The Age of Collaboration: 10 Management Imperatives

In our first conversation, two and a half years ago, I referred to the challenges and business realities that, in my opinion, defined the new Era of Collaboration. I highlighted, among others, the following: the arrival in our organizations of new talent – that of digital natives -, mass collaboration as an essential means to improve productivity, and the enormous possibilities that social networks offer to build new models of collective value creation. In that conversation he also placed a very special emphasis on the need – today a demand – that we have to build new 2.0 organizations: agile organizations with the capacity to adapt to an increasingly uncertain, changing and complex world; organizations in which leadership and innovation cannot continue to be, as they have been until now, the prerogative of a few – always located at the top of the pyramid – but the result of the work and collaboration of all. Today we can say that the emergence of these challenges has been consolidated. All these trends have ceased to be the bold practices of a handful of free software pioneers and a group of Wikipedia volunteers to become a social and economic reality. So much so that Facebook is already the sixth most “populous” country in the world, with its more than 600 million inhabitants. Another example: according to comScore, our country has become the second most addicted to video, with more than 2,900 million videos viewed – men and women alike – during the month of October. This confirms that changes do not occur when society adopts new technologies, but when society adopts new behaviors. The new reality continues to generate significant changes – at an increasingly accelerated pace – in traditional models of business value creation. And the chances of surviving and thriving in the new environment depend on our ability to adopt new approaches and new attitudes. Therefore, in today’s reflection we are going to analyze 10 imperatives that I believe will be key for the management and transformation of our organizations in the new year:

1. Complexity and uncertainty

The world is increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex, and we have no choice but to prepare ourselves to face uncertainty. The scenario in which we will have to operate this year will undoubtedly be full of accelerated changes and unforeseeable events that will end up having a great impact on our lives, both personally and professionally. The new context requires new approaches and new attitudes. The usual processes with which companies have been generating value, facing changes and managing uncertainty over the last decade are not up to the current circumstances. We simply cannot explore the future with the common sense of the past, so it is important that you take into account the following:

• What we don’t know is much more important than what we know. Often, the normal is the irrelevant; worry about the things that can really change your life. Focus on taking advantage of those unforeseeable positive events that come your way.
• Remember that the world today is dominated by the unknown and the improbable. Don’t worry about what may happen. Don’t stop, decide and move forward, consider your temporary decisions, eliminate the pressure, let the project grow and speak to you, take shape and evolve.
• In a complex environment, the future is only recognizable when we get to it. Many important aspects cannot be foreseen. That’s why, instead of trying to cement an impossible balance, we must accept experimentation, ambiguity, and uncertainty as natural and healthy values for our organizations.
• Worry less about the shame of failing, and more about losing the opportunity of your life. In the current context, statistics are dubious, analysis loses its primacy, the cause-effect relationship loses its meaning, and long-term planning becomes unfeasible and becomes an obstacle to devoting resources to what is really important.

2. Agility and adaptability

“The secret to success is not to foresee the future, but to create an organization that thrives in a future that cannot be foreseen.” Michael Hammer

Are you ready to change in 2011? If everything changes – and it does so at an ever-increasing speed – it is clear that we can no longer continue doing what we did before, at least not in the same way we have always done it. The old recipes are no longer useful. We must learn to adapt to changes. And to achieve this, we must focus on flexibility and agility. The same happens at a collective level, and also with an added difficulty: we have to build flexible organizations but, at the same time, we must be able to control results and maintain efficiency. That is why I believe that the time has come to seek a balance between the need to achieve scalable and effective organizations and the increasingly present demand to build truly people-centered organizations. We must be able to coordinate the efforts of our people without being forced to create bureaucratic, hierarchical and inflexible organizations. It is necessary that we begin to create new products and services in collaboration with our customers, that we involve them in our value chain and integrate them into basic business processes, making proximity to the customer our number one priority. Finally, we must find a new balance between the personal needs for freedom and autonomy and the organization’s needs for prediction and control.

