CollaborativEye

Collaboration "2.0" is not about technology. As mentioned in a previous post, it is about people. This naturally leads to culture and leadership as key components of effective collaboration. One of the biggest challenges to collaboration is "non-collaborative" leadership. We've all experienced it: leaders who may verbally encourage openness and participation, but who nonetheless feel compelled to guide and bound the process, afraid that it will lead off into non-strategic areas or "obvious" -ends without their active input. Talk about a wet blanket!

Why is such behavior so prevalent? While there are many reasons, I believe one of the primary causes is the FEAR OF FAILURE. Who wants to work on a project that gets cancelled? Who wants to include in their monthly report to executive management that 2 of their 4 projects are being shut down? These questions reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the VALUE OF FAILURE: namely the ability for organizations to LEARN. A truly abject failure is not a project or idea that does not meet goals, but one in which there is no corporate learning. Instead of asking "Why did the project not meet expectations", a better question is "What have we learned and how are we going to leverage that knowledge to create value?"

A culture that values failure, is a culture that values experimentation (the two go hand in hand). Tom Peters writes on this in his 1997 book  The Circle of Innovation.  He quotes Michael Schrange: "...specification-driven companies require that every 'i' be dotted and every 't' be crossed before anything can be shown to the next level of management. Prototype-driven companies, by contrast, love to...PLAY. They are open to new ideas. They cherish quick-and-dirty tests and experiments. Free-flowing exchange around rough s is the norm. It's not that sloppy work is encouraged or tolerated; it's just that hasty experiments to gather some real data are 'the way we do business around here.'" (pg 97 hardback). (For those familiar with current-day Agile development methodologies, the similarities should be obvious.)

As a leader, the best thing you can do to encourage and develop a culture of collaboration is NOT to install some whizzy new software.  The best thing you can do is to explore what prototyping and experimenting means in your organization. The best thing you can do is to praise failures and concentrate people on what was learned. The best thing you can do is to encourage diversity and opposition to established patterns. In such an environment, collaboration will not only begin to happen, it will thrive.