Mary Bernklau's List: Collaboration

EFINITION: Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more organizations to achieve results they are more likely to achieve together than alone.

The organizations believe they are interdependent. Partners agree that each organization has a unique role to play to address the issue. The relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; and sharing of resources and rewards. Partners focus on the way in which the current system can be improved by changing individual organization policies and procedures.

Collaboration is a very intense way of working together while still retaining the separate identities, autonomy, and decision-making authority of the organizations involved. The beauty of collaboration is the acknowledgment that each organization has a separate and special function, a power that it brings to the joint effort. At the same time, each separate organization provides valuable services or products often critical to the health and well-being of their community. When the problems have been addressed, or the system has been improved, the collaboration is over.

A simple definition, to cut through the hype

That’s it — just nine words to define “collaboration.” It’s a very simple definition. But such simplicity is desperately needed in a time when “collaboration” has become an overly-hyped term, where “social business” vendors are trying to sell new ways of working to confused companies, where business experts constantly extol the imperative for executives to build more collaborative and innovative organizations, and where overly-complex definitions serve only to obscure the truth.

Dissecting “collaboration”

 

This simple definition includes three parts:

 
 
1. Two or more people (team)
 
2. Working together (processes)
 
3. Towards shared goals (purpose)
 
 

This definition doesn’t once mention technology or software, but it does provide a solid framework for understanding exactly what collaboration is and isn’t. For starters, collaboration takes place in teams. A big group of people using social software together doesn’t translate directly into collaboration. It may be conversation; it may be cooperation; it may be knowledge sharing; it may improve employee engagement; but it is not collaboration.

 

Next, collaboration is about people working together and completing shared processes. This is where technology fits in, but not all of these processes are technological.

 

Finally… purpose. This is where a lot of the misunderstanding around collaboration stems. If people are working together but have no shared goals, they are “cooperating,” not “collaborating.”