What are the various levels of involvement individuals can have with a nonprofit? Using an ‘I Care Scale’ to assess engagement. It highlights the challenges faced by nonprofits in maintaining interest amid competing distractions and emphasizes the importance of targeting marketing efforts to potential volunteers and donors effectively.
Continue readingThe first in a (hopefully) series of how the Canadian Birkebeiner can create a best in class in experience for its 500+ volunteers.
Continue readingIn two previous blogs (Collaboration – Not the Vichy Variety and AIIM’s Collaboration Definition), I provided an overview to the definition and a lifecycle model of Collaboration. Developed by the American Institute for Image Management (AIIM), in this blog, I want to drill down on the Life-Cycle model. But first a quick re-cap, the definition is…
AIIM Collaboration Definition
… and the lifecycle model is an eight stage recursive loop:
AIIM’s Collaboration Lifecycle
| Lifecycle Element | Definition |
| Awareness | We become part of a working entity with a shared purpose |
| Motivation | We drive to gain consensus in problem solving or development |
| Self-synchronization | We decide as individuals when things need to happen |
| Participation | We participate in collaboration and we expect others to participate |
| Mediation | We negotiate and we collaborate together and find a middle point |
| Reciprocity | We share and we expect sharing in return through reciprocity |
| Reflection | We think and we consider alternatives |
| Engagement | We proactively engage rather than wait and see |
While I like the AIIM definition of collaboration, I have a hard time understanding and using the lifecycle model. The circles suggest that one moves sequentially from one state to another. While I would agree that Awareness is a good starting point, is motivation really the next state? Is engagement truly the end-statement; e.g. everyone in an organization proactively being engaged? Does this not also lead to a lot of organizational noise and tripping over each other?
Some of the states are very important, in particular Reciprocity. I would suggest that this is the most misunderstood aspects of human existence let alone collaboration. Without getting too far into social-evolutionary theory or economic transactional-theory (stay tuned for future blogs); altruism in organizations only gets you so far and often not that much. I know this because I have created numerous Microsoft SharePoint sites which now lie abandoned or have long since been deleted and forgotten. In many cases the underlying business need has come and gone. In others I failed to or stopped providing a reciprocal advantage for erstwhile users (… errr, on that note, thank you for reading this blog).
As a model, I think the Life-cycle is found wanting. However, as a set of principles, I think there may be something there. Read the stages again but this time with this principles lead statement such as the following:
We the members of our organization, where we choose to work, seek to create a collaborative culture and an effective organization through the following collaborative principles:
Thus, I think the AIIM Collaboration Lifecycle can help an organization establish a set of principles to allow for the creation of a collaborative culture. What the lifecycle fails to do though is provide a more robust conceptual framework to build, nurture, evaluate and continuously improve organizational collaboration. To do that, I would like to introduce the ‘3 Ps and a G over T Collaboration Framework’.
It is not uncommon in military circles to have a weekly after work drink. Typically occurring on a Friday afternoon, the officers get together and kibitz over a few libations. Easy to dismiss as frivolous, there is much more going on here. In the words of one retired US Air Force Lt. Colonel I worked with: “I got more work done in 30 minutes at the officer’s mess than I did all week.” His observation was that “… everyone was there, everyone was relaxed and we could quickly work through problems and come up with solutions.”
Given the hierarchical structure of military organizations, why would a beer, an officers’ mess and a Friday kibitzing be necessary? For the Lt. Colonel, his observation was that the casual environment promoted informal collaboration that led to more formal decisions and actions been taken the following week. The Friday meeting promoted a social bond that is less obvious in a formal meeting setting. This setting allowed people to work on a problem and not focus on the position or rank of the person at the table. There are valuable lessons from the military for any organization. Nurturing and supporting the ephemeral qualities collaboration is critical to achieving hard and tangible business results. Leaving the officers’ mess, it is time to go and find a definition (don’t worry, I will be your designated blogger).
As a person interested in history, I cannot hear the word collaboration and not see the image of a shaved-headed French woman, perhaps clutching a baby, leaving for an uncertain future while being mocked by her neighbours who have just been liberated from the Nazis.
Jeering neighbours after the D-Day libration
For me, the word has a dark recent-history. For the business world, the lesson from 65+ years ago is that collaboration can be positive or negative within your organization.
Collaboration’s Latin origin means ‘to labor together’; this definition is more relevant to the current business context and can be found in most current definitions. For example, the Association for Information and Image Management or AIIM defines it as:
Collaboration is a working practice whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit.
A companion to the AIIM’s definition is its lifecycle model. Shown as a recursive loop, it involves eight elements.
AIIM’s Collaboration Lifecycle
| Lifecycle Element | Definition |
| Awareness | We become part of a working entity with a shared purpose |
| Motivation | We drive to gain consensus in problem solving or development |
| Self-synchronization | We decide as individuals when things need to happen |
| Participation | We participate in collaboration and we expect others to participate |
| Mediation | We negotiate and we collaborate together and find a middle point |
| Reciprocity | We share and we expect sharing in return through reciprocity |
| Reflection | We think and we consider alternatives |
| Engagement | We proactively engage rather than wait and see |
Beyond a definition and a lifecycle, AIIM also provides two flavours of collaboration tools. Flavor one is “Synchronous collaboration” such as online meetings and instant messaging; flavor two is “Asynchronous collaboration” such as shared workspaces and annotations.
A quick survey of the literature finds that other definitions are kissing-cousins to AIIM’s definition. As well, the lifecycle model and technology flavors are very consistent with most development views of collaboration. As a result, the work that AIIM has done is a good place to start when thinking about and managing organization collaboration and will be the basis of (hopefully) further blogs on the subject. However, lifecycle models and definitions is thirsty work – let’s head back to the officers’ mess.
