PHAC Knowledge Exchange Forum Nov 2010
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This presentation offers a framework for social media to help enhance mass collaboration efforts or small group collaboration, especially when combined with practices of face-to-face communication. It was presented to a two-workshop sponsored by Canada\'s Public Health Agency.
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PHAC Knowledge Exchange Forum Nov 2010
- 1. Knowledge Exchange Forum 2010 Finding the Middle Ground in a Spectrum of Collaboration Chateau Laurier / Government Conference Centre November 23 & 24, 2010 Christopher Wilson, Research Fellow, Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa
- 2. A Practitioner’s View of Collaboration “Collaboration is an unnatural act between non- consenting adults.” – Former US Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders “We all say we want to collaborate, but what we really mean is that we want to continue doing things as we have always done them while others change to fit what we are doing.”
- 3. Lessons from the Dancing Guy
- 4. Technology Spectrum of Social Collaboration Mass Collaboration 100,000+ Small Group Collaboration < 25 Culture of Sharing Dissemination and exchange Knowledge collaboration High social learning Shared ownership Rigorous feedback & accountability Innovation Shared Commitment New resources Efficient implementations Where to Find the Middle Ground? Uses Social Technologies Slow start up Relationships before action High trust requirement High partner monitoring Tacit knowledge exchange High customization Team decision making Smaller scale & exposure Member dependent growth Uses Physical Technologies Quick start up Relationships after action Low trust requirement Low partner monitoring Exchange of codifiable knowledge High standardization Un-centralized decision making Greater scale & exposure Viral growth
- 6. Take Away • Create a collaboration toolbox – Use examples from the upcoming case learning • Possible roles for government & social media to facilitate collaboration • Ask yourself: – Where am I in this continuum between mass collaboration and small group collaboration? Where do I think the balance should be? – Am I employing sufficient face-to-face communication? – Are there social media tools that could bring others into our conversation? – Am I employing enough of the right practices? • Then go home, experiment & become a connoisseur.
- 7. Thank You Christopher Wilson Centre on Governance Email: wilson@telfer.uottawa.ca Tel: 613-355-6505
- 8. Resources • Us Now – A film by director Ivo Gormley about mass collaboration • Howard Rheingold on collaboration – Howard Rheingold talks about the emerging world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action. • How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict – Author Robert Wright presents at TED & explains how "non-zero-sumness," -- a game-theory term for cooperation -- is the chief distinguishing feature of human evolution.
- 9. Key Practice Areas for Mass Collaboration • Use minimal rules • Engagement • Self-organization & Ownership • Awareness • Coordination (instead of control) • Exchange Practices for Codifiable Knowledge
- 10. Key Practice Areas for Small Group Collaboration • Dating • Engagement • Trust Building • Meeting Design • Governance • Operations • Social Learning • Information Dissemination
- 11. Potential Roles • Government – Independent stakeholder involved in knowledge creation, service deliverer, regulator, policy developer. (Standard) – Convener (particularly for face-to-face interactions)? – Partnership broker? – Facilitating partner awareness? – Collaboration support? • Social media – As a record of stakeholder engagement? – As a record of subject-matter information & collective learning? – As a record of collaboration support information?
