The Culture of Collaboration

How Bean Counting Compromised Value at General Motors

Too often companies emphasize numbers over products and forecasting over customers. Such firms typically focus on short-term results over long-term value. This creates greater internal competition and encourages shorter-term supplier relationships rather than enhancing collaboration internally among functions and externally with business partners.

The relentless focus on numbers at the expense of domain expertise figures prominently in the book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters (Portfolio, 2011) by Bob Lutz, former vice chairman of General Motors. Fifty years ago, GM products were the epitome of design. Over the last half century, though, the company’s products have steadily lost traction with customers. This decline culminated in the company’s reorganization under Chapter 11 in June of 2009. While many factors contributed to GM’s bankruptcy, short-sighted bean counting was undoubtedly one of them.

“It’s time to stop the dominance of the number crunchers, living in their perfect, predictable, financially projected world,” writes Bob, who specializes in getting people’s attention. I first encountered Bob early in my career when I was reporting on the auto industry and attending the introduction of the Jeep Grand Cherokee at the 1992 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Bob exuded machismo as he drove the SUV through a plate-glass window into the hall, shocking me and other journalists awaiting the usual dull presentations. At the time, Bob was president of Chrysler.

Bob’s detractors consider him an old-school, shoot-from-the-hip executive who makes decisions based on his gut with little analysis. In reality, Bob understands the need for left brain and right brain driven people to collaborate regardless of their titles or functions. And he encourages more junior people to challenge him. In short, he values constructive confrontation, one of the ten cultural elements of collaboration I introduce in my book, The Culture of Collaboration. 

The former Marine Corps pilot insists that “car guys” should run auto companies, “supermarket guys” should run supermarkets, and “software guys” should run software companies. He concedes that these “guys” can be of either sex. Too often, as I noted in The Culture of Collaboration book, boards of directors and senior leaders believe that if they hire “star players” these supposed stars can and will achieve results regardless of their domain knowledge or industry experience. Some prominent management consulting firms reinforce this skewed logic. The so-called star players are typically numbers-driven MBA’s interested more in units rather than in products and in forecasting rather than in customers. The organization promotes these internally-competitive numbers crunchers and sidelines others who focus on improving products and interacting with customers.

Of course, quantitative analysis is critical to any business. The problem arises when quantitative analysis dominates and pervades every aspect of a business while designing awesome products and creating market stickiness take a back seat. As Lutz chronicles in his entertaining and informative book, once upon a time design dominated the auto industry. Think of the tail fin era of the late 1950’s which gave rise to cars including the 1957 Chevrolet and the 1959 Cadillac (see images, Chevy image courtesy Trekphiler). Designers originated products. By the 1970’s, General Motors had reigned in designers, made design “part of the system,” and assigned product origination to a department called Product Planning staffed by former finance people.

Neither the old design-driven General Motors nor the newer numbers-driven organization is a model of collaboration. In the 1960’s, when design and the designers were at their pinnacle, Lutz writes that  chief designers in well-tailored suits graced magazine covers. Essentially, designers had become stars and expected star status and treatment within GM and in society. Chief designers often silenced and sidelined people in other functions.

When GM reduced the role of designers, the organization empowered product planning to originate products in a vacuum. Handing plans off to designers with the instruction “go design this” hardly enhances collaboration. Ideally, designers would lead a design process with input from, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, sales and dealers. In a collaborative organization, people come together across departmental and functional barriers to share ideas and develop products and services in concert.

At least among senior leaders, GM more recently came closer to this ideal when it hatched the Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid electric/gas car introduced in December, 2010. Lutz, who had advocated an all-electric vehicle, describes how he sat across from Jon Lauckner, former GM vice president of product planning, as Lauckner sketched out the first drawing depicting the “sequential” hybrid technology of the Volt. This differs from the “parallel” hybrid technology of the Toyota Prius (The Volt is designed to go forty miles without using gasoline unlike the Prius which alternates between electric and gas). And almost immediately people Lutz dubs “unconventional thinkers” in design and product planning began collaborating.

