Author: simongterry

The Harvard Business Review has put a lot of attention this year into collaboration overload, the challenges of collaboration and sharing of information. Can there be too much of a good thing? Always. The issue as ever is not the volume. Managing success and the return of collaboration comes down to the choices you make. Making the right choices demands a clear strategy and plan.

Reap the Whirlwind

I sell my services to work as a consultant with clients in innovation, collaboration, learning and leadership. I work for multiple clients at the same time and often work alongside other consultants, vendors and partners in this work. I have speaking engagements that can require coordination with other speakers, event organisers and more. I coach executives and sit on boards. I run conversations on multiple social media channels. On top of this I work out loud, mentor and assist others, participate in a number of communities, help manage the CAWW community and I run Working Out Loud week and other projects. I have plenty of opportunities to feel the pain of collaboration. Most weeks feel like a collaboration whirlwind.

Frustrations will always happen. Many of these pains are a part of all work:

• Am I thrilled with people who take my ideas to reuse them often without attribution? No, but I know that they aren’t helping themselves much. Often they forget it is not the work but the understanding and discussion that adds value. There is always more to be shared. In many cases, they miss out on this value and damage their own brand in their efforts.
• Am I comfortable that some people don’t realize I can help them more, form a negative impression or decide not to hire me on what I share? Those people are missing the value that comes from discussion, tailoring, and more thinking than fits in 140 characters or 800 words. Many more people will start a productive work conversation based on what I share.
• Do I need to juggle other people’s priorities with my own? Yes. However, that is frankly life. We are not islands of personal productivity. Never were. Never will be.
• Do I get frustrated with the people who don’t appreciate or acknowledge assistance? Yes, but I know I am often busy and forget to be grateful enough for the help of others.
• Do I enjoy the critics, the egotists, the argumentative, and the trolls? No. However, I am aware enough to realize that some of them are right and I will make lots of mistakes. I can learn from seeking to understand other viewpoints. I have learned not to feed the trolls. Their issues are their own.
• Do some people take more than they give in collaboration? Of course.  Much of the time this is unthinking. People can see their own needs more clearly than yours.
• Do you need to speak up for your value and the need for reciprocity? Yes. Nobody makes me give my time and effort. I have choices to make.

At the heart of issues like information overload, collaboration overload, the perils of the gig economy, and the perils of working out loud are issues of human relationships and personal agency. We can’t escape relationships and we need to own our own agency. Most importantly, we must use our frustrations as the impetus to learn and to change.

A Strategy and A Plan

Owning our personal agency in networks of relationships asks us to have a strategy and specific plans. The value of collaboration is a net value. If you look only at the costs of collaboration, you will miss all the value. The net value is realised by maximising the returns and minimising the costs.  A strategy and a plan for our collaborative activities is how we achieve this.

We can’t learn how to do better until we know what we are trying to achieve and we are measuring our performance. Some of the frustrations I described above are expected.  Many are surprises, as are many of the benefits. My goal in the work I do connecting, sharing, working out loud and helping others is to minimise the costs and continue to grow the benefits.

Here are some guidelines for your plan:

• Have a purpose: Knowing why you are sharing helps clarify the rewards that you are seeking, whether those flow back to you or are your impact on others
• Know what success looks like: When you can define success you have the better chance of achieving it.
• Know your networks: Who are your communities? What are you sharing where? Why? If you have a one size fits all strategy, you are missing out and wasting effort.
• Make choices: You cannot and should not do everything. Choose what is most valable to you and others.
• Invest only what you can: There is no valuable return on overwork. Running yourself down has only a long-term cost.  Learn to say ‘no’ when the demands are too great or the returns too thin.
• Remember the value of relationships and learning: It can be easy to forget that deeper relationships and growing skills are part of the value of collaboration. This human & social capital is just as valuable as the financial capital and may have more to do with your future success.
• Seek to match cost and value as closely in time as possible: Invest upfront for a much later return and your frustrations will escalate.  The risks will increase that things change.  Make sure you are getting returns from your collaboration now. They don’t have to be reciprocal but there should be value to you to participate.
• Ask for the value you need: People don’t know what you want unless you clearly ask for what you need. Everyone else is busy and distracted. You don’t factor in their thinking unless you make an ask.  They will assume you are OK if you keep participating silently.

