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@KRISTOFDEWULF
In a world gone social, an ever increasing number
of organizations is chasing the benefits of social
collaboration, both inside and outside their own
four walls. With initiatives such as Google
launching its high altitude balloons to wirelessly
connect billions of people in remote areas, global
collaboration has never been easier and is
expected to surge in the next decade. The core
drivers to get employees, customers, partners and
many other sections of society collaborating with
each other are obvious: disseminate knowledge,
reduce costs, increase innovation speed and
success, share risk, boost market performance
and improve operating efficiency. Yet, despite the
fact that the promises of social business are
overwhelming, Gartner estimates that throughout
2015 about 80% of social business efforts are not
expected to achieve the intended benefits. Even
more so, many collaboration initiatives leave
participants behind with a hangover, generating the
opposite effect of what was intended originally.
So how do you avoid suffering from a collaboration
hangover?
Too many collaborative initiatives are set up for the
wrong reasons, for unclear reasons or for no reason
at all. When the underlying motivation to start
collaborating is the opportunistic desire to just make
more money or to look better, you are bound to fail
simply because the reason to collaborate is not
mutually shared between all participating actors.
Make sure you spend enough time articulating the
why behind your collaborative efforts, creating a
shared and crystal-clear compelling purpose for co-
creation. Similar to the story of the elephant and the
blind men, only too often we make the wrong
assumption that our perception of the world is similar
to someone else’s. Without a clear unifying vision,
one ends up making too many bad compromises in
an effort to address everyone’s concerns, destroying
the potential impact of your collaboration. When in
1970 the 3-member crew of Apollo 13 seemed
doomed after an oxygen tank exploded, everyone
successfully united around one clear purpose: saving
the lives of all three astronauts, making sure nothing
would go wrong during their 200,000-mile journey
back to Earth.
01Sharea clearpurpose
@KRISTOFDEWULF
It seems counter-intuitive, but one of the main
stumbling blocks for collaboration is that our own
success gets in the way. The more successful we are
or feel, the faster we stop looking for inspiration through
others. Take a brand like Nokia. Being the world’s
largest vendor of cellphones from 1998 to 2012, Nokia
became too arrogant, assuming past success is a
sufficient guarantee for future success. But once a
crisis or emergency hits us, it forces us to think and act
differently. Fight your own success demons by making
people feel somewhat uncomfortable, not allowing them
to settle for current success. Create a positive vicious
circle of open discovery: the more people (want to)
know and discover, the more they realize what they
don’t know. Think of the immense amount of time
aircraft pilots spend in simulation environments, getting
prepared for emergency situations they will hopefully
never encounter in reality. Organizations should
develop a similar simulation, moving from a ‘crisis-
prone’ to a ‘crisis-prepared’ context by immersing
themselves in less than comfortable business contexts
and surrounding themselves with people thinking
differently or being more critical than they are.
@KRISTOFDEWULF
02 Makeyourselfuncomfortable
You cannot force collaboration upon people. It happens
because people are intrinsically motivated to be part of
it: when they want to, where they want to and how they
want to. Collaboration hangovers often result from the
fact that people are pushed into rather than pulled
towards something. The old ‘plan and push’ is out, the
new ‘engage and pull’ is in. Consider the example of
Microsoft Encarta vs Wikipedia: while well-paid
professionals incentivized with standard extrinsic
motivators developed Encarta, Wikipedia was built for
fun by unpaid volunteers and believers. Just before
Microsoft decided to remove the software from stores in
2009, Wikipedia got 97% of U.S. online encyclopedia
visits, Encarta just 1.3%. Create the necessary degree
of freedom for people to act autonomously, tapping into
their unique strengths and capabilities as suits them
best. Next time you think about organizing yet another
2-hour client focus group or internal brainstorm session
to squeeze every drop of inspiration out of people,
consider alternative formats which allow more flexibility
for people to contribute.
03 Embraceopt-in
@KRISTOFDEWULF
"Curiosity has its own reason of existing", Albert
Einstein said. Humans are indeed ultimate learning
machines as long as their engines are oiled by
curiosity. Even if there is no immediate benefit, people
love to explore the answers to things. Even the best
artificial intelligence algorithms fail if they are not
encouraged to openly explore new options. Yet, while
people are inquisitive by nature, they unlearn a big
part of it while growing older, as rigid educational
systems and bureaucratic organizational thinking are
getting in their way. Did you know human capacity for
non-linear, imaginative thinking drops from 50% at the
age of 12 to 20% at the age of 16 all the way down to
less than 10% the moment we graduate from
university? Think about how you nurture the creative
child that resides within your workforce, make
collaboration a fun and engaging experience and
allow people to ‘waste time’. The World’s Deepest
Garbage Can is a great example of this, making it fun
for people to pick up trash and dump it in a garbage
can.
