Collaboration is all the rage in enterprise technologies. Whether it’s the latest “enterprise social network” or the newest feature of an established intranet provider or learning management system, technologies are promising to solve your organization’s collaboration ills by claiming to make collaboration easier, more efficient, and more fun. Here’s the only problem: if your organization doesn’t cultivate and support collaboration without technology, then technology isn’t going to cultivate it for you. Collaboration software typically works great for the people who were already collaborative (and liked technology) without it, but isn’t likely to make collaborators out of the previously un-collaborative. Collaboration succeeds where it is understood, promoted, and developed as a value and an expectation. It’s not an activity. It’s not a new technology. Collaboration is a lot less something you do, and a lot more how you are with others and how that shapes the way you work with them (or not) toward common goals. Organizationally, culture frames process; process necessitates tools; tools support process and reinforce culture (but cannot create either of them alone). For it to be sustainable and meaningful in a work setting, collaboration needs to be: STRATEGIC (Culture and Process) – It should be clear at all levels of your organization (at least where collaboration is key to performance) that collaboration is a critical strategy to achieve outcomes. It can’t be “nice-when-we-have-time.” If it’s strategic, it’s fundamental. LEVERAGED (Process and Tools) – Assuming it is, in fact, strategic, collaboration must be part of the design of your organizational processes. It must be operationalized effectively such that it is part of everyday workflow, job expectations, and even evaluation measures. MODELED (Culture) – Like anything, if the people “at the top” don’t “practice what they preach” then it’s hard to get strong buy-in from everyone else. Leadership must be intentional and overt in exposing when and how it leads through collaboration. CELEBRATED (Culture and Process) – We celebrate each other in our work in both subtle and overt ways: the passing comment, the simple nod of a head, or a formal award. Each represents a celebration that promotes and reinforces organizational values. Collaboration needs to be celebrated in many ways and at all levels. INVESTED IN (Process and Tools) – What we invest in shows what we value. What we implement well shows our commitment to our values. We can’t decide collaboration is important and never put the tools behind it. But, we also can’t just throw technology at it and proclaim “now we collaborate!”
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“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw
I cannot confirm exactly when he said this (I didn’t look all that hard), but Shaw died in 1950, so, it’s been awhile. What would he think now? Could he possibly have imagined that something so fundamentally true pre-1950 could become exponentially more true by 2014? So, let’s look at the state of the illusion specifically in organizations: We are creating too much noise and delivering too little signal. Sending it in an email does not make it communication. Your message has to be valued, read, and understood by the recipient to become communication. Many of us are overwhelmed by bloated inboxes full of irrelevant emails and don’t feel like sorting through it all to find out what is actually important to us. Most of us don’t have time anyway. “More than half of the email we receive is not a priority to us.” “We are twice as likely to read unimportant email than important.” “We tend to reply to the unimportant emails first.”[i] We are wasting time, energy, and money on poor communication. For many, checking email no longer facilitates our work; it is our work. The ease and expediency of sending an email creates an illusion of easy and expedient communication, but the reality is quite messy. It’s ironic that as initiators of communication we rely on email, and as receivers many of us hate it. Regardless, alternately using and hating it is consuming our workday. “On average employees spend more than half their workdays receiving and managing information rather than using it to do their jobs; half of surveyed workers also confess they are reaching a breaking point after which they would not be able to accommodate the deluge of data.”[ii] Poor communication leads to distrust, dissatisfaction, and disengagement. For most organizations, this reality is clear, but effective communication has remained illusory. And, the impact on our employees and partners has been acknowledged across industries. Research on physicians, for example, shows that they are generally distrustful of hospital management, feel uninvolved in decision-making, and are disillusioned with the level of communication they receive. And, the best-practices and strategic recommendations from across the industry start with developing clear and efficient communication channels.[iii] In sum, communication is critical, but most of us work in a land of illusion. So, what can we do to improve? Be intentional: We have to start taking communication seriously and strategically rather than treating it as something that just happens. We should think about the communications element of everything we do and treat it as fundamental to our internal and external operations. Use the right tools: We need to create and invest in new tools specifically for communication, specifically for our organization. We’ve overwhelmed email. Intranets are stagnant repositories. Social media and social media-ish collaboration tools are noisy and are inundated with messages by a few overactive users – losing their communication value. We can do better if we just concentrate on communication. Focus on implementation, change: We have communicated so poorly for so long, it has become accepted. So, improving communication is also about changing expectations, processes, information flow, and accountability. It requires focus and effective change management. It requires communication. [i] http://www.messagemind.com/pdf/MM-WhitePaper.pdf [ii] http://www.salon.com/2013/10/16/your_brain_needs_more_downtime_than_it_thinks_partner/ [iii] http://www.rqhealth.ca/inside/publications/physician/pdf_files/roadmap.pdf I had the pleasure of sitting and talking a few weeks ago with Bill Milliken. And, among the countless gems that began to flow when he started getting into the rhythm of the conversation, he dropped this: “If I am on an operating table, I don’t want collaborators. I want an integrated system!” With his sharp wit and wily twinkle in his eyes, Milliken is relentless in pushing us to “get it right” in our collective work for and with young people. This is what he has done and advocated for decades (it’s what makes him Bill Milliken!). His charm aside, I thought this quote was worth exploring a little further. So, I started thinking about the difference between collaboration and an integrated system. And, while there are certainly many specific differences to consider, I believe that, at its core, the difference is that of shared strategy (not to be confused merely with a shared strategic plan, strategic vision, strategic alignment, or any other narrow bastardizations of the concept of strategy). As collaborators, we typically bring 1 and 1 together and celebrate how we “strategically” made 2. To use another analogy, in collaboration, I have my puzzle piece and you have yours and we navigate around the edges a bit to see if we can “strategically” fit them together. But, collaboration is too often just that – around the edges – and generally happens downstream of our truly strategic organizational and institutional decisions. In other words, the critical decisions (who we serve, how, when, where, etc.) are already made by the time the collaboration tries to fit them together. Collaboration becomes a reactionary tactic attempting to overcome the lack of an actual integrated system! In an integrated system, we co-create in an ongoing manner our collective strategy, which guides and determines organizational and institutional decisions, key roles, responsibilities, and tactics. I work in this area or on this issue because it complements (not simply adds to) what you do and how you do it toward our common objective (also an element of strategy). An integrated system, therefore, requires constant communication, reflection, and learning so that together our 1 + 1 achieves the proverbial 3. Cynically, then, an integrated system comes at a cost: our work must actually be about our work, not just our organization or institution. Our work must be about the young person, for example, not whether or not I work in a school setting or an after-school setting. Let’s be honest, in most of our communities, the “systems of support” (or lack thereof) we have created for young people have been created because they work well for us as adults and the organizations we lead. Even in some of the best cases, our efforts represent an attempt to add things up for young people, but never really ask us to change what we are doing to make the system more complete. We generate plans of systems but claim expertise or blame funding for why someone else needs to change or do more, and not us. We rarely, if ever, achieve an integrated system at the level of shared strategy. We rarely, if ever, achieve the sort of integrated system that would actually work for our young people. Unfortunately, no amount of collaboration can overcome this reality. And, even more unfortunately, collaboration can obscure the weaknesses within the system by averaging them out. This, in turn, makes future efforts at a more integrated and strategic approach that much more complicated because we appear to be better than we actually are. It also makes it more difficult to identify and address where we are falling short. If I am on the operating table, I do hope my surgeon is part of an integrated system with the nurses and the doctor who diagnosed me. And, once there, I certainly hope the stellar work of my surgeon doesn’t obscure or average out the marginal work of my anesthesiologist! So, Bill, thanks for the analogy, the push to work smarter, and for ensuring the next time I have surgery that I will be completely scared-to-death! Many years ago, I learned a training/facilitation protocol we simply call Comfort/Risk/Danger.
When working with a team, the protocol helps them, based loosely around whatever it is they are trying to accomplish and what kind of work it entails, to share what things put them as individuals in the comfort zone, the risk zone, or the danger zone. For instance, some team members will be totally comfortable with public speaking; for others, it feels dangerous. For some, crunching numbers is comfortable; for others, it would be a risk. Some find conflict dangerous; some find it risky. And, we all know those who are a little too comfortable with it. But, we need speakers; we need numbers people; we need people who create, manage, and support effective conflict. And, we cannot afford for those skill sets to reside with one person or in one department. It’s too easy for them to get marginalized, or to go away completely. Some element of each has to be part of a broader culture. So, as the protocol helps demonstrate, building an effective team cannot just be about capitalizing on what everyone is already good at (i.e. what puts them in the comfort zone). Creating a team is about learning how to support a pervasive element of risk. Humans learn better when there is some level of risk. In the risk zone, we are stretching, challenging ourselves, and actively asking questions and seeking solutions. When we are comfortable, on the other hand, we are surrounded by what we already know. We aren’t actively learning. When we are in danger, we aren’t learning either (social, emotional, and professional danger; not just physical). Fight or flight kicks in. We shut down, seek relief, and avoid (or project our danger onto others). This week, we launched Zeumo in four beta schools with a little over 4000 students, and Comfort/Risk/Danger has been on my mind all week. I have watched and experienced this frame play out not only within the Zeumo team, but with our school partners and their students. How do we launch a new product and company in a way