The Collaboration Craze

When Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University, endeavored to find the recipe to successful teams, he turned his attention to Broadway musicals. According to Uzzi, pulling off these theatrical productions requires the epitome of teamwork: “Nobody creates a Broadway musical by themselves. The production requires too many different kinds of talent.” Indeed, a musical is delivered through a diverse cast and crew—including the performers, choreographers, composers, musicians, producers, stagehands, and director, to name but a few. Having dedicated his career to discovering the ideal composition of a team, Uzzi wondered if groups consisting of those with preexisting relationships perform better than those composed largely of strangers. To answer the question, he studied the teams behind 474 musicals produced between 1945 and 1989 and charted the degree of extant relationships among collaborators with the success of the show. He devised a formula to measure the relative density of previous relationships on a team, a factor he called Q. His hypothesis was that those teams with a history of working together would yield more winning ventures. Indeed, his data proved Q to be a reliable predictor of a show's success. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest and 5 being highest, those shows with a Q below 1.7 were the most likely to fail. “This wasn't so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.”

However, in an interesting revelation, his data concluded that shows for which Q was too high—above 3.2—also had weak results. In a case of diminishing returns, deeply embedded and familiar relationships led to productions that failed to deliver. As evidence to this claim, Uzzi points to shows produced in the 1920s—commonly filled with big-name talents, although 90 percent flopped nonetheless. As he opines, “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever. But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.” Uzzi and his team calculated what they termed the “bliss point” for Q—between 2.4 and 2.6—representative of teams with a mix of social intimacy. According to Uzzi,

This interesting team dynamic of familiar and new relationships translated to box office results. A show with a Q in the bliss point range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than those at either end of the scale. It was also three times more likely to win the praise of critics.²

Hoping to stumble into their own bliss point, companies are deploying tools to connect employees like never before, creating a new social dynamic where relationships are created and nurtured. Spurred by a technologically ravenous employee population and convinced of the veracity of the old adage “multiple heads are better than one,” companies are jumping headlong into a new category of collaboration and socialization tools. The passion to find more valuable avenues for employee engagement is legitimate given how much time employees spend with one another—time that is often deemed unproductive. According to a 2011 study by GetControl.net, 60 percent of the average workday is spent on e-mails and meetings, of which one-third is considered “wasted” by employees. More than half of professionals are frustrated by the hyperactive multitasking of their peers, particularly annoyed by those coworkers distracted by their mobile devices during important meetings. What's worse, nearly half of meetings are arranged quickly, without a clear purpose or agenda. In addition, the amount of time consumed by these nonproductive activities adds up quickly, with the study estimating that companies spend $12,000 in annual waste per employee as a result of e-mail and meeting distractions.³ At an average employee salary of $45,000 in the United States, that equates to about a quarter of an enterprise's payroll burned.

The fascination with getting more out of these team interactions can be traced at least as far back as 1948, when advertising executive Alex Osborn released his bestseller, Your Creative Power (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948). The book gave Osborn's prescription for unlocking creative genius based on his experience in doing the same for advertising agency BBDO. Perhaps the most eternal idea to emerge from the book was found in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas,” in which Osborn introduced the concept known as brainstorming, which, by his definition meant, “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” Osborn heralded brainstorming as key to his success at BBDO, pointing to incredible examples of a team's ability to tackle a problem more quickly and comprehensively than any individual on his own. In one, he reflected on a group consisting of 10 BBDO employees crafting 87 ideas for a new drugstore in 90 minutes.⁴ At roughly one idea per minute, the potential output of brainstorming was hard to deny, and companies enthusiastically embraced the concept, along with Osborn's prescriptive rules for running effective brainstorming sessions, in their own organizations.

Among Osborn's most important cardinal rules of brainstorming is the pursuit of quantity over quality. In other words, members are explicitly instructed not to criticize an idea during the brainstorming process. The idea is to get as many ideas on the board as possible before worrying about the merits of any. Criticism is kryptonite to the creative process. If people on the team are concerned about rebuke by their peers, they are less likely to offer ideas, bringing the entire brainstorming process to a grinding halt.

