The Culture of Collaboration

Getting High on Collaboration

        Is collaboration or competition in our DNA?

        The answer is both, but we enter this world collaborative. We are naturally inclined to work together to create value. But competitive organizational cultures short circuit our collaborative instincts.

        Lux Narayan, CEO of the data analytics company Unmetric, analyzed two thousand New York Times non-paid obituaries. In a TED talk, he describes how he used natural language processing on the first paragraphs of these obituaries and found that the word help appeared more than almost any other word.

        The lesson is that people want to help. Our instincts are to work towards common goals. Psychologists including Sander van der Linden write about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. When we are intrinsically motivated, we take action because we want to help or because it’s the right thing to do. In contrast, competition involves extrinsic motivation which is derived externally rather than internally. An incentive system that rewards sharp elbows in an organization is extrinsic motivation.

        The more educated people are, the more competitive they are. Our educational system has traditionally used extrinsic motivation to beat collaboration out of us. In high school, we compete to get into college. In college, we compete for admission to graduate school. In graduate school, we compete for grants and fellowships. We enter professions, careers and corporations conditioned to compete.

        In smaller communities where many people get jobs right out of high school, people are driven more by intrinsic motivation—and they’re used to working together. They organize fundraisers and cook together at the VFW, fire stations and churches. They help neighbors repair tornado or hurricane damage.

        It’s this type of attitude that we need to nourish in companies, higher education, government and in our communities. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini lit a spark that is taking hold at Aetna. In a "corner office" interview in Sunday’s New York Times, Bertolini describes how drugs and Western medicine failed him after a serious ski accident. His success with alternative therapies propelled him to introduce yoga, meditation and an enlightened approach at Aetna. According to Bertolini, the CFO’s initial reaction was “We’re a profit-making entity. This isn’t about compassion and collaboration.”

        Nevertheless, leaders became more enlightened and began paying attention to the struggles of front-line team members some of whom were on Medicaid and food stamps. Aetna raised the minimum wage to $16 an hour and improved benefits. Next the company stopped giving quarterly guidance to investors and focused more on collaboratively creating long-term value.

        Studies show we feel good physically and psychologically when we help people. Psychologists calls this the “helper’s high.” There’s no research I know of yet, but I suspect there is also a “Collaborator’s high.”

Rank and Yank or Differentiation?

Sometimes corporate speak or shop talk migrates from cubicles to the front page. This is exactly what happened to the terms “performance review” and “performance appraisal” last November. That’s when Microsoft eliminated its so-called “stack ranking” of team members.

Last spring, Microsoft Chairman and co-founder Bill Gates read an advanced copy of The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. The book shows how to change organizational structures from Industrial Age command-and-control to Information Age collaborative. Regarding performance reviews, The Bounty Effect demonstrates why ranking team members falls short and how a Collaborative Reward System creates greater value than an internally-competitive system. Ranking is essentially grading on a curve, because the organization often pre-determines which percentage of its workforce must fall into categories such as below target, target, above target and significantly above target. And grading on a curve fosters internal competition rather than collaboration. How encouraged are team members to share information and ideas if they must compete with colleagues for rankings? Not very. More likely, people will try to fake collaboration.

Headlines regarding Microsoft’s shift include “Stack Ranking Falls Outs of Favor” in Computerworld and “Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stack Rankings” in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Within several days of Microsoft’s elimination of stack ranking, I was on a flight from Taipei to San Francisco reading The Wall Street Journal Asia edition. And I was fascinated to see a condemnation of Microsoft’s shift and a defense of ranking team members from Jack Welch, who once was CEO of a company known for using what Welch calls “differentiation.” That company is General Electric.

Here’s how Welch describes differentiation: “It’s about building great teams and great companies through consistency, transparency and candor. It’s about aligning performance with the organization’s mission and values. It’s about making sure that all employees know where they stand. Differentiation is nuanced, humane and occasionally complex, and it has been used successfully by companies for decades.”

In The Culture of Collaboration® book, I describe “differentiation and affirmation.” The process is more commonly called “rank and yank,” a term that Welch considers “media-invented” and “politicized.”  One company that adopted the approach and created a star culture was Enron, which went bankrupt for many reasons.  Star culture is a hallmark of the Industrial Age command-and-control organization. Such organizations pit people against one another and hidden agendas multiply. In contrast, a collaborative organization encourages team members to work in concert towards common goals.

Welch seems to endorse star culture in describing “feedback and coaching” as one component that makes “differentiation” work. “Your stars know they are loved and rarely leave. Those in the middle 70% know that they are appreciated, and they receive clear guidance about how to improve their performance. And the bottom 10% is never surprised when the conversation sometimes turns, after a year of candid appraisals, to moving on,” according to Welch.

Further, Welch endorses the “bell-curve” grading aspect of “differentiation.” “We grade children in school, often as young as 9 or 10, and no one calls that cruel. But somehow adults can’t take it? Explain that one to me.” Well, here it goes, Jack. Curve grading is no more helpful to children in school than it is to organizations. Our educational systems, particularly in the United States, too often foster unnecessary competition rather than collaboration. It’s no wonder why corporations have difficulty migrating from command-and-control to collaboration. Part of the reason is that team members competed for grades in school, competed for graduate school admissions while in college, and then competed for limited grant money and fellowships while in graduate school. In particular, law schools often grade first-year students on a curve in part to limit merit scholarship awards. Eliminating curve grading in which a fixed percentage must fail is a major step towards reducing internal competition and curbing the “star culture” that complicates collaboration.

Ranking team members is part of the broader recognition and reward process. This process typically features performance reviews, which distract organizations and waste an incredible amount of time. The Bounty Effect describes how to replace performance reviews with a far more collaborative approach. Whether we call ranking team members “differentiation” or “rank and yank,” this Industrial Age command-and-control approach has no place in an Information Age collaborative organization.

 

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.

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.

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.