Collaboration in 2012

It seems to us that the last year has brought forth a higher level of recognition across most businesses that it is both possible and necessary to engage in more collaboration at work. Painting with a broad brush, this recognition shows up as:   

• more adoption and awareness of collaboration tools, especially social networking
• willingness to connect people through technology, rather than just have face meetings
• understanding the possibilities embedded in web-based planning and shared notes

Some of this new thinking seems to be a result of exposure to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Google Docs, whether from friends, children or colleagues. More of this new willingness is the result of a need to maintain connections across stakeholder groups in the face of reduced travel budgets. There is also growing awareness of the positive result possibilities in sharing information through organized crowd-sourcing.
We see what amounts to a perfect storm of conditions that are leading to a sea change in proactive thinking by business leaders. Budget constraints, information overload, dispersed teams, connecting to external experts or stakeholders, multi-step processes, digesting collected data, referring back to previous decisions, encouraging input from various points of view.... all these trends drive team leaders toward the use of online collaborative tools. Such tools provide an interactive platform, an archive of previous work from various constituents, an always-available resource, an opportunity to engage in iterative planning, a minimum of paper notes, a chance to build in transparency for more stakeholders.
Let's consider some current stories in the press. The Iowa Electronic Elections Market predicted the outcome of the last presidential election with more accuracy than did the polls or the pundits. Companies are having to develop workplace policies on friending bosses on Facebook. It is now possible to announce a contest for a logo design, offer $300 and receive 40 diverse, professional entries from graphic designers all over the world, to which you give reactions and don't-likes by comparing different treatments, and within the week, you can choose a refined version from your designated finalists. There are simple systems to have a large audience vote their preferred options among your presented choices, using text messages from their cellphones, and display the immediate results on your powerpoint presentation. Three teams can work separately on a design template, review each others' presentations, evaluate their shared 'must-dos' and 'stop-doings', prioritize these and then develop the dependencies for the top issues, all in one day.
Employees participating in the GE’s “Imagination Market” trade or buy “ideas” based on how closely they believe an idea is aligned to the business objectives, how an idea compares to other alternatives, and if the idea is operationally feasible. Most often, these ideas represent new technology or new product ideas.
Looking out into the new year, we can make a number of 'predictions' for business processes related to collaboration:

• Managers will be more skillfull at holding short check-in meetings. Most of the work will have been done and updated online, so the meetings will be for review and go/no-go decisions. This will alleviate a lot of meeting paralysis and boredom.
• Meeting tools will become more interactive, so that the audience is drawn further into dialogue and participation -- both with the presenter and with each other.
• Teams will become more facile with keeping notes online, even during conference calls. This lets everyone append comments and corrections, and there is one record immediately available.
• Quick surveys -- for checking confidence and clarity on initiatives -- will be commonly used, in order to clearly identify the state of the team on contemplated product, policy and strategy changes.
• Many more people will learn to write an idea once, online (rather than making notes on paper, transferring these to a Word documnet, and finally publishing the idea out to colleagues.) More employees will be (comfortably) members of various online sites which enable them to interact, gather information and connect to others with similar research interests.
• There will be more connection to customers and outside vendors, as workers become more comfortable with collaboration sites. Communication and inclusion are key issues for effective work, and online interaction sites make this much more available to everyday people across the organization.