Why is Collaboration so difficult?

Here's an email I received a while ago (the names have been changed!):

"This product is 'owned' by the Golden Egg Division run by Veruca Salt. As such I have no control over it, cannot make any decisions for it, cannot even use it. Certainly, I can start to work with Augustus Gloop on putting something together, but I know that whole Golden Egg group is very much pre-occupied with getting something off the ground re the new laying tool which they have been talking about for years now. So I do not expect much cooperation there. To me that means it is something of a non-starter, even if this suggestion was our best option.

The person who wrote this was not doing the wrong thing or being selfish or having bad turf wars. They are behaving exactly as their reward system dictates, as the culture established by their company dictates. They reason that there is no benefit to working with any other group unless it improves their own bottom line. After all this is what they are accountable for."

Does this sound familiar? I suspect it might. Is it any wonder why collaboration is so difficult in large organizations?

I'm not at all sure how I would go about incentivizing collaboration but I think my first step would be not to actively incentivize against it!

One thing that I have tried to do in the past is to task certain people with driving collaboration or rather brokering collaboration between groups. I still believe this approach is effective but now I also realise that it is much more effective when the people in the groups concerned are natural collaborators. You can take a individualist to water but you cannot get them to drown themselves!

It was Rachel Mooney, Head of Organisational Culture at Google, who reminded me of this at a presentation last year. Google takes enormous effort to hire the right people. She said that they expect 25% of managers' time to be spent on hiring. Google values potential over experience: "we hire people for what they will do with us and not for what they have done before". Interesting since this is the exact opposite of the widely held belief that "past performance is the best predictor of future success". It was also instructive to note how Google's highly structured and bureaucratic hiring process compared to their loose and free-flowing development process.

What else can you do to stimulate collaboration?

You can strengthen the focus on working in teams and consider Project Management training for all. Mind you, there's little point in offering project management training without having projects for folks to work on. One idea that I have tried to push is short-term secondments to projects. My reasoning is that we seem to be able to manage maternity cover for staff for periods of several months, why can we not use the same process to free up people to work for a few months on a project?

In the end I think that collaboration is like communication - even if it comes naturally to you, you still have to work hard at it ALL the time. It requires investment of time and energy, if only to remove the many barriers that block collaboration and make it easier for people to connect. My bottom line is that even if you hire the right people, you still have to work at it.

One final thought. Seth Godin reports that he has "been thinking a lot about issues of scale and units of measure". Many businesses that are in trouble, he says, are in trouble for a simple reason: "they're the wrong size." He goes on: "A newspaper that only had a few dozen employees would be doing great today. But they have hundreds or thousands of employees because that was an appropriate scale twenty years ago. When I started my first web company fifteen years ago, the idea that you could be successful with six or ten employees was crazy, but today many of the most successful companies have not many more than that."

So my question to myself and to you is: is there an appropriate scale for collaboration and if so what is it?

Science Friday

When I lived in the US I discovered how wonderful National Public Radio is. Now I'm back in Europe I listen to it live on my internet radio and to the podcasts of my favourite shows: CarTalk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, News from Lake Wobegon and Science Friday.

The March 20th podcast of Science Friday includes an interview with Harold Kroto, who discovered Buckminster Fullerene. It is absolutely fantastic and I thoroughly recommend it. He describes how he made the discovery and gives a passionate defense of fundamental science. His explanation of nanotechnology is pure genius.

I urge you to listen to the very end of the podcast. Harold's answer to a question from a young member of the audience is simply wonderful. In a few short sentences he reveals the magic of science. A classic NPR driveway moment.

You can listen to the show on the NPR site or download the podcast from iTunes

Let me know what you think

"We have plenty of ideas...."

"We have plenty of ideas, it's the execution that let's us down" I have heard this said very often, especially by senior / executive managers. I think it is something that people keep telling themselves so much that they come to believe it. If this is the root cause, they say to themselves, then the solution is simple: get better at execution and we'll be fine.

They exhort: "innovation is all about execution" or "we need to raise the bar on our execution". Sounds good doesn't it?

I think it is complete crap. Or rather incomplete crap. Incomplete because execution is only part of the picture.

One of the (many) things I love about ?WhatIf! is their equation for innovation, and especially their new and improved version:

Innovation = Insight x Ideas x Impact

What this means is that for Innovation, you need Insights into the problem, the customers, the user or the context. You need Ideas. And you need to DO something with those ideas - i.e. make an Impact. If any one of the these variables is missing or is ineffective and thus of zero value, then there is zero innovation. That's the point of the multiplication signs, if you miss out on any of the elements of the equation, it isn't innovation.

