Carol RozwellThe mission that I chose to accept is the creation of a new presentation for the upcoming Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. The presentation will deal with the 80% of a successful collaboration project that is generally acknowledged and ignored – the people.
My goal was to find some new ground to cover and I decided to use crowdsourcing to garner some new ideas. My intention was modest – tap the ideas of my colleagues. But the brief foray into crowdsourcing revealed some interesting dimensions about how willing people are to collaborate – at least to this one-time request.
My approach was simple: I sent an email (which is, after all, the great collaboration tool, right?) to a select number of communities of practice (which in Gartner we call research communities). The CoPs copied were in the bcc field so as not to spawn a flood of spam. The request was simple. I asked for: one suggestion for what needs to be done in order to create a truly collaborative workplace.
The response was delightful. I received over 50 responses which I estimate to be about one third of the people contacted. Even though I asked for one suggestion, nearly half of the people provided multiple ideas and many wrote elaborate responses. Over 75% of the responses came in the same day I sent to email. Responses came from both strong and weak ties and very few were duplicate suggestions.
The input helped me create the storyboard for the talk and also gave me some novel, new research sources (innovative means it’s new to me, right?).
Because the response was so great, I’ve been trying to analyze the factors that help me get such a good response. These are the ones I’ve come up with:
- The request was direct – it was clear what I was asking for.
- The request was short – it did not require much time to answer.
- The topic is one people care deeply about – working collaborative with colleagues.
- Responding was easy – just reply to the email. No context switching required.
- The relationship is ongoing – these same people will likely need my help in the future.
Hopefully, this story will help readers of this blog as they think about how to initiate or adjust their collaboration programs.
I would also be interested in your thoughts about what makes collaboration work in your organization. Please leave a comment.
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5 responses so far ↓
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2 murugan anandarajan July 8, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Hi Carol
Interesting experiment! I tried something similar. I was interested in writing a book on e-research collaboration. Given time constraints, I thought it would be pretty interesting to crowdsource a book. I used the research MyNetResearch.com as the tool from which to launch the idea. I got a few responses, mainly asking what I meant by crowdsourcing. Anyway, that did not work
So I switched to plan B, I act as facilitator (i.e., editor) and let others collaborate. Again, I made the information available on MyNetResearch. This time the responses and response rates were phenomenal. I received over 200 inquiries. Researchers used mynetresearch to find other collaborators or used their own private networks or worked individually to contribute chapters for the book.
All correspondence and project management etc was done on mynetresearch. The result was a book of 19 chapters, with contributions from all over the world. I have served as editor for four books before and never had such responses before. I believe that these new breed of research collaborative portals are changing the nature of collaboration. As one of the authors in the book mentioned, its moving the paradigm of research from one of convenience to one of opportunity.
3 Carol Rozwell July 9, 2010 at 6:31 am
Thank you veru much for sharing this story. You bring up an important point, that collaborative activities allow people to build their own networks.
4 Adam Deane July 13, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Ah.. a small comment if I may…
The first 4 factors are good pointers for getting any response from colleagues in an organisation.
The request was direct, the request was short, the topic is one people care deeply about and responding was easy – clear, precise and makes good sense.
But if we remove the pink glasses for a moment, the reason we received 50 responses was factor #5 – “these same people will likely need my help in the future”.
Factor #5 kind of lets the air out of the experiment.
Had I sent the request to those people in a typical organisation – I would have received (maybe) one answer (and that would be from someone really likes me or is very bored at that moment).
Had I offered money, am very popular, played on their ego, or winked at them – I would have received 100% response.
Had one of the managers sent the request to those people in a typical organisation – They would have received 100% response.
#5 isn’t collaboration, and the question to asked is: do I need #5 to get collaboration programs to work?
Cheers,
Adam
5 Carol Rozwell July 20, 2010 at 5:06 am
Adam,
Thank you for taking the time to comment. I’ve been mulling over your message and thinking about a response. You’ve covered a lot of ground in your comment – from a ‘typical’ organization to social capital to management requests.
It’s been my experience that management dictates are often ignored, which led me to explore the human side of collaboration in recent research. A fundamental question for most organizations today is ‘how do we encourage people to work together better?’ This is an important issue to address if organizations are going to cut down on duplicated effort and create stronger networks.
The concept of social exchange is fundamental to solving that issue. For lasting collaboration, mutual self-interests have to be met. Anticipated reciprocity is one of the things that motivates us to engage with others. For continuous, pervasive collaboration, it may be the most important.
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