- 12. Complexity Increases with Increases in the Number of Risks and Uncertainties IssueIssue ComplexityComplexity Context Technology Resources Business Action Interdependence Political Stakeholders Knowledge Shared Goals Work coupling Time
Notes de l'éditeur
- I’d like to begin by saying the purpose of social media is not to use social media. The purpose of social media is to connect people so that we can share our interests, ideas, goals, work, and achievements. If the experience doesn’t lead to real people interacting and working together in some way, it might as well be cheap reality TV. [click]
- With that in mind, let me offer a quote from former US Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders. [click] She says “Collaboration is an unnatural act between non-consenting adults.” For all those who’ve tried their hand at collaboration, her comment is all too familiar. It captures our frustration with the need to work together in the first place and our unfamiliarity with the tools and practices that might make it ‘natural’ for us. Elders then continues by naming the taboo assumption we almost all share when we enter a room with potential partners: she says, (click) “We all say we want to collaborate, but what we really mean is that we want to continue doing things as we have always done them while others change to fit what we are doing.” We know we can’t do things by ourselves – that’s why we’re willing to engage in this un-natural act. But convinced as we are of the completeness of our understanding and the ‘rightness’ of our proposed actions, our expectations are that others, once persuaded of our wisdom, will automatically adjust themselves to accommodate us. Unfortunately, this delusion is one we almost all share. Collaboration is generally perceived as hard, time consuming, unfocused and risky. It puts people in situations of potential conflict. It may also suffer from big egos and free-loaders. So why do it unless you absolutely have to? The answer is quite simple – more & more you absolutely have to. [click]
- I believe Elders’ suggestion that collaboration is not natural is wrong, as this Youtube video illustrates [click]: It begins with someone making a choice – this is the social innovator who sets a new direction -- and he’s unafraid to look stupid. This is his real contribution, his willingness to risk standing out from the crowd. As you can see, there’s lot’s of people looking on but afraid to take this risk. Then someone else makes the same choice, and the two support each other. It’s not about one or the other. It’s all about the work together and the work is energizing. The second person is taking a big risk too but he’s also demonstrating that there is no barrier to making that choice. Without this second person we’d only ever have the one Lone Nut. The two then try bringing in others. Here comes the third person. This is the tipping point because we all know that three’s a crowd. Three is suddenly the cool fringe. Now here are two more and then three more. We’ve got momentum now and things are taking off. Now it’s OK for people to feel comfortable in their choice to join in. They don’t have to feel any sense of social sanction for acting crazy. The sole entry barrier has collapsed. Now we’ve got a movement. As we see more and more people join in, the whole thing goes viral. Now there’s no risk in joining, in fact not joining can be seen as being anti-social. So let’s recap what we saw: We saw one person making a choice. We might refer to him as the leader and he may get the credit for starting the whole thing but we know what we saw. It was the second person that really made the difference between a lone nut and a collaboration. He was the one who showed that there was no penalty in making that choice and that anyone could join in. Leadership didn’t matter much, except to support those people coming in. What we didn’t see is persuasion, goal setting, negotiation, coercion or getting buy-in. The work, the energy of collaborating was its own reward. And, as the risk of standing out was lowered, people did join in -- in droves. Even complete strangers. In under 3 minutes we saw a lone nut transformed into a large collaboration. So much for collaboration being an un-natural act. [Click off web] So how do we reconcile this with Elders’ comments? I believe that collaboration is not only natural but that it is hardwired into us as human beings. Robert Wright once wrote that our ability to cooperate is the defining trend of human history. Yet for too long we’ve been fed this myth of individualism that has limited both our willingness and our capacity to work together. What’s needed is a greater familiarity with the skills, techniques, practices, and mechanisms of collaboration so that the whole thing becomes as ‘natural’ to us in our organizational lives as it was with these young people at a concert. Of course with the advent of the Internet and social media, we have many more tools at our disposal to help us connect and pursue our shared goals. But what tools do we use and when do we use them? [click]
