Is the practice of collaboration the same today as it was ten years ago? Will it be the same next year or the year after? I am coming to the conclusion that "yes," in fact, collaboration is different today and will be different next year as well. How it is different and how to make explicit that difference is the challenging part.
Collaboration remains a major key to our existence as a living and working society. It has become more a part of daily life. What is different is the path to collaboration.
Collaboration In The Past
Growing up in the post-World War II era and then doing organization consulting, my perspective is that the world had pockets of collaboration, but that they were subservient to the command and control approach which pervaded work and organizational life. I make the assumption that World War II was won not by collaboration but by an effective command and control structure. Returning veterans carried this onward in the companies of the forties and fifties. Collaboration seemed to occur on baseball and football teams. However, even there, the names of Casey Stengel and Vince Lombardi in those respective sports reflected that the coach was key and the coach's word was law.
It was not until the seventies and eighties that I saw us as a society of people working in organizations opening up the doors to collaboration. Team work and team building became a new trend as did the use of teams in organizations. On the other hand, it was a long and difficult path to gain a foothold for collaboration. I remember the derision which often greeted the prospect of working in teams, the jokes made such as references to "workless teams," and the guidance to never mention the word "team," "empowerment," or "collaboration" even as we did this work.
I remember when the quality movement started being imported from Japan (after having left the U.S. shores for lack of traction). We marveled and wrote lots of books on how the Japanese worked together in teams.
Through the eighties and nineties, I along with many others offered workshops to help organizations set up teams, enable employees and managers to learn collaborative skills and change how work was done to fully utilize collaborative approaches and hopefully attain higher levels of performance through team-based organizations.
I trained organization members in the elements of collaboration: effective speaking, active listening, decision making, problem solving, providing feedback, and managing conflict. I helped individuals and teams to establish trust and be comfortable bringing more of who they are to the workplace. I helped teams experience and understand the impact of group dynamics on their functioning as work groups and to make use of this knowledge in managing themselves. I utilized instruments like Myers Briggs and FIRO-B to help people understand and accept their own unique personality styles and needs, how each person is different and how this all plays out in the workplace. This was part of building and utilizing diversity constructively - all a larger part of the effective practice of collaboration.
As time went on, I began using other approaches to build collaboration. I used the practice of Dialogue (made famous by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge) which helps to build effective conversations. This seemed to me to be a more efficient and organic though less concrete approach to building collaborative skills.
Collaboration In The Present
Looking back at all of this from the early part of the twenty-first century, I see that ultimately teams and collaboration took hold. The U.S. military developed a unified command in the person of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and in the structure of the Joint Chiefs of Command. Teams are commonly used within departments, across functional groups in organizations and even across organizational boundaries. The "need to share" has been steadily replacing "the need to know."
I have persisted with the assumption that the advent of the Internet and all of the applications that we currently call Web 2.0 simply extends and supports the previous trajectory of collaboration. I expected a slight discontinuity that would lead to a modification of the old approaches to getting to collaboration as well as the practices of collaboration. I now know that I must question this assumption and peer out from its protective shelter to test whether the current path to collaboration may be different.
I am beginning to realize that there may be a significant discontinuity between the collaboration of the past and the present. This is not to say that intact, in-house, co-located teams are extinct. They will continue. Society still has a need for effective speaking, active listening and conflict resolution. In-person interactions remain important. However, I believe that what is happening in the NetGen world (NetGen: those born between 1977 and 1997 as defined by Don Tapscott) and their use of Web 2.0 is a paradigm leap in collaboration. This new paradigm is one that I am beginning to understand intellectually and experientially as I become a more accomplished user of Web 2.0 technologies. However, the paradigm of NetGen collaboration is one that I, as a Baby Boomer, will never fully experience as the younger generation does.
The Two Paradigms
In his new book, "Grown Up Digital," Don Tabscott cites research that points out that the NetGener brain is, in fact, different from the Baby Boomer brain. The early experiences in formative years of using the Internet, incessantly playing video games, actively searching for data and reaching out to countless others on social networking applications and multi-tasking to do all of this at the same time, essentially results in wiring the NetGen brain differently than the Baby Boomer brain. Tapscott as a Baby Boomer observing his NetGen children and often quoting them provides a very personal view of this.
I don't yet have my hands around this new paradigm, but for the moment, one way I can describe it is that the NetGen generation is hard-wired for collaboration. For us Boomers, collaboration was a new kind of software that we liked, learned how to use and then used effectively albeit on a more local scale. For the NetGen generation, collaboration is something that has literally been wired into their brains through continuous use of the Internet, Face Book, My Space and collaborative multi-user games. In the process, countless skills and a socialization has developed and been continually reified by their global cohorts.
It is like we as a society have approached one of those monoliths in the movie "2001" and what we have travailed to achieve in the past may be second nature to those of the present. This means that we will become an even more collaborative society and our work will be conducted more collaboratively. Our structures, work and life habits and practices will change in line with these new collaborative aptitudes.
Transferring Knowledge Across Paradigms
I do believe that there is a meeting of paradigms held by the different generations. This meeting point is mutually desired if not yet explicitly acknowledged. How do we transfer the knowledge and skills between these two generations representing the two different paradigms? How can the newer generation understand the Baby Boomer context and the struggles for collaboration and the skills that we developed? How can the younger generation transfer the second nature aspect of collaboration to Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers? I think this will, in fact, be the more challenging task. How can we begin to utilize what each generation brings to the workplace and society?
I think it is easier to break collaboration out into elements and convey it through discrete cognitive and experiential events as we have done in the past. I think it will be challenging for the NetGen generation to transfer their more organic practices of collaboration. There may not be a cognitive component to this more organic and tacit knowledge. It may have to be learned experientially just as NetGeners have done. This may require more on the part of the Baby Boomers than simply getting on Face Book and Twitter. I have done both and still do not think I have succeeded in rewiring my brain.
I do keep looking for cognitive signposts. I found one such sign in a recent New York Times Op Ed article by Noam Cohen (March 29, 2009). Speaking of Wikipedia, Mr. Cohen said that "Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller." Maybe Web 2.0 is simply asking us to do what we already know how to do and to be what we already know how to be.
The combination of Web 2.0 approaches alongside traditional political approaches in the Obama Presidential campaign gives me hope that both Baby Boomers and NetGeners and those in between will learn ways to share what each brings and will begin to teach the other to create within themselves and in their interactions the new mental patternings. It is the meeting of old and new in pursuing a new joint future.
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