' As a ': new book explores models for collaboration

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A couple of years ago, business consultant Mehrdad Baghai and James Quigley, the global CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, were chatting about Quigley's formidable challenge of getting all 170,000 of his company's employees "on the same page," working for the collective good of the organization.

"So we started with that question--what does it take to get large numbers of people to work as one," Baghai says stop during an interview in Boston while on a recent book promotion tour. One of the things they found was that management books tended to lay out broad advice about how leadership should work to build collaboration. "Every leader does this--one, two, three, four--and everyone should build an internal market, everyone should do this in innovation."

They knew that the one-size-fits-all approach wasn't what they had in mind to help groups of people develop a shared organizational identity as they worked together. "It just seemed to us that you should think about collaboration as a general good," Baghai says.

Armed with the notion that "collaboration" is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that because the purposes might be different you might need different styles "of collaboration for different situations, they set forth to find out what had been written and what analyses already existed. What they came up with were some "notable efforts," particularly among academics, but "we wanted to find one that in a pragmatic way would help leaders act differently, so it has to be a framework" that would identify ways of collaborating, says Baghai, who lives in Sydney and also is managing director of Alchemy Growth Partners.

Because what they were searching for didn't exist in quite the way they envisioned it, they created a method to identify collaborative archetypes and the characteristics of each, which they detail in their new book, "As One: Individual Action, Collective Power," published by Penguin. Their approach also has been a springboard for the Deloitte Center for Collective Leadership, which is now open in London, as well as related apps for Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Their pragmatic approach started with reviewing hundreds of perspectives on collective action taken from a variety of academic disciplines, including science, economics and psychology. They also pulled together 60 detailed case studies to analyze successful collaborative efforts, asking a set of questions for more than 100 factors about those organizations, such as their structure, systems and processes, leadership, and how they communicate.

They took that date and used on self-organizing map (SOM), to sophisticated forensic data analytic method to "identify distinct modes of behavior As One," as the book explains. The SOM helped them identify recognizable models of collaboration. For instance, some organizations operate akin to a "conductor and orchestra," with "highly scripted and clearly defined roles that focus on precision and efficiency in execution as defined by the conductor." The archetype "community organizer and volunteers" works from a bottom-up model, while "captain and sports team" has "minimal hierarchy" and is highly adaptable to a rapidly changing situation, as would be found on a playing field.

Each archetype is examined in-depth in individual chapters in the book, which reads like a combination of a management book, textbook and a how-to primer. Each archetype is bolstered by explanatory case studies--Apple's App Store, for instance, is highlighted as a case study for the "landlord and tenants" model of collaboration; Linux is a case study in the "community organizer and volunteers" approach (along with Gandhi); and Cirque du Soleil is a study for the "producer and creative team" method.

Part of the idea behind establishing such easily recognizable and understandable models of collaboration was to then provide "language around the archetypes." In other words, "how do you make a group conscious about what you need to do to succeed. If you give them language around the archetypes, they can focus on them. " Baghai uses a recent real-life example from the sports world, recalling how the Miami Heat basketball team got off to a rough start this season, despite all of the hope--and hype--after LeBron James and Chris Bosh signed with the team. Their fellow superstar Dwyane Wade already played for Miami. But superstars do not necessarily make a team.

Asked if he'd seen the press conference where James said after the team started to gel that it just took him a while to figure out Wade's style of play, Baghai says he hadn't, but his eyes light with recognition--that, too, feeds directly into the model of coaches and a team working together. "The key to being on a team is knowing what the other guys are going to do," he says, adding that it's also crucial to not go into games with a set playbook, but to be flexible depending on what the other team does as well. "You have to be reacting to the field of play--one of the things they had to do was change their mode of play."

Other collaborative archetypes outlined in the book are more rigid and, as Baghai notes, it's often the case in work environments (and other interactions with people, in fact) that the best model for working together as one will shift now and again depending on the task or situation. For instance, even within organizations that aren't heavily hierarchical or rigid, there are times when a supervisor just has to tell someone how something is going to be done a particular way and that's that. The book offers guidance on moving fluidly from one archetype to another collaboration, lists and examines characteristics of each, and provides questions to ask to determine the archetype an organization most fits with and how to tell if a particular archetype might not be a good fit.

Establishing what archetype is in play in an organization, remaining conscious of how people interact in that model and seeking ways to support its use can help to overcome the "false sense of commitment" that can stymie attempts to get people to work for the collective good, he says. "Say you need to lift this conference table," Baghai says, gesturing to the table in front of him. "There will be those who circle around it and get at lifting it. There will also be those who say, ' it's a great idea to raise the table, but it's not my job to lift the table, ' "and those are the people whose commitment is false.

