Why working wikily is so hard (at least for me)

Cover via Amazon

Yesterday I blogged about the working wikily paper. It takes the stand that the tools are not so innovative, it's the networked way of working that's revolutionary.. and that's partly engendered by the tools.

My own blogpost made me think about the generational differences and the different mindsets about collaboration. I read and blogged the book Grown up digital. Though many people I meet recognise that different generations use the web differently, often they point to exception to the rule. And don't really know how to work with the differences. The depth of the difference may be underestimated. Trust in working online and trust in jumping into collaborative partnerships is an issue. It's almost a paradigm shift, but it sure is a deep shift.

An example from my own experience to show that working wikily is a profound change of mind. Though I try to learn many new tools (and not just technically, but also diving in socially) I have a mindset about collaboration that is not fully networked. It feels like it is partly changing- for instance I met a person in the train and may jump into a collaborative project with her because we have common interests. I'm organising a series of workshops with 3 colleagues by open admission. People send an email to one of us, the central coordinator for that workshop. Since each workshop had another coordinator, it caused difficulties when people changed workshop etc. My solution was to propose a central coordinator for all admission. Even though I know all the tools, wikis, google docs etc. it didn't occur to me. My colleague then proposed to co-coordinate, use all our email addresses and put all admissions in a google doc. It a networked way of working at small scale. But illustrative of a different way of working nevertheless.

I do wonder whether my daughters will have a mindset of working wikily (they sure learn it on the various social networks they are already part of) and whether that's a good thing. There are probably also downsides to it. What do you see as the downsides of working wikily with a networked mindset?

Collaboration across divisions is unnatural

We're writing a booklet in Dutch about the possibilities of web2.0 tools to foster learning and collaboration in knowledge-intensive organisations. I'm struggling a little whether the tools are just helpful and nice, helping you to do your regular work. Or whether they hold the potential to turn over the way knowledge workers collaborate in organisations. On the one hand I don't think it is an automatic process- you introduce a wiki and hoops, the various departments that used to have such diferent attitudes start to collaborate. On the other hand it is true that fervent web2.0 workers are very open to share what they know and to respond to questions. Having lots of those people would make a different workplace, wouldn't it?

So I found a great article about boundaries in organisations. (Boundaries Need Not Be Barriers). I really liked it because it highlights the psychological difficulties to collaboration across groups within organisations. It's not natural to work across departments since we have an intergroup bias towards other groups, favouring our own group. This is complemented with a territorial need of groups. Territory includes physical space and other tangible and intangible objects. Groups may see themselves as possessors of certain knowledge and may restrict their information exchange to what they consider as 'their' members (the ingroup). The final barrier is that people are poor negotiators across groups or departments. We first think of how to get a large piece of the pie and don't think about enlarging the pie for the whole organisation.

What managers or leaders can do to stimulate collaboration across boundaries (often very needed!) is to emphasize group goals but at the same time organizational goals at a higher level. Furthermore showing that collaboration can yield a more secure place in the organisation instead of lead to insecurity. Lastly, people need to learn how to negotiate and identify win-win opportunities. It's a skill to look at the broader picture and see how we can all create a larger pie.

It's clear that collaboration is not as natural as it seems through the web2.0 tools. Possibly web2.0 tools can help to connect people across divisions, and help see the larger picture and identify opportunities to collaborate...

Clay Shirky on collaboration via the internet

I bought Clay Shirky's book 'Here comes everybody' to read during my holidays. I hesitated because not everyone was positive, it might not have so many new insights. But I decided I would read it after all.

Yesterday, I found this video from the tedtalks with Clay Shirky talking about collaboration via the internet versus institutions. Interesting to watch (20 minutes). He points to the fact that coordination costs have come down tremendously so that collaboration is possible on a scale and at a speed that can't be reached by institutions. Institutions are the slow ones with relatively high coordination costs. Smarter collaborations are coming up. Planning is no longer necessary as it used to be, like the mobile phone made us lazy in planning our meetings carefully. An example of this collaboration he mentions is the pro-ana movement. (which I also blogged about). The infrastructure offered by the internet is generic, accessible to anybody. I liked his statement that the question of whether bloggers are journalists is a wrong question. Journalist used to be a solution to the problem of public information. Now the whole field has changed. (like when the book- press was invented leading to 200 years of chaos). He predicts 50 years of chaos to come.

