The Culture of Collaboration

New Expanded and Updated Edition of The Culture of Collaboration® Book

How has collaboration evolved? What is the current state of collaboration at Toyota, Mayo Clinic, Industrial Light & Magic, Boeing and other companies profiled in the first edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book? What are the keys to long-term value creation through collaboration?

These are questions I sought to answer as I went back inside collaborative companies to research and write the new, expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book.

The expanded and updated edition has just been released, and I’m proud of the finished work. The 363-page business book includes 54 images and illustrations and a beefy index. By the way, 54 images and illustrations is no easy feat in 2024. Ever wonder why most business books lack pictures? It’s time-consuming to license even a single image from a large organization.

One thing I’ve learned is that deserialization and collaboration go together like peanut butter and jelly. Deserialization means removing sequences from the lifecycle of products and services. The idea is to collapse outmoded sequential approaches and replace them with spontaneous, real-time processes.

Deserialization also involves removing sequences from interaction. This means killing what’s left of the in-box culture. In short, deserialization is the key to long-term value creation through collaboration. That’s why the subtitle of the expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® is: Deserializing Time, Talent and Tools to create Value in the Local and Global Economy.

I’ve also learned that despite best efforts, collaboration can stall within highly-collaborative organizations. Paradoxically, collaboration happens in companies in which the dominant culture is command and control. Likewise, internal competition and command and control exist in mostly-collaborative organizations. Many factors, as I explain in the expanded and updated edition, influence both the evolution and regression of The Culture of Collaboration.

More broadly… as I write in the preface, in some ways we’re less collaborative than we were in the early 2000s. Social media lets us broadcast opinions without refining ideas through real-time interaction. We join groups that make rules for how we should think. Videoconferencing enables interaction at a distance, but too often we’re wasting time in scheduled virtual meetings rather than creating value together spontaneously. While in the same room, we meet rather than collaborate. We leave meetings to work and then schedule follow-up meetings to review work. This serial process zaps value.

My objective in revisiting this topic is to consider whether we have evolved or veered off track and to provide a new framework for unblocking collaboration and unlocking value.

Let me know your thoughts about the new, expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book.

Goodbye Meetings. Hello Collaborative Group Sessions.

COVID-19 has taught us that the only thing worse than a meeting is a virtual meeting. And the buzz lately is about the relative merits of video calls vs. in-person work gatherings. I had dinner recently with a former colleague, now a communications professor, who has concluded that videoconferencing is best for meetings people want to avoid while in-person gatherings work better for meetings people want to attend. No question it’s easier to multitask and disengage during virtual meetings.

Because of my work in this arena—including a book on videoconferencing in the 90s and two subsequent books on collaboration—outlets have been asking me for my take post-COVID on how to improve meetings in the “hybrid” work environment. Since my focus is on completing a new book for release next year, I have been quiet here and elsewhere. Yet I feel compelled to inform those who have yet to read my books about my view of meetings.

Meetings are a waste of time. That’s true whether we’re talking about same-room or virtual meetings. When I wrote the book Personal Videoconferencing in the mid-90s, I concluded that the benefit of then emerging PC-based videoconferencing was that we could work together screen-to-screen while seeing one another. We could jointly create a work product. In many scenarios, this involved minimizing the video while we shared applications and together produced something.

Virtual meetings were by no means the killer app for personal videoconferencing. The killer app was co-creation. That’s still true. Yet during COVID, many of us grew to hate videoconferencing because we misused the tool for something we dislike: meetings.

So how do we fix meetings? We don’t. Instead, we replace them with collaborative group sessions. I write about this in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. In a nutshell, meetings—whether physical or virtual—are a remnant of command-and-control culture. Often, the highest-ranking or highest-status person sets the agenda and conducts the proceedings. Meetings involve presentation and discussion. Then participants leave to do follow up work, often in isolation. Then this work is reviewed or discussed at yet another meeting. Meetings produce no work product and therefore create no value.

In contrast, a collaborative group (CGS) session produces a work product. Participants co-create documents, drawings, slideshows, animation, 3D models, spreadsheets—you name it. A CGS creates value and is infinitely more collaborative than a meeting. Goodbye meetings. Hello collaborative group sessions.

COVID-19 Triggers The Bounty Effect

We are living in a time of exigent circumstances. What do I mean by exigent circumstances? I mean a do-or-die challenge that raises the stakes for survival.

