Bob Morison - Research Director, Stryve Advisors

We hear a lot of talk about collaboration these days, and organizations regularly pledge allegiance to its importance. Yet few are purposeful in how they enable and encourage collaboration, and so few really capitalize on how collaboration can help their businesses.

The growing role and importance of collaboration are pretty obvious. Global and round-the-clock operations, networked business models relying extensively on outside partners, activist customers who want control over products, services, and the process of purchase and consumption – to thrive under these conditions, businesses need to collaborate extensively and effectively both inside the organization and out in the marketplace. Collaboration can be key to efficient operations, responsive service, rapid innovation, and better decision-making in a complex enterprise.

Information technology, of course, makes this complexity possible by giving us the tools to manage it. And the recent wave of Web 2.0 tools has dramatically increased our ability to locate, connect with, learn from, and collaborate with others. But the popularity of tools, starting with Facebook and Twitter, has also fed some misconceptions regarding collaboration, especially in a business context. We often say “collaborate” when all we’re really doing is connecting and sharing basic information. And we sometimes assume that, because the tools are simple to use, collaboration is easy, and it will expand virally.

Armed with that second assumption, many companies have taken the “if you build it, they will come” approach. Install some technology for collaboration, and good things will happen. More often than not, they find adoption slow, results sporadic, and the value of the investment questioned. Technology enables collaboration but doesn’t cause it.

Business collaboration is not easy (and in some corporate structures and cultures it may be downright difficult). It may require changes to skills, attitudes, incentives, and business methods to unleash the power and value of collaboration. The company that wants to capitalize on collaboration must be purposeful about it. Start with a clear view of what collaboration is and isn’t. We’re talking about getting work done, not just connecting and communicating in general.

Business collaboration is working together to achieve a level of performance, or to create something new, that is superior to what any individual entity could do alone.

Then be specific about where collaboration can be most important to the business – what people, doing what activities, pursuing what objectives? For example, collaboration can be leveraged where the work entails innovation, people and tasks are dispersed, and people haven’t worked together before. You may well provide a basic collaboration toolkit to all employees, but focus your efforts to encourage collaboration where the objectives are important and measurable.

Recognize that collaboration takes different forms, and that collaborations can in fact be designed and managed. Consider these four dimensions:

• Type – For example, are similar activities being coordinated across business units, or different activities being linked in a value chain? To what extent do the people collaborating “speak the same language” to begin with? 
• Scale/Scope – How many entities are involved, and how much of the business and marketplace do they span? Does the addition of each new collaborator leverage the “network effect” – or make things more complicated? What ambition is reasonable? 
• Intensity – At one extreme, do people simply share knowledge that improves each other’s work? At the other, are they altering and integrating their work to form a new and more collaborative business process? 
• Duration – Short-term collaborations, such as temporary teams addressing specific business problems, are relatively simple to shape and motivate. Long-term collaborations need much more attention to the “rules of engagement.”

With those factors in mind, you can anticipate how a collaboration should play out, you can equip it with technology that fits the tasks and workflow, and you can provide training and incentives to collaborate well. The enemies to overcome are organizational silos, the not-invented-here syndrome, and localized rewards. Collaboration must be recognized, measured, and rewarded – and failure to collaborate where needed must carry consequences.

As you close this collaboration loop, you can really put collaboration to work:

For more detailed coverage of these ideas and recommendations, Stryve Members can view the “Business Collaboration Basics” section of the Stryve Outcome Project, Analytics and Collaboration, research report. To discuss further, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it