The case for collaboration

What is collaboration

The idea that working towards a common goal becomes more efficient if information and experience is shared - this is what lies behind the idea of collaboration.

Photo by andresmh Flickr CC

From Emails to Twitter

Production and transactional work makes up about half of all tasks performed in companies and does not require much collaboration - the work is defined and only requires communication at its beginning and end. It is the unstructured collaborative work that can facilitated by social networking tools.

Email was the beginning of asymmetric communication, meaning that people had the chance of a relatively rapid interchange of idea, even if they did not speak directly to one another. As the flood of mail grew, with many declaring “email bankruptcy”, by erasing all emails and starting up from scratch, on a more or less regular basis, it was obvious that alternatives had to be found.

Lotus Notes, Wikis and other common databases had their day, but even that was not enough as SMS took to the scene. Messages becoming ever shorter and spelling seen as less important.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess, but right now the frontier is somewhere in FaceBook like applications for business - these tools are intuitive for the younger generations but have huge hurdles for many. But, collaboration is not about technology, it is a mindset and a part of Open Management.

What it takes to collaborate

In a recent infographics produced by SocialCast called “Dare to Share”, the company states that three things defines good collaboration:

• Contribute - To research, collect and relay information.
• Take responsibility - To perform all duties of the assigned role on the team.
• Cooperate and Listen - To respect the viewpoint of others while helping the team reach a fair solution.

Over to you, what do you think?