Deeper Understanding Leads to Effectiveness

My partner here at GroupMind sent me an interesting article the other day: the author proposes looking at collaboration platforms within organizations in three modes (by "platforms" he is speaking about sets of practices and systems):

• exploration
• experimentation
• execution

It is written by Satish Nambisan for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He says,

"Collaboration platforms can help dismantle the long-held barriers between government, business and non-profit sectors. They also speed the cross-fertilization of innovative ideas and solutions throughout the sectors."
"To be effective partners in social innovation, organizations need a deeper understanding of these three platforms so that they may develop the necessary skills and resources."

I think Mr. Nambisan has pointed our a valuable framework for thinking about what we are doing with collaboration. You see a lot of "cool" widgets out there -- the real issue is to understand the overall context for initiating collaboration within a department or across the organization. What are the larger goals we are connecting?

By making this framework explicit, the organization gains some clarity for the practices it promotes with its call to collaboration; the designers of the processes get a more specific context for their processes and the sponsors have a clearer expectation for outcomes. The users, of course, can still do whatever they want, but hopefully the fledgling enterprise has focused the efforts of all involved at the very start.

For those considering adding collaboration capacity for a project or a part of an organization, I see this framework as providing a useful guide in thinking through various aspects of the idea:

• tools
• metrics
• involvement of stakeholders
• timeframes
• goals

If you look at several collaboration projects you know about, consider whether applying this framing would have helped to clarify what should have been going on. I believe there is a rich vein to be mined in understanding many social innovation tools through these glasses.