Defining Collaboration

One of my favorite blogs is “The Big Shift” over at Harvard Business Publishing, a blog about innovation, collaboration, and other trends in business.  In a recent post, they lamented that “Popular as the word is, collaboration mostly goes undefined.”  They go on:

Many people, we suspect, would define collaboration as any situation where people work together in a coordinated way to achieve common objectives and would include highly specified and synchronized coordination, such as traditional assembly line operations.

I would take this statement a step further, in that many people (and organizations) would define collaboration more broadly than this even to include things like “coordination” and “information sharing”, both activities that I (and I suspect the authors of the Big Shift) would argue are not really collaboration.  And while this may seem like a semantic arguments, the Economist Intelligence Unit stated: “The labels themselves are not important, but labelling every initiative as “collaboration” creates a misnomer that robs [organizations] of the ability to deploy resources efficiently and effectively to create the most value.”

Things That Definitely Aren’t Collaboration

A word on two activities (there are many more) that are grouped with collaboration, but are entirely different activities.  These two are coordination and information sharing.

Coordination generally involves sharing an already-written draft document, report, policy, or proposal with stakeholders inside and outside the initiating organization.  While it sounds good, this is more of a C.Y.A. activity than anything meant to produce value: get other pieces of the organization to check off some boxes, hopefully while not changing products too much.  Coordination, in my opinion, is usually a value-subtracting activity.

Information Sharing is another activity that is sometimes called collaboration, but to me is just a piece of the collaboration process.  In the words of 9/11 Commission members LTG Peter Kind (United States Army, Ret retired) and Katharine J. Burton, “Access to information does not necessarily lead to effective knowledge sharing and collaboration.  When people share knowledge, they are not just sharing information; they are also sharing cultural and social references.” Access to similar information is an important piece of collaborative knowledge creation process; however, it should not be confused with collaboration.

My Definition of Collaboration

Having said this, much like the Big Shift, I have now posted more than 30 posts to this blog without ever really having defined collaboration.  My definition  of collaboration is the following (drawn mostly out of my client service experience):

Collaboration is the interaction of and among employees and their partners—exploiting their diverse expertise and organizational resources to more effectively create superior value and/or deliver more efficient services than an organization or individual could have accomplished alone.

I believe that this definition highlights that the value proposition of collaboration for organizations, as “higher value” (in terms of service delivery) is ultimately the driving force behind the focus on collaboration in organizations  Additionally, this definition deliberately characterizes collaboration as a means to achieving an organization’s goals: collaboration is not an end itself.

The Long Tail of Collaboration Value

The Long Tail is of course one of the most popular and notable thoughts/books of the social media movement. From Wikipedia:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. . . . The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of “non-hit” items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

Uh Justin…what’s the point?

Well, this may require a logical leap here, but I think that the long tail is a valuable metaphor for the value of collaboration. You see, there may be a few “blockbuster” examples and a lot of less impressive examples of collaboration. But, like those items on iTunes that sells only 10 copies, successful “collaboration events” may only be important/significant to the 3 people that were directly involved. Not something that’s “sexy” or tells a good story.

However, given that, as Rob Salkowitz notes, most knowledge work is a collection of relatively insignificant tasks that ultimately lead up to more significant outputs, these individually insignificant collaboration events add up to generate significant organizational value. So while on an individual level, collaborative interaction may be relatively banal, the sum of these events is significantly higher, if harder to communicate.

Measuring Value

This is another of the unique challenges in measuring the true value of collaboration, especially in knowledge work. Most collaboration yields relatively low value individually; however, when taken in connection with other collaborative activities, the cumulative potential of effective collaboration is remarkable. One of the great ways to make the case for collaboration would be to figure out a better way to measure the value of the tail.

Collaboration, Moneyball Style

In the field of sports writing, few names are more familiar than Michael Lewis. Though Lewis has written quite a few books, he’s best known as the brain behind Moneyball, which tracked a new way to create a successful baseball team without spending a whole lot of money. The poster child of the book and the broader movement is Billy Beane and his early 2000s Oakland A’s teams. According to Wikipedia:

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A’s became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

Recently, Lewis wrote an article that basically called Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets of the NBA. This article argues that Battier, despite being “a marginal NBA athlete” and having a reputation as a “replaceable cog”, was perhaps the reason that the Rockets were a “championship caliber team” and not a “bubble playoff team”. For those interested in the complete argument, I highly recommend it. (And for football fans, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Smart Football, take a stab at Lewis’s latest article as well.

