© Karl-Erik
Sveiby 2003. All rights reserved
Why collaborate? It may seem a silly question when collaboration is the flavour of the day and one software after another, supporting collaboration, sees the light of the day. We are fed plenty of anecdotal evidence to support the notion that collaboration is worth investing in.
But is it really? Since the birth of market economy, competition has proven its worth in producing value. Why should collaboration be more effective?
Investment in collaboration is above all an investment in changing the collaborative climate of the organisation. But is it worth the risk, the cost and the huge effort? We don’t know.
Does collaboration software support value creation or is all you get a very expensive garbage can? We don’t know.
The truth is that the money spent on enhancing collaboration is – at best – a leap of faith. And some of those that have taken the leap are now giving evidence. The now retired president Bob Buckman began investing heavily in collaboration in the mid 1980s without more than a gut-feel that it would be worth the money and today Buckman Labs spends $8 million annually on its KM budget. He attributes the more than doubling of introduction of new products from 14% of sales to 34%, to an improved climate of trust and increased willingness to collaborate. So he claims it is well worth the money spent.
So is the value then proven? Unfortunately not. We hear the successes loud and clear, but the failures keep quiet.
The sad fact is that we do not know the value of collaboration. Some empirical studies suggest that trust and collaboration are essential ingredients for the willingness to share knowledge, information and ideas. But it has also been shown that creativity and knowledge creation thrive in competitive environments. Is there a limit to collaboration or is more always better? When does collaboration turn into group-think? When should experts compete rather than collaborate in a Community of Practice to create value? We don’t know. Almost all we know is anecdotal evidence provided by consultants, managers and IT vendors, who have a vested interest in the message.
The willingness and ability to collaborate form part of the “culture” in an organisation. This is an amorphous, hard-to-deal-with concept both to manage and to research. An initiative to improve collaboration that is rated high by one person can be rated low by another.
Dr. Roland Simons and I have researched the ability and willingness to collaborate, collaborative climate, since 2000. We find that – among other things – the appreciation of collaborative climate depends on the vantage point of the person. Collaborative climate tends to improve with age, power position, seniority in the organisation and level of education. The same organisation will thus look different depending on whether you are a young, newly employed person or an executive with many years of employment.
The full study, based on 8,200 respondents, has been reported in a Paper on Collaborative Climate - Collaborative Climate and Effectiveness of Knowledge Work – an Empirical Study, published in the November 2002 issue of Journal of Knowledge Management. [To editor: please add a link to the article in the Emerald Archive. Alternatively use this link which is the final draft www.sveiby.com/articles/ccs.pdf ]
Buckman Lab’s survey data from 2000 is still, (July 2003), “Best in Class”, although we by now have more than 12,000 respondents from companies and organisations world-wide in the database to benchmark against. (The worst results are from a research institute in Norway – would you believe!)
It is worrying that a field that managers rate as the biggest hurdle against knowledge sharing (according to a survey by the Conference Board), is not researched properly; it is a morass of conflicting concepts and unreliable empirical data.
So, better tread carefully!
Author
Professor in Knowledge Management at Hanken Business School, Helsinki.