And we’ve been talking about collaboration in the Organizational Developmental world for about 20 years, anyway, 25 – 30 years, self-directed work teams, socio-technical works systems and so on. So, I would say that collaboration as a generality, we’ve probably often talked about this or imagined it, will continue to soften, make flexible and/or break down existing structures. And that’s what I’ll come to later here, or that I’m leading into now is that, apart from the customer service and customer response and supplier response work, which are classified as external, we’re going into internal collaboration… The place where that’s important, I think, is in what we call ‘knowledge work’. And I would say that that’s work that either synthesizes or creates or evolves things.

Fair enough? And there, there are I think three big issues. There’s the existence of the analogue to business processes in terms of the way any given company works, which is an interplay of its organizational structure plus the existing social networks that we know a lot about from social network analysis, and hubs, and gatekeepers, and mavens and all that kind of things. But one of the big issues is the existing business processes and their relation to the work structure.

The second big issue in terms of that internal knowledge work and it’s shifting more towards collaboration is the whole job description (pay, performance management and HR stuff), which is absolutely geared to the previous structures and mindsets as a large generality; I mean, that’s just formed on different assumptions.

And the third, and I think probably the most important, is where both the business process or information flow architecture, and the job definitions and understandings of it, of people that hold the jobs, come to play in collaborational change, decision making and execution, in that type of work – that’s synthesis and creation. And that then touches on power, influence, your clout in an organization; then you can have great discussions and if you can’t make anything happen or can’t get new idea started then people pretty quickly say, “What’s the point of collaborating?” and so on and so forth.

So, that’s where I suspect you get into the hierarchy to wirearchy thing, is you have to look at the decision making processes, you have to look at the places where influence matters and makes something happen and can change things. And I think the ways that collaboration will change that, is that a lot of more information about a company, its customers and its workings, should become public inside the organization and maybe some outside the organization. What also should always be public, I think, is the purpose, the objectives, the timelines, all that kind of stuff that a self-directed team would need to direct itself, manage itself. And when I brought up history before is, I think that there are forces that are taking us towards the point where what we are talking about generally as a collaboration is becoming more understood as this is just the way people do things. But that has to infuse, adapt and, I guess, erode the existing structures.

The overwhelming thing for me in terms of this discussion about collaboration is that, the mass of sociology and the impulses that forces towards transparency, the flows of data information overload, is that it will make… it’s imperative and it will happen anyway, it will make things clear.

The question then becomes one of philosophy and politics. And I remember writing about this, when I first wrote about Wirearchy 10 years ago. There has been a lot of writing on the positive Utopian collectiveness, collective consciousness and intelligence raising of this. There’s also a dark side of surveillance and control and invasion of privacy and so on and so forth. And neither will be fully resolved and both will be eternally present with us. But this getting clearer means then that things that are not dealt with will remain there, and we will collectively as a society or as an organization if you… will we acquiesce or not? We will say, ‘Yes’. And for me the big danger of this webified world… and I actually think we’re on our way there, this may disqualify me from further involvement in this project or something. I think we’re on our way towards what I call ‘soft fascism’ in certainly the industrialized countries. And I think what ultimately the web and collaboration forces bring to us is a need for the individual… a heightened need for responsibility for paying attention for… The constraints that have been put upon people to date have been typically from constraints from them acting like some… The metaphor that has often been used is we’re really children in grade school. And that’s what’s been behind a lot of the initiatives and the lamentations about empowerment for many years is that by large hierarchy in organizations doesn’t treat knowledge workers as adults, as responsible adults.

We are going to have to decide about those kinds of things. I think what I see in the United States is there has been actually… I think the danger of a lot of this is that there will actually be tightened control and hierarchy. I think that’s very real and very possible. And the control would be maintained by the flipside of all this, which is that people come and go from jobs.

So, it’s way easier to get rid of people in North America than it is in France. And it’s an enormous amount of corporate control of people by fear. I don’t see that changing particularly anytime soon. I mean behind all this, my final notes and my beginning notes is, involuting the competition versus collaboration strategy, behind all this is the philosophical issues of whether capitalism is, what organizations should be working at. Until you change capital markets, the demands for performance will demand control.

Later on, when we get into what will collaboration do, it will make, I think, changes to those kinds of business processes; more essential, but probably more frequent. And that’s what I think one of the key things that collaboration can take us through eventually in terms of changing much things – is sort of, let’s call it continuous improvement in real time – as you keep adapting information systems. Because the points where both collaboration and social interaction happen will be typically at the exception points of business processes. If everything is working smoothly and works well, you don’t really need much interaction, much feedback, etcetera.

And I think this is that kind of point Sameer Patel and others have been making. It’s really exception handling, it’s where you have the potential for improvement. That’s in the business process world. What I also want to mention, I guess, is that I think that in terms of collaboration there are two large worlds.

