What motivates someone to collaborate? Five essential needs that must be met.

Recently, I was invited to participate in a workshop to address the question “How might we motivate people to participate in complex interdisciplinary problem-solving initiatives?”  The premise here was that this is not about the committee your boss directed you to join, but rather about complex problems where the solution is not clear, where many possible solutions may exist and where it is not clear who should participate or you don’t have the functional relationship to direct people to participate.

The workshop was designed as a “Deep Dive”, a facilitated process to help a group collaborate to design creative solutions that are focused on user needs.  I won’t go into the details of the process here, but I will say that there was an emphasis on what is sometimes called empathetic, or active, listening, which is listening to really understand the needs of the other person.

To help us, as participants, get a better understanding of the issues around motivation, we were asked to interview people who have experience organizing and managing teams.  Using active listening, we attempted to tap into their knowledge and experience.  We wanted to understand what motivated people to collaborate in teams and what they learned about leading teams of people in a collaborative initiative.  The interviewees were quite diverse in their level, type of work and years of experience, ranging from junior analysts up to an acting Deputy Minister.  They were similar, however, in that they all had considerable experience organizing, managing and motivating teams to help them achieve goals. In many cases, this meant motivating people with whom they did not have a direct reporting relationship.  Collectively, my fellow workshop participants and I interviewed over 20 people.

From these interviews, a wide variety of knowledge and experience was shared.  Yet, there was a lot of similarity in what was said.  Out of all this information, we were able to identify the five key needs below (in order of importance).  Think of these as needs that must be met in order for someone to volunteer to participate in an initiative that you might be leading. 

1) Efficiency

-         Nobody volunteers to join a team because they want more work. Potential participants will always ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?”  In particular, it must be clear to the potential participant how their involvement in the team will help them do whatever it is they are interested in doing more effectively or more quickly.  Perhaps, their involvement will help them learn a new skill; perhaps it will help them network with other experts in their field; perhaps they can influence something that will have an impact on them.  Whatever it is, they will have a need to do something more efficiently.   In addition, potential participants in your team will want to know how they can add value.    These two questions, “What can I contribute?” and “What can I take away?” must align with the objectives of the team in order for potential participants to consider becoming involved.

2) Clarity

The people we interviewed made it clear that there are several items potential participants often need to be clear about before they will commit to join a team, including:

• Clarity on the goals of the team and the desired outcomes. The goals and outcomes need to align with their interests, available time, and what they can take away or they will get out of it.
• Clarity on the context for the team. Why is the team being constituted? Who has asked for the outcome?
• Clarity on their role. It’s your job as a team leader to help participants see how they can contribute and remind them of the value of their contribution.  It’s also important to remember that success is a shared responsibility among all members of the team.  It is not just the Chair’s responsibility.  
• Clarity on the process.  Participants need to feel that the process is logical and has a high chance of leading to a successful outcome.  To this end, it is important that the leader or Chair be honest and transparent throughout the process.
• Clarity on how members expect to interact with one another.  For example, sometimes, you have to overcome a culture of hierarchy where people defer to the highest ranking member at the table.
• Clarity on credit.  Being acknowledged for one’s work is important.  As the leader or Chair, it’s you must ensure that credit is given where it is due, and not taken when it is not due. Celebrate the small achievements.

3) Purpose

-         Purpose does not refer to the aim or goal of the team, but rather to need of participants to know that their involvement will contribute to something greater.  Participants want to know that they will have an influence on a larger issue that is of interest to them.  Nothing is more demoralizing for a team member than the realization that they are involved in a consultation disguised as a team - where a Chair is only interested in checking a box to say that they had broad involvement but is not really interested in the contributions of team members. 