Exigent circumstances ignite the structural change necessary to collaborate for governments, companies, non-profits, universities and just about every organization. This is The Bounty Effect which I describe in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. I call this The Bounty Effect using the metaphor of the mutiny that occurred on the H.M.S. Bounty more than two centuries ago. For Captain Bligh and his loyalists who were cast adrift on a small boat in stormy seas, surviving meant changing the structure and culture from command-and-control to collaborative.

COVID-19 is an exigent circumstance. COVID-19 is The Bounty Effect.

The pandemic is kick starting collaboration in myriad ways as command-and-control practices recede. Companies that weeks ago shunned telecommuting now embrace working from home. Organizations that paid a few people to think and paid everybody else to carry out orders want everybody thinking and contributing. It’s all hands on deck!

Deficit hawks have voted for the largest stimulus in history as legislators of both parties collaborate in ways not seen for at least a decade. Companies are mobilizing and retooling to manufacture medical supplies. Toyota says it’s ready to produce face shields, face masks and respirators.

Companies that preferred email and messaging are integrating rich, real-time collaboration tools such as videoconferencing into work processes and they’re rediscovering an age-old synchronous tool called the telephone. Companies with centralized decision making at “headquarters” are spreading decision making around the organization.

Is this actually lasting structural change or just a temporary reaction to an imminent threat? COVID-19 is a watershed event in the modern history of the world, and many shifts in practices and processes will become permanent.

We’ve seen The Bounty Effect before with pandemics. AIDS changed the structure of vaccine development from competing isolated labs to collaborating across organizational boundaries. Likewise, we will experience not only lasting structural change in organizations of all kinds but also more institutionalized cross-organizational and cross-sector collaboration.

Collaboration Washing

It takes more than appearing collaborative to achieve The Culture of Collaboration.

As collaboration has become a trend, companies and people talk collaboration without being collaborative. Just as greenwashing involves deceptively promoting the perception that an organization’s products and policies are environmentally-friendly, something similar is happening with collaboration. It's called collaboration washing: promoting collaboration as a corporate or product trait without any real collaboration happening.

When the first edition of my book The Culture of Collaboration® appeared in early 2007, consciousness for organizational collaboration was just beginning. One prominent Silicon Valley company had pre-ordered thousands of copies of the book. A new chief marketing officer disliked the word collaboration, and so the books remained in the company’s warehouse until the following year when more people, organizations and media outlets began embracing collaboration. Then the technology company distributed the books to customers globally.

Now collaboration is a buzz word. Marketers link myriad products to collaboration, and human resources people embrace the word as a corporate culture label. And guess what? The meaning of collaboration is getting diluted. In The Culture of Collaboration® book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.”

Many people regard social media use as a mark of a collaborative company. As I’ve demonstrated to many audiences, it’s quite possible to use social media and create zero value. It’s also possible to use any collaboration technology without creating value and, therefore, without collaborating. Some consider a youthful workforce as an indicator of a collaborative culture. But I’ve observed, interviewed and worked with numerous engineers in their fifties and sixties who have designed everything from game-changing software to airplanes. Without significant collaboration, these products would have been dead on arrival. And it’s easy to find internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior among people in their twenties working in technology and other leading-edge sectors.

Real collaboration requires adopting a collaborative organizational structure as I outline in my most recent book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. This goes well beyond buzz words and window dressing. The Bounty Effect is the second book in The Culture of Collaboration® series. The first book, The Culture of Collaboration®, is about raising the consciousness for a new way of working. The Bounty Effect focuses on how to achieve collaboration in organizations

Open-plan workspaces are a current popular marker of a collaborative company. Collaborative workplace design is much more than window dressing. It’s a key practice in adopting a collaborative structure, but it’s only one element. Citigroup is the latest Fortune 500 company to jump on the open-plan workspace bandwagon. Citi reportedly is adopting a “non-territorial” or “free-address” deskless approach similar to the one GlaxoSmithKline uses in its Philadelphia Navy Yard building. In The Bounty Effect, I explain GlaxoSmithKline's approach to collaborative workspaces and culture.

Citi CEO Michael Corbat told the Wall Street Journal that he is particularly excited about a “town square” space on the ground floor that will increase serendipitous encounters among team members. This, in turn, he expects will enhance communication and exchange of ideas. Also, Citigroup anticipates that the open-plan workspace will flatten hierarchies.

Essentially, Citigroup is taking a step towards adopting a more collaborative culture and structure. However, transforming a company into a global collaborative enterprise requires many more structural changes than the physical workplace environment. Many organizations such as police and fire departments, newsrooms and trading floors have operated with open-plan workspaces for years. Yet a lack of collaboration still compromises many of these organizations.