- As I noted in the pre-conference material, social media like Wikis, Facebook, Twitter, and Digg are part of a range of physical and social technologies that can help to foster connectivity and choice within a wide spectrum of social collaboration. This spectrum of social collaboration ranges from: Small group collaboration that is based on direct, face-to-face communication and is dominated by social technologies, TO Mass collaboration that is based on mass communication and is dominated by computer, telecommunications and Internet technologies. [click] Small group collaboration, involves social technologies for networking, building trust, developing relationships, sharing decision making, building consensus, getting shared commitments, establishing performance monitoring, ensuring accountability, developing partnership agreements AND THEN actually doing something together. Once this pre-work is done the social costs of collaboration do decline but the need for relational governance continues as long as a collaboration exists. Small group collaboration might be characterized as: [click] Slow to start up Having relationships before action Requiring high trust Involving high partner monitoring Focusing on tacit knowledge Involving high customization Using team decision making Involving smaller scales & exposure Being driven by member dependent growth To illustrate let me draw again from my work with the Ottawa-Carleton school board where they asked me to reflect on their performance evaluation system for Trustees and senior staff. They pointed me towards the Peel School board as a best practice of board-staff relations and effective collective learning. So I interviewed the Peel Board Chair and asked how they went about staff evaluation. I was told they did all the usual things that everybody did – strategic plan, create annual targets, negotiate metrics, conduct end of year assessments, and so on. Curious I asked her “how have you managed to create such a high level of trust and respect between staff and trustees?”. “What kind of a knowledge exchange system do you have in place to head off things before they become problems? How have you reached such a high level of consensus? How do you keep focused on big picture issues?” She thought for a moment, and then said “We have dinner! We all have dinner together every second week before Board meetings. So if you have an issue you just sit with whoever you need to talk to. There’s no pressure like there is under the glare of the media. There’s just a conversation. People inform each other. They learn from each other. And they make plans with each other.” In small groups, collaboration is often facilitated by such simple practices which bring the right people together in conversation. Small things like having dinner, or coffee or a beer after work become important tools for facilitating partnerships in small groups. [click] While mass collaboration does require a few basic rules, action essentially comes first. Collaborators then react to some initial action by accepting it, modifying it or rejecting it. This is the premise of the well known ‘open source’ technologies such as Linux or Wikis. Complete strangers can collaborate without having to invest anything in establishing a relationship. Hence, this form of collaboration is often assumed to be very efficient. In contrast to collaboration in small groups, mass collaboration may be characterized as [click] : Quick to start up Having relationships after action Requiring low trust Involving low partner monitoring Focusing on codifiable knowledge Involving high standardization Using un-centralized decision making Involving potentially large scales & exposure Being subject to viral growth What’s really interesting is that these forms of collaboration, although polar opposites in some respects, can both produce similar cultures of sharing which includes: [click] Effective dissemination and exchange of information, Knowledge collaboration and frame reconciliation, Collective learning, Shared ownership and decision making, Rigorous feedback & accountability, Innovation, Shared commitment, The development of new resources, and most importantly, The effective and efficient implementation of collaborative endeavours Since Thom Kearney will take up this notion of a culture of sharing in more detail in a moment, I’ll leave it at that for now. The key differentiator between these forms of collaboration is scale. Research has shown that small group collaboration works best in groups less than 25 people. On the other hand, mass collaboration requires access to large audiences, ideally over 100,000, which is why this form of collaboration was not particularly prevalent until the advent of the Internet. Without that reach, mass collaboration tends to be weak, unreliable or lacking in quality. For instance, the basic premise of open source, famously captured by Linus Torvald the originator of Linux, is, “the more eyeballs, the fewer bugs”. Of course, its corollary is also true “the fewer eyeballs, the more bugs”. Some enthusiasts have promoted social media as if simply putting the technology in place will magically generate collaboration, ignoring the huge audience scale needed to be effective. Anyone who has ever tried to create an online chat space or discussion forum knows what ‘white elephants’ these can be. On the other hand, some groups using relational collaboration have tried to extend their reach by involving hundreds or thousands more people and then are surprised by how fruitless and ineffectual their collaboration becomes. Both types of collaboration have well known rules and practices. Trouble is many initiatives are not purely one type or the other. Their scale is somewhere in between. So what do you do with groups larger than 25 and smaller than 100,000 that might want to work together? How do you bridge that middle ground? [click] The answer lies