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THE MEANING OF TRUE COLLABORATION
Every corporation says it values collaboration and wants to encourage more of it. Almost every piece of enterprise software claims to support collaboration somehow. But what does collaboration mean? What does it look like when it happens? How do we do it? How does the web help us do it better?
Collaboration is one of those big words isn’t it? Many of us use it, especially in business. It gets bandied around quite a lot. On the other hand, you don’t find staff using the word much. They just do stuff together. Collaboration is a bit like innovation, creativity, and engagement – words that have been hijacked and had their meaning misappropriated. You see people sharing documents with each other, having email exchanges, and talking to each other on the phone but how much of this is truly collaborative? Isn’t a lot of it simply sharing information?
When people are in places they feel comfortable in, with people they feel comfortable with, they might just start talking together about things that matter to them or things that they are trying to achieve. This is the essence of collaboration – low level conversations carried out in the process of doing stuff – “conversations that get your job done”. We sort of know what this feels like and intuitively know that more of it would be a good thing. The trouble is that as soon as you start to orchestrate it, or measure it, or demand more of it – it tends to evaporate. This problem is even more acute when ...