Citigroup and the increasing numbers of organizations adopting open workspaces can create incredible value through collaboration if they go beyond the most obvious manifestation of a shifting culture—the physical workplace environment—to embrace principles, practices and processes of collaborative organizational structure. These include everything from replacing the traditional organization chart and the traditional meeting to changing the recognition and reward system and keeping measurement mania in check.

Anything short of structural change is collaboration washing.

Media Embraces The Bounty Effect's Structural Change

There are encouraging signs that the media is recognizing that the structure of organizations must change to enhance collaboration and maximize value. And when the media gets on board, organizations often follow.

Several media outlets that have featured The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration have focused on changing organizational structures from Industrial Age command-and-control to Information Age collaborative. This is crucial, because The Bounty Effect is about seizing opportunities to design and build new organizational structures that exigent circumstances provide. So, reviewers and journalists have clearly understood the central theme of the book.

Reviewing The Bounty Effect in The Washington Times, James Srodes describes the big picture of why changing organizational structures is necessary. He relates the need for collaborative structures to the changing “hinges of history” in which a decades-long trend suddenly shifts. Srodes mentions a global economic state where little or no growth is the norm and dwindling raw materials and political instabilities among other trends impacting the planet. This insightful review endorses the book’s approach:

“If you recoil at the notion of folks sitting around a boardroom campfire singing “Kumbaya,” Mr. Rosen offers an ingenious example of the essence of the collaboration strategy. The “Bounty” in his title is in fact the HMS Bounty, famed in Hollywood’s bogus history for its portrayal of a despotic (command-and-control) Captain Bligh.”

In a question-and-answer article with me entitled “Can Collaboration Be Forced?” in Talent Management magazine, Kellye Whitney also focuses on changing the organizational structure. My answer to a question about what talent leaders can do to change command-and-control structures echoes the “hinges of history” shift in the Washington Times review:

“In the workplace we should constantly be working to create value. It used to be that companies could make a decent buck by just telling people what to do. A few people were paid to do the thinking and everybody else was paid to carry out orders. But with globalization, increased competition and the boom and bust cycles, companies are realizing that it’s all hands on deck.”

In another question-and-answer article entitled “The New Way We…Collaborate” in Avaya Innovations magazine, Eric Lai focuses the interview on changing organizational structure and culture. Here’s my response to his question about the role of technology in changing the structure and culture:

“The Greek philosopher Socrates believed that the way to truth is through dialogue. Socrates rejected writing because it meant—quite literally in Ancient Athens—that ideas were set in stone or wax and that the process of developing those ideas was dead. Email is the modern equivalent of setting ideas in stone. If given the choice, Socrates would have found a lot more truth in using real-time tools rather than email. Email is essentially an updated version of the old memorandum. In command-and-control organizations, people send an email and wait for a response. An email is often a report or a request for a decision. There is no real-time dialogue in email, so Socrates would have found little truth in email.”

So the media is beginning to join the growing numbers of organizations that have jumped on the structural change bandwagon.

Big Data, Measurement Mania and Collaboration

The world is drowning in data. The term “Big Data” appears in most technology trend articles in 2013 and reverberates at seemingly every conference regardless of industry. This reminds me of a quote attributed to Mark Twain that I used with my senior picture in the high school yearbook: “Collecting data is much like collecting garbage. You must know in advance what you are going to do with the stuff before you collect it.”

Now companies and government agencies have an idea what they’re going to do with the data they collect. And a leading use of data is measurement. Measurement mania has spread throughout every function of seemingly every organization from government agencies and universities to public school systems and corporations. Organizations can now measure traits among applicants and team members ranging from emotional intelligence to flexibility. Plus companies can calculate transactional cost-per-hire.

The relentless drive to measure people can reduce value creation and compromise collaboration. Measurement mania breeds fear and internal competition among team members and encourages leaders to focus on short-term results which create less sustainable value than achieving longer-term objectives. In a numbers-obsessed organization, leaders are more likely to cut corners by booking phantom sales or sacrificing safety in manufacturing plants. With hidden agendas running rampant, collaboration towards common goals becomes impossible.

Media reports suggest that Zynga, the company that develops online games including FarmVille, has thrived on numbers. “Relentlessly aggregating performance data, from the upper ranks to the cafeteria staff,” is the way Evelyn M. Rusli of the New York Times describes the company in a November 27, 2011 story. According to a November 28, 2011 blog post by Ryan Fleming of Digital Trends, executives nurture “fierce competition both between the groups and within each department.”

