@KRISTOFDEWULF

In a world gone social, an ever increasing number

of organizations is chasing the benefits of social

collaboration, both inside and outside their own

four walls. With initiatives such as Google

launching its high altitude balloons to wirelessly

connect billions of people in remote areas, global

collaboration has never been easier and is

expected to surge in the next decade. The core

drivers to get employees, customers, partners and

many other sections of society collaborating with

each other are obvious: disseminate knowledge,

reduce costs, increase innovation speed and

success, share risk, boost market performance

and improve operating efficiency. Yet, despite the

fact that the promises of social business are

overwhelming, Gartner estimates that throughout

2015 about 80% of social business efforts are not

expected to achieve the intended benefits. Even

more so, many collaboration initiatives leave

participants behind with a hangover, generating the

opposite effect of what was intended originally.

So how do you avoid suffering from a collaboration

hangover?

Too many collaborative initiatives are set up for the

wrong reasons, for unclear reasons or for no reason

at all. When the underlying motivation to start

collaborating is the opportunistic desire to just make

more money or to look better, you are bound to fail

simply because the reason to collaborate is not

mutually shared between all participating actors.

Make sure you spend enough time articulating the

why behind your collaborative efforts, creating a

shared and crystal-clear compelling purpose for co-

creation. Similar to the story of the elephant and the

blind men, only too often we make the wrong

assumption that our perception of the world is similar

to someone else’s. Without a clear unifying vision,

one ends up making too many bad compromises in

an effort to address everyone’s concerns, destroying

the potential impact of your collaboration. When in

1970 the 3-member crew of Apollo 13 seemed

doomed after an oxygen tank exploded, everyone

successfully united around one clear purpose: saving

the lives of all three astronauts, making sure nothing

would go wrong during their 200,000-mile journey

back to Earth.

01Sharea clearpurpose

@KRISTOFDEWULF

It seems counter-intuitive, but one of the main

stumbling blocks for collaboration is that our own

success gets in the way. The more successful we are

or feel, the faster we stop looking for inspiration through

others. Take a brand like Nokia. Being the world’s

largest vendor of cellphones from 1998 to 2012, Nokia

became too arrogant, assuming past success is a

sufficient guarantee for future success. But once a

crisis or emergency hits us, it forces us to think and act

differently. Fight your own success demons by making

people feel somewhat uncomfortable, not allowing them

to settle for current success. Create a positive vicious

circle of open discovery: the more people (want to)

know and discover, the more they realize what they

don’t know. Think of the immense amount of time

aircraft pilots spend in simulation environments, getting

prepared for emergency situations they will hopefully

never encounter in reality. Organizations should

develop a similar simulation, moving from a ‘crisis-

prone’ to a ‘crisis-prepared’ context by immersing

themselves in less than comfortable business contexts

and surrounding themselves with people thinking

differently or being more critical than they are.

@KRISTOFDEWULF

02 Makeyourselfuncomfortable

You cannot force collaboration upon people. It happens

because people are intrinsically motivated to be part of

it: when they want to, where they want to and how they

want to. Collaboration hangovers often result from the

fact that people are pushed into rather than pulled

towards something. The old ‘plan and push’ is out, the

new ‘engage and pull’ is in. Consider the example of

Microsoft Encarta vs Wikipedia: while well-paid

professionals incentivized with standard extrinsic

motivators developed Encarta, Wikipedia was built for

fun by unpaid volunteers and believers. Just before

Microsoft decided to remove the software from stores in

2009, Wikipedia got 97% of U.S. online encyclopedia

visits, Encarta just 1.3%. Create the necessary degree

of freedom for people to act autonomously, tapping into

their unique strengths and capabilities as suits them

best. Next time you think about organizing yet another

2-hour client focus group or internal brainstorm session

to squeeze every drop of inspiration out of people,

consider alternative formats which allow more flexibility

for people to contribute.

03 Embraceopt-in

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"Curiosity has its own reason of existing", Albert

Einstein said. Humans are indeed ultimate learning

machines as long as their engines are oiled by

curiosity. Even if there is no immediate benefit, people

love to explore the answers to things. Even the best

artificial intelligence algorithms fail if they are not

encouraged to openly explore new options. Yet, while

people are inquisitive by nature, they unlearn a big

part of it while growing older, as rigid educational

systems and bureaucratic organizational thinking are

getting in their way. Did you know human capacity for

non-linear, imaginative thinking drops from 50% at the

age of 12 to 20% at the age of 16 all the way down to

less than 10% the moment we graduate from

university? Think about how you nurture the creative

child that resides within your workforce, make

collaboration a fun and engaging experience and

allow people to ‘waste time’. The World’s Deepest

Garbage Can is a great example of this, making it fun

for people to pick up trash and dump it in a garbage

can.

