The Culture of Collaboration

The Amazing, Disappearing (and Collaborative) Phone Call

Texting and instant messaging (IM) have rapidly supplanted voice calls as our preferred communication mode. When we say “I spoke with him” or “I had a conversation with her” often we’re referring to text chat rather than voice. This lack of real talking adversely impacts collaboration.

In many organizations, people never bother to set up their voice mail. And we increasingly view voice calls as intrusive. Yet companies have redesigned their physical spaces ostensibly to encourage intrusions such as on-the-fly and chance encounters which can spark collaboration.

 

1910 Advertisement for the automatic (dial) telephone service of the Illinois Tunnel Company in Chicago

When I wrote the first edition of The Culture of Collaboration book in 2006, I summed up the deserialization of work and interaction as the “in-box culture is dead.” The idea was that something called presence would allow us to see who’s available and that we could connect with anybody in the organization via instant messaging. Then—and this is the important point—we could escalate that instant messaging session into a spontaneous voice or video call with the simultaneous capability of collaboratively working on documents, spreadsheets, presentations or in any application. So there was no longer a need to schedule voice and video calls. Through real-time collaboration, we could create far greater value.

Somehow IM took hold in companies but escalation to voice and video calls has seemingly stalled. And use of voice on mobile devices has plummeted. At one time speakerphone quality was a key attribute of devices, but Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy marketing barely mention voice.

IM has the advantage over email in that it’s nearly real-time and there’s an expectation of immediate response. So it’s easy to find people and connect with them. The problem is that like email IM and texting are one dimensional. It can be difficult to determine the real meaning and the emotion behind the words. If we talk with each other on a voice call, we can often understand each other better, cut to the chase and resolve issues more quickly than through IM. If the issues are more involved, a video call fits the bill.

Also, people feel less isolated when using real-time voice and video. In fact, there are signs that we are desperate for real connection and interaction that IM and texting can’t deliver. The New York Times recently ran a story on how people are using calls to customer service representatives as therapy sessions. Increasingly, companies are training representatives to show compassion and focus on the emotional needs of the customer rather than rush them off the line.

This phenomenon cuts both ways. Increasingly, customer service representatives are anxious for a real connection. I experienced this first hand when I called a credit card company recently to discuss my airline co-branded card. The representative told me about her background as a former flight attendant and a singer with a band. I also learned that she had a degree in advertising, likes to roller blade and moved from California to Florida. At the end of the call, she arranged a mileage bonus and said “thanks for letting me be me.” We both felt connected in a way that an IM session with the card company could never deliver.

I’m currently writing a new edition of The Culture of Collaboration book and assessing where we’ve gone wrong and how we can get collaboration back on track. When it comes to tools, we’re half way there. Rather than getting stalled with texting and IM (not to mention social media), our challenge is to maximize our ability to find and connect with people. This means turning some of those texting and IM sessions into voice and video calls so that together we can create value.

Does Remote Work Reduce Collaboration?

Some companies are eliminating remote work or “telecommuting” because they believe their people must share the same physical space to collaborate.

I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” But apparently some organizations want to get more physical rather than virtual.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, companies including IBM, Aetna, Bank of America, Best Buy and Reddit have ended or reduced remote-work arrangements as managers “demand more collaboration, closer contact with customers—and more control over the workday.”

Companies facing challenges are often the first to scrap or reduce remote work programs. In 2013, as Yahoo was struggling, then CEO Marissa Mayer defended her decision to eliminate work from home. Speaking at the Great Place to Work conference in Los Angeles, Mayer reportedly said “People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.”

No question people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together, but the point is people can be together virtually as well as physically. Many tools and technologies support high-impact virtual collaboration. Forcing people to endure a daily commute and interfering with their life/work balance reinforces command and control and disrupts collaboration and innovation. Also, remote work lets companies tap expertise regardless of geography. And teams are often comprised of people in multiple regions, so forcing people to work from a company location is unlikely to enhance collaboration within a team. It does make sense to encourage remote workers to spend some time at company locations to spark chance encounters in cafeterias, corridors and break rooms with people outside their teams.

Command and control culture is the opposite of collaborative culture so an organization trying to control team members by keeping them at the workplace short circuits collaboration. Ironically, my research interest in collaboration began in the mid-1990s when I was writing a book on personal videoconferencing. Early telecommuting programs experimented with PC-based videoconferencing so that remote workers could look each other in the eye and talk with colleagues while they were collaboratively working on spreadsheets, documents, design plans and other work. The issue then was whether we could collaborate as effectively at a distance as we could in the same room.

