Collaboration Tips

On his blog at Think for a Change, Paul Williams lists some useful advice on how to get the most from collaborative innovation efforts.  They include: 

  • Understand that there are different personalities in every group
    • Understand the differences
    • Use the differences to your advantage instead of as fuel for disagreement
  • Understand that on top of differing personalities you can also have different motivations and/or behaviors based on the circumstances
  • Successful collaboration (and change) comes from providing more benefits than negative alternatives
  • Reward those who interrupt and challenge…that promotes “non-accepting” behavior
  • Encourage self-organizing teams (natural collaboration)
  • Create cross-functional teams (unnatural collaboration)
  • Implement robust collaboration tools
    • Conferencing tools (web, video, telecomm, etc.)
    • Web2.0 (wikis, blogs, message boards, forums, etc.)
    • GroupWare (Lotus Notes, GroupWise, Sharepoint, etc.)
  • Make sure there is a clear mission, vision or goal to ensure collaboration moves in the right direction…otherwise stand back!
  • This is all useful input into the continuing question - how can we get our collaborations to work better?

    Paul Sloane

    Tags: , , , , ,

    Leave a Reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.