in mixing physical and social technologies. At NRCan, for instance, one of their most strategic choices was to minimize the number of rules which would apply to it. This is a mass collaboration technique and it was achieved by negotiating a handful of rules with Treasury Board, which NRCan now refers to as guardrails. At the same time, they insisted that the wiki have no budget and encouraged employees to build it themselves for their own purposes, which, as it turned out, proved to be largely social – connecting groups of people within the organization. By letting staff take ownership, they created a network of small groups linked together by wiki technology. As a counter example, the senior partners at a major US consulting firm tried implementing Lotus Notes as a platform for firm-wide collaboration only to see it fail. Although the partners themselves were in agreement about its use and collaborative potential, they only later discovered their mistake in overlooking the different dynamics among their more competitive junior associates who had no culture of sharing, no incentives to cooperate, little mutual trust and no way of knowing if their cooperation would be reciprocated. The imposed solution was not their solution. So by not paying attention to these internal relationships, the firm virtually guaranteed the initiative would never get traction. If creating a culture of sharing is the goal, then how much social media should we be using? How much face-to-face communication is enough?? [click]
- The answer to these questions lies in the degree to which collaborators need to be aware of each other to align their actions. Research shows that in any collaboration, partners consciously or unconsciously pay attention to the activities of each other and that the more complex and interdependent their work becomes [click], the more the partners must pay attention to each other to appreciate any changes to their shared understandings [click] and their changing individual operating contexts [click]. Since people tend to act together as if they shared the same background understanding (whether or not they actually do), collaboration inevitably encourages conflict when that assumption ultimately proves false. The very distributed nature of collaborative organizations tends to fracture the shared understanding of partners -- something which social media can only partially address. The tacit, trust-oriented dimensions of this mutual awareness require a more direct, face-to-face level of communication [click]. The green line represents the increasing need for on and offline interaction. Putting up a website and simply dumping a lot of content into it, probably won’t require much face-to-face interaction, but create an online space where different disciplines need to interact to create new innovation, or developing the capacity to respond to an emerging new viral pathogen -- these online tools would likely require much more personal contact to coordinate and align partner assumptions. Even Wikipedia needs face-to-face communication at times as one of my students pointed out to me. When a heated debate emerged over Wkipedia’s definition of “fair trade” the various contributors organized their own workshop to try and resolve their differences together. [click].
- As a take away, I would like to challenge you in three ways over the course of today : [click] First, consider the upcoming cases and think about the tools, tricks or mechanisms that were used to enhance either mass collaboration or collaboration in small groups. Try and make a list. This list can then become the foundation of your own collaboration tool box. [click] Secondly, consider the possible roles for government and for social media to help facilitate small and large groups working together. New roles for government might include becoming a convener or partnership broker. Alternatively, government could support efforts among partners to improve awareness of each other, or support efforts to integrate other government stakeholders, or provide a clearinghouse for lessons learned and best practices. Social media could support collaboration by maintaining historical records of who said what, when in the lead up to partnerships, OR by simply providing contact information on various partners. It could help to disseminate subject matter content and do so with various levels of access. But social media might also help provide collaboration support information such as business plans, MOUs & agreements, joint implementation procedures and schedules; meeting transcripts, etc. in order to create a reference point for sustaining shared partner awareness. Thirdly, I would encourage you to think about what might be added to your own collaboration or partnership. Are you hearing anything today about how to enhance a small group experience with technology -- to scale it up as it were? Or, are there relationship practices that you might use to enhance your mass collaboration initiative? [click] Ask yourself: Where am I in this continuum between mass collaboration and small group collaboration? Where do I think the balance should be? Am I employing sufficient face-to-face communication? Are there social media tools that could bring others into our conversation? Am I employing enough of the right practices? [click] Then collect your answers, go home, & experiment. Try things out. You’ll be well on your way to becoming a collaboration connoisseur. (click) Thank you
- Lastly some interesting resources.