that doesn’t put those of us at Zeumo in danger? How do we support each other’s risk and keep out of danger? How do we offer a new educational technology in a way that doesn’t put teachers or administrators in danger? How do we support them as they risk trying something new? And, for students, how do we…well, for this kind of thing, our students seem to be more capable of staying safely in risk. They are still natural learners. This week and this frame have reminded me why I enjoy teenagers so much. It has also reinforced just how powerful an educator-who-is-still-a-learner can be. We met many this week. And, finally, it has proven to me that new education technologies can and should do more than facilitate business as usual. We must risk working with students in new ways and flexing our own traditional practices to meet their real and current needs. We must be willing to be risky. In a variety of workshops, whether around school climate, youth/student engagement, or even broader community work, I reference the following change model out of Harvard, which I actually discovered through the Forum for Youth Investment:
Change = Dissatisfaction x Vision x Plan Why is this simple model so powerful? At the simplest level, what happens when you have a zero for any of these elements? No change. It’s basic multiplication, but profound in that so many of our traditional change efforts are built on addition strategies. If we do this and then we get that then it will add up to change. If we add this resource…If we add this position…If we add this new frame for our work… Addition alone doesn’t generate real change. Change is multiplicative. The elements necessary for change are interdependent and exponential magnifiers of each other. So, why can’t we pull this simple multiplication together on a critical, and fairly universally concerning, issue like education reform? It shouldn’t be that hard, and, candidly, a lot of folks have been working really hard on it! We have built countless strategic and organizational plans focused on education from district-level reforms down to teacher evaluation and curriculum. We have crafted mission and vision statements for our community organizations and community collaborations to align around our schools’ vision and plans. We’ve brought in trainers, consultants, data wonks, and various other experts from out of town. We have invested billions of dollars in re-visioning high schools. We have paid millions to develop, implement, and evaluate new data-driven models. The list goes on and on. So, why do we rarely generate real change? Using the Harvard Change Model, we are left to reflect on our dissatisfaction. Now, it may seem ludicrous with the current outcries and the previously mentioned investments in education and education reform to wonder if we are really dissatisfied. With every media outlet in the country full of ideas, opinions, and impassioned rants about education, our dissatisfaction is obvious. Given the increased role of state and federal governments (not to mention the business sector) and the position of education reform in our local and national agendas, surely our collective dissatisfaction with the status quo is clear. At the individual level, I suspect all of us would describe ourselves as frustrated, sad, angry, and myriad other descriptors of dissatisfaction with the state of education in our communities and in this country. Surely, dissatisfaction isn’t the problem. But is it? In expressing our dissatisfaction, we too often focus on the work of others: teachers, principals, counselors, students, unions, community organizations, business, and policymakers (we all are focusing our dissatisfaction on each other). We point outward from our position and proclaim our righteous indignation at someone else’s inability to change, at their role in maintaining the status quo. We all join the chorus saying “something’s gotta change” with an implicit “but it’s not me”. I believe we are all part of the education system (as community system) in some form or fashion. So, if a critical mass is not truly dissatisfied with our own work (and not just the work of others) then there is not the real dissatisfaction required to generate change. There is only blame and subsequent defensiveness (and a lot of failed visions and plans). If all of us who claim dissatisfaction, inside the education system and out, actually changed our own practices, I wonder if it might add up to something? Audience Member: So, let’s say you have a class full of 10th graders and all of them are in danger of dropping out of high school. They have discipline issues, are under-credited, disengaged, all of it. You have no cost restrictions – no amount of money is too much. There are no limitations – you can literally do anything you want. What would you do to keep these students in school and get them on the right track toward graduation?
This was the question posed to six students on a panel I was moderating at a dropout prevention summit in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. Four students were in high school and two in college. I thought it was a great question; a question to promote dreaming; to generate the ideal with the obvious understanding that it would have to be trimmed back into something more real, something with real-world restrictions. But, just offering the chance to dream with “no holds barred” left me excited to hear what these young people would say. Tear down the traditional school building and start over? Create programs that do X, Y, and Z? Change the time structure of the school day? Connect students to jobs? Make it more “fun”? Get rid of all the teachers (except for Mr./Ms./Mrs. (NAME HERE) who changed my life)? Scrap the boring curriculum and make it relevant to my life? Get an iPad in every student’s hands? Nope. None of this. Their answers were clear and consistent, and would cost next-to-nothing.
So, for the big question with no money restrictions, the prompt for these students to dream big about dropout prevention “no holds barred”, we get 1. relationships, 2. personal motivation, and 3. a sense of positive personal identity. |
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