Making Collaboration

Work for You

February 3, 2010

University of Chicago Booth

Alumni Club

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Registration Activity

• Take a few moments to collect your thoughts before socializing.

• Identify 3 to 5 of your personal attitudes, or frames of mind that you carry when you enter the following collaborative environments:

– Meeting at work

– Meeting with perspective clients

– Meeting of a voluntary organization (may be an environment with formal roles or informal roles - please specify)

• Put one attitude on each post-it note and post on white board

• Make a mental note to yourself of which frames of mind are common across multiple settings. No need to write out/post similar attitudes multiple times.

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Agenda

• Registration 5:30-6:00

• Dinner 6:00-6:20

• Welcome 6:20-6:30

• Opening Presentation 6-30-7:15

• Break (Post-It Notes Review) 7:15-7:30

• Workshop Breakout 7:30-8:15

• Wrap-up 8:15-8:30

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Collaboration in action

1. Who is Lee Roy Jenkins?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU

2. The Best Buy story

Best Buy’s smart use of Web 2.0 tools

Collaborations are happening everywhere.

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Collaboration offers a competitive advantage

―Finding ways to connect with people

and institutions possessing new

knowledge becomes increasingly

important,‖ says Hagel. ―Since there are

far more smart people outside any one

organization than inside.‖ And in today’s

flat world, you can now access them all.

Therefore, the more your company or

country can connect with relevant and

diverse sources to create new

knowledge, the more it will thrive. And

if you don’t, others will.

Is China an Enron? THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: January 19, 2010

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Collaboration, a Process best suited for:

–short term or focused activity

–"rapid convergence‖

» Experience

» Intuition

» Data

Collaboration, in Context. . .

Collective

exchange/

evaluation

Confident, aligned

Decisions

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Managing Expectations

Technology tools offer opportunity to advance your ―work;‖

BUT…….Quality and comprehensiveness not a necessary by-product.

―90% of collaboration exists in emails.‖

Objective is to have your process naturally match the way people think and work.

Let the process evolve to meet the needs of the collaborators. Users create their own ways of organizing knowledge and ―work‖ processes.

RESULT—what you see is what you get.

Wikis and blogs, when effective, are a work in progress rather than polished deliverables

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Field of Dreams

Just because you build it, or even invite people,

don’t believe that is sufficient for people to show up

Collaboration for the sake of collaboration—just doesn’t cut it.

it takes more than good ideas

Even signs of moderate interest isn’t sufficient.

To realize a good collaboration…its got to be natural

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People are busy. So…….

Incentives require that goals or expectations be apparent

Ill or loosely defined goals or expectations provide little incentive to make time or add to our responsibilities

ASK Yourself Two Critical questions

1. Is this the best collaboration I am likely to find, taking into account the search costs of finding collaborations?

2. Is this solution better that other approaches to getting what I want , e.g., figuring it out myself, hiring someone who knows the answer given both the direct and indirect benefits of doing things in a collaboration.

Twitter Example: Why Tweet?

1)it’s an effective tool to source/share information

2) check information availability across the Twitter network,

Information shared first with those who are following you, but could easily be caught by others on the Twitter network

3) Rapid, character limited response –making it an efficient tool too!

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Collaboration Environment Framework

Collaboration Environment 2X2 Observations

• Collaborative approaches offer an array of choices and complex trade-offs

• Recognize that no type of collaboration is necessarily superior to others

• Open is not always better than closed, and flat is not always better than hierarchical

• Tonight, we are talking about voluntary opportunities to collaborate

Open

Flat Hierarchical

Closed

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Finding the right collaborations to join

The right collaborations to join are ones that have:

1. Good structural characteristics which tend to predict success

2. Members who are individually good collaborators - or a large subset of members

# o

f m

em

bers

# high skill/content experts

Great structure can’t compensate for lousy individual collaborators -- it won't work well.

Well intentioned and good skills also can’t overcome bad set-ups.

–Good collaborators can find their way out of this problem... but on which do you want to spend your time?

–"fixing the collaboration" or

–"getting the collaboration’s intended work done”

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Collaborations more likely to prove useful when . . .

• Collaborative technology tools you employ are simple and open, familiar, or as compatible as possible with those of the rest of the world

• The work at hand is being shared, everybody can see everybody’s input. Allow people to learn to filter and sort for themselves increases their sense of contribution and promotes interaction

• Build communities of trust: Think modularly, start with a few and then add

• Encourage teaming: Encourage variety and adaptability, a recombination of options helps in the realization of an option’s value

Open collaboration is a complex — indeed, all-embracing — process, requires genuine commitment … and an appetite for unleashing and managing disruptive change.

―The widespread adoption of open collaboration, [like] the quality movement

of the 1980s, …require deep changes in the way knowledge is controlled

and shared — changes that have the potential to alter relationships both

within a company and with its outside constituents….an incremental

approach is likely to lead to short-lived improvements and eventual

failure.”

