Last year I published with my two esteemed co-authors, Dr. Jose Claudio Terra CEO of Terra Forum and Heidi Collins, prior CKO for Air Product Chemicals, a new book on Winning at Collaboration Commerce: The Next Competitive Advantage. We wrote this book as it was very clear to us five years ago that the only advantage left in business was for organizations to develop sustaining collaboration capabilities. With the development of the web, the collapse of time and space has never been more apparent.
The recent research of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) has learned that successful collaboration embraces three types of work: conceptual, relational and action driven - and together these three forms build a healthy “learning ecology” for supporting systemic change. Some of SOL’s lessons we have also found in our research and in servicing our clients.
One of our collective key learnings is to build community through thinking together and sharing. ThOur thesis is that iterative process of collaborative dialogue increasesthe production of trust making attributes (listening, authenticity, transparency, etc) which increases humans willingness to share knowledge and as a result achieve higher levels of transparency. The SOL’s research has also concluded that when faced with handling difficult conceptual tasks - it is faster and easier to leave the work to a small group of experts or to outsource the problem solving to consultants or academics.
The second key learning is to achieve simplicity without reduction. Clarity must not come at the expense of oversimplification of the trivialization of complex issues.
In our work at Helix Commerce International Inc. we have also leaned that collaboration between organizations is rooted in the quality of the relationships and the iterative interactions that support cooperative problem solving, joint learning, and the development of mutual and respectful trust.
We have come to the end of the transactional leadership era. We believe that the only way to achieve scale now is to generate change that engages large communities of diverse stakeholders to co-create new possibilities. In our research on innovation in leading organizations, we have also concluded that for innovation to flourish collaborative sense making processes need to be mature. The art is in the quality of the conversations or the dialogue - perhaps as humans we are returning full circle to what it means to be truly human and that is having a genuine conversation to co-create new possibilities.
The applications of wikis and blogs also help to accelerate communication processes and support new pathways to achieve stronger collaboration ties. If you are interested in learning more about how wikis and blogs can accelerate collaboration capabilities, check out this NEW program we are co-delivering with IBM.
For more information on views expressed on this blog on collaborating, please see the MIT Sloan Review Winter 2007 for Peter Senge’s et al paper: Collaborating for Systemic Change. If you would like to continue this dialogue please email Dr. Cindy Gordon at cindy@helixcommerce.com or post a response to this blog.