So what’s the point?

The business world loves sports metaphors. Everyone knows that. So how’s this for one: someone who’s good at collaborating can be a clear difference maker in an organization. This is not to say that people who are good at collaborating don’t have skills or value to contribute beyond being a good “collaborator” (a word that I don’t particularly like, but will use it…); rather, it’s that someone who is good at collaborating can really take a project to another level. A star performer who’s great at making those around him/her better is better than a star performer that doesn’t play well with others. The best of the best do both.

The catch-22 in business, as in basketball, is that it’s very difficult to understand exactly what it is about somebody who performs like Battier that makes them so valuable to a team. There’s no stat (other than wins and testimonials) that will highlight that value and there’s not an easy way to figure out who these performers are, except by reputation (or maybe social network analysis).

Moneyball Management

Moneyball was all about creating new ways to measure performance and value created by players. And these new measures were created because the old ones weren’t sufficient to tell the story. Collaboration is one of those other things, that if we can measure an individual’s ability to collaborate, could revolutionize the way we evaluate the creation of value. After all, guys who win (even if they don’t have any one great thing they do) will have a job until they choose not to.

Measuring Collaboration

Anybody who has experience in collaboration software or enterprise 2.0 knows that there is a endless demand for proof of value. However, as I gain more experience with consulting in the area, I’ve learned that this is really a red herring: the metrics people want don’t really exist. And almost always, people looking for metrics aren’t particularly interested in those that can be collected (largely participation-related metrics).  That’s not to say participation metrics aren’t important, they just don’t tell enough of a story to answer the mail (generally).

Everyone knows this: Collaboration in knowledge work is famously difficult to track and measure. Moreover, few organizations realize that they don’t know how well (or poorly) that they actually collaborate. Nor do they realize that social software offers a more effective and efficient means for collaboration: email works just fine if you don’t even think about how inefficient it is (though it seems like more effort is being expended to improve how we use email).

More Widgets vs. Better Widgets

There are generally two ways that collaboration can improve work: process improvements or quality improvements. It’s more widgets (or faster-produced widgets) or better widgets. More widgets improvements are generally easier to cataloged, for obvious reasons: producing a report in a week instead of two is easily quantifiable (assuming quality is held constant).

However, the improvements that people and managers generally want to see qualitative improvement, and the metrics to prove it. But how can you measure whether a knowledge output is 50 percent qualitatively better than a previous report. To make it worse, knowledge work is rarely repetitive enough that you can measure improvement without meticulous analytic review. And how difficult is it to get someone demanding metrics and proof that a new way of collaboration is worth the effort?

The Million Dollar Answer

So needless to say, if you can come up with a way to reliably “measure” collaboration, you will be rich indeed. In the meantime, the best tactic (in my experience) is being able to tell the story of collaboration, including more than just participation stats. Communications is important: you have to be able to tell the story. The who, when, and where are important; but it’s important to both be able to and have a means to tell the why, what, and how.

Collaboration as Competitive Advantage

One of the hardest parts of being a collaboration consultant is that quantifying and qualifying why collaboration is valuable, especially in knowledge-creation organizations, is extremely difficult. Everyone knows that collaboration is goodness, but why? What is it about collaboration that is just so great?

A while back, I heard a presentation by Jeffrey Mann and Carol Rozwell (Gartner Analysts), that summed up the (potential) value of collaboration nicely: they presented a collaboration maturity model, and occupying the top line was simply the phrase: “Collaboration as Competitive Advantage”. The slide said that collaboration, in its most mature form, collaboration is so ingrained in an organization’s activity that it gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.

It’s put so simply, yet so accurately: organizations can best their competitors by enabling smart people to swarm quickly and deliver advantages in cost, quality, timeliness, and flexibility.

Collaboration enables improvement in all of these areas. We can reduce costs by improving efficiency and reducing duplicative effort. We can improve quality by increasing the number of eyes on a target and by bringing multiple points of view to bear on any given problem. We can improve our timeliness by again increasing efficiency, but also by better positioning information for discovery and integration. We can also improve our flexibility by empowering people to work across organizational lines and by not binding them to traditional production cycles (especially if that model doesn’t fit the problem).

So just as Nordstrom derives it’s competitive advantage from top-flight customer service and Wal-Mart from its ability to get low cost items to its stores efficiently, organizations can derive unique value from their ability to effectively and rapidly organize teams of smart people to solve hard problems. If an organization understands its own social networks, people, and leaders well enough, I contend that this advantage can be within reach.