Positive Structures

Collaborating Minds

For the past few months, my colleague Jim McGee and I have been hard at work on a project we've named Collaborating Minds. It will be an online problem-solving community -- with a unique membership recruiting strategy. The goal is to create a resource that will be able to assist organizations with hard problems by providing rich insights and multiple perspectives. It's a marriage of some of the ideas of crowdsourcing with the principles that make for high performance teams. It's an example of getting more people to work together better, a topic I wrote about a while back.

Collaborating Minds' main assets will be:

1. Its network of 500-700 part-time participants
2. Its approach to community building and structured problem solving,and
3. Its software platform that supports and enables the community building and structured problem-solving. 

The people will be recruited and selected based on their interest and ability to work together in the community in just the way the software platform allows. They will include people from a very diverse set of backgrounds. We'll have scientists of various stripes, engineers of various types, humanists, consultants, experts in all kinds of fields. So in that respect it will be like crowdsourcing.

The community and the problem-solving will be actively managed, and the members will be expected to get to know at least some of the other community members outside the context of the specific problems we are working on. Community members will help each other on their own issues and challenges, and can use the problem-solving tools provided to do so if they like.

The software platform includes a social network of a particular kind, and a structured problem-solving process and spaces for the problem-solving to occur. The problem-solving method will combine structured asynchronous elements and structured synchronous elements (online meetings). We also will have an alternative free-form option for members to use when the structure isn't right for the problem at hand.

There's a lot more info available now at the Collaborating Minds site. We are almost finished with the alpha version of the software platform and are starting to talk with people about recruiting and membership. We have a lot of unanswered questions (e.g., precise target markets, compensation, and governance) and probably some wrong answers to others. One of the best things about this idea though, is that we can aim our group at ourselves; if this sort of group can generate insightful and powerful solutions to hard problems (which I believe it can) then it help us solve the issues that remain ahead.

Improving Virtual Collaboration - Managing the Motivations

On Saturday, May 28, I am going to be participating in the 3rd annual Radical Realtime Virtual Collaboration event. It's an unconference where people can lead sessions on whatever topic they want related to the overall topic, which this year is Innovation Cloud: Virtual Spaces for Creative Collaboration. To minimize technical difficulties, the organizers are encouraging organizers to use a chat collaboration tool for the session, and to prepare any upfront material, well, upfront. I'm organizing a session called Improving Virtual Collaboration - Managing the Motivations, and I put together this video as my upfront material. If you find the questions interesting, you can join the event which will begin at 10am ET(in the US) and at the same time around the world. The sound is a little up and down at the beginning, but it gets better after about a minute. I hope to report after the event on what my worldwide friends have to say in response to the questions, and also to say more about the collaboration I mention in the intro.

Improving Virtual Collaboration - Managing the Motivations from David Friedman on Vimeo.

 

 

CivicConnect - an online community and problem-solving site

 
The Idea

 
CivicConnect is an online community and problem-solving space that I have been working on (with my colleague Jim McGee) for the past 18 months with Civic Consulting a unique and wonderful organization in Chicago. CivicConnect has been a successful testbed for some important ideas about how to use to  social tools successfully for problem-solving.

Civic Consulting is a not-for-profit backed by the business and philanthropic communities of Chicago. It provides free management consulting to the City of Chicago and related agencies. Civic Consulting has a core group of 6-8 consultants who work on teams that draw dedicated pro bono assistance from leading professional service firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, AT Kearney, Leo Burnett, Mayer Brown, etc.

  



Civic Consulting's network of alumni and friends is rich and talented but not as connected or as valuable as possible. To strengthen it, Civic Consulting agreed to explore CivicConnect for its alumni and friends. CivicConnect gives members of the network who have a shared interest in Chicago and a shared experience at Civic Consulting the chance to meet each other. It also lets them  keep contributing their talents to Civic Consulting's ongoing work, even though they cannot come back for another 3-6 month stint.

How CivicConnect looks and works

CivicConnect looks like a social network crossed with a collaboration site. Because so much good work happens "at the water cooler or the coffee bar," CivicConnect has the social network and the problem-solving space in the same place. The social side starts with profiles that ask different questions than other sites might, such as:

What are you good at helping people with?

What problem-solving experiences continue to influence your thinking and approach to new problems?

What books or people have influenced your thinking about problem solving?

What broad scale issues or problems most capture your attention today?

What have you done to help someone who is also in CivicConnect?

What else are you working on (so other people know what to help you with)?

The problem-solving (or solution-advancing as we like to call it because the problems that we are tackling eventually require spilling over offline and bringing in other affected parties) is done both synchronously and asynchronously. On any question, we have periods of asynchronous structured problem-solving, carried out in very small pieces, called "inch pebbles", as opposed to milestones. After the asynchronous work has progressed to a certain point, an online (Webex or competitor) meeting is held, and we facilitate it with Compendium (an open source discussion management tool) in order to organize and document the conversation.

 
The results so far

We've demonstrated that real, analytical, fact-based problem-solving can happen in a collaborative way online. People have done analyses, and other people have reacted by bringing new facts to bear.

