What exactly is collaboration anyway?

While the modern “social networking” meme (as opposed to the classic “social network” and “online communities” memes) appears to have been caught in a hype cycle, the “collaboration” meme seems to have gone through ebbs, flows, and pendulum swings. Recently, I’ve noticed a sharp increase in both the blogosphere and Twitterverse of mentions and inferences to collaboration centric concepts and connotations as if being the anti-hype against social networking. Personally, I don’t believe that it’s an either/or proposition. To be clear, I’ve asserted that networking (be it for social or professional purposes) and collaboration along with community are core aspects of the modern business life cycle and must be integral parts of a holistic Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

But what exactly is collaboration?

Well, Wikipedia defines collaboration as “a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together [“at” or “with” must be the missing word here] intersection of common goals.” [I guess even the epitome of collaborative applications that is Wikipedia still cannot prevent typos or omissions from occurring. :-)]

Although I'd certainly agree with the above definition, I also like the following description of collaboration as referenced in the “Collaboration thread in CACM for April 2008” blog entry by Jack Vinson:

Collaboration generally means working together synergistically. If your work requires support and agreement of others before you can take action, you are collaborating.

Jack’s blog entry also referenced the “Collaboration and Community” paper, which had been published by Scott London way back in 1995 and provides the most streamlined definition of collaboration:

As its Latin roots com and laborare suggest, collaboration reduced to its simplest definition means “to work together.”

While Scott’s paper had focused on collaboration in the political and civic arenas, I believe that the basic characteristics of collaborative endeavors described therein and quoted below apply just as well to any other arena that involves people working together:

• The problems are ill-defined, or there is disagreement about how they should be defined.
• Several stakeholders have a vested interest in the problems and are interdependent.
• These stakeholders are not necessarily identified a priori or organized in any systematic way.
• There may be a disparity of power and/or resources for dealing with the problems among the stakeholders.
• Stakeholders may have different levels of expertise and different access to information about the problems.
• The problems are often characterized by technical complexity and scientific uncertainty.
• Differing perspectives on the problems often lead to adversarial relationships among the stakeholders.
• Incremental or unilateral efforts to deal with the problems typically produce less than satisfactory solutions.
• Existing processes for addressing the problems have proved insufficient.

Scott’s paper goes on to differentiate collaboration versus other models of cooperation:

Collaboration, then, involves articulating a shared purpose and direction and working toward joint decisions. This distinguishes it from other forms of cooperation which may involve common interests but are not based on a collectively articulated goal or vision. Ann Austin and Roger Baldwin note that while there are obvious similarities between cooperation and collaboration, the former involves preestablished interests while the latter involves collectively defined goals.

Upon reading that, I was compelled to post the following tweet:

Social/Networking: shared narcissism | Community: shared interest | Collaboration/Teamwork: shared objective | deets: http://bit.ly/15pbyG

Then of special importance are the principles of collaboration as suggested and referenced in Scott's paper:

What are the preconditions for effective collaboration? Most observers agree that it must be democratic and inclusive; that is, it must be free of hierarchies of any kind and it must include all parties who have a stake in the problem. As Cornelia Butler Flora et al. point out, "without community empowerment and broad participation in agenda setting, the ... decision-making process of discussion, debate, and compromise is relatively meaningless."

Barbara Gray observes that collaboration can only be meaningful if the stakeholders are interdependent. "Collaboration establishes a give and take among the stakeholders that is designed to produce solutions that none of them working independently could achieve." In this way, they all depend on each other to produce mutually beneficial solutions.

The remainder of Scott’s paper discusses the dynamics and limitations of collaboration, collaborative leadership, and collaborative communities, all of which are well worth reading. Scott also published a companion paper titled “Collaboration in Action” that provides a survey of over a dozen best practice examples of collaborative efforts in the government and civic arenas, which every enthusiast or perpetuator of the current “Government 2.0” meme would find enlightening, and those examples would apply equally well to other arenas such as “Enterprise 2.0” in particular.

So, there you have it – exactly what collaboration is and a whole lot more. Any questions?