Since Osborn's brainchild, there have been numerous experiments measuring the collective wisdom of groups. In the case of brainstorming, the evidence suggests that individuals almost always outperform groups in both quality and quantity of solutions. In one of the early experiments at Yale University in the 1950s, 48 male students were divided into groups of four and asked to solve creative puzzles. Simultaneously, 48 individuals in a control group were given the same objective. Not only did the individuals working alone come up with roughly twice as many solutions as those working in groups, but also the viability of their responses were deemed more “feasible” and “effective” by a panel of judges. Many follow-up studies have reached a similar conclusion. According to Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”⁵

Rather than generating more or better ideas, group collaboration can have the opposite effect, as brainstorming experiments through the ages have demonstrated. Some attribute the outcome to lower individual accountability for each member of the team (meaning that each individual suppresses his or her output in anticipation that the collective team will pull the weight). Others cite a psychological reflex triggered by the amygdala in our brains—a primitive response function that serves as the body's danger center and kicks into high gear when humans feel threatened, a common reaction to conflict. To avoid the uncomfortable sensation the amygdala creates when one is at odds with many, an individual in a group may simply choose not to dissent and instead follow the crowd. In still other cases, the result may be a situation in which collaboration isn't warranted in the first place. For example, in one study of more than 100 experienced sales teams at a large information technology consulting firm bidding for multimillion dollar contracts, researchers found that the greater the cross-team collaboration (measured by hours of help a team received from another more experienced team), the worse is the result (measured by success in winning contracts). The researchers discovered that teams did not learn as much from one another as first anticipated, and whatever information was gained was more than offset by a loss in productivity in completing the proposal. They attributed the finding to a case in which collaboration was simply the wrong tool for the job.⁶

Or, perhaps the reason that individuals tend to perform better than groups has something to do with those sacred rules first established by Osborn. In 2003, in yet another brainstorming experiment, University of California at Berkeley Professor Charlan Nemeth divided 265 female undergraduates into teams of five. She assigned each team 20 minutes to solve the same problem: how to alleviate traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay Area. Teams were assigned one of three conditions. The first set of teams received the standard no-critique rule as prescribed by Osborn. The second set of teams was encouraged to share ideas freely but to critique and debate suggestions openly. The rest were part of the control group and given no ground rules on how to behave. Although the traditional brainstorming teams outperformed the control groups in the number of ideas generated, those assigned the debate condition were the most prolific, generating nearly 20 percent more ideas. After the exercise was completed, researchers asked each respondent if she had any more individual ideas to solve the problem. Those in the brainstorming and control groups produced, on average, three more ideas each; those in the debate group generated seven more ideas per individual.⁷

It appears that brainstorming itself is not the problem, but the way in which it is applied in organizations. And, for all the inherent challenges of collaborating with others, the growing complexity of problems facing organizations creates a situation in which teamwork is important, if not essential. Academic journals are increasingly littered with research studies born of a group of collaborators, not of lone rangers. In analyzing nearly 20 million peer-reviewed papers and 2.1 million patents over the past 50 years, Northwestern University Professor Ben Jones discovered that the levels of teamwork have increased in more than 95 percent of scientific subfields, with the average team size increasing roughly 20 percent each decade.⁸ With the glut of collaboration tools entering the enterprise, there's no shortage of technology available to a company looking to pool resources in solving a complicated problem of its own.

As evidence to the hot technology trend, consider recent efforts by Microsoft to take its share of the collaboration market. Long the mainstay of office software, Microsoft has made some bold moves to ensure that its place in the enterprise environment is not ceded to disruptive competitors eager to define the emerging collaboration space. In 2011, it made its largest acquisition in company history when it acquired Skype, the online voice and video service, for $8.5 billion. When Microsoft announced its purchase, questions abounded as to the reasoning and value of the deal. The prior year, Skype had a small loss of $7 million and had accumulated $686 million in long-term debt. Microsoft's own software had considerable overlap with Skype, with three times the number of active users.⁹