By the time I wrote The Culture of Collaboration book, the tools and technologies supporting remote work had become pervasive and the culture supporting virtual collaboration had become widespread. People at many organizations were becoming accustomed to collaborating spontaneously from almost anywhere. So the challenge was changing. I wrote:

“Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.”

This is because same-room collaboration tools were lagging behind those used at a distance and people were becoming more accustomed to collaborating from applications on their notebook and laptop computers. Also, “presence” technology provided the capability to find colleagues, check their availability and begin collaborating with them on the fly from anywhere.

Spontaneity and organizational culture supporting ad hoc encounters is critical to creating value collaboratively. In some cultures, this means it’s okay to grab people out of meetings or interrupt their work for on-the-fly collaboration. But in mature companies walking back remote work, often this level of spontaneity is a cultural faux pas. So the most effective way to spontaneously connect in these cultures is often through online chat which can escalate into a collaborative group session (CGS). Organizations create far greater value by moving away from command and control and instead enabling team members to connect and collaborate spontaneously regardless of physical location.

As I demonstrate in my book The Bounty Effect, exigent circumstances including disruptive market forces, new competitors, or a regional slowdown are opportunities to accelerate collaboration and emerge stronger from the challenge. Eliminating remote work because of a difficult environment rarely enhances collaboration and instead increases command and control. The more effective approach is to seize the opportunity exigent circumstances provide and adopt a more collaborative organizational structure and culture which transcend physical location.

Collaboration Creates Leap in Photo Organizing

Inheriting shoe boxes full of photos presents challenges. You can leave them in the garage or attic gathering dust. You can argue with siblings about who keeps the photos, who scans them, and who shares them electronically with everybody else. You can hire a professional photo organizer. Or you can collaborate with professionals and incorporate their techniques into your system.

That’s what Epson has done. And that collaboration has helped produce the FastFoto FF-640 photo scanning system which Epson is

The Epson FastFoto FF-640 scans and organizes photos. It's the result of collaboration.

releasing today. The system combines what Epson says is a one-photo-per-second photo scanner with image organizing software. Epson’s Jack Rieger demonstrated the system a couple of weeks ago during a pre-launch briefing at San Francisco’s Le Meridien hotel. Rieger described Epson’s collaboration with the Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO). “We took the best of their techniques and embedded them in software,” explained Rieger, a chemical engineer and former film designer and digital product marketer for Kodak. These techniques include file structure and hierarchy for automated sorting of photos, a file naming system, a capture date that reflects the date the photo was taken, and searchable metadata which is the data about the data.

According to the Association of Personal Photo Organizers, 1.7 trillion printed photos “languish in boxes and containers.”  Each month, people take another 10 billion pictures globally resulting in what the association calls “photo chaos.” APPO says it equips its more than 500 members who are independent professionals to “rescue” and organize all these photos.  Now APPO has a new tool color in its palette of organizing tools.

“This is groundbreaking, something that was not possible before,” Rieger insisted. The scanner features a 30-photo auto feeder and scans the front and back of the photo to preserve any writing on the back. The software automatically restores and corrects the color of old photos. Plus the system ties in with frequently-used services including Facebook, Dropbox and Google Drive to enable collaboration among friends and family. So the sibling who inherits the photos can more easily digitize, organize, and share the anthology and collaborate on the collection with other siblings, relatives and friends.

Tools and technologies never create collaboration, but they can enhance and extend collaboration. This is true whether we’re developing a slide show with siblings or producing a product with colleagues. And the Epson FastFoto FF-640, a product developed through collaboration, also enhances collaboration among its users.

Coffee and Collaboration

In San Francisco, where I live, coffee plays a major role in lifestyles and work styles. People stand in long lines at artisanal coffee businesses for coffee that’s sourced, roasted and prepared with care. It has become de rigueur for leading technology and social media companies to make artisanal coffee available to team members. Google stocks beans from the better San Francisco purveyors in snack areas throughout its “Googleplex” in Mountain View, California. Team members can grind the beans, brew a cup, or pull a shot of espresso on demand.

As the artisanal movement in coffee, often called “Third Wave Coffee,” sweeps the U.S. and infiltrates workplaces, people are becoming particular about what’s in their mug. Commercial brew just won’t do. Yet coffee consumption remains primarily a solitary activity. People fiddle with their smart phones or work on notebook computers as they sip that Yirgacheffe or Antigua drip-by-the-cup in cafes and in workplaces.

In contrast, workplace coffee consumption in Sweden is primarily a social activity. Swedes embrace the ritual consumption of coffee rather than the coffee itself. So Swedes care less about sourcing, roasting and preparation and more about gathering around a table with colleagues to consume the beverage.

