Doing Collaboration Badly Is Worse Than Not Doing It At All - SideraWorks

Collaboration,
Innovation,
& Social Business
Lessons Learned Along The Way
Defining Social Business
SideraWorks.com
the ties between

collaboration ‘truths’
There isn’t a clear understanding/agreement amongst the participants as to what collaboration means. There is a lot of
confusion on the very definition of collaboration. In a general context that’s fine, but as an organization, particularly one
approaching a collaboration initiative, everyone needs to have a common language if they are to communicate effectively.
Virtually everyone (often approaching 100% of our respondents) agrees that collaboration is not only valuable but critical
to the success of the organization. Yet many aren’t able to articulate that value, or why they should be doing it.
Effective collaboration requires a major focus on culture, the deployment and use of technology, and the adoption of
process, policy, and governance for positive results. Few companies focus on all three. Which leads us to the next issue.
Bad is worse than none – Morten Hansen points out in his book ‘Collaboration’, that bad collaboration is a waste of time
and resources and produces no real gain. Deciding not to collaborate at all is a better option than bad collaboration. While
harsh, it is undeniably true.
Confusion with “innovation” – There is often confusion with the relationship between collaboration and innovation. By
being innovative you aren’t necessarily being collaborative and the reverse is also true. There are definitely interdependencies
between the two, and a collaborative culture certainly breeds innovation more effectively but they are not the same thing.
© 2013 SideraWorks LLC. All Rights Reserved.
As we run workshops and projects with our clients there are certain issues that occur frequently enough that
in hindsight we should have predicted and prepared for. Where collaboration is concerned we’ve provided a
few consistent ‘truths’ that we’ve had to learn along the way.
*Thanks to Carlos Dominguez for the inspiration of the sequence

what is social business?
The principal idea behind social business is to create a business with purpose
and meaning.
Today, that means responding and adapting to the shifts that are being
compelled, in large part, by empowered communities of people and the
powerful communication capabilities provided by the social web and technology
as a whole.
It also means designing an organization that wants to catalyze something larger
than itself, a key characteristic of businesses that will not only survive the
emerging business landscape, but thrive within it.
Combined, those two things require rethinking not just how we work, but why
we do what we do, and creating the healthiest conditions we can for
collaboration, innovation, and an outstanding organizational culture.

what is collaboration?
SideraWorks typically defines collaboration as the practice of working in
concert with others (virtually or physically), usually across disciplines and with
a diversity of skill sets, to solve a shared problem through collective effort and
contribution of expertise.
When it’s done right in a workplace environment, collaboration is all about
mutual contribution and mutual benefit toward a shared vision as well as just
solving shared challenges. Often, we end up with a solution or a new creation
we never would have arrived at individually.
Everyone puts something in, everyone gets something out, and we’re all left in
a better place - smarter, more effective, better prepared, closer to our vision -
as a result.

No, not really. But it’s a subtle distinction.
When you’re working as a team, you can all
be working together for a common
outcome or toward a goal. Could even be
something as simple as a project deadline or
task.
The diﬀerence between teamwork and
collaboration is the value created and
derived collectively by the group.
In a teamwork scenario, you could all work
together to divvy up work, do independent
tasks, and arrive at an endpoint or outcome
that’s shared by the team.
You can all individually contribute
something that you know so that the
problem gets solved faster. In fact, your
value on a team is very much about what
you know.
but isn’t that just the
same thing as teamwork?
The problem can be someone else’s entirely,
and you could have no stake in the outcome
but still function as part of the team. Your
contribution doesn’t depend on anyone
else’s, and you can be on a team and not
necessarily be invested in whether the team
achieves what it set out to do.
In addition, a team usually has a clear leader,
someone accountable for the outcome and
responsible for resolving disputes, assigning
tasks, making decisions and ultimately
delivering a speciﬁc solution.

is really about the collective purpose and shared
investment of the group itself. Think of it more
like an ecosystem than a “task force”.
It’s distinct because of the interdependence of
the people, the process, and the results.
The effort toward a collaborative goal is mutual,
but so is the outcome. Everyone contributes and
everyone benefits somehow from the
collaborative effort.
Most often, rather than just contributing a bunch
of resources and letting someone else sort
through them to come up with a solution,
individual collaborators pool their resources and
expertise to then create something new that
ends up being greater than the sum of the
parts. And the value of participation isn’t just in
what you know, but in how you connect with
others and truly leverage what you know to make
something bigger, together.
collaboration, on the
other hand
It’s the result of shared expertise and
collective brainpower and dialogue that
ends up creating new solutions to problems
that lots of people share. Problems they care
about solving.
In successful collaboration, the collective
outcomes are what matter. The group gets
all the credit, all take the critique.
Collaborators care about the health of the
collective as well as their own individual
needs, and the results -- for better or for
worse -- are owned by everyone and
rewarded as such.

articulating value
Organizations have reaped the benefits of working in teams for years: it’s efficient, it’s
effective, and it can be a lot faster than tackling problems piecemeal.
Collaboration, on the other hand, can be messy. It’s not always faster. It’s not always
super efficient (at least not in the traditional limited measure of efficiency). It takes
cultural change as well as process change.
That sounds pretty negative doesn’t it? However, when done well it is incredibly
effective.
Here are just a few of the proven benefits of collaboration.

faster innovation
better access to
information and
knowledge
Beyond simply being more productive, people who
collaborate as a matter of practice have better self-esteem,
more refined interpersonal skills, feel more creative, and
believe that their work has value and impact beyond
their day to day tasks.
individual purpose
Accenture says that 59% of middle managers miss critical
information every day because they can’t find it or never
see it.
Dedicated collaboration helps remove some of the friction
in everyday communication and information sharing.
In a global market that sees a rapid pace of change, it’s
critical to not only stay competitive, but stay ahead of
what’s happening in your sector.
IBM interviewed 765 CEOs. Nearly half of them said that
collaboration was not only critical to innovation, but that
their most significant source of those innovations was
collaboration among their employees.