We've worked on three problems:

• How to take advantage of Chicago's cultural riches to attract more tourists from overseas
• How to reduce violence in Chicago
• Why would you "friend" the government?

We've also demonstrated that the network creates magic that is unknowable in advance. A topic introduced in The Water Cooler (a part of the site to put things you think others might find interesting) have led to surprising discussions and even the prospect of action.

The people who have participated have gotten to know each other much better.

What have you seen like this? What lessons are there for Enterprise 2.0 installations?

Making Enterprise 2.0 Stick

For the past few months, a few colleagues and I have been trying to figure out how to make Enterprise 2.0 solutions work much better. We've got a few ideas, and a working prototype (to be discussed in a future post), and plans for more. Our key insights are:

1. More infrastructure is needed than the software typically provides (and much of what's needed is not hard to add), and
2. The social process of joining and being in the Enterprise "community" (we put quotes on deliberately -- it's a vague word) must be orchestrated and managed. Some people do this -- they just may need to do it more, better and longer.

Enterprise 2.0's challenge is often called "adoption," but to us the issue is usefulness. To be picked up and used, the tools and processes must be useful to people, valuable to them (which includes their value in doing a particular task but also includes other ancillary benefits they may get) and be easy to use.

Most Enterprise 2.0 implementations focus on picking software and managing the introduction of the software to the target audiences. The hope is that a critical mass will be built and then that the people using the system will generate value for each other. We'd suggest that more is needed.

The first addition is workflow. As indicated in a previous post, it helps to have workflow structured enough so that people can easily do what you want them to do in the collaborative setting (which means that you need to think about what you want them to do). At the same time, you need  flexibility for people can invent their own ways of doing things; you can't know ahead of time what will happen, and much that you don't know will be good!! That's one of the reasons you are installing Enterprise 2.0 tools.

The second addition is social processes that facilitate the creation of bilateral relationships within a collaboration. In most collaborations, the focus is on the joint task. But good, caring relationships among even a small number of pairs of participants will make any collaboration (online or offline) work much better. In the offline world, these can sometimes be generated by a beer after work; in the online world they need to be planted, nurtured, and watered systematically (which is a good idea offline too).

 

The social processes can consist of, at least:

• Carefully constructed profile pages. Profile questions can be asked in ways that provide many hooks into who a person is. This lets people understand each other in ways that are outside of the immediate work context, but which can provide "glue" between them.
• Aggressive management of initial participation. Community managers (yes, you need one for your internal community) can contact joiners early on, and help them find their way around. Or the community manager can facilitate contact by someone else in the community. Encouraging -- or requiring -- some offline conversation among site participants can be very powerful; if two people talk for 10 minutes on the phone, they have a much stronger tie than online alone usually creates.
• Ongoing management of social interaction. Enterprise 2.0 communities have the same challenges and life-cycle events as other online communities -- they need the same kinds of moderation and support that interest-based communities and customer communities need. Otherwise people will come, participate a little if you are lucky, and then wander off.

What have you done?  What do you think?

 

 

The role of workflow in collaboration

My friend Jim McGee and I have lately been prototyping a unique online problem-solving community. It’s a place where people who are mostly strangers can come together and productively work. I’ll be writing more about that in the coming weeks.

Today, I’m focused on one issue we’ve encountered – which is building the right amount of workflow into an online collaboration. To me, the right amount of collaboration is enough to guide people to do what you want them to do, but not so much to constrain them to do only that. Or to paraphrase a long-ago manager of mine “the job of the collaborators is to do exactly what I tell them – or something better.” 

Ideally, there’s enough structure built in so the tool is useful, but not so much that the structure significantly reduces the chance of discovering other reasons for working with the people you encounter (beyond the reason that first brought you together) or other ways of working with them. 

Enterprise 2.0 platforms generally skip workflow. Few people would think it would work well if you just invited a large group of people to a face-to-face meeting with no agenda and no planning but that’s what the typical Enterprise 2.0 online collaborative platform assumes. In most Enterprise 2.0 applications, many tools are offered (blogs, wikis, microblogs, forums, etc.) but no workflow or structuring mechanisms. You can post to your heart’s content, and comment on other people’s work, but if you want to do project management within the system, you have to cobble something together. If you want to do a particular complicated workflow, you have to cobble something together. If you want to let your collaborators invent workflows on the fly, you have to cobble something together.

The danger of tools without purpose is demonstrated, some say, by the recent decision of Google to kill off its much heralded GoogleWave. GoogleWave had a lot of capabililities, but not enough people could figure out how to use it for something they wanted to do.


On the other hand, some companies, like Cisco, have at least at times stressed the need to understand what the purpose of collaboration is, and have encouraged people to build collaboration around a specific need. And certainly, there are purpose-built tools for specific collaborative efforts, like Spigit and Imaginatik for managing collaborative innovation processes. These tools have workflows built into them. These efforts seem to me to ignore the possibility that these same people may want or need to collaborate on other tasks.

The blending of easily customizable workflows into collaboration tools seems like it is a critically needed step. I’d love to hear about collaboration tools that let people take advantage of the ability to find new people through profiles and searches and lets them craft ways of working together.