- For mass collaboration, they include: Define minimal rules Encourages ownership & minimizes entry barrier Eg. of NRCan’s guardrails Apparently Wikipedia is now struggling because they have imposed a growing number of rules on potential contributors. The rules essentially represent entry barriers, reducing the number of ‘eyeballs’ that may be focused on any given contribution Minimize the specialized functionalities that are ‘hardwired’. Maximize the flexibility and adaptability within the data model. Engagement Keep the barriers to entry low Make it about the overlapping interests of potential partners Create unique community designs Engage both users & developers in community building Design online networks that are more “socially centered”, a social experiment eg NRCan Drive maximum attention to the site using multiple SM tools Find practices that help users to define a sense of identity & shared belonging Self-organization & Ownership Practices Helping users drive development Their ownership will contribute to shared resourcing The dancing guy video demonstrates how this could happen Awareness Practices Managing shared contexts, workflow, contingent cooperation & goal congruence requires practices which permit partners to maintain awareness of each other. Some of this can be done via social media but some of this will require face-to-face contact. The more complex your work together the more you and your partners will need to be aware of your common ground and your evolving organizational and environmental contexts. Coordination Practices (instead of control) Requires a variety of offline supports such as tech training but also face-to-face meetings, knowledge mobilizers or champions, & regular information updates Ongoing mechanisms to measure progress & disseminate results This could also involve senior management support, public indications of moral contracting among partners, establishing failsafes (what to do if collaboration fails) Exchange Practices for Tacit & Codifiable Knowledge Ensuring both subject-matter information & collaboration support information such as MOUs, business plans, reports, minutes, etc. Differing practices for tacit and codifiable knowledge The simple conclusion is that the more people involved (the more your audience resembles an Internet audience) the more you need to apply the practices of mass collaboration AND the fewer people involved the more you need to apply the practices of relational collaboration. However, it is rarely an either / or choice. However, there is no clear cut recipe to achieve this balance. The approach is very much trial and error. One might consider practices which use technology to scale up small group interactions. Alternatively one could think of approaches which scale down large technology facilitated interactions through the introduction of various small group practices. The more practices you know the better off you’ll be. The more you do it the better at it you’ll become.
- Dating Practices These are the initial socialization or pre-collaboration exchanges, that shape shared purpose, and create a basis of trust Engagement Practices These are the conversations that take place that include people, empower them and build ownership, help to personalize involvement & generate shared commitment Trust Building Practices These are the things you would do to help build sufficient confidence to begin interacting, or to affirm your trustworthiness and your contingent cooperation. Given that collaboration is essentially an agreement between people this may involve practice that create a moral contract with one another. Meeting Design Practices Creating the meeting architecture Recognize that how we are together determines how we work together Structuring the process w/o structuring the outcomes Governance Practices Establish principles, people, concepts, structure & processes to achieve purpose Shared decision making & consensus Working with multiple accountabilities Operational Practices Appropriate & fair sharing of risks, rewards, workload Learning Practices Developing a common language & shared metaphors Exchanging tacit knowledge Learning while doing through double loop learning Information Dissemination Practices Satisfying social learning, contingent cooperation & multiple accountabilities Eg. Of Peel school board using dinner as a mechanism of accountability and social learning
- As something to consider over the day, I wanted to propose several potential roles for government and social media that might help catalyze and sustain collaboration. Already government agencies act as independent stakeholders in knowledge creation, service delivery, regulation, & policy development. But possible new roles for government might include: Acting as convener to bring parties together on various concerns or issues (particularly for face-to-face interactions), Acting as a partnership broker, contributing business planning support; acting as a seed funder; using “street level bureaucrats” willing to build alliances, be entrepreneurial, be persuasive, to educate, and to negotiate; Facilitating partner awareness to reduce the costs of aligning assumptions as well as providing conflict mediation Providing collaboration support: should be sure and fund basic collaborative mechanisms and not treat them as overhead costs; provide a clearinghouse of lessons learned and best practice ; enable data storage, exchange platforms & assessment support. Lastly government could provide some kind of nexus for the integration of collaborative efforts with its own internal government stakeholders Possible roles for social media might include: Maintaining historical records of who said what when, of the conversations that were the precursor of agreements, as well as contact information of the various partners. Social media could provide subject-matter information such as: raw & distilled data, research papers, news, events, policy documents, and other related content such as images, video clips, web links, etc.. Might also include different access levels for public data, data for health professionals and data for policy makers. Social media could also provide specific collaboration-support information, such as: records of previous discussions; MOUs and agreements; business plans; procedures; schedules for joint work; overhead data, such as session transcripts; and meeting minutes