Prue Salter’s Blog: Exploring the Power of Technology as a Learning Tool

SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: ’Building a collaborative workplace’ - Callahan, Schenk and White

New environment for innovation and getting things done:

• no lone pursuits
• need collaboration
• changing skills so seek people with these skills

But:

1. Collaboration skills don’t tend to be taught - on the job or hit and miss.
2. Organisational culture will determine how collaboration is supported.
3. Many companies but ‘collaboration’ software they are not using well

“Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen”

…………………………………………

2. TYPES OF COLLABORATION

a) Team collaboration:

• members of group are known
• clear task interdependencies
• expected reciprocity
• explicit timelines and goals
• implies equal status/footing

b) Community Collaboration:

• shared domain or area of interest
• goal more focused on learning rather than task
• share and build knowledge as opposed to complete projects
• time periods for membership open and ongoing
• status can vary due to experience etc
• reciprocity but not one-to-one

c) Network Collaboration:

• moves beyond relationship-centric nature of team and community collaboration
• starts with individual action/self-interest, then accrues to networks as individuals add to it
• membership and timelines open and unbounded
• no explicit roles
• probably don’t know each other
• driven by advent social media and connectivity
• individuals can’t cope on own with so much info
• networks then mechanisms for knowledge capture, filtering, creation

3. COLLABORATION SUCCESS FACTORS

The article then lists a series of factors that contributes to success in this type of collaboration - they are all of value, but too long to mention, and mostly derived from the factors outlined above.

4. UNDERSTANDING AN ORGS COLLABORATION CULTURE

a) Leadership Culture:

Leader’s behaviours that mould the organisation’s culture:

• Do they pay attention to collaborative strategies?
• How do they react to critical incidents and organizational crises?
• Do they invest resources in collaboration capability?
• Do they model collaboration?
• What behaviours are they rewarding?
• Are collaborative talents sought and nutured?

(ie ‘how does one get ahead around here’)

 b) Team Culture:

• Are specific interdependencies between people valued and supported?
• Through: priorities, targets, learning, explicit team processes

c) Community Culture:

Community leaders usually lead from passion and need to gain support of members as involvement not compulsory.

• What incentives (positive and negative are there)?
• What sort of involvement/time participation is happening?
• Is it clear what teams can share with communities?
• What is the purpose of the community?

d) Network Culture:

• No centralised leadership - more reaction to signals, how do employees manage these?
• Who in org is good at cutting through info overload and are they encouraged in this role?
• Can employees differentiate between identity and trust?
• Are key employees being rewarded so other attractive employment options in network are resisted?
• How does company leadership culture sit with the distributed leadership in networks?

5. STRENGTHENING THE COLLABORATION CULTURE

a) Foster Collaboration Leadership and Support:

• Establish a collaboration coordinator who will:
  • Find opportunities for collaboration
  • Connect people and ideas
  • Help people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools
• Build a group of collaboration supporters, look for people with:
  • Strong project-management skills
  • Curiosity and global thinking
  • Good ‘people connecting’ abilities
• Recruit and promote collaborative people

b) Communicate the fruits of collaboration:

• Initiate communication with leaders: tell success stories backed up with reasoning and data
• Go beyond the leadership: share stories with the wider community

c) Implement collaboration tools:

• First identify the collaboration activities to be supported.
• Then match the tools to these.

Basic technologies:

- telephone and conference call facility

- email and distribution lists

- place to share electronic documents

- ways to share ideas (eg wikis)

- people directories with photos

- instant messaging

- directory of relevant networks

- social bookmarking

- aggregators

May also have features like group calendar, discussion threads, photo and video sharing

d) Start communities of practice: