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.
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