Want to Improve Collaboration? Close Your Email.

One of the most serious problems in organizations today is our (ab)use of email. There’s no question that email has fundamentally changed the way people work and how people collaborate. However, now email is often thought of as a scourge: leave the office for a week, come back to 500 emails waiting for you, of which probably 50 require action and 10 are very important.

In terms of communication, Email is usually the first resort. Sadly, that means that email is now also most people’s primary means of collaboration. But here’s what email collaboration looks like:

Created by Manny Wilson

Not exactly the cleanest business process. Not pictured is the person in the middle of the process: the stuckee given the unenviable task of aggregating all of the changes made in the various silos into the “master document”.

Here’s an idea: Try Something Else!

So, as a first step towards improving collaboration: don’t use email. Sounds simple, but of course the difficulty is in the execution. I’ll start with the why. There are several reasons that you should move away from email for collaboration.

• People get enough email: If you can contribute to your colleague receiving less email, I will guarantee you that they will genuinely appreciate it. So, rather than sending out another email to lose in the email, try using another platform!
• Email is not discoverable: To me, this is the most important piece. Email conversations are by definition not discoverable. So if I have a question, I could email five people; unless they forward it on, I am limiting my potential sources of answers. However, if I ask the question in a online, discoverable forum, I can still get the same 5 people to answer the question, but also add everybody else with access to the platform to the potential sources of information. As an added bonus, the knowledge gleaned from the discussion is then captured in a discoverable venue, rather than trapped in an email box.
• Email won’t help you bump into others: One of the great benefits of working in the open is that you can actually bump into people with similar work focuses and similar experiences. Working in a more open environment allows for fortuitous opportunities in order to expand social networks. And given that workforces are becoming more dispersed, this will likely become more important as face-to-face opportunities dwindle.

Executing

Let’s face it, it’s hard to get out of email. It’s been too successful in penetrating the business world. How many times a day do you have a face-to-face or phone conversation that ends with “I’ll type up an email summarizing what we just said”? Well, there are some good ways to start:

• Signal: Rather than sending out questions via email, post the question online and send out the link. It’s still an email, but the discussion and answers will be more discoverable to others
• Do Point-to-Point in the Public: We have a lot more means to talk point-to-point in public nowadays:  Wiki User Pages, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc. Communicating on these is a good first step because they are all more discoverable then email.
• Get out of your comfort zone a bit: Working in the open is a new, weird thing, so it’s not unusual that you would feel strange doing this instead of email. But sometimes you just have to make the leap. Give it a shot.  As a colleague tells me, “If you aren’t out of your comfort zone, you aren’t doing your job.”

PS. A note about email notifications. Email works well as a notification for these other tools.  Getting an email that says to check a wiki page because it’s changed is inherently different from getting a document in an email, because you can delete the notification and know you won’t be missing information later.  If you get a document in an email, you will likely keep that email/document combo because you just don’t know if you’ll need to refer back to it.

Leading and Owning Communities

Pre-S:  this post has taken me a bit of time to write.  This is half because I was having difficulty with what I wanted to say (and I’m still not sure that I’ve figured that part out…) and because I have been blessed with a flood of post ideas thanks to some interesting discussions that I’ve had, as well as the conference that I attended earlier this week.

So reading this got me thinking about a lot of issues.  The first section, I think is absolutely dead-on.  A colleague this week introduced me to some of the ideas in The Starfish and the Spider (I know, I’m terribly behind on my reading in general) that basically align with what Ross is saying here.  Leadership is definitely one of the more important challenges in working with a distributed group.  Ross explains the example of a start up spread across four countries; I can attest to this even in a small group working across the Washington Metro Area.  Focus is the key to successful collaboration: collaboration has to be working towards something, and it usually falls on the leader to set those priorities and guide groups towards them.  This is not to say that the leadership has to come from above, as horizontal leadership can often be just as effective in leading collaborative efforts.

So that part was easy.  It’s the second piece of Ross’s post that I’ve sort of been wrestling with over the past few days.  The lead in:

Who Should “Own” Community?

On the panel I answered with the always correct answer that “it depends.”  But also suggested that ownership of community will trend in two directions.  Social Software has made community a strategic imperative for many organizations.  Recalling when risk management became a strategic imperative in some industries about ten years ago, you saw the rise of the Chief Risk Officer.  While the emergence of a new CxO function is fleeting at best, I was provocative to make a point that we could see the rise of the Chief Community Officer to align and coordinate internal and external communities.

This got me thinking: “owning communities”.  How do you even go about doing this?  I think Ross is talking about owning the problem of communities (and establishing them),  but I wonder, how exactly can a CxO really go about owning a problem that is inherently personal, since it depends (almost) entirely on personal styles, social skills, and dedication to maintanance of a network.

I have been trying to think through the idea of what exactly this Chief Relationship Office might do.  On one hand, he/she could be the owner of things like internal and external involvement in social networking sites.  So this would be managing internal social network sites for large organizations, as well as coming up with new ways to use existing platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn for the benefit of the organization.  I can also see this role as being a big promoter/innovator of ways to establish relationships inside the company through cross-functional events, etc.

However, I tend to think that Charlene Li is right in her tweet:

Does having a “chief community officer” make sense? Initially, yes, but community *engagement* needs to be responsibility of every employee. –2:01 PM September 04, 2008 from web

Especially in a social software environment, the community is ultimately the responsibility of nobody and everybody all at the same time.  Social software requires social networks to succeed.  And though the software can help create social networks, ultimately the success of social software project is still almost completely dependent on either chance or effective use of one’s network.  This problem is ultimately about the health of the collaborative community, which ultimately cannot be the responsibility of one person or one team of people, because this community gardening must be the responsibility of all users in order to succeed in establishing a stable and enduring collaborative ecosystem.

So after re-reading Ross’s post again for the nth time, I guess this is all just a long way of saying, I agree.