4) Autonomy

-         Team members need to have some control over how they contribute.  This does not mean that it is a total free-for-all in terms of everyone doing their own thing.  As the Chair or leader, it is your job to ensure a shared understanding of the desired outcomes and the tasks required to reach the goal.  You need to highlight what needs to be done and then set the conditions to allow members to commit to the work.  Start by talking to your participants to understand their interests and let them help develop the process and associated tasks.   Help members understand how they can contribute or find ways for two or three members to share responsibility for a task.  Emphasize that success is a shared responsibility, not just the Chair’s. Don’t position tasks as something interesting that someone might want to take on, rather, position tasks as essential to the success of the team that someone must take on.  Not all tasks are glamorous and some are just a sheer grind, but your best chance of success is getting someone to volunteer.  Whatever you do as the team leader, do not micromanage the tasks.  The people I interviewed all agreed that it was better to define the task result and then let the responsible team member have ownership on how to deliver on the task.   

5) Safety

-         The people we interviewed shared a view that it is essential to create a safe environment for the members to participate fully.  This means both an intellectual and emotional safe space -a place where differences of opinion are respected, even if they are not agreed with.  Constructive criticism is OK, but personal attacks are not. Remember, people like to stick to their disciplines.  There is a fear of being criticized.  There is also a strong culture of hierarchy in some organizations (e.g whatever the highest ranking member of the team says is true).  There is also sometimes a culture of protectionism (it’s my knowledge, I did the research, I own it). Set ground rules everyone can agree on early on in the process or develop a team charter that defines how members will interact.

The needs identified above are not exhaustive.   They are the top 5 needs that we identified from the information we collected from our interviews. Participants may have other needs that must be met depending on the circumstances.  Nor does meeting these needs guarantee involvement in an initiative.  These are basic, minimum needs that interviewees told us must be met in order for a potential participant to consider becoming involved in a collaborative initiative.  Without having met these basic needs it is unlikely that someone will become involved in an initiative.  They are a necessary pre-condition for involvement, but do not guarantee involvement.

As a leader, or someone trying to encourage participation in a team it is important that you think about the needs of the participants. Put yourself in the shoes of the person receiving your request.  What is their context? Why would they want to participate? You must align what you want as leader with the participants’ interests, time and needs.

In addition, our interviewees spoke about the importance of developing relationships with team members.  Team building is the key to a successful team.  Fostering strong relationships is crucial to ensuring strong commitment to actions. Our interviewees suggested spending time one-on-one with team members, even if it’s only a few minutes.  Get to know little things about the members and remember those things for the next conversation.  A little personal interest goes a long way.

Finally, stay focused on action.  Remember, action is the end goal, not just talking. 

Speaking of action, I invite you to share your experience leading or participating in a team.  Do the needs identified here resonate with you?

The power of storytelling: strengthening science-policy integration when times are uncertain, and the ideal future state cannot be described

When I used to work as a scientist in a regional science and technology unit for the Government of Ontario, there was popular, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, refrain at the end of meetings between scientists and policy analysts. The policy analysts would say, "You scientists never give us an answer we can use!" To which the scientists would retort, "You policy folks never ask us a question we can answer!" For as long as I have been working in government, people have been trying to improve the integration between policy and science.  Yet we are still at it and success seems as elusive as ever.

There are ample reasons why science and policy are so difficult to integrate, and there is lots of good work being done to try and address this issue.  But a recent half-day session with David Snowden gave me new inspiration into how one might tackle this particularly thorny issue.

If I have captured the parlance of Snowden's Cynefin framework correctly, then I think science-policy integration must be a complex problem.  That is to say, a problem in which cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat, there are no right answers and many competing ideas, and where problems and solutions interact so the system is constantly evolving.

Snowden had a couple of pieces of advice that resonated with me when it comes to solving complex problems.

First, he says, don’t waste time trying to figure out what to do. Instead, probe with small experiments, then monitor and adapt.  Since you cannot define what the ideal future state will be, start with a good definition of the present and move forward with safe-to-fail experiments that may lead to unforeseen outcomes.  It’s cheaper and more successful.  If you can accept that your theory for proceeding is coherent with the facts - with the way you understand the present - then you can move to a place where the outcome is uncertain.  In other words, you have safety in direction, not safety in outcome.

