Collaboration
Collaboration is “a relationship in which two or more people are committed to the success of whatever project or process they are jointly engaged in and use assumptions and behaviours consistent with interdependence while pursuing those outcomes [...]
It is a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more parties who work together toward common goals by sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability for achieving results [...]”
Collaboration is also defined as “the confluence of engagement of the parties involved; the higher the engagement, the higher the collaboration achieved”1.
In light of the above definitions we propose that the quality of any action taken by a group of people will depend, to a large extent, on how well they collaborate rather than ‘just work together’.
From applied complexity
science we know that if we want to respond effectively to circumstances,
we need to match the complexity of our response to that of the circumstances: the field we act in and
the challenges we are facing. We live in a highly complex world and the challenges we need to rise to
are intrinsically complex. Any one person would simply not have a high enough level of complexity to match those.
How well we collaborate — as groups, teams, even families and organisations — will determine our ability to effectively
deal with the world around us and the challenges it presents us with.
And indeed, collaboration is a hot issue in the corporate landscape. IBM in their global CEO Study 2008 report that more than 40% of the 1100 CEOs interviewed are changing their enterprise models to be more collaborative
With the exclusion of instinctive and “automatic” reactions, any human action is preceded by thought and is, in effect, the product of the thought processes. Successful collaboration rests on the ability to think together.
Humberto Maturana, an Evolutionary Biologist specialised in cognition, asserts that language is the medium in and through which we, humans, think together: “We learn, adapt and bring forth our worlds through the networks of conversation in which we participate”.
If collaboration is our strategy, encouraging the formation of networks of interactions and the free flow of meaningful conversations is our means of execution.
In fact, in our current day knowledge economy, where knowledge has become the competitive resource organisations have2, “[...] conversations are the most important form of work”3.
“[...] conversations are the way knowledge workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organisation. The panoply of modern information and communications technologies [...] can help knowledge workers in this process. But all depends on the quality of the conversations that such technologies support. [...]”
“One of the many paradoxes of the new economy is that conversation — traditionally regarded as a waste of time — is in fact the key resource for competing on time [...]”
“If the new work of the company is conversation, than what is the job of the manager? Put simply: to create an environment where employees can have productive conversations rather than counter-productive ones, useful conversations rather than useless ones. [...] In order to create an environment where people can have such conversations, managers must set a tone whereby people are secure enough to say what's really on their minds and aren't afraid to expose their ignorance or ask for help...”
The inherent contradiction between the prevalent uni-lateral control management models and the establishment of truly collaborative cultures notwithstanding4, a range of collaborative conversational 'technologies' and processes (such as Dialogue, Open Space Technology and Dynamic Facilitation — to name a few) have been developed and widely experimented with over the past 30 years. Common to all of these processes is establishing a 'container' within which participants in the process indeed feel safe to speak up their own mind and to share their knowledge, understanding, perceptions and ideas.
These processes have been applied extensively within the corporate world with an impressive return of inspiring success stories.
Using a truly collaborative approach will “[...] generate several outcomes: (1) increased quality of decisions or results, (2) increased commitment to implementing the results, (3) reduced time for effective implementation, (4) improved working relationships, (5) increased organisational learning and (6) enhanced personal satisfaction.”5
Also known to flow out of these processes are innovation (which makes sense: innovation thrives in an environment where information and knowledge are available, accessible and being shared) and highly coordinated self-organising action.