3. Productivity and collaboration

Collaboration is the most powerful way to create value. This is because the key is no longer in individual work, but in the shared and interconnected work of all actors. The new technological platform – web 2.0 – provides us with all the tools we need to create, disseminate and share knowledge, and to build richer and more efficient relationships inside and outside the organization. That is why we say that, in the new economy, sharing creates value; that networks are the new organizational chart; that we are facing a new order that is not based on the power and authority of the formal hierarchy, but on the relationships of participation and flows of activity that naturally arise in collaboration networks, based on the added value of people, authenticity and trust. And we can go even further: today, an organization can only be truly competitive when it makes the most of the tools and models of collaboration that the new era offers us. The use of these 2.0 tools, and the new mental models that accompany them, allows us to approach customers in a different way, and helps us to enhance the organization’s internal communication, strengthen relationships and commitment, work remotely, and find and maintain the talent and creativity we need. This positive momentum can have a very special impact on SMEs, which today are in a position to transform collaboration into productivity and results.

4. Redarchy: The New Emerging Order

To face the challenges we have mentioned, we need to build new 2.0 organizations that are more open, participatory, and transparent; organizations that allow us to collaborate to provide a collective response to the adaptive challenges of the Collaborative Era. We also need new structures that make innovation, creativity, and leadership possible at all levels. It is increasingly evident that we need new words to represent this new reality. That is why we talk about the network, the new organizational model emerging in the Collaborative Age. Hierarchy is what we have known so far: an imposed order (from the top down) that establishes the formal authority and power relations between superiors and subordinates within traditional organizations. The network, on the other hand, is an emerging order (from the bottom up) that arises as a result of the relationships of participation and the flows of activity generated in collaborative environments. This new concept will be more and more prevalent in our organizations, as it allows us to push boundaries, facilitates open innovation, and helps us find new ways of relating and co-creating with our customers.

5. New adaptive leadership

After 150 years of “orthodox management” – based on hierarchy and the practices and techniques of the Industrial Age – we tend to assume that leadership can only be oligarchic, that is, that it must be exercised by a few placed in a position of authority over the rest of the organization. But if there is one thing that is clear – especially in a context of crisis such as the one we are experiencing – it is that the answers can no longer come from the top of the organizational pyramids. The problems are too complex for the answers to be in the hands of a few. The starting point must necessarily be an exercise in humility. We must accept that, as individual leaders, we do not have the capacity to find the answers we need. To address the complex challenges we now face, the response must be collective. The work of Adaptive Leadership is everyone’s responsibility. Anyone in the organization, with or without formal authority, needs to be able to face the new reality, identify those key questions that will allow us to anticipate the impact of changes on our organization, and mobilize others to take collective responsibility. In 2011 we need to preserve the good in our organizational culture, the part that works, and discard what no longer works. We will need to make small changes to see which ones work and which ones don’t; we will have to find new ways to reward and integrate diverse and unconventional points of view; we will also need to learn to question our business model to make the most of new opportunities; and, of course, we will need to explore new communication styles, technologies, and tools (blogs, Twitter, social media, etc.) both to lead a new generation with new talent – the digital natives – and to provoke and promote an innovative mindset in our organizations. This exercise in constant adaptation will allow us to grow and improve without putting our organization at risk.

6. Organizations without borders

One of the characteristics that best define the new scenario is the flow structure. Physical boundaries and borders no longer exist, at least not as we have known them. Communities of users – as large as countries – emerge seemingly out of nowhere and environments that were previously well-defined and differentiated, such as work and private life, begin to fade. The young people of the new generation are digital natives. They send a work email from home while watching a video on Youtube. They consult Facebook while programming, designing or preparing a document. They communicate at the same level with their partners, their bosses, their friends and their collaborators. They chat quite naturally with someone who lives thousands of miles away, thus pulverizing the physical and cultural barriers we know. If physical borders are disappearing, and everything is different today, it makes no sense for us to continue building and managing our organizations as we have done so far. The time has come to break with limitations. We can work from anywhere. We can take advantage of the talent of people who are thousands of kilometres away. We do not need a physical space to design innovative and quality products and services. In 2.0 organisations , knowledge is built in connected, open collaborative networks, based on trust and on the contributions and interrelationships of all its members. We are facing a revolutionary phenomenon that is changing the way we work, our way of understanding the world and relating to others. That is why we must be able to create organisations without borders. Networked and open organisations, based on the talent and creativity of excellent professionals who relate on an equal footing, and who do not have to be linked to a specific physical space. The mere fact of collaborating and sharing on an equal footing generates interactions, proposals and innovative solutions, and allows the activity to be transferred, in a natural way, to the nodes where value is really being added to the organisation. An alternative order thus emerges in organisations. An order not necessarily based on the power and authority of the formal hierarchy, but on the relationships of participation and flows of activity that naturally arise in collaborative networks, based on the added value of people, authenticity and trust.

