The Culture of Collaboration

Virtual Worlds and Cisco's Evolving Culture

As organizations adopt virtual worlds, there is growing confusion about when telepresence or videoconferencing may fit the bill and when virtual worlds make more sense.

 

Virtual worlds such as Second Life and Qwaq Forums enable geographically-dispersed colleagues to collaborate in a shared, immersive 3D environment. Qwaq is particularly suited for business. For more on Qwaq, see my September 21, 2007 post. Typically, avatars represent each collaborator and there’s audio without interactive video.

 

At the American Society of Training and Development International Conference last month in San Diego, corporate managers packed a session on using virtual worlds in the enterprise. The buzz was that virtual worlds make more sense than videoconferencing in part because people are getting more accustomed to a gaming-type experience. That supposition is debatable, because tools must fit the situation and the culture. For a performance evaluation, virtual worlds would be a poor choice of tool. Telepresence would work, if a team member is a continent away and a face-to-face meeting is impossible.

 

On Friday, I had a broad discussion with Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.  Chris, a Canadian, joined Cisco 18 months ago after serving as vice president of marketing for Netopia, which became the broadband home unit of Motorola. Our discussion ranged from virtual worlds to collaborative culture, and the conversation flowed easily and informally perhaps because Chris was relaxed and enjoying the informality of his cottage on the lake outside Toronto.

 

“If it’s a casual relationship, video is less important,” Chris noted. Such a relationship might include tech support sessions, customer service calls, and some sales calls. In such cases, virtual worlds may offer better opportunities for branding than videoconferencing. Several years ago, there were many predictions that we would soon be using interactive video for customer service calls. This has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. However, if vendors begin thinking differently about telesales and customer service and start considering these transient relationships as opportunities to build relationships over time, interactive video may be useful.

 

Regarding culture…like many people who work for companies that are adopting collaborative cultures, Chris has had to adjust. He previously embraced the command-and-control approach. However, Cisco has moved away from a competitive, authoritarian culture and has adopted a more collaborative culture in which team members from many functions and regions participate in making decisions.

 

My sense is that Cisco has made this shift for at least two reasons:

 

1) Collaboration creates greater value

 

2) Cisco sells a range of collaborative tools including unified communications and telepresence.

These tools, as I’ve written about extensively, take hold far more effectively in collaborative cultures. So, Cisco clearly wants to set an example.

 

Chris and I also talked about the merging of real-time and asynchronous tools. Cisco is now launching WebEx Connect, which provides a collaborative space through which colleagues can connect in real time through web conferencing plus collaborate after the real-time session ends. Colleagues who may have missed a web conference can search the audio and listen to key parts of a web conference after the fact. Users can also post comments about web conferences.

Making Sense of Meetings

There is certainly a distinction between collaboration and meetings. Nevertheless, one company is laser-focused on bringing efficiency to meetings through collaboration before, during and after meetings. That company is MeetingSense, which has just released version 3.0 of its hosted software.

 

“Meetings are not snapshots in time. They are an evolution of information,” according to Hannon Brett, who founded MeetingSense in 2004 with his brother, Gregg. Hannon managed strategic relationships for the Macromedia Breeze web conferencing unit before Adobe acquired Macromedia. Gregg worked in business development for IBM.

 

Hannon insists that users are saving an average of 15 minutes per meeting by using the software’s agenda wizard, meeting information capture, and meeting summary and action item capture and tracking. MeetingSense, backed by TVC Capital, has so far received $3 million in series A funding. The fee for the hosted service is $19.99 per month per user with volume discounts available.

Collaboration Means Knowing When to Step Aside

“Do you want to be rich or do you want to be king?” That’s the question Mark Perry, general partner with New Enterprise Associates, asks founders of portfolio companies who resist being replaced. Often, venture capitalists like Mark seek to replace founding CEO’s with leaders who are more suited to take a company to the next level.