the mobile
workforce
healthier work
culture
When Cisco made dedicated cultural and operational
investments in collaboration, they saved $691 million and
increased productivity 4.9 percent in its 2008 ﬁscal year.
Overall, they’re reporting a 900% return on their
investment.
improved
organizational
eﬀectiveness
Talent recruitment and retention are critical in this
emerging business age. According to the metrics of Trust,
Pride, and Enjoyment -- key Great Place To Work®
components -- “The degree of pride and levels of
authentic connection and camaraderie employees feel
with one another are essential components”.
Creating opportunities to encourage and reward
collaboration can encourage all of the above.
By 2015, 1.3 billion people will be part of the mobile
workforce. That’s 37.5% of the workforce overall.
Collaboration then becomes absolutely essential to
operations and keeping the wheels on an evolving
business, not just helpful to culture.

what gets in the way?
Collaboration and social business, however, isn’t always as smooth and easy as we’d
like it to be.
Getting individuals to work together can be complex and nuanced in and of itself, and
there are a number of factors that can make that even more complicated when
dealing with the existing structures of organizations, cultural issues, and the day to
day pressures of getting work done.
Getting from a traditional culture of “Knowledge is MY power” to one of “Sharing is
OUR growth” isn’t simple.
Here are some of the common trouble spots.

lack of education
no incentives in
place
When collaboration is considered a luxury instead of an
essential part of achieving business goals, it can be shoved
to the side. That means it gets passed over for budgets, for
process improvements, and in discussions about
improving culture or workforce development.
missing ties to
business goals
Individuals focus their time in two places: where they’re
compensated to focus, and where they’re intrinsically
motivated to focus.
If collaboration is undervalued, it’s not tied to raises,
bonuses, promotions, or performance evaluations, and it
can discourage people from exploring its more qualitative
beneﬁts. If it’s not recognized as a worthwhile
accomplishment, it loses its luster pretty quickly.
Communication is everything.
In addition to communicating that collaboration is valued
and will be rewarded, we have to articulate what we mean
by collaboration and what our expectations are. If we
don’t understand how collaboration can help us do our
jobs better or beneﬁt the business, we simply won’t
spend time doing it.

competing priorities
lack of
empowerment for
employees
Collaboration is an open process and a creative one, but it
does require some thought and planning to do well. In
fact, it benefits from formalized structures to create the
optimal conditions and circumstances for collaboration
to arise naturally and regularly.
weak internal
structure
Everyone is being asked to do more with less. And often,
workplace environments discourage pursuits of
initiatives that aren’t directly related to someone’s role
or job description.
Collaboration is immediately stifled if individuals don’t feel
like they can devote time or resources to it without having
their priorities called into question.
While business goals are often shared, the path to
achieving those goals is complex and requires contribution
from varied departments, business units and individuals, all
of whom have their own responsibilities.
How do you decide which problems are the biggest
priorities, and who gets to make that determination?
Competing priorities often hobble collaboration efforts
before they can even start.

Successful collaboration requires a great deal of trust and
contribution on the part of everyone involved.
If there are personality conflicts among individuals, they
can create difficult or even toxic environments that
discourage the discourse and sharing that are so critical to
collaborative success.
interpersonal
conflict

bad is worse than none
Eﬀective collaboration, just like social business initiatives, requires a three-pronged
approach. A strong focus on Culture, application of enabling Technologies, and a
meaningful approach to Adoption (policies, processes, governance, incentives, etc.).
These are three legs of a stool and without addressing all three you’re just wasting
your resources.
In fact, a bad collaboration initiative is worse than an organization simply deciding to
not collaborate at all. It happens all too often however, namely because these
initiatives will be taken on by a single group or department who isn’t empowered to
address the other areas or isn’t educated on the need to do so.
Failing to address all three areas is the number one reason that
collaboration projects fail (indeed, it’s the main reason for
the failure of most cross-departmental initiatives).

the innovation connectionCollaboration and innovation go hand in hand, so it’s easy to see how they can often
be confused with one another.
This document isn’t about defining innovation so we won’t spend much time on it
other than to say that those waters are also muddy. For some companies they only
look to quantifiable measures of intellectual property outputs, for others it’s a
qualitative trait of their culture. The reality should be somewhere in the middle and
the degree varies depending upon industry sector.
Regardless of your specific definition, collaboration brings about an exchange of
ideas amongst a diversity of viewpoints. And executives intuitively know (and studies
prove) that
innovation, whether planned or unplanned occurs through this
cascading, domino-like sequence of one idea sparking
another.
So while collaboration is not to be confused with
innovation, it is certainly the enabler.

the big picture
Collaboration and enhanced innovation are natural artifacts of a social business. The
six core traits of a social business (agile, adaptive, empowered, connected, open, and
active intelligence) remove barriers to these objectives, reduce friction, and setup the
appropriate organizational culture for organic adoption of these types of initiatives.
Perhaps more importantly, the holistic viewpoint of a social business mindset ensures
that all of the necessary elements for success (culture, technology, process) are
accounted for and exponentially increases the odds of seeing a positive return.
Adaptability
Empowerment
Agility
Connectivity
Active
Intelligence
Openness

Amber Naslund, President
@ambercadabra
want to know more?
Defining Social
Business
SideraWorks.com
Matt Ridings, CEO
@techguerilla
info@sideraworks.com

Doing Collaboration Badly Is Worse Than Not Doing It At All - SideraWorks

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Doing Collaboration Badly Is Worse Than Not Doing It At All - SideraWorks