The future depends on collaboration
The future depends on collaboration
Michael Beyerlein
Three issues seem to me to emerge as pre-eminent for the 21st century that depends on collaboration: group intelligence, learning, and goal alignment. Other people would have lists that differed somewhat, depending on their disciplines and concerns. But heaping all of those together and distilling the essence is likely to result in something that includes the points I make here. I make these points, because they directly involve work teams and other forms of collaboration.
- 1.
Group intelligence: is the phrase "group intelligence" an oxymoron?(for example, consider the old adage, "a camel is a horse designed by a committee".) The problems we face have become more complex. No matter what work one does, the changes over the past few decades have impacted that work and made it more complex. By complex I mean that the scope of responsibility has expanded, the level of risk has increased, the resources needed have grown in variety and perhaps amount, the information required to work well has doubled or tripled, and the need to think in systems terms has become mandatory. Consequently, goals, decision making, and coordination requirements have changed. Fortunately, some new technologies have emerged to help us cope with that increasing complexity, but I don't think it is enough.
As an individual in a job that requires a lot of information processing, I often feel inadequate to the task. That inadequacy is rooted in a number of circumstances that include lack of easy access to relevant information, tools, skills, and intelligence that can solve ordinary problems but barely chip away at the extraordinary. I assume everyone else is in that same boat: can't learn fast enough, think well enough,understand broadly enough, etc. So to use a phrase that has become a cliché,I need to be able to work smarter: not just harder. And I believe that weneed to be able to work smarter, in other words, develop intelligent groups. As individual human beings we can continue to learn in our daily jobs, but that will only be a linear increase in intelligence. A nonlinear increase in intelligence requires ways of working together. There is a statement in Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot's book The Intelligent Organization (1996) that uses the neural structure of the brain as a metaphor for the intelligent organization. It is a useful metaphor, but I believe it stops short of the key point: intelligence is in the links! Knowledge is captured and stored in a brain through the development of new nodes and links in the neural network; so,intelligence in the team, organization, or society also depends on the density of the links connectivity. Thus the problem of the 21st century becomes: how can we achieve bigger and better synergies in our problem solving?
There are some positive developments occurring that give me hope. For example, the Internet, although often maligned as a waste of employee time, has given us easy access to people and information that would have been impossible for most of us a few years ago. For example, on our discussion list at the Center for the Study of Work Teams,TEAMNET, I can ask a question that will be read by 700 people in 10 countries and receive back relevant information and ideas from 5 or 10 of those people within a few hours. Sometimes their input is quite helpful. So communications and computer technology can help us tackle the big problems. Groupware or collaborative work computer software provides another tool to help us achieve synergy. That type of software has come a long way in a few years, but will continue to evolve and become a valuable aid in working together at long distances. These technical developments give us an opportunity, but we need parallel developments in the social and behavioral technologies to make good use of them. My impression is that those technologies may be evolving at a slower rate they usually have. Our understanding of group dynamics still rests on a foundation built by researchers in the middle part of this century. A lot of good work is being done at abstract levels and some of the foundation work is being applied in new ways, but I am not aware of any practical breakthroughs that have come from recent developments in social/behavioral technology. There seem to be more breakthroughs occurring in organizational development and change technologies, so that helps. We need new tools from both those areas desperately. There are a number of levels of synergies or collaborations that we need to achieve or improve over the next decade, including person to person,group to group, team to team, organization to organization, industry to industry, and country to country. To the extent that we can achieve those synergies, we will have increased our intelligence at a nonlinear pace and developed the joint competencies necessary for tackling the big problems that loom over us.
- 2.