Whether it’s skimping on ingredients in restaurant kitchens or using inferior paint in automobile assembly plants, focusing on numbers over products and forecasting over customers reinforces the wrong organizational values. In time, team members become comfortable sacrificing products and shortchanging customers. Ultimately, value evaporates.  More collaborative organizations use quantitative analysis as a tool rather than as the primary organizational focus.

Collaborative Chaos at the New York Times

Journalism, at its best, involves constant collaboration.

In television newsrooms, reporters, producers and assignment editors engage in a continuous conversation about stories and often edit scripts together in real time. While real-time group writing is a relatively new phenomenon in education and business, reporters and producers frequently write story introductions and “teases” together. This traditionally involves no electronic screen-sharing or web conferencing, but rather colleagues shouting to one another across the newsroom or two people hunched over a single terminal. In newspaper newsrooms, a similar continuous dialogue occurs among reporters and editors. Some colleagues get to know one another so well that they even finish each other’s sentences.

All of this newsroom interaction requires informality. Corporations and government agencies are increasingly embracing informality, because of a growing realization that formality compromises value creation. But informality is nothing new in newsrooms. The informality of journalism dates back at least to the early 20^th Century when few reporters got “formal” higher education and the socialization that accompanies it. Newsrooms then felt more like police stations in which colleagues sat in an open room exchanging sarcastic, irreverent banter. And though most journalists (and many police) now graduate from college and the journalistic culture has evolved, newsrooms have nevertheless retained much of their informality.

Films about journalism have captured this informality. Examples include the 1931 and 1974 versions of The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, about newspaper reporting in Chicago. Also, the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula, about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal, reveals the constant conversation among all the players in the Post newsroom. The conversation continues down corridors and into the elevator where executive editor Ben Bradlee (played by Jason Robards), in a dramatic moment, instructs Woodward (played by Robert Redford) and Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) to “print it” meaning to run a story about Watergate.

Fast forward to 2011. Traditional journalism is under siege, in part because of the Great Recession’s 
ravages but mostly because of systemic shifts in the media industry. These include shrinking audiences and advertising dollars flowing to Web-based alternatives including social media. Against this backdrop comes Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary directed by Andrew Rossi, which attempts to capture a leading newspaper and its people at a pivotal point. (Photo of Times newsroom above courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

The reviews have been mixed, a charitable adjective for Michael Kinsley’s take on the film that ran in—of all outlets—the New York Times itself. Kinsley takes the documentary to task for flitting “from topic to topic, character to character, explaining almost nothing.” Kinsley suggests that the movie is disjointed and confusing. The film does take up a series of topics: WikiLeaks, the Pentagon Papers, the Times survival, Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal, Twitter’s impact, the Times’ plagiarism scandal involving former reporter Jayson Blair, Iraq, the Apple iPad, and the ups and downs of the Tribune Company, among others.

And all of this comes in the form of a continuous conversation upon which we as the audience eavesdrop. “Like a shopper at the supermarket without a shopping list, “Page One” careens around the aisles picking up this item and that one, ultimately coming home with three jars of peanut butter and no 2-percent milk,” Kinsley writes. Yes, but the collaborative process is rarely pretty.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I identify the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that are typically present when collaboration works. One of these elements is collaborative chaos, which is exactly what Page One reveals. Collaborative chaos, the unstructured exchange of ideas to create value, lets the unexpected happen and generate rich returns. In the film, we see former cocaine addict and current Times media columnist David Carr sharing ideas with his sources, his colleagues and his editor, Bruce Headlam. These exchanges culminate in value creation, Carr’s columns. And the film invites us into the Times daily story conferences during which editors jostle over which articles should appear on the front page.

