Getting help with the workload, as it turns out, is a bit more than a no-brainer. The guiding principle is, "be careful what you ask for"...

1. The Logic of Co-Operation
Workgroups, Collaboration and Teams
An archestra notebook.
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

2. The Who Cares Test
WHAT IF…
THIS HAPPENED
Your workgroup was disorganized.
The purpose for being involved was not cohesive or urgent – or it
“aimed too high” to be affected in a practical way
Your team failed to collaborate.
Cross-fertilization did not occur, and the risks of myopia and
friction prevailed
Your collaborative was unproductive. Contributors were unable to organize or direct a systematic
utilization of their inputs
It’s easy to wind up having people try to do the wrong thing for the right reason. All it
takes is to let them have the wrong expectation about why they have been included.

3. Where participants come from
As a supply of participants in work, at-large populations exist in various
forms
In particular, three overlapping populations distinguish themselves
from each other by the type of “boundary” they recognize as defining
them: a staff, a community, and a social network.
Furthermore, in the context of a company, they co-exist in a way that
intends for them to be “captive”.

4. Herding The Cats…
However, a captive population has a membership privilege: exposure to
company objectives.
Working on the objectives can be informal or formal, and scheduled or
unscheduled. And, the company can use members of the populations
without being inhibited by their boundaries.
Three additional groupings of participants are drawn from the captive
populations; most typically, they are workgroups, collaborations, and
teams.
Each participant group comes into being by a different path.

5. Workgroups, Collaborations, Teams
The following sketches point out the essential difference in how (first) the three
participant groupings are formed, and (second) what characteristic of work is most
distinctively served by each new group.
(** company-captive)
Task Participants
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research
At-large Task Force

6. Precedents
Purely as a matter of empirical examples, we know a bit more about how the
supply of participant groups compare. We can characterize our experience of
working with these groups, roughly…
Community
A “crowd”
Social Network
An “open” environment of transaction parties
Staff
A collection of task “partners”
That provides cues for planning action on a workload, including a distinction of
basic responsibilities and expectations that organize co-operation…

7. The Logic of Co-Operation: Participation versus Production
© 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research

8. © 2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research
mryder@malcolmryder.com