Fusion-powered Idea Machine

I’ve been in a cave working on some new stuff, so when I recently did the gopher-boy thing and stuck my head outside the cave, I saw people asking new questions about enterprise social, collaboration, 2.0, etc.  A few of the questions are still silly, of course; but most of the old questions were silly, so we’re making progress.   

My favorite retirements, the things that people have stopped asking, are:

• Why do we need another collaboration platform if we have Sharepoint?
• What’s the ROI on collaboration?
• Are we going to be using Facebook at work?
• Is this a demographic, generational thing?

Though I am certainly not a representative sample, the questions I am hearing most these days are like this:

• What are the cognitive mechanisms by which collaboration facilitates innovation?
• What atmosphere, processes, and features are needed to support those mechanisms?

Now we’re talking!  It seems that the world has turned a corner in the last year regarding enterprise collaboration.  As my buddy Cam says: we’ve stopped playing defense, and now we’re on offense – trying to do something amazing.

I think these last two questions are important for buyers and vendors alike.  For the former, they provide a framework for selecting products, of course.  But, they also provide a framework for the culture, policy, and process change management support required for any transformational program.  You cannot just plug and play a tool to get long-term organizational change.  For the vendors, these two questions provide a backdrop against which to evaluate product development plans.

 

The Collaboration Fusion Mechanism

Collaboration is not additive, it is multiplicative.  And, there is a cross-product.  This sounds sort of math-geeky, but it’s actually some pretty simple logic – and it provides a very nice scheme for thinking about how 1 + 1 > 2 when it comes to collaboration.  Here is how it works.  

Aside from his/her computational and creative skills, each person in the team brings two things to the party.

E is the explicit knowledge of a person, expressed in his/her artifacts.

T is the tacit knowledge of a person, expressed in his/her intuition.

To keep things relatively simple, let’s focus on a team of two people, a and b, each of whom carries both types of knowledge discussed above.  

a = (Ea + Ta)        b = (Eb + Tb)

When they work together on a problem, sharing both elements of knowledge with each other, some powerful idea cross-products emerge – activating Tacit knowledge in lots of places:

(Ea + Ta) x (Eb + Tb) = EaEb + EaTb + EbTa + TaTb

The first term EaEb is combining artifact-based knowledge. Left brain + left brain.

The middle terms EaTb and EbTa are the intersection of one person’s intuition with another person’s artifacts. Left brain + right brain.

The final term TaTb is the collision of multiple vectors of tacit/intuitive power — it’s the magic that happens when we are both at the whiteboard together.  Right brain + right brain.

One caveat: as discussed in the sidebar above, “activating the Tacit” requires a degree of interactivity, experimentation, adaptation, sampling, etc. that is technologically difficult to deliver in an appealing user experience.

 

Therefore…

Based upon the framework above, here’s a representative list of capabilities your collaboration platform must provide if it is to start the innovation reactor: 

Sharing (EaEb, the first term)

1. Upload, share, link, embed any artifact, data, widget or feed from any source
2. Multi-dimensional organizing  and associating with tags, keywords
3. User-defined relationships and links between artifacts
4. Integrated search engine for all formal and informal knowledge
5. Mesh trust model for fine-grain sharing

Extending (EaTb and EbTa, the middle terms)

1. Rich, evolutionary user profiles including endorsements and expertise
2. Emergent group/room/discussion formation and feedback solicitation
3. Conversations (email, IM, voice, vidcon) associated with artifacts & vice versa
4. Direct commenting, textual annotation, and margin drawing by colleagues
5. Interactive sampling, remixing, derivation from all shared artifact types
6. System recommendations based upon content, tags, and user behavior 

Creating (TaTb, the final term)

1. Private communication channels and pre-publication experimentation spaces
2. Ability for users to synthesize data from any source easily, impulsively
3. Simultaneously co-created digital whiteboards, spreadsheets, documents, charts, presentations, Gantts, etc.

There are lots and lots of other features you could/should consider, but I think the list above stretches your envelope in the right directions. (It stretches mine, anyway; I definitely see some things Lyza needs.)  If you’d like to add some suggestions, please send a comment.  Everyone will benefit from your perspective.