The culture of collaboration
In his book The Culture of Collaboration
Evan Rosen’s ten cultural elements of collaboration
- Trust. To exchange ideas and create something with others, we must develop trust. This is a challenge, especially in competitive organizational cultures. Nevertheless, we must get over our fears and develop trust if we are to collaborate freely.
- Sharing. Hoarding information prevents the free flow of ideas and therefore sabotages collaboration. Sharing what we know improves collective creation by an order of magnitude and therefore makes everybody more valuable.
- Goals. Taking the time to agree on goals at the beginning of a collaborative project pays off exponentially by providing the impetus for shared creation. Innovation – The desire to innovate fuels collaboration. In turn, collaboration enhances innovation. After all, why collaborate just to maintain the status quo?
- Environment. The design of both physical space and virtual environments impacts innovation and collaboration.
- Collaborative Chaos. While all people and organizations require some order, effective collaboration requires some degree of chaos. Collaborative chaos allows the unexpected to happen and generates rich returns.
- Constructive Confrontation. Great collaboration requires exchanging viewpoints, and sometimes that means construction confrontation – expressing candor about ideas. Collaborators must confront each other so that they can hash out their differences and make their shared creation better.
- Communication. Collaboration is inextricably linked with communication, both interpersonal and organizational.
- Community. Without a sense of community, we often lack comfort and trust. Therefore, community must be present for effective collaboration to occur.
- Value. The primary reason we collaborate is to create value – reducing cycle or product development time, creating a new market, solving problems faster, designing a more marketable product or service, or increasing sales.
Common attributes of collaborative cultures
According to Rosen, a set of common attributes can be found in collaborative cultures. As outlined by Christopher Ken Mays in his brief review of the book (PDF), they are:
- Frequent, cross-functional interaction
- Leadership and power spread around organization
- People are accessible regardless of their level
- Reduce fear of failure
- Broad input into decisions
- Cross-pollination of people
- Spontaneous or unscheduled interaction
- Less structured interaction
- Formal or informal mentoring
- Tools fit work styles
All in all, the book offers useful heuristics for gauging an entity’s collaborative capacity. I’m a little skeptical of the neat packaging, however. I don’t know why collaboration has precisely ten cultural elements. I’m guessing I could search for commonalities between organizations where people work well together and come up with five, ten, fifteen or more shared attributes. Such is the editing process, I suppose.
Pretty numerals aside, I’m sympathetic to Rosen’s non-technological framework for observing how well people get things done together. He’s writing a third book on the matter and blogs regularly at The Culture of Collaboration. I’m interested in learning how others have applied his insights to their projects, so if you’re on that track, please let me know.