Kinsley, no stranger to journalism as the former editor of the New Republic and Slate, would undoubtedly argue that while confusion may prevail in newsrooms, it’s the job of the filmmaker to present a more organized picture. But attempting to sanitize or beat the collaborative chaos out of the Times or any news operation would present a distorted view. It would be like eating street food in an upscale setting, a current trend in the restaurant business incidentally.

Journalism, and collaboration itself, involves a continuous conversation during which collaborative chaos prevails, recedes, only to prevail again all the while creating value.

Recasting Knowledge Management

Collaboration is shaking up the once-staid field of Knowledge Management (KM) as enterprise social media and interaction play an increasing role. The premise of KM is that an organization’s intellectual capital or “intangible” assets comprise its greatest value and that therefore the organization must manage these assets.  Through the 1990’s, KM gained traction with the growth of data networks, the evolution of database technology and the increasing premium placed on information.

KM has traditionally supported command-and-control organizational cultures and structures in which the organization seeks to gather, retain, unlock and control its resources. And often believing that data drives knowledge, organizations have pushed to populate data repositories. Enterprise blogs and wikis have added an unstructured element to creating and capturing knowledge. As social media takes hold in organizations, KM practitioners are rethinking their craft, integrating social media and collaborative tools into their frameworks, and recasting KM as embodying collaboration. The goal is to broaden KM’s appeal and, in particular, engage younger team members.

“I define knowledge management as information management and collaboration,” insists Katrina B.  Pugh, author of Sharing Hidden Know-How (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Kate, a KM consultant and former vice president of knowledge management at Fidelity Investments, believes gathering data should take a back seat to sharing information. “It’s much more about improving those interactions than populating those repositories,” she explained during a compelling conversation recently.

People often use the terms social media and collaboration interchangeably. Social media describes a category of tools that can be used to collaborate. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” It’s quite possible to create no value while using social media. It’s also possible to create substantial value. And considering the current excitement over these tools, I asked Kate whether there’s a downside to social media when it comes to KM. “It’s losing the person-to-person interaction,” she quickly responded. By person-to-person, Kate means voice, video and face-to-face encounters. I suggested these real-time encounters have a more “three-dimensional” quality. Kate agreed. “The best social media interactions are the ones that follow a conversation,” she noted.

Conversation, in fact, is at the heart of Kate’s approach to KM outlined in her book. She calls the approach "Knowledge Jam." The idea is to transfer knowledge from “knowledge originators” to “knowledge brokers” through facilitation, conversation and translation. A facilitator, either an outside consultant or internal team member, jump starts the Knowledge Jam during a series of structured 90-minute sessions.

I raised two issues with Kate:

1. Many knowledge originators are “go-to” people who hoard information
2. Is a facilitator necessary?

Absolutely, Kate agrees, knowledge originators may hoard. That’s why “there must be something in it for them [to share knowledge],” Kate explains. And that something is that “in a shifting environment, they need to learn the new playing field.” In other words, to remain relevant and keep their jobs, Kate believes knowledge originators will trade their knowledge for new context and skills. What about the need for a facilitator? Yes, Kate says, getting the conversation going between knowledge originators and knowledge brokers requires a facilitator.

I get that a facilitator can jump start Knowledge Jam, but ultimately organizations must share knowledge and collaborate naturally. The problem with consultants as facilitators (full disclosure: I’m a consultant) is that when they step aside, the organization can easily revert to previous behaviors. The problem with internal facilitators is their perceived and, at times, actual lack of neutrality. For collaborative organizations, sharing must become part of DNA. And KM is part of that equation.

As KM evolves to fit with more collaborative organizational cultures and structures, the term knowledge management also needs updating. Management suggests hierarchy and command-and-control. How about knowledge collaboration (KC)?

MIT Technology Review Featuring The Culture of Collaboration

Technology journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Gomes and I had a thought-provoking chat earlier this week about collaboration. Lee was interviewing me for a question-and-answer style profile in the MIT Technology Review. The Review was capping off a series of stories about collaboration with the interview on The Culture of Collaboration book. I’m glad that the editor accurately summed up my perspective in the headline: "Collaborating Takes More than Technology."