Apparent measurement mania is one of many structural and cultural issues that have plagued Zynga. A September 8, 2010 story in SF Weekly by Peter Jamison indicates that the company’s values are sub-optimal and that rather than focusing on innovation, Zynga has instead pushed team members to appropriate ideas from competitors. If these assessments are accurate, it appears that Zynga would benefit from changing the structure and culture of its organization. Principles is one step that I explain in my new book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration.

In perhaps the most sober indication of problems with Zynga’s focus, the company reported second quarter results last Thursday that contained few bragging rights. While the results exceeded analyst expectations, the number of daily active users declined 45 percent in the quarter from the same period last year. In the three months ending June 30, Zynga’s sales fell 31 percent to $231 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zynga CEO Don Mattrick indicated that “getting a business back on track isn’t quick, and isn’t easy.” Mattrick recently replaced founder Mark Pincus as CEO.

While Zynga clearly faces challenges on many fronts, the company’s structure and culture are likely factors in Zynga’s woes. The company is by no means alone in the issues it faces and the possible structure and culture elements. Organizations of all kinds face exigent circumstances ranging from new competitors and disruptive market forces to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. These storms that blow through businesses provide opportunities to change.

In The Bounty Effect, I discuss how to replace command-and-control remnants including measurement mania and how to adopt collaborative principles, practices and processes among other steps. Creating value through collaboration happens only when organizations change their structures and cultures from Industrial Age command-and-control to Information Age collaborative.

Seven Steps to The Culture of Collaboration

My new book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration, has received two favorable reviews: one in Publishers Weekly and the other in Library Journal. Both reviews focus on the 7 Steps: Plan, People, Principles, Practices, Processes, Planet and Payoff.

I’m delighted that both reviewers understood the book’s premise that businesses must abandon obsolete organizational structures designed for the Industrial Age and replace them with infinitely more valuable collaborative structures suitable for the Information Age. Leigh Mihlrad of the National Institutes of Health reviewed The Bounty Effect for Library Journal. “Rosen declares that while the control method might have worked in the Industrial Age, it does not work in today’s Information Age,” according to the review. Mihlrad concludes with the Library Journal's verdict: “For those in positions to bring about organizational change, this book provides many useful examples.”

The Publishers Weekly review highlights my point that The Bounty Effect is by no means limited to corporations. “Rosen argues that collaboration moves well beyond organizational boundaries, as it applies to neighborhoods, communities, and government,” according to Publishers Weekly.  “Collaboration creates greater value, enhances achievement, and produces sustainable business models; the question then becomes how quickly can an organization free itself from the Industrial Age and operate to its maximum capacity in the Information Age.” The sooner an organization starts the seven steps, the faster it can migrate from command-and-control and maximize value through collaboration

Changing Organizational Structures for Collaboration

My new book entitled The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration® is now available. It’s the second book in a series which includes The Culture of Collaboration®: Maximizing Time, Talent and Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy. The Bounty Effect shows how to change the structure of organizations for collaboration.

Why do organizations need to change their structures? The Industrial Age was command and control. The Information Age is collaboration. Yet Industrial Age structures render collaboration dead on arrival in the Information Age. Remnants of these structures—including organization charts, performance reviews, meetings and mission statements—inhibit organizations from using new collaborative methods and tools that spark innovation. Now we’re at the point where many organizations—from corporations and small businesses to universities and government agencies—have a desire to collaborate.  Some have taken action to instill collaborative culture. But what’s holding back collaboration is obsolete organizational structures, which we must change.

The Bounty Effect gets its name from the mutiny that occurred on the H.M.S Bounty in 1789. Before the mutiny, Captain William Bligh used a well-worn management technique: command-and-control. The mutiny forced the structure and culture to change as Bligh became a collaborative leader and his loyalists participated in decisions as they struggled for survival aboard a small boat. The mutiny was an exigent circumstance, one that compels immediate action.

The Bounty Effect happens when exigent circumstances compel businesses, governments and organizations to change their structures from command and control to collaborative. Triggers include disruptive market forces, new competitors, regional slowdowns, natural disasters, terrorist attacks and global downturns.

The book is about how to seize the opportunity that The Bounty Effect provides and change the organizational structure in seven steps.  My objective in writing the book is to provide a framework for structural change necessary to transform organizations into collaborative enterprises. And The Bounty Effect demonstrates how collaborative enterprises create far more value than command-and-control organizations. Using the framework, people and organizations can determine how to redesign and adopt a collaborative structure that fits. I welcome your input.

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.

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)?

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.