 

Collaborative leaders willingly step aside when it’s the right decision for the company. After all, many people have a stake in a company’s success including investors, employees and customers. For a founder to remain CEO because of ego and bravado can damage the company he or she has worked hard to create.  And, as Perry points out, the rewards for everybody are often greater when the founding CEO moves on at the right juncture.

 

At the 19^th Annual IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference last month in San Francisco, venture capitalists and executive search consultants debated issues including CEO succession on a panel called “Building a Management Team in 2008.” The panel included venture capitalists Mark Perry of New Enterprise Associates, Cameron Lester of Azure Capital Partners and Mark Sugarman of MHS Capital plus recruiter Aaron Lapat of J. Robert Scott. Recruiter Jeff Kuhn of FLG Partners moderated the panel.

 

The VC’s agreed that it becomes obvious over time if the CEO puts his or her own success above that of the company. This is exactly the kind of behavior smart VC’s seek to identify before they invest. Cameron Lester of Azure Capital Partners recommends asking founders the question, “If this company grew beyond you, would you be willing to step aside?”

 

Stepping aside, deferring to others, and soliciting input are among behaviors key to collaborative organizations of all sizes.  When we use collaborative tools including web conferencing, it’s important to relinquish control and let colleagues take the cursor while sharing applications. In a broader sense, collaborative people understand how their expertise contributes to collaborative work and know instinctively when to defer to those with complimentary skills.

 

Challenges for collaborative leaders include resisting the control paradigm and inviting input from all levels and functions.  Then it’s easier to recognize when changing roles, relinquishing authority, or even leaving the organization benefits the company. The acid test is whether stepping aside creates organizational value.

Collaborating in the Same Room—What a Concept!

Collaboration happens because of the interplay of culture, environment and tools with an emphasis on culture. While tools are key enablers, collaboration never happens solely because of tools. That said, real-time tools including instant messaging, web conferencing, videoconferencing, telepresence and virtual worlds plus asynchronous tools including wikis, team sites and social networking are extending and enhancing collaborative culture and eliminating distance as a barrier to business and relationships.

 

Ironically, we’re getting better at collaborating at a distance than when we’re face to face. Assuming we work in a collaborative culture and effectively use tools, we are more likely to share applications and collaboratively produce products and services when distance is an issue. In contrast, when we’re all in the same room, too often we meet rather than collaborate. Some highly-collaborative organizations are designing their workplace environments to enhance brainstorming and collaboration.

 

Microsoft has created a new research entity in its business division called Office Labs, which is focusing on the future of how we work. One effort involves exploring how to more naturally interact with information.  At the Microsoft CEO Summit in May, Bill Gates demonstrated an “intelligent white board” or touch wall called Plex. Plex has scanning cameras at its base, so that it can detect when users touch its surface. Using our hands, we can zoom out to reveal documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, browsers and other applications. We can touch a document, flip through its pages, and zoom in to examine flow charts and other embedded elements. We can also use our fingers to draw on Plex.

 

Intelligent white boards are one tool that may enhance collaboration when we’re sharing the same physical space. Ultimately, every horizontal and vertical surface in collaborative rooms could be an inexpensive intelligent display. Like collaboration at a distance, same-room collaboration requires the right culture, environment and tools.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Becoming Enterprise-Ready

I’ve been using Adobe Acrobat Connect for more than a year, and I’ve come to appreciate its simplicity. The web conferencing program has fit the bill as a Minneapolis-based colleague and I have collaborated on refining The Culture of Collaboration workshop.

The latest version of Acrobat Connect Pro, which Adobe is releasing today, includes a host of features that will appeal to many enterprises. Key new features involve presence and regulatory compliance. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. Corporate IT directors, particularly those in highly-regulated industries, get nervous about real-time collaboration tools. As David Slater, Adobe’s group product marketing manager, mentioned to me last week, the feedback his team got from IT people could be summed up this way: “If you don’t take compliance seriously, we can’t take you seriously.”