You can read the article here.

Lee did a good job playing devil’s advocate. Among the issues and questions he raised: “Command and control might not be pretty, but it gets things done. Couldn’t an overemphasis on collaboration paralyze an organization?" I responded this way:

"What paralyzes an organization is when management compromises value by failing to tap ideas, expertise, and assets. What also paralyzes an organization is when requests for decisions languish in in-boxes rather than hashing out issues spontaneously. Paying a few people to think and paying everybody else to carry out orders creates far less value than breaking down barriers among silos and enabling people to engage each other spontaneously."

Changing Education

Businesses face challenges in becoming collaborative partly because traditional education systems often discourage collaboration. These systems condition workforces and organizations to operate in command-and-control mode. Now there are promising signs of an educational upheaval that mirrors shifts in business and government. Many universities are seeking to reinvent themselves to preserve their relevance.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the shift in the role of the professor from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.”  Driving the shift is the decline in credibility of professors. In an era of rapidly changing information,  students can search online for ideas more quickly than teachers and professors lecture about them. “Students don’t really believe their professors,” is the way David Edwards put it during our conversation last week.

David Edwards, who’s the Gordon McKay professor of the practice of biomedical engineering at Harvard, has collaborated with colleagues to update his university’s role in educating students. David shares my view that both universities and businesses must provide physical and cultural space to spark and collaboratively develop ideas.

David is the author of The Lab (Harvard University Press, 2010). This compelling book chronicles the growth of Artscience Labs, an international network of idea labs David and his colleagues have developed. The labs spark “idea translation,” a process of repeated experimentation, exhibition, prototype critique and team evolution. The book delves deep into emerging approaches to innovation growing out of these interconnected labs which include Le Laboratoire in Paris, The Lab at Harvard, and similar labs at other universities and high schools. Many ideas incumbated and nourished in the labs have become commercial products. These include everything from edible bottles to inhalable chocolate.

The growing Artscience movement draws inspiration from the Bauhaus school that flourished in Germany during the Weimar period after World War One. The Bauhaus concept was a “total work of art” bringing together all arts including design and architecture. Bauhaus emphasized “rationality, functionality” and the need to free art from Bourgeois influences.  The labs break down boundaries between arts and sciences to accelerate learning. This mirrors silo busting and curing Silo Syndrome in business and government that I write about frequently here and in The Culture of Collaboration book. Results of Artscience efforts range from new designs and art to new companies and humanitarian organizations.

Edwards believes institutional boundaries have hampered education at Harvard and elsewhere, and he agrees that similar boundaries plague businesses. Technology and culture shifts have curbed “our ability to curate information and give it any meaning,” David notes. He compares overly-curated art with overly-curated information. Why is it, Edwards wonders, that there are thousands of works in a museum like the Louvre, but that art “experts” and books focus on only a handful of “important” works? Not to mention, I was thinking, all of the art--some of it excellent-- that never makes it into the collections of the Louvre and other museums.

So, a new cultural model is necessary. And guess what this model involves? “Nothing gets done without intense collaboration. We can no longer ignore it,” David insists. Amen. Some design firms advocate a formal process for brainstorming and ideation. In contrast, the approach to collaboration, innovation and ideation practiced in Artscience Labs is decidedly less formal. “I’m very skeptical about rules for ideation or idea development,” David says. Freedom to take risks and make mistakes is key, and so is the ability to realize mistakes and quickly develop a new idea or approach.

Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker

Management consultants, technology vendors, and human resources departments often segregate workforces into “knowledge workers” and everybody else.  In a collaborative organization, every worker is a knowledge worker. Every team member contributes, shares knowledge, and participates in making decisions, whether he or she is loading crates, designing products, servicing customer accounts, creating tactical marketing plans, or determining long-term strategy.

