blogs, it does a great job of visualizing how to engage in social media.

If you have any examples you would like to share – feel free to put them in the comments.  If you have any questions I will do my best to answer them here.

Stimuluswatch.org allows citizens to see local government requests for stimulus-spending projects, add details, vote projects up or down and generally discuss the merit of each.  It is a great example of how the Internet lowers the cost of developing software and allows citizens to collaborate in government.   Anyone from an Enterprise can learn a lot from Stimuluswatch about
1.    How complex software does not need to cost millions (your intranet, your website etc.)
2.    How quickly projects can now get off the ground (weeks not months)
3.    How people outside your company can contribute their talent to get things done (Open beats Closed)

For those of you less inclined to read, here is a screencast that covers most of these details

A bit of history.  Stimuluswatch began with this blog request from Jerry Brito,

Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

I got in touch with two of the developers who responded to Brito’s blog request, Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, to get details on their collaboration.  The final site included all of the functionality (and more) that Brito had asked for was launched after only two weeks of work conducted over seven weeks including the holidays (for more technical detail on how they achieved this, see my Radar post here).

None of these people knew each other previously.  They were brought together by blog post into a common effort.  They used open source tools in rapid development.   They plugged in off the shelf social technologies  (Disqus as a tool to enable forums and commenting on projects, Tumblr as a blog and publishing platform for updates from Jerry and Mediawiki as a tool to allow citizens to collaborate together on building a common definition around each project – much like wikipedia allows users to collaborate on defining the meaning of a concept).  They achieved this in a matter of weeks.

Results so far?  One week after launch Stimuluswatch had 20,000 unique visitors.   These visitors were actively voting, discussing and even cleaning up mistakes in the mayor’s original data. Total cost of the effort?  $40 per month for hosting.

I am not sure that Stimuluswatch is the right set of tools for citizen engagement in public works.   That remains to be seen.  It does demonstrate the power of the Internet to radically reduce the time it takes to create powerful software and lower the barriers to group collaboration. If you are a business being faced with a million dollar software price tag from a big consulting firm you should think long and hard about whether or not your money is being wisely spent.

Blogging may seem old hat – but it can still be a powerful tool for a company.  Consider the recent Wells Fargo / Wachovia merger blog… A merger blog?  Yes, a blog all about the impending merger of Wells Fargo and Wachovia.   It sounds boring as hell to me but if you are a customer, an investor, a front line employee — well, then it might very well be of great interest.  I saw this on its first day because the social media circles were talking about the nifty comments box that appeared at the top of the blog (as opposed to just at the bottom).
But after a few days the blog got a whole lot more interesting and illustrative of the best that a blog has to offer in terms of reaching out to stakeholders, listening and connecting.

It begins with a simple, Obama-esque post

Once Matt introduces himself, he is clear on his intent:

The blog is about the merger and how it will affect customers of both banks (and employees)…  The comments came in fast and furious…  There are the standard “good for you” comments:

But many of the posts begin asking some serious questions about how the merger will affect bank policy and services.  Some of these are simple (below) and some get very complicated.

Interspersed in the comments Matt and a few others are responding and answering questions:

There are people who think the blog is an extension of the soulless corporate leviathan (my words not theirs):

Matt Wadley lets it stay (good move) and doesn’t respond (they aren’t asking for a response – just an airing of complaint…) As with many healthy blogs that have a good sized audience there are critics but also defenders:

Finally, if anyone is thinking of adding a comment Wells/Wachovia have made their guidelines clear right where you comment.  Including the request that all employees disclose their affiliation.

In Summary, these are some of the good practices shown on this single post:

• Let your personality show
• Have a clear focus
• Listen well and respond to comments
• Allow reasonable, negative comments (unless profane etc.)
• Be transparent about your subject matter
• Use “real” language when addressing business issues
• Make your commenting terms clear

While these practices (and others) have been well covered in books like Scoble and Israel’s Naked Conversations — I thought that this single post summarized a lot about how blogs work (and why).  I encourage you read through it (here is the link again) – there is a lot there….