I recently returned from Gothenburg, Sweden where I gave a keynote speech on collaboration to a group of government leaders, healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical executives. While in Sweden, I engaged in Fika which is an institution in the Swedish workplace. Fika is scheduled twice a day, typically at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Work groups sit around tables in break areas. They drink coffee, eat cake sometimes baked by a team member, and they discuss issues pertinent to their work. Fika helps achieve the consensus that is integral to Swedish business culture (consensus is not integral to collaboration, but that’s a different post). Fika’s limitation is that people share coffee and cake with the same team members every day.

Both U.S. and Swedish workplaces can enhance collaboration by changing how they consume coffee—but the challenges are different for each culture. In the U.S., the challenge is to put down the devices and engage others while enjoying that artisanal cup of joe.

In Sweden, the challenge is to include people from other levels, roles and regions so that fika is less insular. Collaborative tools such as telepresence could bridge the distance gap and offer the opportunity for a video fika. Because fika is so engrained in the Swedish business culture, it is a critical channel Swedes can use to enhance organizational collaboration.

 

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.

Enhancing Products with Collaborative Services

Last Wednesday, I stopped into Rosetta Stone’s splashy event in a trendy nightclub in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Company officials were on hand to demonstrate Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe. Chris Spiller, executive producer, demonstrated the Spanish version of the popular software for learning languages.

Chris and I discussed how immersing oneself in another culture is by far the best way to learn a language. And we shared stories about the overemphasis on grammar in high school foreign language classes.  It turns out that cultural immersion is exactly what Rosetta Stone had in mind when developing Version 4 TOTALe. “We looked at what are the pieces of that experience we can recreate through technology,” Chris explained.

Rosetta Stone has recently transformed its offering into a hybrid product/collaborative service. This means that no longer must customers learn a language in a vacuum. They can now collaborate with other learners globally and can also learn from language coaches who interact with customers through one-way video and two-way audio. Adobe provides and hosts Rosetta Stone’s video and audio through its Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service Platform. Incidentally, today Adobe is releasing version 8 of a related web conferencing product called Adobe Connect.

Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe includes Rosetta Studio, which involves live, interactive coaching. The bundle also features Rosetta World, which lets users collaborate with fellow learners. There are lots of activities and games that geographically-dispersed users can do together while talking with each other in the language they’re learning via voice over IP (VOIP) and text chat. Other activities pair learners with native speakers who are, in turn, learning their partner’s language. This collaboration among customers accelerates learning and creates value.

Getting customers to collaborate with each other can turn a maturing product into a virally-adopted habit. Smart companies realize that collaboration is more than customers participating in discussion forums. It’s about getting customers to create value using a product or service together in real time. Depending on the product, collaborating among customers may involve creating, learning or playing.

Besides enhancing learning, the collaborative service lets Rosetta Stone enhance its business model and presumably its revenue. The software includes three months of access to Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World, and customers can then buy more access. I suspect that this hybrid software-as-a-product/collaborative service model is a prelude to a pure software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering.

While Rosetta Stone officials say the company has no plans to expand offerings beyond language software and services, this collaborative approach to online learning could apply to subjects ranging from history and geography to algebra and physics. A user in India and a user in Germany could collaborate to learn the geography, history and culture of their respective countries.

The big picture is that companies in many industries can create value by encouraging customers to collaborate with each other. This produces greater stickiness by building interactive communities around products with the potential of generating new revenue streams.  And this goes well beyond software. Take a product like a motorcycle. With a 3D model of the motorcycle plus interactive audio and video, enthusiasts can collaborate on maintenance, diagnosing problems, and doing repairs. Collaborating among customers could also apply to furniture. Using a 3D model of a home or office and choices of virtual furniture, customers could exchange ideas and collaboratively design spaces for living and working.

Collaboration among customers can build brands, increase marketplace stickiness, and create new revenue streams.   

 

U.S. Embassy Vatican Gains Influence by Sharing

After delivering a keynote speech for the Tagetik User Conference 2010 in Lucca, Italy late last month, I wanted to experience first-hand the collaborative movement in the United States Department of State.

So, I visited the United States Embassy to the Holy See. With only six diplomats plus local staff, the embassy is undoubtedly one of America’s smallest. Unlike every other U.S. embassy, Embassy Vatican represents the U.S. government not just to a sovereign nation, but also to the largest single organization on Earth. That organization is the Catholic Church and its 1.2 billion Catholics globally.