There is collaboration externally, with customers and suppliers, and there is collaboration internally, working. And I think that, by and large, many people are just in a place doing a job, there is the exception handling and other aspects and routine, banal information exchanges with colleagues to get things done inside a business process. Where I see more opportunity then is as business processes always get refined and changed, exception handling comes into play mostly in some form of customer service. Is that fair to say?

And there again, I’ve been coming out from the North American point of view, you see changes and saw a wave over the last 10 years – there are a lot of customer service training. You can recognize that because it becomes a routine in how you get responded to. And now you’re seeing another wave of, I think, probably better training where the customer service is more about asking questions, and trying to get to the root of the problem, and find out the exception or the problem handled. And I – excuse me, I’m just checking my notes here. You see that mostly in the retail areas and in basic services. So, I’m thinking about going downtown in Vancouver or Toronto or whatever, and I typically get annoyed by retail people. France is a whole different thing; I mean, I’m always struck by… if you go to Paris, if you go inside the door then people expect in little retail stores you to buy something and if you just say, “I’m looking.” They get annoyed.

I don’t know much about the Asian or oriental world, but in the occidental world it’s taken as sacrosanct that competition is fundamental to human nature I think. And this goes back to the Adam Smith’s free market and yayaya. I’ve never been convinced by any of the arguments that competition is necessarily fundamental to human nature. I understand well that we are animals, I understand well the issues of survival and status and legal and power and social hierarchy and so on. I’m not sure if humans are not capable of evolving to a next step, and arguably, in the very long arch of time – that’s what some of the discussions today are about – do we have collective intelligence and can we act on it, as opposed to staying in the market mire of …, you know, we’re all red fanged and tooth and really talk a nice game, but if we have to eat you we will?

So, that’s what got me into thinking about that, the struggle. That said, just like OD and other things, I think there’s a long slow sociological, cultural, psychological evolution that we’re all participating in. When I say, ‘slow’, I mean generations, I don’t mean 5 or 10 years. So, we have seen over the last 20 or 30 years, you know the term ‘coopetition’ as well as I do. And there are many arguably collaborative efforts between competitive companies and people for that matter. I think, when you look to the sports world, I think, top athletes compete but they also collaborate. They share information.

The way I think is different today than 20 or 30 years ago, is that when you have competition, innovation, any improvements in design, in manufacturing, in the delivery of services, is copied very, very rapidly, anywhere and everywhere. And so what that means for a company in terms of wrestling with the issues of: how do we compete, do we collaborate, how do we collaborate, is that… I think, the first thing is that these two competing and reinforcing forces will make the ecosystems very clear. What I mean by that is, a company, what it needs to do is understand what do we need to… In other words, are there any essential parts of what we do that we just cannot collaborate on and that we cannot share on? But my point is that all it does is it will make it clear, or it should make it clear for companies. Then we are also wondering about, at the individual or at the small group level, the tension between fellow competition and collaboration. What I’m left with in thinking about these things, is that both individuals and both companies will have to ask themselves on an ongoing, I think periodic, basis: where are we competing and where are we collaborating, why are we competing and why are we collaborating?

And the only thing that this question brought up to me is two options. One is, I think the key issue for today’s workplace in terms of the pressures to move towards collaboration and to also identify the differences between competition, collaboration is this notion of incentive. Should people be incented to collaborate versus should just this be the basis for work design? I am biased. I don’t think fellow collaboration should be incented

Now, there is lots of opportunity there obviously for aggregating, analyzing, but also getting into various kinds of discussions with customers or with suppliers. From there I think it’s just sensible and intelligent process and work design to obtain the benefits of collaboration.

I think companies have been doing this in one form or another for long time; again tell me about making my points about whether it’s quality circles or Six Sigma or almost any kind of continuous improvement initiative have been looking actually for ways to collaborate… Well, that’s the point. It becomes then a cultural point because what I want to say is that given that we’ve already been doing this in various forms, trying to improve for many years now, what is it that gets in the way?

Before we could interact with the company whether you’re a supplier or a customer by let’s say telephone call, you still can, by mail, by going visiting or meeting, but they were all seen as formal channels, and the frustration that built up over the years was that it was very… the company controlled very rarely where these inputs acknowledged or used. And I think, I’m generalizing, making vast generalizations here, I think that my recollections through the years of growing up, is that when people did have their input acknowledged, whether that’s by a response, or letter, or phone call, or maybe some kind of credit voucher – whatever the response is, they felt like they’d won a small victory. That’s I think the kind of thing that needs to change. It needs to be seen as a natural and necessary, as part of the service feedback loop that must be maintained at all times and at all costs. And I think that applies…