We don’t have to share and give and contribute. The challenge for each of us is to make the choices to contibute and create value for us and others. 

Contribute and Create Value is the theme of this Working Out Loud week from 5-11 June 2017. 

Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one – John Berger

Work can be demanding and alienating. Isolated into performance units in a mechanical process of production the individual can feel disconnected from peers. Worse peers may be structured as competitors, if not in performance terms, as competitors for scarce resources and attention. 

As John Berger highlights in his book Confabulations the power of storytelling is to creat human moments of intimacy out of every day events. We tell stories to find the intimate humanity in our relationships and our experience. 

Working out loud involves narrating work. Working out loud takes what to us are the mundane challenges of our work and tells their stories to others. To our surprise, our mundane experience can be extraordinary to others. Our limited capabilities look magical to someone who doesn’t know how or that our everyday work is even possible. 

In a world where we are always connected, it can be hard to remember that crowds are lonely places. We can devalue human connection because we have so much of it. The value of working out loud is that its stories of work bring opportunities for new intimacy in our relationships. When we add the generosity that working out loud asks of its practitioners, then all kinds of magic are possible. 

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet everyday total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy – John Berger

Working Out Loud week is from 5-11 June 2017. See wolweek.com for more. 

You can’t escape Relationships

Look at any diagram representing an organisation and you will see webs of human relationships. Some times these relationships are obvious. Other times the relationships are hidden in our mechanistic mindset. When an organisation describes its customers or its touch points, relationships are usually evident. Organisation charts describe relationships of roles in terms of power but they also describe boundaries and stakeholders that need to be navigated. Process flow diagrams have hidden layers of human relationships and entangling human activity that supports the lean stripped back focus on a neat process.  Equally system diagrams have hidden layers of human relationships.

Put a single human in or around your organisation and you are going to have to deal with real human relationships.  No matter what technology promises. No matter what simplicity CEOs and boards may desire.  Their roles and relationships alone bring the complexity of human relationships into the organisation. I’ve seen many CEOs bemoan the fact that “the business, the products and all the numbers have changed, but market perceptions haven’t.”  They are discounting the value of human relationships in their work.

While organisations may not treat them well, it is worthwhile to remember that no organisation exists without stakeholders. An organisation that exists for its own sake has failed already.

You have to deal with Humans

Once we acknowledge that the humans aren’t going away, we must deal with what humans and their relationships bring with them.  Every human brings motivations, knowledge, capabilities, hopes, fears, biases, experience, expectations, behaviours, trust and reputation. Every human has a network that can support them and help develop their capabilities or hinder them and distract their performance. These elements must be factored into any work.

Real humans are not fungible. They don’t move neatly when you want them to move. Humans value the personal and social capital that surrounds work, often more than the work itself. That applies to employees, but it also applies to customers, shareholders, suppliers and other community stakeholders. Any organisation ignores these fundamentals at their peril.

We are all so busy. Every day presents difficult challenges beyond our available resources. The pace and demands of our busyness mean that our work becomes too complex when a question:

• moves beyond a yes or no
• has more than two options
• requires thought
• balances multiple goals
• involves human relationships
• hangs on interdependencies; or
• does not offer an easy answer.

We are all so busy. Every day presents difficult challenges beyond our available resources. The pace and demands of our business mean that our work is always addressing the kind of question that:

• moves beyond a yes or no
• has more than two options
• requires thought
• balances multiple goals
• involves human relationships
• hangs on interdependencies; or
• does not offer an easy answer.