Second, you need to monitor the experiments carefully, with impact indicators, not output indicators. In complex problems, argues Snowden, you cannot manage the outcomes because they are emergent.  However, you can manage the boundaries of the issue you wish to deal with, the tools and processes you put in place to influence the patterns of behaviours in the system, and the resources devoted to amplifying positive patterns and dampening negative patterns. Snowden gave an example of how focusing on outcome indicators can derail solving complex problems.  In the UK, a hospital authority decided that it was unacceptable to have people in the emergency waiting room for longer than 4 hours and in the emergency ward for longer than 48 hours. The result was that patients were not properly triaged or treated.  They were pushed through the system and on to the wards based on how long they had been there, not based on their medical need.  The quality of care did not increase, but the emergency room met its targets.

Third, it is really difficult to address complex problems directly.  Instead, address them obliquely.  Many complex problems are about changing organizational culture.  But it is very hard to change people. Instead, argues Snowden, change the system and the people will change to match it.  Nobody, for example, is going to share information across silos just because they had a workshop and were told they should share.

So what does all this say about developing evidence-based policy to strengthen science-policy integration when times are uncertain, and the ideal future state cannot be described?

Snowden gave a number of examples of work he has done to solve complex problems using self-indexed micro-narratives, which may be relevant to strengthening science-policy integration in an organization such as the one I work in.

At the heart of Snowden’s examples is a process by which people are asked to first tell a story about a particular topic and then to score or weight their story using a carefully constructed index.  The stories are recorded in any number of formats: written, audio, video.  The format is not important, as long as they are left unfiltered and are not summarized.  The index is similar to keywords used to describe the story, but much more sophisticated.  The index takes the form of a triangle on which the storyteller is asked to place a dot.  At each point of the triangle are carefully selected keywords. The storyteller is asked to place the dot in the triangle closest to the word that describes their story.  When the storyteller places the dot, it gives three quantitative weights – one for each choice between two points of the triangle.  These weights can be used to plot the stories on a 3-D graph. Storytellers are often asked to score their story on several indexes, which can be recombined to create different graphs.  Similarly scored stories show up as clusters on the graph.

Snowden gave an example of this technique from when he worked with the CIA in the ‘70s.  The CIA funded an American university to work with a French University to study attitudes in Iran. The French University had some Iranian professors, and as part of the study the professors asked Iranians to tell them stories about Iran and then self-index the stories.  After collecting about 18,000 stories, two clear clusters of stories emerged.  One cluster was stories that related a strong dislike of America.  The other cluster was stories that related a strong dislike of the West.  This was not too encouraging, but they continued collecting stories.  After 21,000 stories, a third cluster emerged.  This cluster was comprised of stories that related the concept of not wanting to be seen as a barbarian.  Snowden recognized that this was the opportunity for intervention; that if the US could somehow emphasize the later story, it might drain energy away from the other stories.

Snowden did not go into detail about what the CIA did, but he did give more detail about a project he is working on right now in Mexico City.  This project is focused on changing the culture of violence associated with gangs and drugs.  They have collected about 200,000 self-indexed stories from ordinary people on the street.  When they analyze the stories, they are confident that a cluster of stories will emerge about the violent gang culture.  However, they also believe that a number of positive stories will emerge.  Once they find out what those positive stories are, they will work with experts in Hollywood to create films, TV spots, multi-media presentations, whatever it takes to emphasize the positive stories, and hopefully, drain energy away from the negative stories.

For Snowden, the culture of a society or an organization is wrapped up in its stories.  If you can change the stories people tell, you have changed the culture.

So how does this relate to science-policy integration?

I think that strengthening science-policy integration within a science-policy organization is actually a culture change problem.  So, what if we took this approach:

1. Record stories from employees in the organization about their science-policy interaction experience and have them self-index the stories on carefully selected indexes (e.g. is the behaviour in this story best described as "competitive", "cooperative", or "altruistic"), 
2. Graph the stories to find clusters of positive behaviours that might represent opportunities to intervene.
3. Develop and implement some safe-to-fail policies, guidelines, or tools to reinforce the positive behaviours and dampen the negative ones,
4. Recollect stories, perhaps a year later, and see if the clusters of stories have moved one or two index points toward more desirable values. Resources are given to tools that seem to be working and taken away from the tools that are not working.

