Social Media Collaboration: Open, Closed or Somewhere In Between?

Our August 3rd post, The Map Is Not The Territory, provided a few simple tips of getting your feet wet with social media. This was meant as a precursor to thinking more deeply about what it means to use social media for collaboration within and between work groups and organizations.

Terms like “virtual”, “social media”, and “collaboration” have many meanings. In this post I will use the terms “virtual collaboration” and “social media collaboration” interchangeably to mean working with others to produce or achieve something together using the capacities provided by computer technology on the internet. I mean anything from a proprietary tools for online meetings to wikis, blogs, chats, online communities, and so on.  In this light, social media collaboration is a groundbreaking opportunity for organizations because it allows people to gather, find and share expertise, knowledge and information in ways that are relatively fast, easy and cheap.

In the analysis phase of our first benchmark study on social media collaboration, I am struck by both the pace and scale of change swirling around this topic. There has been a lot of excitement about examples of social media collaboration from the development of information resources such as Wikipedia and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive, to the mass adoption of social media business tools like Twitter and Linkedin.  Curiously, there seems also a scarcity of systematic approaches for developing virtual collaboration strategies.

Many organizations are diving in with piecemeal solutions and feeling their way along. Such patterns if frenzied adoption are familiar to me after spending over 20 years in the computer industry. What is different, however, is that the impacts of piece-meal strategies are now amplified by other organizational pressures. Much of the strain is the result of the relentless consolidation of functions in a quest to build efficiency. At a recent planning session, an executive of a highly successful global marketing company disclosed, “We have squeezed about every ounce of productivity from our employees that we can. There are fewer of them and we are asking them to much more. The incoming generation of workers are more demanding and less tolerant and we are losing the wisdom that comes from experience.”Adding further confusion to the social media front is the dizzying array of new tools. It seems every few weeks there is another to choose from.

Understandably, only a handful of organizations have made the effort to develop robust enterrpise-wide virtual collaboration strategies. After all, it is human nature to approach any new paradigm in terms we already understand. Many executives can’t imagine a new world of internet-enabled collaboration that isn’t about marketing.  Others see it as the implementation of a new software standard. Collaboration is not the same thing as gathering customer data, even if that data is found through the use of social media.

Collaboration means to work WITH others to produce or achieve something. Regardless of the technological platform you choose, collaboration begins to occur only when new meaningful work is approached by people with a shared vision for what the work they intend to accomplish. Social media collaboration is neither an information technology project, a people problem nor a business issue. Virtual collaboration occurs at the intersection of all three. That is not to say there is only way to virtually collaborate, in fact, there are many ways. Yet to build and sustain a virtual collaboration strategy, most organizations will need to learn how to nurture a fit between collaborators AND the context in which work if accomplish  with social media tools.

Marten Hansen of the University of California and INSEAD, France, builds a case for “disciplined collaboration” rather than open or closed collaboration. In his new book*, Hansen suggests three leverage points to collaboration, virtual and otherwise.

1. Unify people
2. Cultivate T-shaped Management (a balance between individual performance and shared contribution)
3. Build nimble networks

Because technology, people, and business issues are evolving and inter-dependent parts of any organization, they are better understood as living entities than as static objects. Nurturing the fit will continue to be more of an art than a science. Ask any musician, artist, athlete or visionary leader. One never masters an art, one just gets better through life-long practice.

Practicing an art implies that social media collaboration feeds on the the same things that healthy organizations thrive on. Organizations will have to continue to become better at differentiating between what they know and when they need help from outsiders, balancing long-term opportunities with concrete goals, objectives and actions, and sharing accountability for learning and adapting to changes that are the inevitable by-product of being a a living system.

*Hansen, M0rten T. Collaboration: how leaders avoid the traps, create unity and reap big results. Harvard Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4221-1550-2