Learning: I list learning as a critical need for several reasons. There is plenty of public press coverage of the inadequacy of the public school system in generating learning; but, as critical as that is to our future,learning at home and on the job are equally critical. Learning occurs and must occur in every aspect of our lives. I will focus on the work aspect here. At work, we have to become better at learning. We have to become more capable of learning faster, deeper, and from more sources. We have to do that individually and as groups. Unless we can become better at learning, the standard of living in current first world countries will gradually deteriorate to that of third world countries, and second and third world countries will not be able to achieve first world levels. We MUST learn from our mistakes, we must be supported in that effort, we must learn better from each other, we must learn better as groups and not just individuals. For example, I have friends who lost their jobs when the companies they worked for were downsized. The management of those companies could not learn fast enough to cope with the changes in the customer and competitor environments around them. They resorted to shrinking the company to save money, so they could keep the organization viable in tough times. I might have made the same decision in their place. But I want to believe that if we could work smarter and learn faster such decisions could be avoided. At the turn of the last century the leading industries were farming, rope and leather, and transportation. Today the leading industries seem to be retail/service, oil and chemical, electronics, and aerospace. How long will they last? Do you work there? What will it take to keep that place going for one to 10 decades more? We have to get a lot smarter and learn a lot faster to deal with issues like that. That means we have to get a lot better at working together to learn! Learning persons form the foundation of learning organizations which form the components of learning societies.
- 3.
Goal alignment. Most of us believe that competition is a good thing. In fact, Darwin's theory of evolution seems to suggest that it is one way for the "fittest" to survive. Of course, Darwin assumed that the survivors were adapting to their environments; he did not acknowledge that the survivors might be the ones who designed the environment. Collaboration on the grand scale can enable us to do a lot of design work. However that will require extraordinary goal alignment. And I don't think we have passed the kindergarten stage in learning how to achieve goal alignment. A few companies have served as examples for the rest of us. Perhaps Shell has been the best example of using scenario planning to achieve a unity of forces in tackling the future. Hewlitt Packard may be one of the best examples of coordinating change across the organization by using a virtual team of change agents from a number of different geographic regions. However, the one percent or even 1/10 of 1 per cent of companies that are doing the extraordinary are too few in number to protect our future. Unless profound changes occur, we may not be able to depend on them.
How can we at the local level achieve productive alignments that focus our resources on key problems and issues and in so doing create environments that are worth surviving in? There are some promising things happening in scattered places. For example, the City of Chicago has a program called Imagine Chicago that uses ordinary citizens,especially teenagers, in a program of appreciative inquiry to generate a sense of the "city as village": we are all part of the same community. Dallas recently followed Chicago's example. A number of smaller cities have used search conferences as a way of bringing together the interested citizens to do community planning and then establishing the infrastructures to execute the plans. In the work place, we see innovations in design emerge from efforts like search conferences where everybody gets in the room together and has a voice,but also from grass roots efforts, formal top-down efforts, and even middle manager led efforts. One key point of the new designs is to make the organization more capable of survival. One result of the new design efforts is to involve more people in the process of adaptation. One thing that effort depends on is goal alignment.
I think a key to this is finding the MOST CRITICAL GOALS THAT WE CAN AGREE ON. There is a technique in team building called "superordinate goal." The technique requires two warring factions to identify some higher level goal that they can all aim for; when that happens, perspective shifts, and the differences that separate the factions tend to be perceived as less important and quit being obstacles to collaboration. We need a lot more tools that will help us come together on this problem.
Conclusion: essential collaboration
There is some hope that we are learning how to collaborate at the larger scale levels. Experts from a number of different areas are arguing that the paradigm that dominated business for most of this century may slowly be evolving into one that is not merely numbers driven but takes into account the human side of things like quality of life,sustainability of development, environmental quality, etc. Frank Friedlander,one of the pioneers of OD work, suggested at a workshop in July, 1996, that there is a historical trend emerging in that direction. Art Kleiner (1996) in his book The Age of Heretics, argues that the numbers orientation to business that dominated the 20th century is gradually broadening because of the efforts of some remarkable change agents. The World Business Academy was organized in 1988 to address this issue and has continued to grow. And so on. If we don't find ways to more effectively align our goals and the subsequent use of our resources, we are doomed. As population increases over the next century, as global business competition emerges and intensifies in all parts of the world,as we struggle with the balance of inflation and growth, and so on, we will either solve the three problems of collaboration described here, or pay a terrible price.
What has this to do with teams?Solutions will require teamwork. Collaboration is critical. It may take a variety of forms, but it will be critical. We need to learn the skills for that at work, and we can use those skills away from work. I have heard team members talk about how the learning of team skills has changed their home life and how working in teams has made it possible to be interested and involved with work again. As in the days before the industrial revolution when work was not separate from the other parts of life, we see more complementarity emerging again; working in teams may help us deal with problems and issues at work, and at home, and in society at large. Whatever you call it, that sounds like"teamwork" to me!
