The Culture of Collaboration

Creating Collaboration Takes More than Technology

Decision makers often think collaborative tools will create collaboration, and they're perplexed when results elude the organization. Technology extends and enhances--but rarely creates--collaboration. My current column for BusinessWeek.com describes what organizations need besides technology to make collaboration happen. You can read the column here.

California Academy of Sciences Collaborates to Discover Mammals

Collaboration requires long-term thinking. That’s where universities, libraries, museums, and research organizations often eclipse for-profit companies. Pressure to generate quarterly returns can compromise long-term value, particularly at publicly-held companies. With less pressure to deliver immediate results, research-driven, non-profit organizations can focus more on creating long-term value. Maybe it’s a new take on history or a scientific discovery. Regardless, the work product may remain relevant hundreds of years from now.

 

That said, competition internally and within fields of study can prove more ferocious in the research arena than in corporations—whether it’s competing for limited grant dollars or for publishing articles in academic journals. Like corporations, the best research organizations mitigate unhealthful competition by thinking and acting towards creating long-term value. In this realm, long-term value can extend into eternity.

 

Knowing the collaborative mindset of the California Academy of Sciences, I accepted an invitation to attend a briefing and preview tour last Thursday of the Academy’s new Extreme Mammals exhibit, which runs through September 12, 2010. For background on architectural collaboration in the Academy’s building design, see my February 17, 2009 post.

 

San Francisco is the Extreme Mammals exhibit’s second stop after opening at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  Over tea and cupcakes, I had a compelling pre-tour conversation with Greg Farrington, the self-proclaimed “chief penguin” or executive director of the Academy. Farrington, a chemist, is the former president of Lehigh University. “You might think everything in the world has been discovered at least twice, but it hasn’t,” Farrington noted. Touring the exhibit confirmed Farrington’s point.

  

  
The exhibit features extinct, living and recently-discovered mammals including the striped rabbit identified as a new species in 1999 and the gray faced sengi or giant elephant shrew discovered in 2008. Galen Rathbun,  
a behavioral biologist at the Academy and Francesco Rovero of the Trento Museum of Sciences in Italy and other collaborators discovered the gray-faced sengi in the Ndundulu Forest in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains. It was the first new species of giant elephant shrew discovered in 126 years.

 

Rathbun accompanied us on the tour and later took a small group behind several locked doors to view a collection of shrew specimens shelved inside fireproof cabinets in the Academy’s research collections. The collections include 26 million specimens of animals, insects, reptiles, birds, plants, fish and gems. Rathbun noted that several collaborating research institutions had loaned shrew specimens to the Academy for research.

 

One participant asked birds and mammals curator Jack Dumbacher if we could look inside the special cabinet that contains extinct animals and so-called “type specimens” of newly-discovered mammals. Dumbacher obliged, and we walked down the aisle past many rows of cabinets until we reached a shorter cabinet set apart from the others. As Jack unlocked the cabinet, he unleashed a ripe odor along with a feast for the eyes of preserved birds, rodents, and bats. The treasures also include the largest egg in the world from the elephant bird of Madagascar. A model of the egg is on display in the Academy’s public area.

 

Back to the public galleries and the Extreme Mammals exhibit. Scientists and administrators from global institutions have collaborated on the show, which the American Museum of Natural History organized. Collaborators shared knowledge, pieced together skeletons and gathered skulls, fossils and taxidermy specimens for Extreme Mammals. The result is a compelling experience for visitors who gain insight into the extreme variety of mammals and the awesome biodiversity of our planet.

Breaking Corporate Rules to Collaborate

What happens when team members want to collaborate, but command-and-control approaches and internal competition prevail in culture and processes? New research indicates team members are starting to “spoof the system” by flouting organizational guidelines and creating work-arounds so they can collaborate. The global study conducted by InsightExpress and funded by Cisco surveyed more than two thousand end users and a thousand information technology decision makers from ten countries. The study found that 52 percent of organizations prohibit the use of social media applications and 50 percent of end users admit to ignoring company policies at least once a week. “End users have started to take things into their own hands,” says Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise solutions.

 

The study found that users most willing to break company policies are those in the United Kingdom and France. Respondents in China were least likely to violate corporate rules. Still, the survey found that companies in China and India had significantly higher adoption rates of collaborative tools than companies in the United States or the United Kingdom. This is likely because companies in these growing economies are relatively new, and therefore their infrastructures are by no means set in stone.

 

Ironically, the study found that 77 percent of IT decision makers plan to increase spending on collaboration tools this year, while team members say corporate policies are constraining collaboration. Investing in collaborative tools makes little sense if an organization lacks the culture and processes to support the tools. The result is a schizophrenic organization in which some team members break rules, others operate by the book, and most team members get confused by mixed messages. Considering the study results, a prime opportunity exists for leaders to think and act collaboratively and for organizations to adopt collaborative culture.

 

Cisco will gladly sell you any and all of its more than 60 collaboration products. But buying these products or those of any other collaboration tools vendor will produce limited results unless your organization makes a fundamental commitment to collaboration. This shift includes moving away from command-and-control, internally-competitive culture and processes and replacing the pass-along, serial approach to work and decision-making with spontaneous, real-time models. I address this in the introduction to The Culture of Collaboration book.

 

Intercompany Collaboration: Focus on Culture and Processes

 

On another note…outmoded culture and processes can curb collaboration and compromise value—whether we’re talking about within a company or “outside the firewall.”  As vendors and standards groups resolve intercompany collaboration technology issues, there’s a temptation to conclude that intercompany collaboration is “good to go.”

 

About three weeks ago, I participated in a discussion via TelePresence with Cisco senior vice presidents Tony Bates and Barry O’Sullivan. The company was discussing details of its new Intercompany Media Engine, which extends unified communications among companies. So, a supplier can easily view the availability or “presence status” of a customer, connect via instant messaging, and easily escalate the interaction to a voice call, web conference, or telepresence. You can view video of a demo call here. Meantime, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on an open standard for telepresence and unified communications so that people can interact regardless of technology vendor. This has particular relevance for business partners with different installed telepresence brands. Ultimately, the challenge for intercompany collaborators goes well beyond the technology. Organizations must focus on adopting collaborative culture and processes and integrating them across organizational boundaries.