Asking the wrong questions about collaboration

The RSA invited me to write a conversation-starter about collaboration for their Fellow2Fellow feature  as you can see here, and below. It's part of their programme to promote more discussions on key social topics online and face-to-face. It's all making this 250-year-old think tank really buzz.
Anyway, I duly wrote something  ... then as soon as I saw it realised I had asked the wrong questions. This thought was prompted by reading a piece at the ever-excellent Anecdote. Shawn recounts how a team that had lost all its old staff plans to invite them back to a working re-union for a question and storytelling session. He then goes on to give some general tips about good questions to ask, including this:

One of the things we said is, “use 'when' and 'where' questions and avoid 'how' and 'what' questions.” Questions like “When have you been inspired at work?” tend to elicit stories. While questions like, “What do you think about your work?” tends to elicit abstract opinions.

Oh dear, my RSA piece is full of woolly how and why questions. Maybe I should have asked: when did you have really good (or bad) experiences of collaboration  ... and then maybe followed up with the why you think that was the case.
The RSA forum is closed to non-members, but any reflections welcome in comments below.
My thoughts: collaborations have worked well for me with people I know and trust ... with new people when there's been a chance to meet face-to-face ... or when I've been following their blog for some time. Collaborations haven't worked when it's been unclear what we are trying to achieve (or people have different undeclared aims), or what are the benefits above doing things separately.
Here's the piece on the RSA site:

The RSA Coffeehouse Challenge is a model for making things happen by getting people talking, finding some shared interests, and then thinking what to do. Engage, collaborate, act. The think tank Demos proposes in The Collaborative State that working together can transform public services. In their book Wikinomics Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams argue that mass collaboration - made possible on the Internet - will transform the way that we do business. Wikipedia demonstrates how thousands of people can work together on complex topics to develop a knowledge resource ... and the RSA is trying the same approach with its own programme wiki.
As a consultant working on collaboration and engagement programmes, online and face-to-face, I would like to explore with other Fellows their experience of what it takes to make collaboration work.
It is people, not organisations, that collaborate - so their personalities and preferences are hugely important.
How do we better understand that, online as well as off?
Organisations create the cultures which may or may not encourage sharing.
Will blogs and other social media really help change that, when senior managers are often reluctant to use new tools?
Conversations and stories work better than bullet points to get people talking.
So why are many meeting rooms still dominated by immovable Board tables, and conferences by Powerpoint?
Effective collaboration requires trust, relationships and understanding that take time to develop.
Why are so many online systems still developed on the basis of "build it and they will come and work together" ... ending up with empty Forums and a lot of money wasted?
Collaboration isn't easy - but I believe that new media is starting to make a big difference, not just in providing new tools, but new ways of thinking. The collaborative development of free and open source software inspires us to explore how that approach can work elsewhere.
Instead of thinking enviously "I wish I had done that" we may be able to respond more creatively with "that's something I don't have to do, now I can build on it".

Previously: 250-year-old think tank ripe for relaunch

Technorati Tags: collaboration, storytelling

Comments

[Andrew Brown]

I think the ones I've enjoyed the most are where we've had to work at it a bit. If you think that someone is coasting on your work it somehow doesn't seem as positive.

For example, I did some work with residents who were worried about the impact that the new licensing laws would have on where they lived. They could have seen me - a councillor at the time - as ineffectual, and could have seen them as a threat to my authority. And certainly there was a level of friction in our first meetings - "What are you going to do for us?"

But we moved past that and found our common ground and by working hard together and working on the things we could change I think we made real progress. We drew the police into the dialogue (no mean feat), and the planning officers, and put considerable pressure on the pubs and bars to clean up their act.

The area seems less rowdy than it was, publicans understand that people who drink in their establishments shouldn't be using the street as a toilet, and the police were going into the pubs on a regular basis rather than waiting until something kicked off.

Of course some of these things may have happened anyway, and we didn't achieve all the things we thought we wanted. Nevertheless I came away from that experience feeling that we'd made a positive contribution to our community.

[Nick Buckley]

Nothing wrong with those questions for me - and I'm looking forward to tackling them at the 'Social Impact of the Web' event tomorrow. They made me think and I've posted a response here

http://unclebuck.vox.com/

Sorry - I don't know whether it's possible to do trackbacks between typepad and VOX. I certainly don't know how to.

The gist of my response is that several of your questions point to a paradox - as individuals we want to use collaboration to get results beyond our own isolated potential - but then we want to reel all those results back in and contain/explain them, rather than letting the group continue to own the space. That's why we use powerpoint, thinking it works like the ghostbusters' ghost capturing 'nuclear accelerator' to pack the ideas back down again.

[Steve Dale]

The following question resonated with me:- "Effective collaboration requires trust, relationships and understanding that take time to develop. Why are so many online systems still developed on the basis of "build it and they will come and work together" ... ending up with empty Forums and a lot of money wasted?"

I was determined to avoid this problem when I set up the IDeA communities (www.communities.idea.gov.uk) by de-emphasising the technology and promoting the fact that there was a central team of people who were there to support project and programme managers in setting up their communities of practice. This extended to facilitating face-to-face launch events which were used to build trust and introduce users to the social media tools they could use.

This is the model I'm also going to use for the contract I'm working on for the DfES, where a network of CoP's will be established across the Education Sector. The first priority is recruiting community managers who will be out there meeting with various stakeholders and encouraging greater collaboration. This is before we've even spec'd the on-line community facilities.

Thus, I think my approach is about as far as you can get from what they've done with GovX!