04 Create acuriosity culture
@KRISTOFDEWULF
In the massive global change around us, there is one
constant: humans remain human and will always act
as prosocial beings. So don’t confuse collaboration
with a piece of technology or software: these do not
solve problems, people do. Collaboration does not
simply happen, but needs to be nurtured through a
group of people, tapping into human needs and
solving human problems. Think of using more
‘Facebook-like’ enterprise collaboration technology
that puts social first and collaboration second. Have
people do and experience things together, thus
creating the necessary social glue for smooth and
relevant interactions, sharing and co-creation. Keep it
small enough, taking into account Dunbar’s magical
number of 150 persons whom we can keep stable
social relationships with.
05 Make ithuman
@KRISTOFDEWULF
When collaborating with others, people often fear that
they will give more than they get back or that they will
reveal more of themselves than they want. Define a
clear ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) for all contributing
parties, setting clear expectations as to what people
are willing to invest and what they will get back. The
LEGO Ideas initiative allows volunteers to submit any
project idea to LEGO. Ideas reaching 10,000 votes
are reviewed by the LEGO Review Board and
potentially turned into real products, with the person
having submitted the original idea receiving 1% of the
total net sales of the product. Sharing is caring: create
a ‘wall of fame’, making the output of collaboration
visible to everyone, put high-performing contributors
in the spotlight and embed continuous feedback
loops. Sometimes, a mere ‘thank you’ is good enough.
The moment users feel they are no longer listened to
or appreciated, they will pull out.
06 ThinkWIIFM
@KRISTOFDEWULF
We all know the good old quote from the late Steve
Jobs that “people don't know what they want until you
show it to them.” He is right in many ways: people
often don’t know why they are doing what they are
doing, they can’t even always report back about what
they actually did, let alone what they were trying to
solve. When people are expressing what they want,
we often start off from the false assumption that they
have a set of stable, explicit, conscious and consistent
preferences to live by. Instead of having people tell
you directly what they want, you could observe,
involve and activate them in new and creative ways so
you can get to their deeper needs and emotions. Have
you ever considered swapping roles in your company,
experiencing how it feels to step into someone else’s
shoes and having people learn from this? Take a look
at how Adecco’s CEO Patrick De Maeseneire
organized a ‘CEO for one month’ competition among
Millennials to take on his job for one month. Congrats
to Paola!
07 Don’t believewhat peopleare telling you
@KRISTOFDEWULF
Memes are defined as carriers of ideas, behaviors or
styles that are transmitted and spread from one
person to the next within a culture. Much in the same
way as genes, they self-replicate, mutate and respond
to selective pressure. Worthy of being imitated and
repeated over and over again, memes can be very
instrumental in making collaborative initiatives self-
sustaining and long-lasting. Think about the power of
the selfies or loom bracelet hypes, spreading like a
virus by having people imitate and inspire each other.
At Amazon, Jeff Bezos installed a meme by bringing
an empty chair into meetings so that people would be
forced to think about the crucial participant who wasn’t
in the room: the customer. Can you think of similar
meme-inspired approaches that could act as burning
platforms to spur collaboration, getting people
positively addicted to it?
08 Creatememes
@KRISTOFDEWULF
Diversity is the cornerstone of good collaboration,
tapping into the complementary power of diverging
views and perspectives for a stronger result. It helps
to avoid getting involved in managerial wishful thinking
and acts as a sound counterbalance for selective
perception, ego-involvement and ungrounded
optimism. Yet diversity in itself is not enough.
Diversity needs to result into a real collaboration
culture, making sure diverse opinions and
backgrounds blend and are translated into meaningful
actions. A strong collaboration culture is one where
the whole organization is immersed into collaborative
thinking and acting, horizontally and vertically.
Ultimately, the organization of the future will thrive on
ecosystems of collaboration, minimizing waste,
recycling output and being self-sustainable, with
various crowds of people being available on demand
or providing input without even being asked for it.
09 Considerdiversity asa start
@KRISTOFDEWULF
At the end of the day, collaboration needs to deliver
against business KPIs such as protecting margins,
driving market share and loyalty and boosting
innovation. Make sure your collaborative efforts are in
sync with real and important business needs and that
they follow the rhythm of the business rather than the
other way round. Try to embed collaborative thinking
in existing workflows and projects, making it part of
your daily business reality and actions. Think of
collaboration as a strategic organizational capability
through which you can support everyday decisions
and guide strategic choices. A ‘one size fits all’
approach does not work here: your CEO might get the
best inspiration from occasional speed-dating with
users, while R&D people from UCB, a large
pharmaceutical company, get the best results from
having patients participate in multi-disciplinary
working groups, exactly the same way the company’s
strategists and R&D managers do.
10 Findthe rightbeat
@KRISTOFDEWULF
@KRISTOFDEWULF
It is often said that people do not like change. But maybe it is just that
we do not pay sufficient attention to creating the necessary conditions
for change. It takes time to train our brain: people can only turn new
behavior into a habit after executing the new behavior at least 21
times in a row. While establishing a collaborative culture is a
disruptive move for most companies, are we paying enough attention
to respecting these 10 rules? I am interested in learning more about
your personal experiences and I challenge you to add more rules to
avoiding a collaboration hangover. Let’s build a better collaborative
future together!
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