In June of 2012, Microsoft announced another purchase when it acquired Yammer, the social networking equivalent of Facebook for the enterprise, for $1.2 billion. In an effort to retain its share of the $280 billion global enterprise software market (roughly comparable to the GDP of Greece),¹⁰ Microsoft signaled its intentions of adding Yammer to its growing portfolio of enterprise collaboration solutions (alongside existing Microsoft solutions and Skype).¹¹ The latest acquisition again spawned criticism for its seemingly exorbitant purchase price. According to Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch, “Microsoft acquiring Yammer will make them relevant in the social space, but their lack of execution is forcing them to pay a premium.”¹²

Even if Microsoft is indicted in the court of public opinion for paying a premium for its latest acquisitions, it does so to remain meaningful to a changing enterprise market it once dominated. If not Microsoft, there are scores of other software providers willing and able to offer the latest collaboration solutions sure to fit the bill for just about any enterprise need. In addition, just as they welcomed brainstorming when it entered the scene, enterprises are embracing new technologies hoping such tools will lead to the desired bliss point for employee collaboration, helping to explain why Microsoft and other providers are plunging headfirst in an attempt to deliver.

Yet, just as organizations had to learn how and when to apply brainstorming concepts effectively, the same is true when assessing the purpose and fit of collaborative technologies. As an example, businesses plunk down nearly $3 billion in videoconferencing solutions each year,¹³ in part to reduce the time and costs of travel, but also to facilitate long-distance relationships. Despite the investment, the technology has not alleviated the problem of nonproductive meetings in the first place. According to analyst Ovum,

But, when an organization has a clear purpose for using the technology, collaborative tools can help nurture healthy cultures—making investments in technologies like videoconferencing worthwhile. In the 2012 Alcatel-Lucent study, 71 percent of the top-performing companies (as self-reported based on several financial indicators) use videoconferencing compared with slightly more than half of companies, on average. An identical 71 percent of companies with forward-leaning cultures also use collaborative technology, compared with 58 percent of all companies. With an ever-growing mobile workforce, the challenges in creating collaborative environments will only intensify for enterprises. In the 2012 Alcatel-Lucent study, the top concern mentioned by employees when considering the greatest drawback to those working remotely was the increased challenge in coordination of work (cited by close to one in three respondents). Although videoconferencing, in particular, has suffered a prolonged gestation period, there is evidence to suggest that it may have finally earned its place as a viable enterprise technology. More than 60 percent of all employees (including frontline workers and decision makers) in the 2012 Alcatel-Lucent study (discussed in the preface to this book) prefer videoconferencing to audioconferencing because nonverbal communication is not sacrificed and richer interactions can result.

It is precisely the complex recipe involved with collaboration that makes the current craze so confounding. On one end, individuals working alone often produce better results than those in teams, and enterprises would be wise not to stifle the creative genius that may just spark the next major breakthrough. At the same time, the very complexion of a mobile and virtualized workforce is demanding a toolset capable of addressing the challenges created by time and space. As such, there are several implications that companies should consider before blindly deploying collaboration alternatives:

• Don't fake it—In a 2001 article in the Journal of Educational Administration, researcher Megan Tschannen-Moran contemplates the challenge of the time in fostering collaborative relationships between administrators, teachers, and parents. She posits that the tepid progress in doing so has something to do with intentions. She cites studies of schools in which shared decision making was undertaken in order to increase the satisfaction, loyalty, and decision acceptance of teachers and parents. However, success was stunted because of teachers and parents complaining of not being given any real influence over the outcome of decisions—a condition Tschannen-Moran calls “contrived collaboration.”¹⁵ The same result is awaiting enterprises with disingenuous intentions. Managers may encourage a spirit of collaboration while at the same time deliberately withholding necessary information to employees or ignoring suggestions entirely. Under this scenario, employees will resent the time they invested working in good faith toward a solution and will likely suppress creative contributions in future contrived exercises. In other cases, a lack of intention is sufficient to derail progress, with many companies launching the latest collaboration tool expecting that employees will simply use it, despite the fact that there may be no reason to engage with one another in the first place. As evidenced by the study of experienced sales teams in the information technology consulting market, sometimes collaboration is not just unnecessary, it's counterproductive.

