CollaborativEye

We all know by now that social networking technology, collaboration, and "wikinomics"-thinking works. There are still some naysayers, but their arguments are wearing thin. However, there are limits to collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds and understanding these limits is just as important as understanding the potential. So when does collective intelligence just plain not work?

Interestingly, as far as I know, all the books extolling the virtues of Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, and your-favorite-term-here-2.0, were written by one or two authors rather than hundreds or thousands. These authors created a position, gathered support, did the research, created drafts, and pushed the writing project through. We are Smarter than Me tried to break this pattern and use the concepts that the authors write about in the creation of the book. But they concede that part-way through the project "...we found the actual text of the book, the flow of the topics, and the graphical design had to be produced in the conventional way, rather than relying on the crowd to perform these functions." (pg. xiv) I applaud Barry Liebert and Jon Spector for their candor. Why the breakdown?

Before we answer, the same book provides another example of "collective intelligence gone wild". TheBusinessExperiment.com (TBE) was created to harness collective intelligence for the incubation and creation of businesses. Interaction was good during the idea creation and refinement stage, but when an actual project was chosen to work on, the wheels fell off. Most people lost interest, and getting any real work done was difficult to impossible. A "traditional" leadership was created, with a CEO who quickly drove the project forward. Again, why the breakdown?

I think these examples provide important reminders that collaboration and collective intelligence still require leadership, albeit leadership of a different kind. The role of such leadership?

1) From Jim Collins of Good to Great fame:  Get the right people on the bus (and correspondingly get the wrong people off the bus). TBE founder Rob May noted that inviting people to vote on ideas attracted people who liked to discuss ideas rather than people interested in the actual idea itself. In application, this means that leadership needs to chose a specific direction or plan (hopefully applying collaborative principles in the idea creation, vetting, and refinement process), and then amass the right team to make the initiative a reality. The actual implementation, once passionate people are on board, can again utilize collective intelligence.

2) "2.0" leadership still requires the hard work of translating an idea into a plan. Leadership must create a vision around the plan, sell that vision, and  set goals. That plan must include some type of work-breakdown-structure to give concrete things for people who are "on the bus" to sink their teeth into. The size of tasks is important: too big and the task is too open-ended to realistically develop in a collaborative, distributed manner. On the other hand, the task cannot be too small or progress will grind to a halt.

My goal in this post is not to say that collaboration doesn't work. Far from it. As we evolve in collaboration maturity, we will see failed experiments from which we must learn. Understanding the limitations in a concept is crucial to appropriate and most effective application of that concept. Collaborative leadership understands these limitations and knows how to strike the right balance between top-down decision making and collaborative wisdom. Further, collaborative leadership must be willing to explore where that balance is.