While Deloitte has moved forward to put the "As One" approach globally into place internally and with its clients, and opened the center to support those efforts, research into collaborative archetypes continues. Baghai and Quigley--who were assisted with the book by Ainar Aijala, Sabri Challah and Gerhard Vorster--believe that eight archetypes just scratches the surface. They're now at work to establish a taxonomy around collaboration, which has in many respects been left to management intuition rather than being clearly established with identifying characteristics and behaviors.

He likens the continuing process to one of discovering an animal, naming it and then identifying its genus and species as part of the taxonomy. He expects that as they explore a taxonomy structure around the archetypes, they'll find subcategories within each and undoubtedly other archetypes, each with its own genus and species.

"These forms of ' as one ' behavior exist out there--it's just that we've never rigorously put a taxonomy around them," he says. "We see it As One ' as the first listing of this."

(A video of part of the interview with Baghai has been posted online.)

As collaboration goes social, where it will thrive?

Not surprisingly, when it comes to how they operate internally, early adopters often map social media and Enterprise 2.0 into language that is broadly understood by the business, usually under the aegis of collaboration. Recently at Lotusphere 2011 IBM analyst Carol Gavin turned heads when she underscored the vast size of the still somewhat nascent social collaboration market. It is at least $100 billion, and perhaps more. While Enterprise 2.0, and more recently Social Business, have been the talk of many in the industry the last few years, the perceived importance of better collaboration via social media has never been more acute.

These days you can’t turn around without seeing another statistic on how social media has become a dominant channel for all things consumer. It’s not until very recently however that you’ve had otherwise sober management experts making the same pronouncement for the business world. For example, Bill George, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard University, noted late last year that “social networking is the most significant business development of 2010.”

The problem is that there is still a pretty large impedance between these messages and how most organizations today work and think. A response that I still get too often from senior executives when they hear statements like the one above is that they don’t understand how this could be significant to their business, which has seemingly been getting along fine without social media so far. How then does use of social media, internally and externally, have substantial and positive impact to their business? Where and who should apply it? Where will it likely thrive? These are the questions business leaders want answered first.

Unlike the Web’s relentlessly Darwinian environment, businesses have been — until relatively recently — somewhat isolated from the pressures of social media. That is, until social business becomes a competitive factor, which in my last post I presented mounting evidence that this is now the case.

While the answers to these questions are starting to accumulate en masse today, some of the most convincing research which I’ve explored recently, the fundamental issue seems to boil down to the difference between how healthy and optimally connected organizations function vs. the rigid and traditional hierarchies that make up most companies today. A powerful post last week by well known business visualization thinker Dave Gray sums it up well:

Although we tend to design companies like machines, we instinctively and intuitively understand that companies are not made of cogs, levers and gears. In the end, they are made out of people. For top management, it would be wonderful if we could put our business strategy into the machine, push a button and wait for the results. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to put your strategy into people if you want to get results.

And today, thanks to social technologies, we finally have the tools to manage companies like the complex organisms they are.

So this brings us back to the age-old problem of the Innovator’s Dilemma, which essentially comes down to how do you disrupt yourself before the real world does it for you, often with undesirable results. Dave Gray also pointed to John Hagel’s recent observation that as the pace of technological and other change has increased, the life expectancy of large companies has dropped dramatically. This then, along with the other impending challenges, is just one of the wake-up calls happening in large organizations.

In the face of this growing evidence, it’s generally understood that new methods are required to deal with the pace and scope of modern business. As a key part of the conversation, it’s become increasingly self-evident to a growing number of credible industry observers that social tools, matched with new ways of working together, aka social business, can be a key solution to the problem. After all, social media was the outcome of countless thousands of experiences on how to connect people together at the scale of the Web and make it usable. We are now in the same, though harder to change, boat in the business world.

The good news is that most large organizations are now well along their way in considering how to apply social technologies to their business problems, even if it’s still fairly early days for some adopters. Not surprisingly, when it comes to how they operate internally, early adopters often map social media and Enterprise 2.0 into language that is broadly understood by the business, usually under the aegis of collaboration. And communication and collaboration are indeed key areas where social tools can connect people and knowledge together better and faster, drive productivity and efficiency, and foster innovation and process improvement.

Fortunately, few if any of the organizations I see are throwing away social tools as unworkable or hard to adopt. Rather, they are having more trouble adapting the general purpose activities in enterprise social platforms to their industry and moving beyond general purpose upgrades such as social intranets. This has recently led to the discussion of of industry-led frameworks for social business. While social tools certainly can (and do) have high impact in general purpose business scenarios, the enterprise software industry has long learned that it’s as you bring software solutions closer to specific, high-value business activities, that you achieve the most value.