  Tschannen-Moran submits that trust and collaboration are intertwined concepts. She names multiple examples in which trust has an accretive effect to an organization's effectiveness, transparency, employee commitment, and team cooperation. At the same time, distrust has negative consequences, with organizations turning to onerous rules and regulations as an ineffectual substitute for trust.¹⁶ If a collaborative approach is not in accordance with the management philosophy of the company, business leaders should realize that investing in associated technologies will only amplify this point. Collaboration technologies serve as a magnifying glass on a company's existing culture. Organizations faking a collaborative approach by masquerading behind the latest technology advancements are often left underwhelmed by the results, with 75 percent of companies deploying such tools, considering them fair at best.¹⁷ Enterprises must start first with behavioral and structural factors before tackling technologies and tools.

  In addition, although collaborative tools magnify a company's culture, there is also evidence to support the idea that greater collaboration holds the possibility of fostering greater trust. That is, once individuals have the opportunity to prove their intentions by working honestly and transparently with others over time, trust is accumulated. Researchers call this accumulation of collective trust social capital and argue that it is a tangible asset to communities that earn it.¹⁸ Yet, to do so requires an authentic foundation through which such genuine interactions can occur. Even when management provides an open culture, there is the element of human behavior that can thwart the success of teams (as seen through the scores of brainstorming experiments proving that individuals perform better than groups, based, at least in part, on the human tendency of following crowds). Here again is where the outlook is encouraging for technology-based collaboration tools. As it so happens, electronic brainstorming is the notable exception to the concept's anemic track record—because groups participating in electronic brainstorming outperform individuals. Not only do large groups do better in this case, but the larger the group, the better are the results. It appears that the protection of the computer screen enables groups to overcome brainstorming's traditional challenges—in essence, allowing large groups to collaborate while maintaining the individualistic contribution of each person.¹⁹

• Respect lone geniuses—In a New York Times blog, author Susan Cain laments, “Solitude is out of fashion.... Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.” She points to compelling evidence suggesting that some of the most creative people in many fields are introverted by nature. One popular example is the Apple success story. With the passing of Steve Jobs, much has been written about Apple's meteoric rise as the most valued company in the world. Jobs was certainly at the heart of Apple's success, and his charismatic presence was a force in the industry. Yet, at the origin of the Apple story was another genius, not known for a magnetic personality, but one whose quiet introversion led to the birth of the world's first user-friendly computer. Steve Wozniak was the yin to the yang of Steve Jobs. It was Wozniak who developed the first Apple prototype, whereas Jobs commercialized it. Introverts like Wozniak walk the virtual and physical corridors of enterprises each day. Indeed, addressing aspiring inventors in his memoir, Wozniak offers the following controversial advice: “Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me.... they live in their heads. They're almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.... I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone ... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”²⁰

  Yet, in a rush to be all things collaborative, many enterprises are turning a deaf ear to the potential of individual genius, literally knocking down walls with open and unassigned floor plans (a trend fueled by the increasingly mobile workforce, as discussed in Chapter 1). These pursuits, although well-intentioned, ignore the creative genius lurking in the introvert. Collaboration can harness the output of many, but privacy can fuel the production of individuals. In a study covering 600 computer programmers at 92 companies, researchers found that the performance gap between successful and unsuccessful organizations was not the result of better pay or greater experience. In this case, those in the top-performing companies were much more likely to benefit from increased privacy, personal work space, and freedom from interruption.²¹ Organizations should respect the need for employees to get away and be alone with their own thoughts, an option certainly enabled by online collaboration tools that allow employees to work together, yet still on their own. It's this sense of individualism that Cain says has attributed to the success of the Internet in the first place, leading to many of its “wondrous collective creations.” She writes, “[The Internet]'s a place where we can be alone together—and this is precisely what gives it power.”²²