Well, that message resonated with Adobe. The new version of Acrobat Connect Pro enables capturing, archiving and editing collaborative sessions, online meetings, and text chat. Certain industries would prefer no retention capability, and that’s possible too. Also, the updated software provides advanced authentication to verify that users are who they say they are. Administrators can also selectively restrict functionality for particular users plus provide privacy notices and secure permission from participants before recording online meetings.

Regarding presence, Adobe has integrated Acrobat Connect with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Live Communications Server plus IBM Lotus Sametime and Jabber. Later this year, Acrobat Connect will interact or “federate” with public IM networks. So it’s easy to check a colleague’s availability and launch an IM session right from an Acrobat Connect meeting.

What differentiates Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro from other real-time collaboration solutions is the simplicity of the user interface and the ease of integrating video into collaborative sessions using its Flash platform. Adobe is focused on making video as easy for knowledge workers to deal with as text. Incidentally, the cost of Acrobat Connect Pro is roughly $500 per seat for a perpetual license or $500 per seat per year for a hosted version with fewer features.

Web conferencing is transitioning from a one-to-many presentation or training tool to a few-to-few collaboration tool.  Recently, my colleagues and I formalized our continuing research into all facets of collaboration by establishing The Culture of Collaboration Institute. Our research indicates that users want tighter integration between real-time and asynchronous collaboration.

Now that Adobe has refined real-time collaboration, the company should now think more about what happens if somebody misses an online meeting or collaborative session. How can they quickly access the parts of the session relevant to them? How can they effectively contribute asynchronously? Focusing on questions like these helps fit collaboration into work styles.

Real-Time Collaboration Transforming Social Networking

Many organizations think they’re collaborating by making internal social networking available. However, many minimally-collaborative people have personal sites. Enabling social networking with real-time functionality creates new possibilities for organizational collaboration.

I gave a speech several months ago to U.S. government officials who are focused on getting agencies to collaborate. The agencies were using wikis and a sort of internal MySpace, and the culture was in the early stages of becoming collaborative. A central theme of my talk was how real-time collaboration is changing business models and how we work.

Presence, I explained to the government audience, would soon transform social networking by letting us know who’s online and available for spontaneous interaction. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. With a single click from somebody’s MySpace page or the internal equivalent, a colleague could launch an instant messaging session. The collaborators could then escalate the chat into a web conference or videoconference.

So…I was delighted to read a story in today’s New York Times headlined “Online Chat, As Inspired By Real Chat” in which Brad Stone nails the shortcomings of typical social networking. “It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator,” Stone writes. The story describes how several Silicon Valley companies are bringing “live socializing” to social networking. One company, Vivaty, lets users add 3-D virtual chat rooms to Web pages and social networking sites. Vivaty Scenes offers an immersive experience in which users choose avatars to represent them.  Another company featured in the Times story is Meebo, which lets users add instant messaging to blogs, Web sites and social networking pages.

Real-time and asynchronous collaboration are no longer divorced modeds. This means that real-time collaboration will occur more easily, more often and more spontaneously. This impacts our collective culture in that we'll be interacting more in real time through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Within the enterprise, we can read somebody's personal page or a team site and from there connect with people on the fly to resolve issues or make a decision. Nevertheless, improved tools are merely enablers. It takes a collaborative culture to create value through collaboration.

Collaborative Chaos vs. Organization: Where Mind Mapping Fits In

Collaborative companies need both collaborative chaos and organization. Collaborative chaos is the unstructured exchange of ideas to create value. And some of the best, most valuable ideas are born because people are relaxed enough and connected enough to effectively brainstorm. And collaborative chaos encourages idea development.

Some people confuse collaboration with inefficient second-guessing and emphasizing debate and hot air over action. Effective collaboration requires organization and structure. It’s a sort of yin and yang, organization and structure balancing collaborative chaos. Effective collaborative cultures have the flexibility to develop great ideas and engage people regardless of level, region, function or business unit. But they also provide the organization and structure to collaboratively formulate and execute strategy.

