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"How do you ensure proper Collaboration among your knowledge workers and turbocharge their managerial talents, skills and knowledge?"
"Management is not so much action as it is inter-action" Russ Ackoff - Founder and Chairman Social Systems Sciences (S Cube) Wharton School Doctoral Program.
As much as it can be a surprise to many, the behavioral NORM is - when given a choice - NOT to collaborate.
Two basic attitudes motivate non-collaborators:
- "Information is power" - to share information is to give out some of one's power.
- "Information that I give out may come back to hurt me". The more proprietary the information I give out the more it is attributable to my being a knowledge worker, but the more easily it can be traceable back to me. And who knows what the future holds and how people are going to interpret it...When it is out, I am losing control over that information and I may become its victim."
People usually think that collaboration is more of a negative than a positive. They see a decision not to collaborate as a logical attitude in view of their lack of information on the person they are expected to collaborate with (this lack of information translates in a lack of trust); or the difficulty to assume that this person - under pressure - might not hesitate to jeopardize their best interests ("prisoner dilemma" paradigm studied by Social Scientists). Cynical views of human nature tend to win in our minds when our interests are at stake.
Debating with themselves whether to collaborate on a matter, individual decision makers face risks inherent in the lack of two crucial pieces of information: 1/ the value to the other party(ies) of what they themselves will offer in the collaboration/ exchange and 2/ the value to themselves of what the other(s) will offer back.
The issue here is: "will the exchange be equitable?". Each party wants to make sure the collaboration will be done respecting principles of fairness as to themselves.
To demonstrate to participants that collaboration can be very positive and equitalbe they need to experience going through a series of collaborative tasks/exchanges so then they will be able to look back afterwards, assess the values of what was exchanged over a period of collaborative episodes, and conclude that it was indeed an equitable experience. They will have built TRUST in their collaborators and in the process of collaborating.
The Pin-Stripe training program is a simulation which is to say that it offers is an EXPERIENTIAL lesson (as opposed to a DIDACTIC lesson). It provides a positive - TRUST BUILDING EXPERIENCE - of several collaborative episodes
It is more directly valuable when it is taken with the same people that one will work with upon completion of the training program.
But it defeats so completely the deep-rooted anti-collaboration preconception that most participants are able to transfer this positive experience to collaboration with other people than those they trained with. They have gained trust in the process of online collaboration.
Graduates of such a training program are fully equipped to function in the new global business world where agility of talented teams and their effective implementation of tasks and strategies - the secret of success through team collaboration and project collaboration - makes them able to work in these adhoc teams across very long distances in order to provide solutions to clients potentially located anywhere in the world..
Collaboration
Telework