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Structural Characteristics to Look For – Questions to Ask Yourself

1. Does the topic matter to me (am I aligned with it)?

2. Do I feel that I have something to contribute to it?

3. Do I think other participants (current and future) have a lot to offer?

4. Does the group of people already involved have close to the right skills and resources to achieve the goal?

If not, are they aware of the problem and actively trying to fill out the collaboration?

5. Do I think that it is already well structured and run in a way that would likely yield results, or am I willing and able to put the structure on it?

Clear process including self-reflexive loops

Open process for discussion

Facilitated/moderated process, especially for larger groups

6. Does the collaboration have a well-defined (and satisfactory-enough to me) goal? Or if it's vague is that OK with me?

– Clear and attainable short-term and long-term goals

7. If the collaboration is large, is there a committed group at the core that will keep it moving forward?

8. Is there some kind of governance structure, and am I happy with it?

1. Example: Open Source may have a committee or person who gets to decide what's in and what doesn't make the cut as a contribution

2. Executive/administrative function—the approval process (contextual to its creation, not necessarily overt)

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Workshop Activity

First: Visit the wall of post-it notes and select a few you consider to be relevant and interesting to discuss with your group; look for ones different from your initial mindset (4 minutes)

Second: As a group, discuss these two questions and record and force rank considerations; use the below table as a model: (30 minutes)

1. Consider a time when you were collaborating well, what were you doing? How were you contributing to the collaboration?

2. Thinking about someone who strikes you as an excellent collaborator with whom you've collaborated; what do they do that makes them so good?

Once groups have completed this exercise, we’ll convene to discuss each group’s KEY discovery

Consideration Forced Rank Importance How to Judge

Consideration 1 2 of 5

. . .

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Being the Best Collaborator / Finding other Great Collaborators

1. Define needs / self-interest well (why you are in the collaboration)

2. Be humble

3. Have a long term view

4. Know when to let go

5. When communicating

• Give reasons behind your thinking

• Be concise, patient and persistent

• Develop good listening skills

• Put a stop to domineering, interruptions and put-downs

• Communicate frequently, clearly and openly

• Acknowledge upcoming problems

6. Focus on strengths, not weaknesses

7. Accept individuals as they are and don't try to change them

8. Be understanding of each other when mistakes are made

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In closing…..

Where to find. . .

• Troll your networks

• Ning communities or other COPs that have an interest in output

• Partner up

• Solicitations in the blogosphere

• Engage your customers, clients, vendors

―Looking for Group‖

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0snaJVXje0&feature=related

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WHAT’s NEXT?

March 3 Best examples of collaboration

April 21 Best working practices in collaboration – “How to” Tips

(e.g. increase participation quality on different platforms --in person,

online).

In the next month, we encourage you to try to find some good

collaborations—ones that meet a need you have. Use the criteria we came

up with to evaluate both the collaboration and the collaborators to determine

whether they will or won’t be ―good.‖

Before you leave, take a moment to ask yourself the following and write them

down as an objective.

1. What do I want to achieve that maybe I could do better collaboratively?

2. Where might I begin to look for collaborators?

Grab a partner and share for a few minutes.

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About the presenter/producers

• David Friedman develops new business processes for interacting with customers and for working much more

effectively within organizations. He is a Principal of Bridgewell Partners, a firm that focuses on helping business

people improve their most critical business relationships. David works with professionals and salespeople on

improving their business development results. Prior to founding Bridgewell Partners, David was a partner at

McKinsey and Company, Inc. Contact: david.friedman@bridgewellpartners.com

• Rachel Kaberon advances strategic decision-making by developing learning and leadership initiatives to further

organizational effectiveness. Her independent consulting activities at Arkay Solutions blend principles of design

and a variety of learning technologies to leverage informal or formal collaborations. In her extensive experience

measuring and improving outcomes, her business strategy skills have helped design and implement innovative

process and system applications for internet start-ups, social service agencies as well as consumer banking

divisions for Citibank and JPMorganChase. She holds an MA in Public Policy from University of Chicago and has

done doctorate work in learning theory from National-Louis. In addition to her consulting practice, she is

currently an adjunct at IIT ID teaching a course in design policy. Contact: rkaberon@arkaysolutionsllc.com

• Eric Siegmann is an independent consultant advising clients on how to dramatically boost their business using

eCommerce, web 2.0, and social media tools and services. His 8 years consulting experience include work with

new product/service development; online platform development; pricing strategy and financial modeling; and

corporate strategy and business transformation. Industry specific work spans health care, insurance, and

financial services. Besides being part of the Booth network, Eric is proud to be a Buckeye! Be sure to checkout

his thoughts on eCommerce, web 2.0 and social media at http://dcinsight.typepad.com/dcinsights/

Contact: easiegmann@gmail.com,

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