We are all so busy. Every day presents difficult challenges beyond our available resources. The pace and demands of our business mean we need to address the too complex questions.

We need to see others as individuals, not by comparison. The most dangerous comparison of all is comparing another to one’s self.

Humans are social creatures. We live in tribes, clans, and families. We gather in large aggregations and participate in social activities that reward us with wealth, social status, respect, and fame. For many people, the hierarchy of this social activity is an all-consuming focus.

With this social activity comes the inevitability of comparison. There are others. There is me. In the gap between the two questions arise. How do I compare to them? How do they compare to each other? Am I rising or falling? How am I doing?

The reality is that we will never know. The goals, motivations, failures, set-backs, lessons, effort, history and support of others are mostly hidden from us. We cannot know exactly how they are going or what the outward manifestations mean for their personal sense of achievement. Appearances are deceptive.

Even if there was value in comparison, we live on a planet where there are just too many other people. With all those people there are millions of ways to discriminate. There is no end to the comparisons that can be made. Know your place in one domain and another will arise to confound you.

To compare we need to see some things as like us and others as not. Ultimately, these comparisons diminish our individuality our uniqueness and our ability to contribute to the diversity of our society. As appealing as comparisons may be to our hierarchical brain, we are wiser to see each person as a unique individual.

The answer to each of the questions is not outside us.  Comparisons get us know closer to understanding what will offer us meaning, happiness and satisfaction. Comparions offer no insight into others. We can learn from others and collaborate with others. Competing with others should be saved for situations where that is the point of the game.  Competition is not the meaning of our social, human lives.

The competitive performance orientation of modern business can mean executives will focus intently on execution of the goal. There are no prizes for first, fastest or biggest in collaboration. The best collaboration is fulfillment of your strategic goals. That’s ongoing adaptive work.

Starting the Race

When starting a new collaboration implementation, questions from senior executives often focuses on what success of the project looks like.  These executives look to external experts and sources to guide their definition of success. The questions often come from the traditional competitive dynamics of business:

• Will we be the first of our competitors on this tool?
• Who’s got the most employees?
• Who’s best in our industry or market?
• How many employees do we need to get on the platform?
• How fast can we get this done?
• Why do we need to invest for that long?
• Can we do it cheaper than others?

There is no prize for collaboration. In hunting for the traditional definition of success in competition beyond the organisation, these executives are starting in the wrong place

Each organisation’s strategy, culture, needs and team are different.  Benchmarks can be shared, become competitive goals and a source of bragging rights, but they are usually meaningless in the creation of value. Rather than engaging in the traditional business competition, each organisation needs to develop its own strategic plan and invest accordingly.

Asking Why

In the questions above, while the executives are asking to quantify goals, they are actually trying to make sense of what success looks like in this new and different way of working. Most executives have learned to define success clearly for a new endeavour and work their way back from there using tried and true transactional methods to hit that target.  The questions are all efforts to assess how hard the transition will be and what they will need to do to support the change.  Answer the question at face value with a number or a case study and you might short circuit the learning and sense making process. Importantly, you run the risk of ending up with tried and true approaches rather than a wider adaptive change.

The questions are all efforts to assess how hard the transition will be and what they will need to do to support the change.  Answer the question at face value with a number or a case study and you might short circuit the learning and sense making process. Importantly, you run the risk of ending up with tried and true approaches rather than a wider adaptive change.

Leverage these questions to engage the executives on the question of why they are pursuing collaboration. Go looking for the answer of what success looks like in the broader plans and goals within the organisation. You can’t quantify success until you know what they want and the work they have underway to achieve it.

Help the executives to understand that an important part of any collaborative work is the goals of the workers too. This is a conversation that stretches well beyond the board room and has the potential to significantly change the direction of the project. The goal of any collaboration project is to leverage the discretionary contributions of employees. Their definition of success matters too.

Don’t fall for the numbers game and short term targets. A collaboration project is ongoing adaptive work for the whole organisation.