At times I think, like electrons, we start spinning at increasingly higher speeds.
I hope that his book will address some of the questions around power and leadership. Probably without some visionary Ana's there wouldn't be the pro-ana movement.

Bad teamwork can produce good results

(Cartoon via Jayson Joseph Chacko)




In Ghana I once did a casestudy of a multi-cultural team with difficulties. I discovered a lot of emotions underneath the surface of collaboration, working together and team meetings. Lots of misunderstandings. Lots of unspoken and untested ideas. I thought I could relate this team's functioning with the outcomes of the team's work, which weren't always impressive.

Recently I had two experiences of teams that were having similar difficulties. I was part of a Dutch team organising a conference. I was not part of the second team but was helping them in their work. For both teams, I felt the teams were not doing well in terms of teamwork, not leveraging the individual strengths of its members, and not able to work through the important differences in opinion about the work and the working modalities. In both cases individual team members held underlying assumptions that were not discussed, due to time constraints. (this ofcourse means not prioritising this).

To my surprise, however, (and contrary to my beliefs) both teams produced quite good results. The team I was part of did a learning history. The learning history showed me that I still had some strong frustrations about the team process, but because of the good result (the conference) I can live with it. The other team is going downwards in its performance. Combining both experiences, I now feel that it is possible to be opportunistic, focus on the end result and live with a suboptimal teamprocess. However, in the long run, you do need to address the emotions of the teammembers to be able to function well as a team over a longer period of time.

Collaboration at the design stage

I can't help but thinking about collaboration every time I take the train at Ypenburg, a relatively new station. The yellow line says "train does not stop along this line". The yellow line is an improvement that was painted only a month ago or so. The first time I took the train at this station, I didn't realize the train stops almost 100 meters further on, would have missed it if the conductor had not allowed me to sit in the 'cockpit' of the train, I was clearly not to first to almost miss the train.

Last week I asked a conductor why the train does not stop at the centre of the station (the obvious place). He replied it is because there is a stop sign for the train. Clearly two engineers (or an engineer and an architect) did not work together while designing this station! It shows that it is very simple to say that you have to collaborate with the relevant professionals, but in practice, finding out whom to collaborate with at the right moment is more messy.

Co-creation with Johnnie Moore

I like the word co-creation, more than collaboration. It points to the fact that you create something new, and there is a part of several people in it. It sounds very equal in the sense that there's equal space for people to contribute to the creation.

I picked up the following video when I participated in Nancy White's online workshop 'Facilitation of online Interactions'. I was reminded about the video because of some collaborative efforts I'm in that feel like the co-creation in the video. Of course collaboration is not always that smooth that it feels like real co-creation. I once did the 'towerbuilding' teambuilding game (it was the egg tower exercise, without the egg). Very revealing that due to speed and excitement, we actually left one person out, who did not speak the language very well.

Maybe co-creation is the ideal state of collaboration? I thought I'd search for the video on youtube, and there is was: Co-creation with Johnnie Moore.

Shorter meetings as sign of improved collaboration

Photo by Tony van den Boomen

Since October last year I have been working with a facilitator of a community of practice using online media as well as face-to-face meetings. When we planned our first meeting we took more than an hour longer than planned. Yesterday we had a meeting and finished half hour earlier!

We reflected that this is logical, since in the beginning you have to get to know eachother, test ways of working. When you have an idea, you are careful not to impose this idea. Now we are interumpting eachother, or objecting to ideas and comfortable that the other will say what she thinks.

More effective meetings may hence be a sign of a healthy developing collaboration. It's intriguing that we still underestimate this need to develop a new collaborative relationship.