My current column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com entitled "Every Worker is a Knowledge Worker" describes how organizations can desegregate the workforce. You can read the column here.

Video Driving Enhanced Collaboration

“Like television archives, stored desktop videoconferences can potentially provide a legacy of our meetings, presentations, and collaborations. These video anthologies may follow us through our careers and personal lives.”

This observation is from the book, Personal Videoconferencing, published in 1996 by Manning/Prentice Hall. It so happens that I wrote the book. Recently, I’ve been re-reading the book, articles and columns on collaboration that I wrote in the mid-1990’s to assess how collaboration has progressed over the last fifteen years. This exercise is particularly relevant, because I’m currently writing my third book on collaboration. And to know where collaboration is headed, it’s essential to understand its evolution.

There’s no need to pre-empt my forthcoming book here, but I feel compelled to share some thoughts about the role of video. In 1996, video was the most controversial aspect of collaboration. Engineers, marketing people, and senior leaders were divided on the value of video. Videoconferencing on desktop and notebook computers was emerging and so was non-video web conferencing. Many technologists insisted that people primarily wanted to share documents, spreadsheets and electronic whiteboards rather than see one another. Inside Intel, which was developing an early conferencing system called ProShare, a debate raged on whether to include video in the product. Ultimately, the video proponents won that debate.

In the mid-1990’s, audio conferencing people dominated the conferencing industry and felt threatened by video. So, video was defending itself from assaults from two groups of naysayers: the legacy voice people and the early non-video web conferencing crowd. Essentially, many people with entrenched interests felt uncomfortable using interactive video, disliked how they came across, and lacked vision regarding video’s role in business. In short, they felt threatened by the emerging medium. Their attitude was similar to that of “serious” print and radio journalists towards television news when that medium emerged in the 1950’s.

Fast forward to 2011. The age of YouTube, reality television, and Skype has conditioned us to embrace video. We’re comfortable seeing friends, relatives and colleagues when we communicate at a distance and having them see us. It’s no longer a stretch to accept that video creates an emotional connection second only to an in-person exchange. Nearly every collaborative organization I’ve encountered and almost all of those I feature in The Culture of Collaboration book have not only adopted real-time, interactive video, but also have integrated video into their cultures and business processes.

A few years ago, I gave a speech in London at the Tandberg global sales directors’ meeting. Tandberg leaders sensed a shift in how their customers were making purchase decisions for videoconferencing systems. Increasingly, business unit heads or senior leaders rather than telecom or IT people were calling the shots. So, video was moving from an equipment sale to a consultive sale involvement business processes. I was in London to give sales leaders some pointers about winning in the shifting environment.

Having acquired Tandberg, Cisco is nudging enterprises to adopt video throughout their operations. And Cisco offers a broad portfolio of video products ranging from telepresence to WebEx to Flip video cameras. From a sales perspective, though, Cisco still struggles with some of the same issues that plague other telepresence and visual communication vendors including Polycom and HP. Namely, it’s easy to slip back into pushing boxes of products. The challenge is to collaborate with customers to create value by integrating tools into their cultures and processes.

Ilan Kasan and Grace Kim of Cisco recently demonstrated for me a new version of WebEx. The new version, dubbed the WebEx High Quality Video Experience, offers Active Presence, which is a “film strip” of video feeds showing everybody on a call. Cisco TelePresence offers the same capability, and now people can join TelePresence sessions via WebEx. Plus the new version enables the Apple iPad with WebEx.

Marketing departments of technology vendors are typically bullish on customer adoption forecasts. Cisco is no exception. David Hsieh, Cisco’s vice president of emerging technologies marketing, tells me that within twelve months, 36 percent of Cisco’s top customers will roll out telepresence and video collaboration across their entire enterprises. That percentage climbs to 46 percent in over two years. David and his colleagues believe this, because Cisco gathered its top customers in a room and asked them about their purchase plans. However, my experience with this type of survey is that customers are more likely to reveal purported purchase plans when they are surrounded by other customers---and therefore the results from the customer gathering may be skewed towards greater adoption.