Success is measured by the index values of the stories, which measure the impact of the actions taken to influence the system.  Success is not measured by output indicators, like the number of meetings scientists and policy analysts had.

There is obviously a lot of detail I am missing here, and I need to familiarize myself more with Snowden's techniques.  But at first blush, this seems like a promising approach to strengthening science-policy integration in a complex environment.

Chefs versus recipe users: LOCOP as an apprentice program for leadership

Can NRCan’s Learning Organization Community of Practice (LOCoP) be thought of as an apprentice program for leaders?

Recently, I attended a half-day session with David Snowden, author of the Cynefin framework for solving problems. Snowden makes a distinction between how one should solve complex problems, versus how one should solve simple or merely complicated problems. I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say, that in a knowledge-based economy where innovation is required, we need the type of people who can solve complex problems. In other words, we need chefs, not recipe users!

Snowden made the point that there is a big difference between a chef and a recipe user. Sure, if you have all the right equipment in your kitchen, you lay out all the tools and necessary ingredients and you have a good recipe to follow, then just about any competent person can produce a reasonably good meal. But only a chef can walk into your kitchen, see what’s in the fridge, and create a truly exceptional meal.

The difference, Snowden asserts, is that chefs possess practical wisdom.

Wisdom is the ability to reflect on one’s knowledge or experience. Practical, here, means it was acquired through the process of practice – in a chef’s case, as an apprentice.

The beauty of the apprentice model is that it allows someone to imperfectly mimic the master and make mistakes. Studies have shown that people recall far more knowledge when they actually act on their knowledge than when they just think about it. In an apprenticeship program, one practices what one has learned from books, but in an environment where it is safe to make mistakes. The result is a much greater ability to recall and reflect on that knowledge for innovative results.

Snowden also made the point that doctors and lawyers also use the apprentice model, but managers have no such system; instead they have the MBA.

That’s when I stated to re-think the role of our Learning Organization Community of Practice as an apprentice program for leaders. When I first took my LOCOP training, I came out of that training thinking of myself as an apprentice - but an apprentice in facilitation. Now, I recognize that I am really an apprentice in becoming a leader.

Every time I use my LOCOP facilitation tools to develop a shared vision in a team, to think about the whole puzzle at once, to create space for new learning, to foster deep reflective listening and build shared meaning in conversation rather than argument, I am conducting a small, safe-to-fail exercise in which I practice the theory I learned in my original training. The result is that I now have a bucket of tools in my back pocket that I can mix and match and modify to solve all kinds of problems in a collaborative and increasingly innovative way.

Add to that the value of having a community who I can learn new techniques from, who I can validate my own ideas with, and who I can call on to help me solve tough problems, then I think we have many of the essential elements of a low-cost apprentice program for leaders right in my place of work.

The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday

A recent report by McKinsey & Co.claims to show, using a proprietory survey of over 1000 company executives, that companies that incorporate Web 2.0 technology to increase collaboration see greater growth in market share and other economic indicators.  The majority of respondents to the survey say that their companies enjoy measurable business benefits from using Web 2.0, including increased speed of access to knowledge, reduced communication costs, increased speed of access to internal experts, and increased customer satisfaction.

The report goes on to say:

Moreover, the benefits from the use of collaborative technologies at fully networked organizations appear to be multiplicative in nature: these enterprises seem to be “learning organizations” in which lessons from interacting with one set of stakeholders in turn improve the ability to realize value in interactions with others. If this hypothesis is correct, competitive advantage at these companies will accelerate as network effects kick in, network connections become richer, and learning cycles speed up.

This appears to be another example of how the business world has gone beyond just looking at collaboration or Web 2.0, and is starting to focus on the more important outcomes of using this technology.