Each part of the ?WhatIf! equation should be innovative and remarkable in its own right. If the insights are not new, remarkable, and different to all previous insights, how likely is it that the ideas that flow from them will be remarkable? If you have remarkable ideas but the delivery of them is through the same old channels using the same processes, how likely is it that these ideas will be truly remarkable?

My advice is that when you hear people say "We have plenty of ideas...", your first question should be "how remarkable are those ideas or how new and different are they?". Your second question should be "and from which insights did the ideas come from and were these truly insightful or surprising or remarkable?"

When you have good answers to these two questions, you can start to work on innovating the way you make ideas happen.

Be nice to your bottom

I was in The Hague the other day with an hour to spare while my daughter was at the Ballet School there. I wandered through the station looking for a place to have coffee. It was a miserable day: cold with drizzly rain.

There are lots of bicycles in the Netherlands and many of them are parked outside in all weathers. On a day like this bicycle saddles become really wet. And sitting on a wet saddle is guaranteed to make you feel even more miserable. This insight has not escaped the marketeers at Kimberly-Clark in the Netherlands.

This is what I saw when I came out of the station

I looked closer and saw that this was a fantastic promotional action from Page WC paper (Page is a Kimberly-Clark brand in the Netherlands). Overnight they had fitted all the bicycles parked outside Den Haag central station with blue plastic saddle covers with this tag-line

Which translates as "be nice to your bottom"!

Inspired

Since then there have been more actions in other Dutch cities

and they didn't stop at bicycles either:

and while I am on the subject of DRM....

Stephen Fry made a great point on DRM in his talk at the Apple Store in London last month (download podcast from iTunes here)*

"People who think that if it can be got for free, no-one going to pay for it..... don't understand the fuzziness of the human mind"

Piracy was a grey area. You are not either a pirate or a good citizen. We have all pirated something in our lives whether it was copying a cassette tape for a school friend or photocopying a chapter of a book or some software. And yet along the way we have bought a hell of a lot of stuff. Our houses are full of CD's and DVD's and books that we have bought legally.

"If the creative industry gets too snotty about pirates and criminalizes and tries to create too much of this "you're a thief" business. People will go <expletive deleted>. They are going to say I've seen you in your Rolls Royce and your house in Barbados, don't come to me moaning like this."

"(The creative industry) have to use their human imagination to find a way to sort this out in such a way there will still be an incentive to own copyrights but also there will be a way of disseminating it around that isn't so locked in in zones and codes and things"

Stephen had artists, writers and singers in mind when he said this, but I think this applies to the whole media business including publishing. Some call our sector "creative and media". It is high time for us to be creative!

*The whole podcast is worth listening to, but if you just want to hear the DRM bit then fast forward the podcast to 44.55 minutes

Innovation

I've lost count of the number of articles and books that are published with advice on how to be more innovative, more creative. I think creativity is an attitude not a skill. It is a way of being.

It reminds me of the classic put down (attributed to J.P. Morgan): "if you have to ask how much it costs, you cannot afford it".

A much better question is "what is stopping me from being more creative?". Then do everything possible to break those barriers down.

Is the death of DRM the indicator of real change in the publishing business?

I have been thinking about the future of publishing. It seems to me that above all else DRM represents the old, traditional mindset of publishing. In this mindset it is all about the content. And if content is the asset, it makes perfect sense to protect it with DRM. Let's turn this around, if content is not the asset but something else is instead, then it makes no sense to protect the content with DRM right? By DRM here I mean everything from a simple license enforcing copyright to multi-layered encryption. Rights protection in its broadest sense.

The new mindset is that it is all about what the content does or what it allows you to do. It is about delivering the content in multiple ways, at different times to all sorts of people. It is about embedding content in devices that do something. In other words, the asset is in the use of the content. No DRM needed here.

My theory would indicate that as publishers move from the old to the new mindset, DRM should disappear. At the very least we should see a struggle around DRM as the old guard and the new wave fight it out.

There is perhaps some evidence for this theory. Apple will remove DRM on iTunes on April 7th. There was a huge row recently over the Kindle text-to-voice capability .

Does anyone have more evidence? Examples of publishers moving away from DRM, easing the rights protection, choosing creative commons over copyright? Please let me know.

So what is holding back publishers you might ask? Well I suspect most of them have simply been unable to build products that would allow them to release control over their content. Workflow solutions is the buzzword I hear most often and everyone claims to be doing it. I have seen very few examples from any publisher though.