04 Create acuriosity culture

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In the massive global change around us, there is one

constant: humans remain human and will always act

as prosocial beings. So don’t confuse collaboration

with a piece of technology or software: these do not

solve problems, people do. Collaboration does not

simply happen, but needs to be nurtured through a

group of people, tapping into human needs and

solving human problems. Think of using more

‘Facebook-like’ enterprise collaboration technology

that puts social first and collaboration second. Have

people do and experience things together, thus

creating the necessary social glue for smooth and

relevant interactions, sharing and co-creation. Keep it

small enough, taking into account Dunbar’s magical

number of 150 persons whom we can keep stable

social relationships with.

05 Make ithuman

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When collaborating with others, people often fear that

they will give more than they get back or that they will

reveal more of themselves than they want. Define a

clear ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) for all contributing

parties, setting clear expectations as to what people

are willing to invest and what they will get back. The

LEGO Ideas initiative allows volunteers to submit any

project idea to LEGO. Ideas reaching 10,000 votes

are reviewed by the LEGO Review Board and

potentially turned into real products, with the person

having submitted the original idea receiving 1% of the

total net sales of the product. Sharing is caring: create

a ‘wall of fame’, making the output of collaboration

visible to everyone, put high-performing contributors

in the spotlight and embed continuous feedback

loops. Sometimes, a mere ‘thank you’ is good enough.

The moment users feel they are no longer listened to

or appreciated, they will pull out.

06 ThinkWIIFM

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We all know the good old quote from the late Steve

Jobs that “people don't know what they want until you

show it to them.” He is right in many ways: people

often don’t know why they are doing what they are

doing, they can’t even always report back about what

they actually did, let alone what they were trying to

solve. When people are expressing what they want,

we often start off from the false assumption that they

have a set of stable, explicit, conscious and consistent

preferences to live by. Instead of having people tell

you directly what they want, you could observe,

involve and activate them in new and creative ways so

you can get to their deeper needs and emotions. Have

you ever considered swapping roles in your company,

experiencing how it feels to step into someone else’s

shoes and having people learn from this? Take a look

at how Adecco’s CEO Patrick De Maeseneire

organized a ‘CEO for one month’ competition among

Millennials to take on his job for one month. Congrats

to Paola!

07 Don’t believewhat peopleare telling you

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Memes are defined as carriers of ideas, behaviors or

styles that are transmitted and spread from one

person to the next within a culture. Much in the same

way as genes, they self-replicate, mutate and respond

to selective pressure. Worthy of being imitated and

repeated over and over again, memes can be very

instrumental in making collaborative initiatives self-

sustaining and long-lasting. Think about the power of

the selfies or loom bracelet hypes, spreading like a

virus by having people imitate and inspire each other.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos installed a meme by bringing

an empty chair into meetings so that people would be

forced to think about the crucial participant who wasn’t

in the room: the customer. Can you think of similar

meme-inspired approaches that could act as burning

platforms to spur collaboration, getting people

positively addicted to it?

08 Creatememes

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Diversity is the cornerstone of good collaboration,

tapping into the complementary power of diverging

views and perspectives for a stronger result. It helps

to avoid getting involved in managerial wishful thinking

and acts as a sound counterbalance for selective

perception, ego-involvement and ungrounded

optimism. Yet diversity in itself is not enough.

Diversity needs to result into a real collaboration

culture, making sure diverse opinions and

backgrounds blend and are translated into meaningful

actions. A strong collaboration culture is one where

the whole organization is immersed into collaborative

thinking and acting, horizontally and vertically.

Ultimately, the organization of the future will thrive on

ecosystems of collaboration, minimizing waste,

recycling output and being self-sustainable, with

various crowds of people being available on demand

or providing input without even being asked for it.

09 Considerdiversity asa start

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At the end of the day, collaboration needs to deliver

against business KPIs such as protecting margins,

driving market share and loyalty and boosting

innovation. Make sure your collaborative efforts are in

sync with real and important business needs and that

they follow the rhythm of the business rather than the

other way round. Try to embed collaborative thinking

in existing workflows and projects, making it part of

your daily business reality and actions. Think of

collaboration as a strategic organizational capability

through which you can support everyday decisions

and guide strategic choices. A ‘one size fits all’

approach does not work here: your CEO might get the

best inspiration from occasional speed-dating with

users, while R&D people from UCB, a large

pharmaceutical company, get the best results from

having patients participate in multi-disciplinary

working groups, exactly the same way the company’s

strategists and R&D managers do.

10 Findthe rightbeat

@KRISTOFDEWULF

@KRISTOFDEWULF

It is often said that people do not like change. But maybe it is just that

we do not pay sufficient attention to creating the necessary conditions

for change. It takes time to train our brain: people can only turn new

behavior into a habit after executing the new behavior at least 21

times in a row. While establishing a collaborative culture is a

disruptive move for most companies, are we paying enough attention

to respecting these 10 rules? I am interested in learning more about

your personal experiences and I challenge you to add more rules to

avoiding a collaboration hangover. Let’s build a better collaborative

future together!