The Collaborative Quotient

We had a lengthy discussion about this a couple of years ago when the collaboration banner first got run up the flagpole as the emblem of the corporate new world order.  At the time I was pretty adamant that the actual term we were searching for wasn’t collaboration.  I felt that collaboration was too restrictive in it’s context.

I admit the term collaboration translates well to the corporate world.  I mean, you want people working towards something when they’re on the clock, and if it’s a common goal that benefits the company, more the better; however, I think that you leave a lot on the table when you restrict your view to the co-labor perspective of group activity.  Clearly progress is important, but some of the most interesting ideas, innovations and relationships occur spontaneously — not when someone is diligently pursuing a collaborative goal, but rather when they are participating in a socially active environment.

The trend towards work/life integration further marginalised the term collaboration in my opinion.  Most of the social networking that normal people do outside of their offices isn’t classic collaboration, it’s a manifestation of their participation in the human drama.  I mean Wikipedia and YouTube are great examples of the power of the group to accomplish interesting things, but isn’t the creation of value mostly an accident in these kind of mashups?

The term participation, to my way of thinking, casts a wider net.  First, the concept of participation is more inclusive of not only business, but personal and social endeavours, and secondly it captures the added benefits of serendipitous and spontaneous value creation.

Alas, collaboration had already become too sexy to ignore, so the horses were hitched to that wagon and off we went in a cloud of dust.  Still, I often stop to wonder where collaboration would be without participation.  What if you held a productivity revolution and nobody came?

I was just looking over a new report by some folks I have a lot of respect for at McKinsey entitled Six ways to make Web 2.0 work, when I noticed something interesting.  The word collaboration is practically absent in this report, and instead it looks to have been blasted with a shotgun loaded with participation pellets.  Nice.

Well, maybe participation doesn’t have the cachet that collaboration does in the current buzzword bingo halls, but I still think it more accurately captures the ultimate value of the social networking movement in business.

What do you think?  Do you wake up each morning thinking about how you can use collaboration to be more productive?