Collaboration is important……. Why?
Ignore the trendy labels of knowledge transfer, open innovation or crowdsourcing and focus on the fundamental requirements of successful business….sharing information. OK.. so a certain amount of success can come from self-sufficiency, but to scale a business you employ people, specialize in functional areas and responsibilities and …..share information.
Most businesses dont collaborate or share information and cite inadequacies in technology, knowledge management, or learning programs are at fault. Instead cultural factors have a greater impact. Beyond the fear of external competition and protecting Intellectual Property…. why do we find it hard to share information?
People, Behavior and Psychology 
- People find it easier and more satisfying to reinvent the wheel than re-use other people’s ‘stuff’
- People only accept and internalize information that fits with their mental models and frames
- Most modest people underestimate the value of what they know so don’t believe they have anything to share.
- People grasp graphic information more easily than text, and understand information conveyed through stories better than information presented analytically (we learn by analogy, and images and stories are better analogies to our real-life experiences than analyses are)
- People cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless information
- Most people want friends and even strangers to succeed, and enemies to fail; this has a bearing on their information-sharing behavior (office politics bites back)
- People are averse to sharing information orally, and even more averse to sharing it in written form, if they perceive any risk of it being misused (confidentiality) or misinterpreted (the better safe than sorry principle)
- People don’t take care of shared information resources
- People seek out like minds who entrench their own thinking
- People don’t know what others who they meet know, that they could benefit from knowing (a variant on the old “”don’t know what we don’t know” – “we don’t know what we don’t know that they do”)
- Experts often speak in jargon or “expert speak.” They don’t know they aren’t communicating, and non-experts are afraid to ask
Management and Organization 
- People share information generously peer-to-peer, but begrudgingly upwards (“more paperwork for the boss”), and sparingly downwards (“need to know”) in organizational hierarchy – it’s all about trust
- Managers are generally reluctant to admit they don’t know, or don’t understand, something (leads to oversimplifying, and rash decision-making)
- Internal competition can mitigate against information sharing (if you reward individuals for outperforming peers, they won’t share what they know with peers)
- The people with the most valuable knowledge have the least time to share it
Technology, Process and Training
- People know more than they can tell (some experience you just have to show) and tell more than they can write down (composing takes a lot of time)
- People feel overwhelmed with content volume and complex tools (info overload, and poverty of imagination)
- People will find ways to work around imposed tools, processes and other resources that they don’t like or want to use (and then deny it if they’re called to account for it)
Cost, Rewards and Incentives 
- The true cost of acquiring information (time wasted looking for it) and the cost of not knowing are greatly underestimated in most organizations
- People value information they have paid for more highly than what they get free from their own people (thus the existence of the consulting industry).
- Rewards for sharing knowledge don’t work for long as performance pay is generally not linked to collaboration goals.
Clearly, human behavior and psychology provides the baseline for looking at these questions. Management’s role is to provide organizational structure, incentives, training, pay and recognition to reward the collaborative behavior it desires and needs. Actually, management’s challenge is even greater than that since in most cases upper level managers are motivated by how they are measured; to show how clever they and not expose how much they don’t know. So the real problem in the question of collaboration within the enterprise begins at the top. If the organization is not aware and geared to address human nature with appropriate training and rewards, it will continue to see the poor performance around collaboration.
- Measures drive behaviours
- Behaviours drive actions
- Actions drive results
Credit: Dave Pollard – How to Save the World blog
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