7. Co-creation with customers

We have stressed that the leadership of the future is not based on orders emanating from the top of the pyramid, but on the work and contribution of ALL members of the organization. Well, this philosophy leads us, as it could not be otherwise, to also involve the customer in the creation of our products and services. This is basically what co-creation consists of: the active participation of the customer within our processes. This formula – which will undoubtedly be increasingly used – allows us to innovate, helps us to get closer to customers and generates trust through participation and collaboration between the different actors. In the Age of Collaboration, it is highly likely that, if you are not connected to your customer, your competition is. Hence the importance of using co-creation as an instrument for customer loyalty. As with any form of innovation, co-creation is not without risks. It requires a significant effort at transparency, insofar as it can only work when the customer has access to the necessary information. But the truth is that, in an increasingly saturated market, this direct, open and frank interaction can be of great help to innovate just when everything seems invented.

8. Technology and business are one and the same thing

In the new context, the union between technology and business is becoming one of the most important sources of innovation and strategic value for companies. So much so that, in new generation companies such as Google, Twitter, Skype or Facebook, we can say that technology and business are one and the same thing. Thanks to the new models of access to software – especially the one known as Software as a Service – technology can be supplied and paid for according to use, in a very similar way to what is already happening with other basic services such as water, electricity or telephone. This new model opens up enormous possibilities for many companies that can now access the full potential of technology using flexible schemes, which do not compromise their cost structure, which do not involve prior investment, and which guarantee, at all times, the availability of the required technological services, at the right time and paying exactly for what is used. Although it is undeniable that technology plays a key strategic role in innovation and business transformation processes, the truth is that managers and executives are not yet able to visualise opportunities for change. They do not know the available technologies and, on many occasions, they are afraid that their use will end up with centralized and sometimes too personalistic management. That is why we must first transform our own mental models, linked to management practices and a vision of the world that correspond to the past, to an Industrial Age in which the key was efficiency and scalability, and in which we were able to foresee the future. Today all that has changed. Today we are the ones who must change. Technology can be, however, our best lever to move the entire organization.

9. Trust and transparency

Transparency, trust and credibility. These are the pillars on which we must build new organizations in 2011. Transparency is an attempt to create an environment of trust in which to promote free access to information, open communication, and the participation of all professionals in decision-making. The objective is to communicate the reality of the organization to all interested parties within a climate of trust. After all, transparency plays a fundamental role in the commitment of the workers of any organization, and has a direct and significant impact on the profit and loss account, in which everyone participates. We have always found that transparency and trust are intimately linked. In fact, transparency is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve an environment of trust within organizations. Why is trust so important? Because, in a way, it is the social lubricant that fosters and facilitates relationships of interdependence. It is the real key to teamwork, and it is the natural formula that human beings use to overcome the uncertainty that is always present in our relationships with others. There is still a lot of resistance. The organizations we have built – both in the public and private spheres – are largely based on the opacity of their structures and the ignorance, on the part of their members, of the reality of the organization. But 2011 can be a great year to start building truly transparent and open organizations.

10. Innovation in People Management

If there is one thing that each of the above challenges highlights, it is the need to innovate in people management. After dozens of years of orthodox management, organizations have become bureaucratic and hierarchical, and place all their emphasis on control and supervision. That is why they are unable to meet the real needs of companies, which today need to attract new talent, make themselves worthy of the initiative, creativity and passion of a new generation of digital natives whose expectations and motivations are very different from those of previous generations. The challenge is that, as leaders, we must make the strategic continuity of our companies compatible with the need to adapt to changes imposed by new models of value creation. The challenges we face require, first of all, the humility necessary to recognize that these challenges go beyond our current capabilities, that they require new ways of thinking and acting, new skills and behaviors, that they require experimentation and time to make possible the emergence of new alternatives. We must, therefore, change as people to be able to distinguish, in our previous experience, what is valuable and essential from what is dispensable and burdensome for our future. These changes are particularly difficult to anticipate if you have already reached your “comfort zone”, and you are convinced that management is a tool for managing the status quo. This year 2011 that begins may be a good time to ask yourself the key questions: How do these changes affect my customers? What impact will they have on the competitiveness of my products and services? How does all this affect me personally? How will these changes affect my future employability?