Failing into collaboration
May 6th, 2008[ General ]
Mark Roseman turned me onto a great article titled “Getting to We“. Mark also does a great job of summarizing it in his post.
“Roberts notes that the students eventually got to collaboration, but not before they had exhausted the alternatives of authoritarianism and competition.”
They go on to talk about the idea that “people fail into collaboration“. As a result, it’s only the “wicked problems” that ever reach the collaboration stage. I love that quote, “fail into collaboration”. It’s just so true of human nature. We always start on our own and fail our way through several stages on our way to collaboration.
The concept of ‘wicked problems’ reminded me a lot of a great book Mark recommended to me a few years back titled ‘Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities‘.
“Scaling up the known collaboration processes to country or world sizes will require significant advances in collaboration tools and networking”. While we’re starting with company not world sizes, this is part of our mission at brainpark. All of it hopefully leading to the “hallmark of successful collaboration is the experience of solidarity and new energy: a ‘we'”.
The article also gets me thinking about the entire *Camp movement. Whether we’re freelancers, early startups, or people working in traditional companies, if we want to move up and start tackling the wicked problems then we have to move beyond information sharing, coordination, and cooperation and on to true collaboration.