The word collaboration has being rehabilitated since the dark days of the Second World War. Thus, whether it is in an officers’ mess, a board room or around a water cooler; collaboration is critical to the good functioning of organizations. In future blogs, I hope to drill down a bit more on a model which helps an organization balance the natural inclination to focus on technology while not losing sight of people or the business purpose that collaboration support. In the meantime, enjoy a Friday afternoon beer this coming week with your co-workers (or libation of your choice); and remember collaboration usually goes better with some salty peanuts.
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My oldest brother runs an excavation company and I remember riding with him once. He had dug up some dirt and was looking for a potential buyer. Someone had paid him to do the digging (actually it was me) and now he was looking for someone to pay for the dirt I paid him to get rid of. My brother had discovered what most individuals with a truck and an excavator do not know: the money is not in the work it is in the deal. I readily paid a price to get rid of dirt and someone else was keen to pay for the same dirt – and my brother happily knew the value of both sides of the equation.
I worked my way through this 500+ page beast, found parts interesting and large chunks way over my head. On the one hand it appealed to my interest in history by providing a summary of information including interesting dives into African drums, 4,000 year old invoices, the genius of Charles Babbage, efficient communication, cryptology to protect those efficient communications and then a theory of information. On the other hand, I may simply not be smart enough to ‘get’ this book.
Gleick starts the book with a discussion of ‘Drums that talk’; African talking drums that were used to communicate between villages. A few key points he makes includes the fact that while there were a relatively few number of drummers, most people could understand the messages being drummed. The second was the poetic nature of the messages which were not often straightforward. The reason being that the message had built in redundancy allowing for portions of the drum beats to be lost while the intent of the message was still transmitted. Finally there was the relative speed. A message could travel hundreds of miles within a few days with only a minor loss of fidelity. The information age (or at least the medium part of it) was born! (Read more on drums in communication: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drums_in_communication).
Another medium to communicate verbal knowledge is of course writing. This leads us to alphabets, written words, dictionaries and things of that sort. It also leads to how the written word affects how we think about the world around us. Strictly oral based cultures ‘… lacked the categories that become second nature even to illiterate individuals in literate cultures … ‘. The significance is that the written or graphically presented world fundamentally changed humans and greatly extended not only their information carrying capacity – but also how they thought and constructed the world. Gleick did not say this, but my inference is that the written word was when we became more than animals and became the über-species we are today. (Read more on orality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality)
Possibly pre-dating the written word was the written-number and the organizational context that went with the numbers. 3,000 BC Sumerian tablets, when translated, where ‘… humdrum: civic memoranda, contracts … receipts and bills. … The tables not only recorded the commerce and the bureaucracy but, in the first place, made them possible’. (Read more on Uruk tablets: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrtg/hd_wrtg.htm)
The numeric aspect of writing eventually leads us to one of those unique British geniuses, Charles Babbage. Amongst his many achievements, he managed to string the British Parliament along with the promise of a ‘difference engine’; basically a mechanical calculator weighing tons which everyone now carries around in the smart phone as default application. The purpose of the difference engine was the accurate calculation of mathematical tables needed for things like marine navigation or engineering. Better tables meant fewer lost ships and straighter rail roads. Beyond complicated machinery, Babbage also was both a code-writer and a code-breaker for which mathematics plays an instrumental role. (Read more on Charles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage).
Machines that communicate and securing messages continues into an ingenious French telegraph. It was a mechanical contraption in which the position of the arms of the communicator atop of buildings could communicate according to pre-set codes. A receiving station 10km or so down the line would observe the message, confirm it and then re-transmit to the next station. As a result, a signal could travel across 120 stations or 475 miles in 10-12 minutes. As with anything mechanical, it was subject to the elements, inattentive operators or sabotage. Nevertheless, this system was a brilliant solution in a pre-electric telegraph era. (Read more on the ‘French-telegraph’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Chappe).
One of the problems with efficient communications of information is that anyone with the knowledge of code can also quickly read it. Thus, the book diverts back into a history of codes and where we meet two important men that lead to the current computer revolution: Booles and Shannon.
Booles who was a contemporary of Babbage is the father of the Boolean logic. Anyone who has ever done any sort of computer program has used his namesake, Boolean Logic to perform IF, AND, ELSE type of functions (Read more: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/boolean.htm). Shannon was an American who worked for Bell Labs and help to develop code break and making during the Second World War. He was also known as the ‘Father of Information Theory’, basically how does a message get to a receiver and through things like noise. Your land line, cell phone, internet and Facebook page are all benefactors or Booles and Shannon in a long, protracted way involving mathematics for which I only have the fuzziest understanding. (Read more on Shannon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon ).
‘The Information’ ends its discussion of the world of information at the most macro and micro levels. Essentially the universe is information. Quantum physics is about probabilities and information about a particle’s position rather than necessarily physical units. Even DNA is fundamentally about storing information; the chemical structures are simply the medium-manifestations of the need to do this. Thus, with a wink to the movie ‘The Matrix’, we live, love, reproduce and die in an information universe.
From African drums to quantum physics is the journey Gleick takes us on in this book. It is a fascinating look at buzzing world of data and information around me for which I can only grasp at the most basic aspects. To some extents, reading this book makes me feel like a 2-year old child who first discovers that he is part of a wider world and is trying to make sense of it.
If you have a better grasp of higher math functions than I, make a living moving information about or share a love of history and how we got here – add this book to your eventual reading list. If you are happy to be an innocent 2-year who sees cell phones, the internet and Facebook as happy magic – feel free to avoid and never read this book. (Read More in my Books Read Comment Page).
Organizational Biology 