With a geographically-dispersed constituency, Embassy Vatican requires more than a physical location to accomplish U.S. policy objectives. That’s where virtual or eDiplomacy plays a role. Sure, there are often reasons for U.S. diplomats to press the flesh with Church officials, but Embassy Vatican need not be physically located in the Vatican. And, in fact, it’s not. The embassy is across the Tiber River in Rome, Italy.

To reach the embassy, I made my way to Aventine Hill, an upscale neighborhood of Rome. What distinguishes the villa housing Embassy Vatican from the other mansions on the tree-lined block is the soldiers and small artillery across the street, security at the gate plus metal detectors at the entrance to the building. I waited in a converted living room decorated with portraits of former U.S. ambassadors and pictures of popes with U.S. presidents ranging from Reagan to Obama.

In time, I was shown into an elegant office with a view of the embassy’s lush garden. Julieta Valls Noyes, Deputy Chief of Mission, extended her hand. She then introduced Mark Bakermans, Embassy Vatican’s point person on collaborative tools. After brief pleasantries, Julieta was ready to embrace the informality so necessary to collaboration. “I’ve already greeted you, so I can remove my jacket,” she smiled.

Our conversation focused on the challenges of representing the United States to a global constituency. “We’re a small embassy, but what happens here has universal interest,” according to Julieta. To encourage information exchange and collaboration, Julieta had advocated building a Microsoft SharePoint portal for the embassy. However, according to Julieta, the tiny embassy lacked the necessary bandwidth. So, the State Department’s eDiplomacy team sent people to Rome. In May of 2009, a Diplopedia wiki-based internal site went live. For more on Diplopedia, see my September 14, 2010 post on “Taking Collaborative Risk at the State Department.”

Clearly, Embassy Vatican’s use of Diplopedia is raising the embassy’s profile within the State Department. On an average month, the site gets 300 to 400 visitors. But that number spikes considerably when issues involving the Catholic Church hit the news. As the Catholic Church sex scandal bubbled up to banner headlines last February, Embassy Vatican’s Diplopedia site became a State Department clearinghouse for information on the scandal and the Church’s reaction to it. Most of the staff at Embassy Vatican contributes to the Diplopedia site, but Mark noted that the challenge is getting people across the State Department to comment on posts and share knowledge. For Diplopedia to enhance collaboration, consumers of information must also become contributors to information.

I asked Julieta whether she would provide an inside view of the State Department’s internal ideation tool called Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board, which is based on a blogging platform. For more on Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board, see my September 14, 2010 post. Julieta invited me to sit on the edge of her desk (more informality!) as we viewed spirited debate from employees on topics ranging from recruitment of Hispanics to paying interns. Notably, one of the State Department’s most senior officials participated in the discussion and helped shape the ideas.

The State Department has used Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board to create workplace improvements. These range from installing showers for team members who ride bicycles to installing donation boxes so that employees can deposit left-over foreign currency from trips. The State Department then uses the money to aid families of Department people such as those who were Haiti earthquake victims. Ultimately, the State Department may use the ideation tool to craft diplomacy. Julieta insists that a separate ideation tool for diplomacy hosted on the Department’s classified site makes more sense than integrating diplomacy with workplace issues.

Like so many organizations, the State Department still faces cultural issues that impede collaboration. These include rank-consciousness, unnecessary manifestations of hierarchy and silos among levels, teams and regions. Nevertheless, collaborative culture is starting to take hold—and tools like Diplopedia and Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board are extending and enhancing that culture.

Taking Collaborative Risk at The State Department

Shifting from command-and-control to collaborative culture involves what might be termed collaborative risk, but some organizations are realizing that there’s greater risk in clinging to old ways of working.

 

One organization that is recognizing the need for taking collaborative risk is the United States Department of State. “We’re a very risk-averse culture,” notes Duncan MacInnes, principal deputy coordinator for the Bureau of International Information Programs. State Department professionals fear that misstating policy or saying the wrong thing could become a diplomatic crisis. This parallels the fear in companies that trade secrets or market-moving information could leak. Nevertheless, the State Department has determined that the benefits of collaborating internally and externally outweigh the risks of resisting work style change.

 

Change agents across the State Department are guiding the culture towards embracing collaboration. These change agents have wisely realized that eliminating disincentives to collaboration is as important as creating incentives. Therefore, the Department has updated its policies to eliminate disincentives to taking collaborative risk. “People will make mistakes, and those who have made too many mistakes have not been dinged for it,” according to MacInnes. This approach is critical to shifting the culture, because people must feel that the organization values collaborative risk and will provide the cover for them to try new ways of working.