Related: Top ten issues in adopting enterprise social computing.

A great interview that IBM’s Carol Gavin recently gave makes this point in spades when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 and social business:

When you go into a healthcare company [with] a homogeneous value proposition across industry, it doesn’t answer their question: “How do I solve my problem? I don’t care about a problem in insurance or in government, I want you to solve my problem.”

And quite frankly, that’s the legacy of [Lotus] Notes. Notes history started with specific, business-partner, industry solutions. And it’s come back to its roots because that’s really where the collaboration portfolio shines within a context of answering specific industry needs.

So I thought that was kind of interesting about the collaboration agenda. It is the right way to go to market for collaboration. And now collaboration is such a hot topic. Twenty years ago it was a bleeding-edge technology like Software as a Service is today. So you have to frame it in the context of a business problem. You can’t go in with technology speeds and feeds and, you know, I have a better mousetrap than you. You have to go in speaking in the buyers’ language: “Solve my problem today. I need to do more with less, and how is collaboration software going to do that for me?”

This starts to answer the question in the title of this post, thought it elides some of the dimensions which I’ll attempt to expand on below. If social business has become one of the most interesting new avenues to explore in how we manage and operate our organizations, where then can we see that it will thrive? Will certain industries be much more amenable to adoption, or addressed more proactively by software vendors? What other dimensions matter and more importantly, when and where should organizations focus their social business efforts?

Figure 2:Benefits of Social Business by Organization Style

As usual in a nascent field, hard data on what’s actually happening can be difficult to come by. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. First, some useful data is now available through social business practitioner communities such as The 2.0 Adoption Council, whose members are perhaps the most representative of what’s taking place today globally with social business behind the firewall. Second, in-depth studies have begun to show that organizations that are connected together differently realize different benefits from the various types of social business activities. Finally, there are enough Enterprise 2.0 case studies (Google search) to do meta-surveys of them to mine them for patterns of adoption and usage.

None of this information was available until fairly recently, and it begins to point us to where the value will be for organizations as they begin the transformation to the next-generation of worker communication and collaboration. In other words, it tells us where social collaboration will thrive.

Taking all this into account, these seem to be the areas where social collaboration will find strong adoption:

Certain industries have adopted social business faster. While virtually all organizations are adding social media to the way they interact within and outside their organizations, certain segments of the economy seem to either be more systematically organizations or earlier in their efforts. Using the latest global membership data in The 2.0 Adoption Council broken down by industry, we find that for large organizations it will be technology firms, financial services, manufacturing, and the healthcare as a whole that seems to be implementing social business most broadly. The first two are no surprise and has been the case since Enterprise 2.0 became a term, while the other two haven’t been on the adoption radar nearly as much. Utilities/energy, retail, and education round out the larger segments that seem to be adopting. While this is not scientific or outcome based, it shows at least where the activity has been happening thus far. Organizations that are fully networked and have a high information flow will thrive the most. The discussion around social business is, of course, more than just internal or external. It’s much more about a continuum of collaboration between all parts of a business. The newest McKinsey research on the specific benefits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise breaks its finding down in a way that gives us special insight into where the value happens. Most notably, benefits are highest in organizations that have broken down the artificial wall between internal and external. Also, the leading benefit is clearly information sharing. In work environments where information is the most potent currency, such as knowledge workers (which are the backbone of the modern economy), therefore social business is most likely to provide the highest value.Environments that have had (often long-standing) unsolved business needs around information and collaboration. This first became evident in Jakob Nielsen’s meta-study of Enterprise 2.0 projects and has since become clearer in my studies of current case studies. Businesses have found that traditional forms of communication and collaboration such as telephone, e-mail, and in-person meetings have broken down. It is almost fashionable now to declare e-mail bankruptcy for example. As organizations become more global, more distributed, and tackle ever increasingly more complex business problems, the need for improvements in efficiency, productivity, and discovery of vital and timely information has become more urgent.

Of course, when it comes to collaboration, social business is now widely perceived as helping just about any kind of organization improve how it operates. But there are clearly areas where social collaboration especially thrives and this includes:

Industries high in either knowledge work or critical/time-sensitive coordination.Organizations that are already networked across silos or receive outsized benefits from faster and better information sharing, discovery, and connectedness.Increasingly urgent, unmet business needs around better communication and collaboration.

It’s also clear that communication and collaboration itself is changing. As Dave Gray intimated above, businesses of the 21st century are becoming more self-organizing, adaptive, and less hierarchical in order to meet changes in their environments more quickly and in scale. Social business brings a mindset and a set of approaches that meshes with the large, global trends that are driving change in IT and business today.

Where are you seeing social collaboration thrive? Please put your comments in Talkback below.

Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality.