The Power of Collaborative Innovation

Since Guy Kawasaki started writing his wildly successful blog, no doubt he has fallen victim to many of the tricks and ploys listed in his 'How to suck up to a Blogger' post. Certainly I will have to write more consistently and predictably about any one topic to receive this kind of attention myself, but what it reminds me of is the fact PR, communications and the very act of collaboration has undergone a profound change: that from top-down to bottom-up.

The Economist ran an interesting story (Print edition 21st January 2006) about the shift of IBM from a  traditional command-and-control culture to a much more flexible, network and collaboration-based approach, citing that only this will allow the company to grow in the future. As Linda Sanford puts it in the article: 'you have to have an organisation that senses change and by itself identifies a working team that can go after the opportunities'. When Sam Palmisano, chairman and chief executive, in mid-2003 decided that the company needed to rethink and restate its values, he put it simply "When employees are released from central control, the strongest glue holding them together is the set of values embraced by the organisation they work for.'.
    In a book published recently, 'Let Go to Grow', Linda Sanford argues that 'businesses must adopt a culture of collaboration - both within their four walls and outside them' in order to succeed. This in my mind, sets companies up for overcoming some crucial hurdles for flexible, responsive operations:

1. Know the experts - The bigger an organisation, the harder it is to know the unique skills and abilities of your staff, particularly in creative fields. Change your intranet from a mere means of distributing messages to becoming a lure that brings together seekers of knowledge and collaborators. Use the intranet to identify employees with particular expertise.

2. Feed the minds - Business, development and innovation moves ahead at a breakneck speed and there are no excuses for not keeping up with trends, industry developments, research and headline news. Effective collaboration enables information to get through effortlessly and this is where corporate communications should partially re-direct its efforts from being a insular company-only news media to serving the company with tools to stay on the cutting edge of the latest relevant information

3. Use technology to enable collaboration - Use the intranets to enable on-line knowledge share, take the wiki approach of creating web pages around a topic which can be modified by anyone with access and use that as a virtual meeting room, encouraging contributions, ideas and input.

4. Encourage entrepreneurship - Collaboration will not grow and flourish in structures continuing to employ command-and-control approaches. This stifles creative thinking and creates a cynical, passive attitude, as there are no incentives in doing things in an unconventional way. The benefits of unconventional methods are increasing speed, flexibility and innovation in solutions, but mechanisms net to be set in place to reward and encourage this behaviour - otherwise it is far too simple to do things the way we have always done.

5. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts - Great ideas happen when timing, expertise, collaboration and geographic locations all come together in surprising, unpredictable, but effective combinations. Intranets, entrepreneurship-schemes, time can all be set aside to achieve this, but it is ultimately down to a shift in mindsets and a greater degree of personal ownership and responsibility of the outcome, which creates the necessary sparks. You need advocates, passionate champions of a new way of working to publicise the efforts, and all the other dimensions to be in place and last but not least, a profound understanding of the power of collaboration.

Ultimately the bottom-up approach facilitated by fans, blogs, news media and the like demand lightning-fast reactions from companies, the ability to respond and utilise news, knowledge and input  without falling victim of bottlenecks or overly-complicated decision-making chains. A good example is how IBM solved a technical problem in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Within hours, the company had identified the key players, using its intranet listing the skills of its staff and had set up a wiki page to function as the virtual meeting room, for the group to collaborate on. This open-to-all approach created a solution in mere days, whereas a standard response would have taken weeks.

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[gideon]

See http://twiki.org/ for software on creating an enterprise wiki page. It's free!