The Culture of Collaboration

Sustainability Fuels Collaboration Consciousness

Both academia and business are realizing that the lack of collaboration can impede progress. Traditionally, university researchers compete for limited grant money, so there is little incentive to collaborate.

In a Christmas day story in The New York Times, Claudia H. Deutsch reported on several academic sustainability centers that focus on collaborating across disciplines. One is the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The article quotes Nabil Nasr, the institute’s director, as saying “the problem of sustainability cuts across economics, social elements, engineering, everything. It simply cannot be solved by one discipline, or even by coupling two disciplines.” Well said!

Now The Dow Chemical Company, through its foundation, is funding a Sustainable Products and Solutions Program at The Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business at The University of California-Berkeley. Dow is providing $10 million over the next five years and sending a Dow leader to Berkeley as an executive-in-residence. Part of his role is to recruit other industry partners to fund the program. What’s compelling about the sustainability program is that the Department of Chemistry is collaborating with the business school and the program will likely involve students and faculty from other disciplines. The bottom line is that environmental and sustainability concerns run deep enough and are so complex that they’re sparking collaboration among people who would otherwise do one of three things: compete with each other, ignore one another, or remain at odds with each other.

Urgency in the environmental realm is clearly driving collaboration across disciplines, but sustainability is by no means the only area in which universities and corporations should be applying collaborative principles, practices and processes. In the business realm…marketing should be collaborating with research and development, R&D should be collaborating with information technology, sales should be collaborating with the market research group, and so on. This should be happening asynchronously and in real time.

Reputation and Collaboration

I was having dinner with some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley recently, and social commerce was on everybody’s mind. We discussed different business models and the prospects of some startups. Eventually, the conversation turned to blogging and, specifically, to why people blog.

At the top of the list is reputation. Pundits blog to build their visibility and ownership of a topic. CEO’s blog to build their reputations with team members, investors and customers. People at all levels of organizations blog to establish their expertise. Marketers use blogs to enhance the reputation of brands.

Within enterprises, blogging is becoming a knowledge and content management solution. Ideas can be captured, retained and repurposed. At its best, blogging is a collaborative rather than a solo pursuit. Collaborators can blog about each other’s posts or leave comments on the original posts. And team reputation can be a motivator for collaborative blogging.

Just as reputation is important for bloggers, reputation also plays a role more broadly in collaborative culture. Trust is one of the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in The Culture of Collaboration book, and reputation plays a big role in trust. Reputation is based on work style, knowledge, team contributions, and integrity, among other factors. It’s becoming easier to connect and collaborate with people based on their reputations. As we establish our expertise and interests through blogging, vlogs, team sites, mashups, wikis, social networking sites and other modes, we can more easily collaborate and create value.

Reputation also plays a role in real-time, spontaneous collaboration. Using presence (see my March 7, 2007 post), we can connect in real-time via IM, audio or video with people reputed to have relevant skills, knowledge and expertise. Every organization has internal experts on everything from purchasing to intellectual property. Increasingly, their reputations are based on contributions through wikis, team sites, blogs and meetings (which can be captured, retained, indexed and searched based on keyword). Presence lets us see their availability status and connect with these experts on the fly to solve mission-critical issues and make faster, better decisions.

Yale Law School's Information Society Project is tackling reputation issues in its upcoming “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace.” The conference, scheduled for December 8, 2007 in New Haven, will explore the shift towards the “wisdom of the crowd” and away from such traditional forms of reputation as educational background, institutional affiliations, and traditional business networks. Undoubtedly, this shift has wide-ranging implications for society. But the change in how we view reputation also impacts gatekeepers of every kind: publishers, studios, traditional media and elite universities and institutions. If reputation is based more on what we write, say and do online and less on affiliations, gatekeepers will play less of a role.

Education and Collaboration

Does collaboration begin in the playground?

New York City’s Commissioner of Parks Adrian Benepe thinks so. That’s why the city is partnering with Rockwell Group Architecture and Design to develop a prototype “Imagination Playground.” The idea is to encourage interaction, social play and collaboration. Gone are the monkey bars and seesaws, which child psychologists increasingly believe develop physical skills at the expense of social and interactive skills.

The prototype playground at New York’s South Street Seaport is designed to “suggest options” and provide a flexible environment for many types of play, rather than prescribed activities.  The environment includes what designers call the “raw materials of creativity.” These include such items as sand and water, blocks, buckets, shovels, and a wheelbarrow. Using an idea first implemented in Europe, trained adults called play workers act as facilitators. The city expects to ultimately transform many of New York’s playgrounds into Imagination Playgrounds.

The Imagination Playground echoes the trend in companies to create gathering spaces where people feel comfortable sharing ideas. This helps break down barriers among functions, levels and departments. This, in turn, increases collaboration. Instilling collaborative culture in the playground will likely enhance collaboration in tomorrow’s workplace.