My gut feeling is that Apple are showing us the way. They have shown us how important the device is. As Chris Arkenberg noted today: "Apple has fundamentally rewritten this paradigm by dematerializing the content - music & movies - and connected it directly with the player".

My top tip for today is to watch any publisher that is partnering with device providers or any publisher that is experimenting with i-apps. I think this is the future.

Good design makes you happy

I love the TED talks. This video of Don Norman's talk is fantastic. He is entertaining and insightful on the subject of design. Design that makes people happy. Design that engages the user in different ways. I recommend it highly. If you do watch it then please let me know what you think of it.

Does my bum look big in this?

I love the Wii Fit. I smile every time I power it up. I get up extra early every morning to use it. In just a few weeks it has become an unmissable part of my life. And here's the weird thing: I am beginning to treat it like a real person! How can this be?

The Wii Fit has a Body Test function that measures your body's performance including your weight. If (perish the thought!) your weight has increased since your last Test, the Wii asks you to give a reason for the gain. It then gives some helpful advice on how to keep your weight under control.

So the other day I was in a great restaurant having a wonderful meal and drinking some lovely wine (and not in moderation) when....

....I caught myself thinking "what am I going to tell the Wii?" How was I going to explain my inevitable weight gain?

So what on earth is going on here? Why do I care what a piece software thinks of me? Can a Wii have a personality?

I think there is something very, very special about the user interface of the Wii. It is not simply the accelerometer-based Wii remote that you use to interact with the games. That's pretty cool and revolutionary I agree. It's the personality that really intrigues me. Let's investigate why.

My first clue is the way that the Wii Balance Board and the Wii Remote sense and respond to my body movements. If I start to wobble during yoga or let my arm drop during a fitness exercise, the Wii lets me know and gives me encouragement: "don't give up", or "your leg is unsteady". If I am doing well it praises me: "your balance is terrific". Of course the voice is pre-recorded but it is the timing that is so perfect and makes it so effective. Even though I know this is a machine, I feel good when am praised and I try harder when I am encouraged. It is AS IF the machine can see me.

When you first set up the Wii Fit, you choose a personal trainer, either an athletic woman or a muscular man. The trainers are reasonably lifelike, unlike the bobblehead-like Mii characters that are used in the other Nintendo games. When they speak they use arm gestures. They address you directly. They talk you through the exercises and it is their voice that praises or encourages you. The combination of the sensors and the avatars makes the interaction even more PERSONAL.

The Wii is UNPREDICTABLE. Every so often, the trainer changes. "Sorry", they say, "your usual trainer isn't available so I'll be doing your training today. Hope you don't mind". Occasionally the trainer yawns and admits they had a late night last night. I have tried to detect a pattern but I cannot. Either these actions are truly random or the algorithm is based on some non-obvious variables.

And then there's the FUN details. When you power up and stand on the Balance Board, it gives a sort of surprised squeal. It's an unnecessary feature but it never fails to make me smile. Your Mii character on the start-up screens matches your Body Mass Index; being (a little!) overweight, my Mii is decidedly podgy which makes my kids laugh every time they see it.There are all the usual PERSONALIZATION features you would expect too. It also has a many-layered reward structure that unlocks new exercises and levels. Body Performance is measured by your Wii Fit Age, much like Brain Age.

A dictionary definition of personality reads: "the complex of all the attributes--behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental--that characterize a unique individual".

I think the personality of the Wii Fit comes from the complex of interactions with me the user. There is a physical interaction as it responds to my movements. There is an emotional interaction as it praises or encourages me at exactly the moment I need it. There is a mental interaction as you try to improve your scores in the exercises. The unpredictable and fun elements make it seem almost temperamental.

In short, the combination of hardware and software engages me in a complex way using multiple senses. It responds to me.

I think the Wii and the Wii Fit can teach us a lot about how to engage the user, in particular the way that the hardware and software both contribute to the user experience. I suspect that in a few years time we will look back and see the Wii and the accelerometer that makes it possible as a huge milestone in human-computer interaction.

And finally I hear that the new version of the Wii Fit will give you fashion advice based on your body shape...does my bum look big in this?

Sleeping Ugly

The Sleeping Beauty was awoken with a kiss after a 100 year nap. This blog has been awoken after just a year of sleep (!) by multiple kicks to my ego. So with renewed energy I embark on Jonathan's Wheelbarrow Full of Surprises V2