The Age of Collaboration is Here

The transition from the Industrial Era to the new Era of Collaboration represents a paradigm shift in management, since the new, more interconnected and complex world needs new structures and new organizations that are more open and flexible. Interview for Thinking Heads Digital.

Every day it is more evident that we are in a new context, entering a new Era or the transition of the Industrial Age, based on mass production, scalability and efficiency of what we used to do, and we are entering an Era that I like to call Era of Collaboration , because the model of value creation is mass collaboration.

This baffles us because value creation models and management models are designed for a controllable and predictable world and we are moving towards a world that is more complex, more interconnected, more volatile and, indeed, more uncertain. We’re trying to solve problems of the future with tools from the past.

I believe that in order to address this uncertain future, the starting point has to be an exercise in humility, recognizing that leaders do not have the answers, that political institutions, social institutions or companies themselves are not prepared to manage this complexity and therefore, we must begin by realizing that, in the same way that to manage the present, what is important is what we know. To manage the future, what matters is what we don’t know.

If we really ask ourselves what are the biggest gaps we have when it comes to creating new structures, in my opinion and with my professional experience, there are three.

The first and most important is that we need to give our organisations a social dimension; In the same way that the last decades of the previous century gave our organizations a dimension of processes that was necessary since hierarchy was not enough and we needed a focus on business processes, now we have to recognize that the new means of social communication create a new opportunity for collective work that is only possible by giving our organizations a social dimension.

A second gap, also very important, is to recognize that oligarchic, monolithic, order-and-command leadership and the waterfall mode in our organizations is not enough nor does it serve us to really transform people’s added value into value; Creativity, innovation and passion are things that don’t happen if the organization doesn’t deserve it. We need
new forms of leadership
to be able to connect with collective intelligence.

And thirdly, the maps we have are of no use to us for the new territory.

When it comes to creating new maps, there are Four Challenges what to address; The first, of which we have already spoken, is the imperative of Mass Collaboration; Collaboration is the essence of the new era value creation model, that is, it is not about collaborating being good, but about making collaboration a strategic challenge in our organizations and creating the culture within them to make it possible. A second challenge, and very good news, is the arrival in our organizations of the first generation of digital natives; The first generation of young people who have already been born on the social web, who already have the social web operating system. Digital natives who already know that sharing creates value because information is not something to put in your head, but is to be shared and create value collectively. They are also social in the use of these new technologies; Which brings us to the third challenge: customers are social. Customers no longer buy products, they buy unique experiences Therefore, they not only buy them but also share them on social networks with their colleagues and have at the tip of their mouse, just a click away, all the company’s information, which forces us to approach the relationship with customers in a different way, in some way to dilute the borders and make them liquid and co-create with our customers. And finally, the fourth challenge has to do with creating more open, transparent and truly people-centred organisations with a new social dimension that makes it possible to make innovation and leadership everyone’s job.