Collaborative tools enhance both collaborative chaos and organization, some tools lending themselves to one or the other. Real-time tools including IM, videoconferencing and telepresence are key to collaborative chaos, because they enable geographically-dispersed people to brainstorm. In contrast, asynchronous tools like team sites and wikis help organize collaboration and provide a counterpoint to real-time exchanges.

Mind mapping is an emerging tool that will help us organize collaboration. You can read Wikipedia’s take on mind mapping here. Essentially, a mind map visually represents connections among related information. A Detroit-area startup called Spinscape is developing a user-friendly mind mapping tool that will fit individual work styles and collaborative organizational cultures. The software is currently in a closed beta, but Spinscape invited me for drinks and a demo at a San Francisco hotel suite last week. Product Manager Mark Salamango and Chief Evangelist Jonathan Sapir really get collaboration. They are clearly thinking about how work styles are evolving and translating that thought process into the Spinscape tool. You can learn more about Spinscape from Mark’s Spinscape blog.

Spinscape’s approach to mind mapping could enhance everything from product rollouts to acquisitions. Mind maps resemble org charts and family trees. In a product rollout, one box in the map may link to product images, another to video of previous product rollouts, another to Wikipedia’s entry on the product category, another to internal blogs and wikis on the topic, another to archived meeting video, another to external blogs and news stories.

Mind mapping is a way to keep collaboration on track.

Kaltura and Wikimedia Enable Collaborative Video Creation

Video is by no means a requirement for collaboration, but its role is expanding.

When I reported for television stations early in my career, getting a story on the air was—at its best—a truly collaborative effort. Photographers, producers, assignment editors and reporters worked in concert to produce compelling stories. In the editing room, a photographer and I would sit elbow-to-elbow choosing shots, integrating natural sound, and basically creating a visual story.

Now we’re in a global virtual editing room in which people can edit and produce videos collaboratively regardless of geography. Kaltura is open sourcing its collaborative video making software and is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation. The idea is to bring rich media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki web sites. You can check out the beta here. The move combines and extends two collaborative trends: sharing user-generated video and wiki-based collaborative text writing and editing.

Think of the possibilities. People across the world can capture historic moments and shape history collaboratively through video. People can collaboratively create travel videos as an alterative to the tourism board videos. And in education, the opportunities are limitless. Students can co-create animated content and videos about everything from political science to parapsychology or from anatomy to anthropology.

In the business realm, companies can generate brand excitement and customer interaction and input by inviting people to co-create videos on motorcycles, hot tubs, books, clothing, skiing…you name it. Within the enterprise, organizations can enhance wikis with rich media. Doing research on a previous product launch? View the collaborative video that your colleagues produced. Taking a business trip to the Mumbai office? View collaborative video on the facility, the local leadership and local events.

As collaborative and compelling as video wikis (should we call them vikis?) are, how about taking them a step further? The next step would be the ability to collaborate in a real-time mode in which we can interact over voice or video over IP while simultaneously editing and producing videos? Leading digital effects companies in the film industry are already creating value through collaborative, real-time video production using telepresence and videoconferencing. But there are broader possibilities for real-time, consumer-generated video content. After a candidate holds a rally, political junkies who shot video could connect through instant messaging, escalate to VOIP interaction and produce a video on the fly. In the enterprise, people throughout an organization along with business partners could capture a product roll-out globally and produce and publish a video in real-time.

Integrating Kaltura’s technology with wikis will immediately create broad-scale asynchronous collaborative video editing and production. And the move is a significant step towards real-time collaborative video creation. The possibilities are limitless in that anybody with Web access can participate.

Too Old to Collaborate?

I was recently briefing senior leaders of a large global enterprise that wants to become more collaborative. They described a common observation: some younger team members are far more collaborative than their older colleagues. The age question constantly comes up—either directly or indirectly—whether I’m briefing senior leaders, working in the trenches of organizations, or speaking to groups. So, it’s time to devote some of this space to exploring age and collaboration.

