May 23, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Management
It is a bit ironic to think that in the midst of the information revolution that is surrounding us, that we are in some ways reverting to the ways of pre-agricultural humans.
Bit of a stretch? Just think, pre-agricultural humans lived by what they knew, where the water was, how to track an animal, then kill, dress, and cook it, which plants were edible, and so on. There were no personal possessions, everything was shared, and the group succeeded or failed by group effort and their relative position in their environment.
We moved away from this collaborative model as we started to grow things and gain possessions, but in the information revolution we are going through now, perhaps we are going back to some of the foundations of what made hunter-gathers sufficiently successful to evolve into us.
If this is the case, maybe we should be looking at the social and organisational behaviours that made hunter gatherers so successful. Forget the strategists, bring in the anthropologists.
Feb 20, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Social Media
Things have changed, the tools of web 2.0 make collaboration, at least theoretically, really easy, so why it is so hard to get done?
Outside the web, where Wikipedia, Linux, Ideo and a few others have rewritten the rules, and boomed as a result, the output from new collaboration tools appears far more limited. Most businesses I deal with are struggling with co-ordinating a video conference, and that is about the end of the tools that they are using.
In a fundamental way, they need to consider the architecture of their collaborative efforts. What works for a co-located team, even if it has a few “fly-ins” will not work for a truly distributed team, or one that is working on a complex development, even when co-located. It seems a few rusted on practices need to be revisited:
- Responsibility for the outcome should be clear, along with budgets and timelines. It is the group that holds responsibility collectively, not individuals, and individual performance is measured by their contribution to the groups achievement of the outcome.
- The “how to” get the job done is left to the team.
- The team should be able to co-opt and manage outside skills as necessary to get the job done with relative freedom.
Nov 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Marketing, Social Media
It is pretty clear to most that the number of connections in a network grows more quickly than the number of people in the network. It is a mathematically consistent relationship captured by Metcalf’s Law, but in summary, you double the size of a network, you quadruple the number of potential connections.
This relationship between the nodes in a network, and the number of (potential) connections is the foundation of social media, as the increase of the potential connections comes at little or no cost.
This is in complete contrast to the past, where these added connections added cost at a consistent rate, each new potential connection required someone to spend the time to make the phone call, mail the brochure, meet, discover if there was a potential value in devoting the resources to nurturing the relationship. All this cost prevented the development of the relationships that creates a network.
The relationship maths is the same, but the transactions costs associated with the “old economy” ensured that many things that now can happen, simply could not because of the costs involved. Hugely successful sites like Flikr simply could not have evolved with the transaction costs of the past involved.
The new challenge is harnessing the potential energy in these connections, and leveraging it to benefit the individuals in these potential networks enabled by the removal of the transaction costs.
Nov 18, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Innovation, OE, Strategy
Only in physics, in personal relationships we seek common ground, people who under stand instinctively what we are saying and thinking, and who work the way we do.
Collaborative teams and alliances of many types often fail from the start because those who join, or are “volunteered” are similar, whereas in a collaborative team with a problem to solve, you need all types, and the processes to assist the management of the group need to be a part of the consideration.
You need at least one of each of the four behavioral extremes;
- Someone who is creative, out there, not too concerned with convention and how it has been done before
- Someone who is numbers and data driven, analytical, who seeks quantitative foundations for hypotheses and ideas
- Someone who just has to complete, they like to plan, and then work the plan to the end
- Someone who builds bridges, and can assist the relationships, both internally and with outsiders
These four types will not often come together without assistance, as they are very different, they see thing in conflicting ways, but to solve a problem, or make an alliance really work and create value for all, that’s just what you need, it is just harder to manage.
Oct 13, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration
It is a pretty simple observation that for a group to act collectively, there must be a strong central reason for them to do so. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes to maintain this sense of collaborative security, and more and more dissention to individual decisions occurs.
For this reason, for large groups to be successful there must be a very strong purpose into which all members “buy” and that has the effect of enabling them to deal with the individual decisions they may not like for the sake of the central purpose, so long as there has been due process exercised in the decision making process.
Consider the difference between the disregard generally apparent towards our political parties, and the high regard we have for the ideals of a group like the Salvation Army, irrespective of what we may think about their position on spirituality, and the music they play on the corner on Saturday morning.
Oct 4, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Operations, Social Media
Somehow, there is an evolutionally phenomenon at work that kicks in when a group gets larger than 150-200, the number that social research has repeatedly identified as the number of people that any individual can have a relationship with, first postulated by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, and now commonly known as “Dunbar’s number.“
As humans evolved, they did so in groups of 200 maximum, and there was little serious conflict inside the group, but there was constant conflict with the similar sized groups in the vicinity, even though they were to all intents and purposes, identical, apart from their group membership.
We now have social media seemingly rewriting the rules, or is Facebook and similar networks the electronic equivalent of a genetic mutation?
In a situation where you have many more than the genetic 200 having a sort of a relationship facilitated by the net, what implications does this mutation, if that is what is, have on the way we should be thinking about using, and regulating access to these sites, and what are the implications in the management of conflict?.
These are very big questions for the next 20 years thay deserve more than a passing, and ideaology driven response.
