Finding the driving force behind the need for collaboration

Schools, universities and companies talk a lot about "collaboration", but it's hard to know what this word actually means in each of these areas. The abundance of talk about increasingly powerful tools often conceals the poverty of their uses. All the enthusiastic instructions for use won't change the fundamental question: why do we need to collaborate?

When we want to enable people to talk to each other, we imagine welcoming, comfortable spaces for them: this is what bistros, good libraries and certain "innovative" companies do in principle. This is what many intranet designers and educational engineering managers are trying to recreate online, through platforms that are increasingly user-friendly and flexible. The quality of the infrastructure is not really in question, at least for those organizations that wish to facilitate collaboration and have given themselves the means to do so.

Resistance to collaborative working is real, and the arrival of digital technology only serves to highlight the obstacles: exchanging essential information for a joint project efficiently is a further step that many organizations fail to take, due to a lack of sharing culture on the one hand, and a basic need on the part of individuals on the other.

Anthony Poncier's presentation for Eco-Lab, " Savoir et travail partagé pour l'entreprise " ( Knowledge and shared work for the company ) is very edifying in this respect:

To succeed in working with others, you need to be able to find the person or people you need, you need to be able to put forward what you can bring to the table, and above all, you need to want to!

To collaborate, you have to want to... and not be punished for it.

As he so aptly puts it, " The managerial legacy of the 20th century is opposed to collaboration ": bringing collaboration to life in an organization requires the establishment of a contract, and is therefore not "natural". Once the process is underway, this culture of working together requires technical, human and financial resources if it is to be sustainable.

Technologies are helping organizations evolve from this point of view, but not as quickly as is often claimed: moving from e-mail to sharing on common spaces, for example, is not that common, and the road to wikis and blogs is a long one.

There are a number of rules from what Anthony Poncier calls "Les lois incontournables du collaboratif" (the essential laws of collaboration) that can help us in our training:

• Collaborative work is voluntary, not compulsory;
• We share our knowledge when we know that our work is recognized and appreciated by other collaborators;
• It's not a question of "just sharing", but of having the right information at the right time;
• The tools (wiki, blog, forum, rss) each have a role to play, but it's how they're used that's decisive.

Collaboration practices exist before tools

Another experience sheds light on this question of the origins of motivation, that of professionals in the design of collaborative spaces.

On the Fing blog, you can read an article entitled " L'ingéniérie sociale à l'heure des réseaux sociaux " (" Social engineering in the age of social networks "), in which Michael Johnson, responsible for designing internal tools at Pixar, and Gentry Underwood from Ideo, a knowledge management and social networking company, give their views.
Here, everything is "perfect": this is California, energy, enthusiasm despite the crisis, creativity, youth, the world of animation and cinema, companies that make innovation their raison d'être. The management model is fundamentally different:

" At Pixar, the corporate culture maintains an equal relationship between creative and technical people. The making of a CGI film is fundamentally collaborative. It requires a culture of constructive criticism, to keep all the elements of a film evolving, to find the right ideas, to make the right changes at the right time. Studios are truly director-driven, and the director must communicate the film in his or her head to all collaborators."

• First point: collaboration here is intrinsic; there's no way of doing it any other way.
• Second point: the tools simply flow with the flow of the most massive uses.
• Lastly, there's the question of reward (through recruitment and career development).

"Take the path of greatest use: that is, integrate existing workflows to take advantage of the places where there is least resistance. While you can give users plenty of options, the key is to use system defaults to your advantage, such as using e-mail to bring all employees news from each other's blogs. "No matter how your tools are designed, you can't ask people to go out of their way to use them."

If we compare the two approaches, we'll see that volunteering is not an option but an obligation in a more creative culture. In the field of training, this would imply content adapted to such a deal.

If there is no other choice but to cooperate, then peaceful weapons must be provided. In this case, teaching would also mean helping to develop the skills of listening, critical thinking and contextualization, as well as the ability to relate to others and understand cultural differences in group work, as envisaged by the remarkable FILIPE program for foreign students "obliged" to learn French.

Collective work in project groups