Collaboration is by no means new. However, broad consciousness for collaboration and effective tools to support collaborative culture are relatively recent. Collaboration has been a critical success factor for centuries in everything from fighting wars to writing songs. Also, some venerable organizations were built with a collaborative culture from the ground up. The Mayo Clinic is a great example. At the turn of the last century, Mayo was more collaborative than most companies are today. For the first decade, the Mayo brothers performed surgery together, each doctor trading off as the other’s first assistant. The Mayos assembled a cross-functional team of doctors, laboratory experts, business people and communications specialists.

Since collaboration has been around for awhile, clearly there are plenty of older people who get collaboration. As a society, we must be careful in using the initiative du jour—whether it’s collaboration or something else—to divide people based on age. After all, how collaborative is that? Rather than using collaboration as an excuse to put older workers out to pasture, many organizations should consider how collaboration can unite generations of team members by breaking down barriers.

Many of the perceptions that older people don’t collaborate have more to do with tools than collaboration per se. People in their 20’s often prefer the immediacy of instant messaging over the relative formality of email, while many people in their 40’s have perceived IM as more of a “communicate with the kids” tool. Their perception is evolving, however, and many are embracing presence-enabled tools including IM, web conferencing and videoconferencing as ways to reach people across functions and regions, collaborate on the fly, and get things done.

There is also a perception that people in their 20’s know instinctively how to collaborate. This notion is often based on the perceived comfort level of younger people with collaborative tools. However, the assumption may preclude younger people from getting necessary training and participating in a culture shift towards collaboration.

Age is by no means the most significant obstacle to collaboration in organizations. Some larger issues are internal competition, star culture and unnecessary manifestations of hierarchy. And there are people who unnecessarily compete with colleagues across the age spectrum.

Focusing on age may short circuit collaboration initiatives by ostracizing older team members—people with knowledge, skills and perspective that cross-functional teams require. If we perceive that older team members are resisting collaborative culture, we must first analyze if the issue is collaboration itself or using collaboration tools. These issues involve different remedies, rewards and training approaches to help people, regardless of age, become more collaborative.

Overcoming Fear of Failure Enhances Collaboration

Zane Safrit, the highly-collaborative CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, has added substantially to the conversation about how accepting and learning from failure enhances collaboration. Incidentally, Zane is a living, breathing example of a CEO who leverages collaborative culture and tools to create value.

Conference Calls Unlimited has integrated many collaborative tools into its culture. Using the basecamp Wiki product from 37 Signals, Zane notes, helps eliminate backdoor channels of conversation and decisions at Conference Calls Unlimited. But minimizing fear of failure is more about the culture Zane has helped instill than it is about the tool per se. Rather than trying to hide mistakes, team members feel comfortable sharing work and ideas for all to see. Some ideas work and a few fail, but everybody keeps learning and collaborating; and the company benefits from the cultural acceptance that it’s ok to fail. Zane and his team avoid using the word mistake and instead focus on learning and collaborative accomplishments. And the result is that Conference Calls Unlimited, Zane feels, makes fewer mistakes because of the collaborative culture and environment. You can read Zane’s post here.

Meantime, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch are searching for CEO replacements in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. The problem, according to a story (subscription required) by Aaron Lucchetti and Monica Langley in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, is that these firms suffer from a thin talent pool. It seems that the lack of internal CEO candidates stems from a Wall Street culture that is so focused on quarterly returns that leaders quickly lose their jobs if they fail to deliver.

Something else that’s at play on Wall Street is the star cultures that plague many firms. An individual must perform as a star analyst, star trader, or a star executive. If he or she fails, the company is quick to sack the individual. Trust is out the window, and the organization—as we’re now seeing—suffers. This kind of culture gives rise to scandals including numbers fudging. Enron, which had a star culture, comes to mind. In collaborative cultures, team members brainstorm, make mistakes, chalk up successes, and often create far more value for the organization. Overcoming the fear of failing advances collaborative culture and can deliver significant returns.