By definition, for collaboration to work, you need to both produce and consume.

If you are only consuming, it is not called collaboration.

Many people want the benefit of shared knowledge repositories and cry out for their creation when they don’t exist or cry out for said repositories when they are unknown to those who could benefit.

The problem is repositories often don’t exist, because of the inertia in thinking that it is somebody else’s job to post what I need to know.

A distributed group trying to coordinate it’s effort will be successful only when it finds a critical mass of people willing to step out and share, question, think out loud and initiate with the rest.

Collaboration works best when the ratio of producers to consumers is moving towards 1.

Leave a Comment

Can people engaged in your cause connect with each other independent of location? How many clicks does it take to connect them?

• Do they need to know what time zone the person is in before initiating contact?
• Must they look up the person’s phone number, email address or handle before initiating contact?
• Do they need to install special software to bridge the communication?

Today’s platform’s enable people to connect without any awareness of location or particulars.

Last week I was in a hotel near our headquarters. I needed to connect with a colleague. There was simply a big “call” button flashing on my web browser’s screen. I had no idea where he was, what his phone number was or what devices I might be able to connect with him on.

It turns out, he was three timezones away, working at a student centre from his laptop. I was tethering an internet connection from my phone to my laptop. We enjoyed a five minute video conference, solved our problem and went on with our business.

Choose platforms that don’t ca...

More »

Leave a Comment

1. It’s presumptuous of me to assume that you own software that will be able to interpret the document’s format.

2. If I merely wanted you to read the contents a format such a .pdf is much more universally acceptable and there is free software you can use to open my document.

3. If I want to interact with you on the document, I have no way of knowing you are working on making changes.

4. If I suddenly realize I want to make a change, even while you have the baton (file), I want to be able to make changes to the document.

5. If it’s necessary to invite other people to give feedback, there’s no easy for us to all coordinate making the changes and ensuring we can all see the most current revision.

I will, however, gladly send you a link to something you can work on in your browser and we all have access to the latest revision in real-time. This is the future.

Leave a Comment

I’ve recently journeyed with a group of 12 leaders transitioning from a model of meeting over conference calls, to meeting over Skype.

Here a few learnings.

• Group Chat – It’s very powerful that anybody can say anything at any time without interrupting the main conversation.  This can range from something as simple as “I agree with Tony’s point” to “@melinda, please go on mute” to “I have some reservations about this, could I have a chance to push back?”  This allows for engagement of the entire group without high overhead and actually helps me pay better attention.
• Private Chat – I’ve found I’m frequently dialoguing privately with other team members on the call.  It might be a point of encouragement, a point of clarification or help with a technical issue or pointing them to some supporting information or documents.  This is really efficient because we don’t have to send emails outside the meeting or meet separately but instead can efficiently collaborate during the ebb and flow of the main meeting....

More »

Leave a Comment

The real test is if I gave you only:

• a mailing list or
• a blog or
• a twitter stream or
• an online community or
• a social profile or
• a location-based app

… could you use it effectively to influence others?  That’s right, you only get one.

Real carpenters can use whatever tools you give them and make lots of valuable things.

Many people affiliated with your cause will tell you that they’ll start being collaborative and more effective once you give them better tools.

Tools help, but leaders who are collaborative will use whatever platform you give them in a value-added way.  Keep your eye out for these people, you want them on your team.

I’m all for better tools.  Yes, we need them.  I love making them.  I’m simply realizing having an amazing tool in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it isn’t much help.  Inferior tools in the hands of real carpenters still work.  Just look at Craigslist.

Leave a Comment