Thursday, August 28th, 2008
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: collaboration, Innovation, motivation, team, vision, williams
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »