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Collaboration as it is – Working together, alone – Part 3

The Xpragmatic View #189
February 18, 2012
by Marc Buyens, Xpragma
marc.buyens@xpragma.com
url: http://www.xpragma.com/view189.php

We have looked at how companies collaborate, so now let's move on to individuals.

In the two first posts of this series, we briefly described the "system" of collaboration between two companies. This was a very high-level overview that didn't touch on many of the specifics of business collaboration, but it is sufficient to identify some of the basic rules:

In order to collaborate, the companies do not need to have identical world views.
For most companies, collaboration will introduce elements that are seen as risks or inconveniences, which can be a burden to act and to perform.
By definition, collaboration is a confrontation of different perceptions, which is both a nuisance and an opportunity for learning and improving.

Now, let's move on to individuals.

However, in this post, we will not yet examine individuals in a business context. Instead, we will look at how individuals "collaborate" in a social media context or, as it was previously coined, in a Web 2.0 context. As we all know, the visible success of Web 2.0 platforms has been the incentive for people such as Andrew McAfee to wonder what marvels would happen if similar tools were deployed within the enterprise. And he coined it Enterprise 2.0, the dawn of emergent collaboration.

As we all know meanwhile, it wasn't a homerun. And the reason for this is, again, very simple: we thought that we saw expressions of real collaboration in the Web 2.0 space, but in reality, there were none.

It is about the individual: it is not about collaboration

What follows here is not new. We already wrote this in July 2009 in our 'Enterprise 2.0 - Enter the dark force' post, until today still the post with the all-time highest number of pageviews on our website.

"The essence of Web 2.0 are individuals who make use of some form of technology (wiki, social network, etc.) to gain a personal advantage.

With Web 2.0, we are always talking about social networks, social media, collaboration, but in reality, the main driving force of the social web is not social. It is selfish personal interest. People want to participate because it fulfils some of their desires. This can be a desire for contact, self-expression, self-promotion, recognition, escaping the daily rut, whatever. However, always because they want to, because this participation delivers a direct, personal benefit.

When multiple individuals participate using the same platform, interactions will occur. The individuals can/will mutually influence each other's experience and this will result in "something", in some kind of side-effects. It will create a new context for each participant that will influence the willingness for further participation. In addition, once a platform reaches a certain level of participation or starts delivering sufficient "side-effects", this can become the reason for non-participants to get attracted to the platform anyway. But, of course, it can also work the other way.

So, the expressions that we commonly use such as "social" or "collaborative" are in fact not very well chosen. They refer to our perception of the potential outcome of the joint participation, but blur our view on the real mechanism behind."

OK, that was 2009, but these statements are still equally valid today. Web 2.0 or social media are not about collaboration, they are about participation for a personal interest and all these participations create a "context", some form of deliverable, which, such as in the case of Wikipedia, can be seen as valuable.

However, we must not confuse this participation with real collaboration. The difference might seem subtle, but think about the risks and inconveniences associated with collaboration that we discussed in our previous post.

Are you experiencing such things when participating on a social platform? Of course not! The nice thing about these social networks is that they are essentially opt-in. You participate because you choose to and if the thing doesn't suit your needs, you quit. No questions asked. It is essentially a zero-commitment environment.

Unfortunately, business is different and that is where it all starts to go wrong. The power of "social" is enormous, but social does not work unless a) you have the authority to decide whether you participate or not and b) the final deliverable is not set beforehand.

As we all know, none of these conditions fits very well with the reality of today's enterprises.

To be continued.

About Marc Buyens

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma. He started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

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