Two of the projects I am presently engaged in are a about collaboratively organizing an event. In both cases the organization is by a handful of volunteers. In both cases, the volunteers have not really worked together before. In both cases, most of the preparations (drafting invitations, promoting the event, logistics, registration, travel, programme, liaising with speakers/participants) are done in a distributed way; over email and online.
The projects are very similar, yet the smoothness and efficiency of the collaboration is very different. For one, the organization is smooth, everybody pulling together like a real team, surprisingly effective without much further ado. For the other, it is harder.
The smooth running event is much more complicated than the other one, both logistically and content wise. Three of us are working most, 4 or 5 closely following and jumping in where necessary, lots of people loosely connected. We are from many different nationalities.
For the harder running event we have had the possibility to meet in real life, the event is simple, we are all from the same country.
What is it that makes collaboration work?
I have many ideas. Most of these don’t hold in the above example. I have no clue.
I work for a large financial institution, and we certainly don’t have the answer. The approach to collaboration I see, almost without exception, in our organization is a tools focused “built it and they will collaborate” mentality. Tools are necessary, but by themselves aren’t sufficient. What’s the missing ingredient? I believe the tools and process must either reflect the existing culture (easier to implement, but perhaps less effecting in improving the quality of collaboration) or the culture must change to support the overall goals of collaboration. And this implies considering processes as well as the tools.
That might seem a bit backward - fitting the culture to match the tools, but for example: if the culture is predicated on insisting on a strong group consensus on every issue, specific processes and tools will be needed to support that culture. If the culture is “the boss decides” processes and tools will be different. I’d argue that some cultures are more effective in fostering collaboration, and so if your goal is to reap the benefits of collaboration, the culture (more so than the tools) needs to be brought into snyc.
One more example: if the culture demands face to face contact to make decisions and resolve issues, then there isn’t much in the way of tools to facilitate that, and particularly if one of your collaboration goals is to reduce meetings and speed decision making. Without changing the culture, there’s not much in the way of tools to help (some, but not many).
I don’t have any real experience in the volunteer context, but I suspect the informal culture/dynamics of the 2 groups is markedly different - how you change manage “sub optimal” performance is a tough question. I suspect sociologists have a better understanding than the tool vendors.
Comment by Tim Gray — April 3, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
Thanks for your thoughts Tim. I think you are right about fitting the culture to the tools: many web2 tools imply a culture of collaboration that very often does not exist: they will not work. But I think we can use the “web2.0 hype” as a lever to help develop a culture of collaboration.
Comment by josienkapma — April 4, 2008 @ 11:37 am