 

Externally, the State Department enables embassies to broadcast their own events including speeches by ambassadors on the Web with input from the public. The State Department uses ConnectSolutions Podium high-definition webcasting, which lets users ask live text questions, text chat with each other about the event, and leave video comments. The ConnectSolutions Real-Time Collaboration Platform enhances and extends Adobe Connect web conferencing. Embassies are also using the tool to collaborate internally. At first, embassy staff resisted the shift. “We’re showing them a new way to work, and we’re meeting in the middle,” says Tim Receveur, a foreign affairs officer coordinating global use of the tool.

 

Aside from real-time collaboration, the State Department is also chalking up results in collaborating asynchronously. Over 3500 State Department team members have contributed some 12,000 articles to Diplopedia, an internal online encyclopedia based on Wikipedia. You can view an amusing video on Diplopedia here. The Department has also seen compelling growth in the use of an ideation tool. Ideation means developing and refining ideas so that people can make their organization better. The tool, dubbed Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board, is based on a blogging platform. The tool lets people across embassies, bureaus, regions and levels of leadership brainstorm, make process improvements and create value collaboratively.

 

In the last eighteen months, people have contributed 1800 ideas. “What in the past would have been water-cooler conversation that went nowhere is now [getting results], because the person who can make it happen is part of the conversation,” explains Richard Boly, director of e-Diplomacy. The ideation tool lets a person hired locally who’s working in a small West African consulate to collaborate, brainstorm and develop communities of interest with counterparts globally.

 

One success factor for Richard and his team as they guide the work style shift is focusing on “the how rather than the what” for starters and saving the “thorniest issues” for last. By thorniest issues, Richard means U.S. policy and diplomacy. Meantime, he and his colleagues are encouraging culture shift and emphasizing use of collaborative tools for brainstorming improvements in “how” policy can be crafted. As the culture warms to the new way of working, the change agents believe diplomats will more collaboratively create policy itself.  

 

Private industry is now looking to the State Department for clues regarding how to engage people effectively through corporate ideation tools. Increasingly, companies collaborate through ideation tools with their customers, but lag in collaborating internally. A big factor is fear. Companies often fail to give people cover so that they take collaborative risks. In this case, the Federal government may clear a path for business.

 

The Much-Maligned Meeting and Collaboration

The “M” word creates more outbursts of opinion than practically any other word in business.

 

I’m referring to the word meeting. Almost everybody has a—usually negative—gut reaction to the notion of meetings. Plenty of people would prefer being stuck on a tarmac than stuck in a meeting. Even though water and snacks are often available at meetings, our time belongs to others. On the tarmac, there’s no guarantee of refreshments, but at least our time is our own. In fact, meeting-bashing has become welcome break-room conversation.

 

Nevertheless, technology vendors have invested huge resources in meetings. So, it’s not just employers who want to load up our schedules with meetings. There are vendors with vested interests in making meetings even more integral to our work than they are now.

 

Last night on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Larry asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates his opinion of the Apple iPad. Gates responded, “We’re all trying to get to something that you just have to take to a meeting and use.” He added, “It still isn’t the device that I would take to a meeting, because it just has no input.” You can view the video clip here. So, one way Bill gauges the effectiveness of the iPad and similar devices is whether we will want to take them to a meeting. Bill—and by inference, Microsoft—apparently remains focused on keeping us in meetings. In reality, it’s more important whether the iPad and any similar device fits into our lifestyles and work styles than whether we’ll want to bring it to meetings.

 

Are meetings collaborative? There’s nothing inherently collaborative about an in-person or virtual meeting. That’s right. Using virtual meeting tools is no guarantee that we’re collaborating. Joining a web conference, using telepresence or IMing the day away creates little value unless these tools fit into collaborative organizational culture and practices.

 

If we compete with colleagues and our teams and organizations reflect “star culture”, do the tools we use make us collaborative? No. It takes more than tools to make collaboration happen. If we fill our ranks with millennials and send them to meetings with devices loaded with collaborative capabilities, will those meetings automatically become collaborative? Don’t bet on it.

 

The biggest beef about meetings is that they’re a waste of time. In other words, they fail to create value. If we come together as a group and we’re working together to create value, we’re collaborating. So, we’ve essentially transcended the notion of a meeting and instead we’re in a collaborative session. Organizations and vendors should seek to remake meetings as collaborative sessions.

 

In the final chapter of The Culture of Collaboration book, I note that “Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.” As collaborating in the same room starts seeming awkward, that’s the new frontier. But organizations and technology vendors take note: it’s about creating more value through collaboration rather than better meetings.

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.