Collaboration is Hard

This is a statement posted by Matt Blumberg of Return Path and dissected in a series (1, 2, 3) of interesting posts on collaboration within the corporate realm. Given PlansForUs’ focus on collaboration within the educational sector I couldn’t help but read these posts thinking about the crossover and issues that are addressed by PlansForUs.

Yes, collaboration is hard, it is messy and difficult to arrange. However, collaboration is the most efficient way forward, particularly for educators seeking ways to engage their students.
To begin, lets start with the Wikipedia defintion of collaboration:

Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge and mutual learning between two or more people who are working together, in an intellectual endeavor, toward a common goal which is typically creative in nature. Collaboration does not necessarily require leadership and can even bring better results through de-centralization and egalitarianism.

The most interesting part of this definition is the piece on the effectiveness of collaboration without leadership. This is why collaboration can be messy. Without leadership it is left to the group to self organize and make sense of what is going on. Bees are really good at collaboratively self-organizing because they lack the ego’s that we humans have, consequently they massively collaborate on a regular basis to find the most advantageous site for their hive. Unfortunately for humans massive collaboration does not result in consistently optimal outcomes. Wikipedia is probably our best example of massive collaboration, but even Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collaboration. However Wikipedia points us to a positive outcome that can arise through collaboration and the methods for achieving that outcome.

Two features of Wikipedia are particularly powerful when it comes to creating a successful collaborative platform, asynchronous data entry and the long tail. Let’s start with the long tail. Start with unique ideas/plans, then form community around these and finally attract the participants that are engaged in solving these unique problems.

The issue that arise in artificial professional learning communities is that the participants are not equally incented to solve a problem. I wrote to some folks in MySpace about this particular drawback when it comes to Professional Learning Communities.The reality is that when you assemble as an artificial learning community to solve problems, you are either solving generalized problems to “appeal to the group” or you are solving a specific problem of one of the dominant group members. In either case you will alienating some portion of the group.

By self-organizing around shared problems, micro-communities are endorsing the utility of collaboration by buying into the learning from collective intelligence.  Micro-define your problem then seek out a group that is trying to solve that same problem or if you are using PlansForUs, that group will find you…at least that’s the goal.

Asynchronous data entry is the second feature of Wikipedia that allows collaboration to scale. Teachers are on different schedules: life, school, work load, all contribute to the time a teacher has to address her classroom strategy for the following day. When a teacher is forced into a schedule that doesn’t take into account these outside limiters the teacher may not be in the mindset to participate collaboratively. Collaboration is rigorous and exhausting and if you are already exhausted or your mind is elsewhere, can you possibly contribute your most beneficial information? I would argue that you can not.

With asynchronous data entry, you can contribute to the conversation when you are ready to contribute to the conversation. Those who have come before you have done the same thing, so the outcome is a richer more nuanced collaborative experience. The consequence of this, is that the collaboration does not happen instantaneously, it is an extended conversation. At PlansForUs, we are aggregating the conversations and then using our software to make sense of the ongoing dialogue over an extended period of time. Your job is to contribute when you can, PlansForUs will harness that contribution to improve the overall collaborative experience.

In part 2 Matt Blumberg lays out exactly why collaboration is hard. In my next piece I will describe how you can overcome these hurdles and specifically how PlansForUs is addressing these hurdles.

by Tyler, CEO