This post once again reminds me that these social tools (blogs, wikis, social networks etc.) have nothing to do with technology -after all blogs are a one-click operation to set up… These tools are about shifting the dialogue from corporate-to-customer to person-to-person.  In that shift there are so many things that a corporation isn’t used to (loss of power, shift in tone and the move from business contract to the social contract).   More on that in the upcoming post:  Relationships beat Transactions.

I  posted on Radar about Wikitecture -- a new collaborative form of architecture that uses wiki principles of shared contribution, editing and decision-making within the virtual world of Second Life (disclaimer, my friend Jon Brouchoud is the brain child along with Ryan Schulz).

Recently Studio Wikitecture won Architecture for Humanity’s Founders Award for their submission; a health facility in Nepal. There were over 500 entrants to the contest. Many of Studio Wikitecture’s contributors (roughly 40) were not architects but each brought specific, local knowledge that benefitted the project.

I want to summarize some of the insights from looking at how Wikitecture works -- and then follow with some great video from the project.

Many businesses are wrestling with the notion of “collaboration” and its possible benefits.   Wikitecture reinforces some important points:

• Nothing is off limits: Collaboration can successfully occur in the production of almost anything (if architects can do it anyone can…).  In this case over 40 people came together to design a public health facility in Nepal.  This was a complex project that needed to consider a whole variety of factors (aesthetic, cultural, material).
• Diversity adds value: The more people from differing backgrounds the better the information pool to draw from.  Many contributors were not architects but people who had been to this particular region in Nepal.  That drove specific insights that might have been unavailable to the average sized architecture firm doing research.  This included building material suggestions (example: adobe and gabion wall construction was suggested as among the most viable design material given the exact -and remote- location and the ability to utilize local labor. Other materials would not only cost more but could even be prohibitive in terms of shipping into the area) and the impact of culture on design (example: In Nepal an odd number of steps is considered inauspicious so all stair plans were designed for even numbers.)
• Structure drives behavior: Collaboration benefits from a clear structure to facilitate results.  The wiki tree works in much the same way that Wikipedia does in setting specific rules up front that drive a successful outcome and allow many people to contribute harmoniously.   These “nudges” move decision-making and consensus in a positive direction.
• Organizing beyond the workplace: While Jon is a professional architect and earns his living that way, many of the participants are not (and have no desire to be) professional architects.  They added their talent and insight for motivations other than money.  Businesses that learn how to engage talent beyond their workplace in the same ways that Jon has will have an inherent advantage.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=amCi90zH3VI

Here is a demo of the “Wiki Tree”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3eWKIJxzyc

Here is one of the  tools that I use to help mobilize energy and stay on a productive path during an engagement:

Divergent thinking describes a mindset where anything is possible, new ideas are welcome from all quarters, where issues and opportunities are freely discussed.   It is the realm of strategy and planning.

Convergent thinking is strictly goal oriented, a mindset of managing scope, schedule and budget where strategy is realized.  It is the realm of execution, of project management and risk evaluation.

I have watched many conversations in the executive office swing wildly from divergent possibility to convergent peril;  from “imagine if we did X’ to “imagine if we lost Y.”

Here is the thing: these two mindsets are necessary for a healthy, functioning business but they do not coexist well in the same conversation. When creating new possibilities for your organization you need divergent thinking.     When executing on a project you need convergent thinking.      During any discussion, people in the room will gravitate to the dominant mindset of their formal role;  the IT manager who decries the security risk of social networks (convergent)  the rogue change agent (did I say Creative Director?)  who wants to turn everything upside down (divergent), the CMO who is terrified of losing control of the message (convergent).

If you can consciously move everyone to the mindset appropriate to the moment you will be amazed at how much easier the conversations run.   I am explicit.   I start out a meeting with the goal and the stated mindset and ground rules.   If we are divergent – I explain what I mean by divergent thinking and ask people to hold any discussion of risk, scope, schedule and budget until a set of possibilities has been gathered.    Conversely at a certain point it is absolutely necessary to begin the hard discipline of closely subjecting exciting possibilities to critical questions.

And here is the interesting part;  when you free people from their formal role in the organization you will be surprised how much enthusiasm they can bring, divergent or convergent, to the task at hand.