Nevertheless, Cisco believes the survey results indicate something significant. “This represents a major shift in the market. Cisco is going to put a major stake in the ground,” according to David. There’s a difference, though, between rolling out systems and actually integrating tools into workflow, processes and culture. Cisco, Polycom, HP and other visual communications and collaboration vendors must devote greater time and resources to integrating tools into workflow and processes. This approach will create far greater value for their shareholders and salespeople than simply moving products. As customers see other customers creating value  through extending and enhancing collaboration, adoption becomes more viral.

Clearly, the debate has advanced from whether video is necessary in business to how video can be used most effectively to create value.

Real change happens when the culture shifts and tools, including video, become part-and-parcel of how an organization collaborates and does business. Tools rarely create collaboration, but they play a critical role in extending and enhancing collaboration. Sold and used effectively, video is the tool that can enhance collaboration like no other.

Enhancing Products with Collaborative Services

Last Wednesday, I stopped into Rosetta Stone’s splashy event in a trendy nightclub in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Company officials were on hand to demonstrate Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe. Chris Spiller, executive producer, demonstrated the Spanish version of the popular software for learning languages.

Chris and I discussed how immersing oneself in another culture is by far the best way to learn a language. And we shared stories about the overemphasis on grammar in high school foreign language classes.  It turns out that cultural immersion is exactly what Rosetta Stone had in mind when developing Version 4 TOTALe. “We looked at what are the pieces of that experience we can recreate through technology,” Chris explained.

Rosetta Stone has recently transformed its offering into a hybrid product/collaborative service. This means that no longer must customers learn a language in a vacuum. They can now collaborate with other learners globally and can also learn from language coaches who interact with customers through one-way video and two-way audio. Adobe provides and hosts Rosetta Stone’s video and audio through its Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service Platform. Incidentally, today Adobe is releasing version 8 of a related web conferencing product called Adobe Connect.

Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe includes Rosetta Studio, which involves live, interactive coaching. The bundle also features Rosetta World, which lets users collaborate with fellow learners. There are lots of activities and games that geographically-dispersed users can do together while talking with each other in the language they’re learning via voice over IP (VOIP) and text chat. Other activities pair learners with native speakers who are, in turn, learning their partner’s language. This collaboration among customers accelerates learning and creates value.

Getting customers to collaborate with each other can turn a maturing product into a virally-adopted habit. Smart companies realize that collaboration is more than customers participating in discussion forums. It’s about getting customers to create value using a product or service together in real time. Depending on the product, collaborating among customers may involve creating, learning or playing.

Besides enhancing learning, the collaborative service lets Rosetta Stone enhance its business model and presumably its revenue. The software includes three months of access to Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World, and customers can then buy more access. I suspect that this hybrid software-as-a-product/collaborative service model is a prelude to a pure software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering.

While Rosetta Stone officials say the company has no plans to expand offerings beyond language software and services, this collaborative approach to online learning could apply to subjects ranging from history and geography to algebra and physics. A user in India and a user in Germany could collaborate to learn the geography, history and culture of their respective countries.

The big picture is that companies in many industries can create value by encouraging customers to collaborate with each other. This produces greater stickiness by building interactive communities around products with the potential of generating new revenue streams.  And this goes well beyond software. Take a product like a motorcycle. With a 3D model of the motorcycle plus interactive audio and video, enthusiasts can collaborate on maintenance, diagnosing problems, and doing repairs. Collaborating among customers could also apply to furniture. Using a 3D model of a home or office and choices of virtual furniture, customers could exchange ideas and collaboratively design spaces for living and working.

Collaboration among customers can build brands, increase marketplace stickiness, and create new revenue streams.   

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.