I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “collaboration” as an abstract concept, and I‘m starting to feel we’re going about it all wrong.
I think there’s a conceptual trap that many people fall into – and which I have found myself in, too. When you start thinking about collaboration, what first comes to mind?
I bet that lots of people start with things like tech tools that enable collaboration – better messaging tools, tools that allow co-editing of documents, video-conferencing equipment, and stuff like that.
And I’m also sure that people are adding to the list things like open office spaces that allow workers to gather together (although most recent research tends to find the open-office concept a blocker to collaboration – and productivity!).
I would never argue that having the technology to support collaboration isn’t important. If you don’t have ways to communicate and share information freely, your abilities to do so are constrained.
But even if you have the tools, that doesn’t mean people are collaborating. Just implementing technology isn’t enough. There are some fundamental behaviors that need to change to make collaboration real.
Collaboration isn’t better sharing tools – it’s about actually sharing your information. We need to let down our borders around our work and freely expose what we’re working on to gain synergies and cross-pollination of ideas.
An example that I’ve used before: Bob is working on Sales reporting in New York; Gustavo is working on Sales reporting in Buenos Aires. The problem is that although they’re trying to report on the same thing, they’re working from two different data sets – some of the US information is hidden from Argentina, and vice versa. When they finish their reports, they have two different numbers – and both of the numbers are wrong.
Now, there’s a natural resistance to broadly sharing information. The Security group has made us very nervous about data sharing – their favorite model is “need to know,” where only the people who have to have the information to do their jobs have access. But this is usually defined too tightly – very often, even people who need the data have to go through gatekeepers to get it, thus slowing down processes and hurting productivity.
My personal opinion is that everything should be shared unless there is a specific reason not to share it. Personally-identifiable information, banking info, sure – there are excellent reasons to keep that under wraps. But production information? Department policies? Order records? Why not share these, especially when doing so will give people better information from which to make their forecasts and projections?
People are also a bit worried about sharing ideas because they’ve seen others steal them and take credit. Sad but true – there are a bunch of plagiarists out there. At one point in my career, I actually started hiding signature marks on my documents so that I could prove their provenance when a manager stole them later.
But if everything were openly attributed and electronically tracked, there’d be a lot less opportunity for poaching.
We can also reduce duplication by making work visible. If you can see that there’s a report on the Western Region distribution of product, you won’t have to go and do the research again when you need the information.
And finally, making information freely available is the first step to people collaborating on it. “Oh, look, Charlene is working on a project to revamp the production line in Building C. I’ve got some thoughts about that – I should contact her!” This will never happen if the visibility to the information doesn’t exist.
So, at the end of the day – collaboration tools are important, but they’re not the whole story by any means. The first step towards a truly collaborative environment is the willingness to share information – without that, real collaborative environments cannot exist.