• Embrace the horizontal hierarchy—In 2010, CNBC released its list of the six coolest places to work. The list featured a beer company that offers employees two free cases of beer each month, an online retailer that allows employees to burn off stress with an onsite arcade, and a web giant featuring offices with everything from giant slides to climbing walls. Also making the list was Ning, a Palo Alto–based company that specializes in custom-branded social networks. But, it wasn't free food, beer, or recreational activities that earned the company top honors. Instead, it was what employees called its “horizontal hierarchy,” meaning that all levels of the company collaborate with one another. As one employee commented, “I like that, at age 25, I work alongside the executive team and the CEO. They literally sit across from me, they know who I am and what I'm working on.”²³

  In a culture in which collaborative values live, the tools that nurture a collaborative spirit do far more than increase collective output. In fact, they change the boundaries of the organization, whether in unifying employees across distance or time or in collapsing the vertical silos and layers prevalent in many companies. Indeed, such tools engage managers and employees in new ways, reducing organizational friction and allowing for the generation of new ideas. To this point, as a means of preventing some of the negative outcomes associated with brainstorming, experts recommend building as widely a diverse team as possible to tackle a problem. Doing so avoids the potential for groupthink, a psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people when the desire for harmony overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. It also reduces the chance of generating a group with an excessive Q—as Uzzi found in the Broadway study—a condition commonly associated to entrenched organizations with well-defined relationships. The key to getting the most out of collaborative efforts is to harness the input of multiple stakeholders from various levels and functions of the organization, thereby increasing the likelihood of finding the coveted bliss point in a frictionless horizontal hierarchy.

• Underestimate security—With the movement toward more collaborative and open work spaces has come the debate of whether such an approach increases the risk of theft or leakage of a firm's intellectual property. As a result of the current networked age, privacy is more difficult to maintain, whether as consumers attempting to reduce the digital breadcrumbs behind them or enterprises seeking to keep sacred information secret. The challenge is especially prevalent in high-tech companies relying on technology to remain ahead of their competitors, but littered with examples of cases in which employees absconded with the idea only to execute it better somewhere else. According to Internet security firm Symantec, 65 percent of employees who steal intellectual property from their employer have already accepted positions with a competitor or started their own company. More than half of these individuals commit their crimes within a month of leaving their job.”²⁴

  The threat is sufficient to cause some to ignore the collaboration trend outright in an attempt to secure the firm's assets. Yet, these companies simply risk being outmaneuvered by resourceful, tech-savvy employees who will increasingly find ways of bypassing organizational blockages to collaborate using their own bootstrapped solutions. Other organizations place an emphasis on firewall protection measures. Although a necessary component of any collaboration solution, firewalls and other security technologies are not sufficient to stop leaks (whether intentional or accidental). Employees are still capable of stealing assets or exposing information. Therefore, although companies should consider security as any part of a viable technology solution, just as collaboration tools on their own will not change culture, security mechanisms will not be solely sufficient in protecting the organization from the carelessness or malice of its own employees.

For all the hype surrounding collaboration, very few companies get it right. Technology is certainly an enabler, but it is ill equipped against a dogmatic culture that does not first embrace the principles of collaborative teamwork. Even when the most forward-leaning companies endeavor to create an environment in which ideas flourish and knowledge is transferred, they can only do so when employees themselves accept the opportunity. One of the most collaborative geniuses of our time, Steve Jobs, discovered this reality when attempting to design a collaborative environment for Pixar's headquarters in 1999. He arranged the building around a central atrium, such that Pixar's diverse staff of artists, writers, and computer scientists might have the opportunity to collide more often. When building the space wasn't sufficient, Jobs realized that he needed to create a reason for people to go there. He moved mailboxes, meeting rooms, the cafeteria, coffee bar, and even bathrooms around the central location, increasing the chances of such collisions. As Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille stated, “[Jobs] made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.”²⁵ And, while companies hustle to create the same cosmic energy in their workplaces, some are either missing the point or applying the wrong formula to the problem. Collaboration is not the be-all, end-all to every issue. It doesn't obviate the need for individualistic thinking on the part of creative geniuses. However, when executed in an environment that espouses and walks the virtues of collaborative decision making, technology can reduce organizational friction and harness the true power of collective wisdom among introverts and extroverts alike.