Social Learning at Telus: Linking collaborative technologies to learning strategies

Recently someone sent me a link to a video clip of Dan Pontefract, Director of Learning and Collaboration at Telus, talking about the social collaboration tools they have put in place to encourage the sharing of information and knowledge.  The video is only 2.5 minutes long and is well worth watching.

Telus is not unlike a lot of other organizations, including my own, who have put in place collaboration tools like wikis, forums, blogs, filesharing, instant messaging to promote the exchange of knowledge.  But a few things about Dan Pontefract's presentation really struck me.

It's about Learning, not just collaboration

For me, the key point in Dan Pontefract's presentation is that collaboration technology is intimately connected to employee learning.  By creating platforms like team collaboration sites, blogs, microblogs, videosites and wikis where employees can share ideas, opportunities and issues, employees are continuously learning from one another.  He sums it up well when he talks about the "Learning 2.0 Model" at Telus.  "Learning", he says, "is part formal, part informal, and part social." At Telus social learning is facilitated through social media.  Eventually, as people begin using the technology, they get into a rhythm of how they start sharing and how they start exposing their content, their knowledge and their ideas.  Ultimately, he argues, people realize quickly that what they gain from everyone else helps them do their job faster, better and in a more engaging fashion.

Note, however, that while Social media is facilitating one type of learning at Telus, it has not replaced other more formal and informal modes of learning - the so-called "sage on a stage". Formal and informal learning, no doubt, continues to play an important role in Telus' employee learning strategy.

This is not the first time I have seen Web 2.0 collaboration tools linked to employee learning strategies in organizations.  At a recent conference on knowledge management, I met the director of learning for Rogers Communications, who told me a very similar story about what they are doing. As with Telus, social learning plays an important part of their employee learning strategy, but it is linked to formal and informal methods of learning.  A similar story was told by Sierra Wireless at the same conference.

What really strikes me in these examples is the connection of collaboration to employee learning.  In other words, collaboration is a tool, a means to an end that facilitates learning, but collaboration is not the objective. The objective is to create a learning organization.

Meanwhile, in government these days, I see a lot of  attention being paid to social media and collaboration, but I have not yet seen this formal link to employee learning strategies.  So, while we have wikis, blogs, forums, video sharing sites, file sharing sites, and other tools, and while timely access to information is routinely touted as the key benefit, it is not at all clear that this is seen as a form of social learning or how this social learning is linked to more formal and informal learning in each employees learning objectives.  In fact, I wonder if recent events like the wildly successful Collaborative Management Day series suggests that for many bureaucrats, the focus is still on the tool of collaboration rather than on a broader objective of employee learning.

Not everyone has to participate to get value

Dan Pontefract also made an important point that not everyone in the organization needs to participate in social media tools for them to have value. He said that they are proud that about 1/6 of all team members are active on their microblogging service.  That does not seem like a very high proportion, but he said it is important for people to find their own value in the service and whether they want to use it, which brings me to the last important point;

Don't mandate the use of social media, empower people to use it.

Nobody wants to use a tool if they feel they cannot get any benefit from it.  And mandating them to use it only builds frustration and resentment.  So instead, find ways to encourage people to use it.

To wrap up, this is a very informative interview with Dan Pontefract, and would recommend it to anyone interested in knowledge management, learning or collaborative technologies.

Three behaviours exhibited by knowledge users and how collaborative tools can help them

I have made a couple of updates to my map of collaborative tools available in my workplace, but I still welcome any comments.

Part of the impetus for creating this map was that I have been asked to provide input on the ways that collaborative tools can be used to engage employees. Now, I am not sure what specifically is meant by this, but since I work in a science-based policy organization, it's probably fair to assume that this is about either engaging scientists more in the policy development process, or in bringing the two sides together to co-create policy solutions.

Either way, it caused me to think about how people use knowledge while doing their work and how they might use collaborative tools to help them.

As I stumbled my way through this thought experiment, I came upon a knowledge management framework presented by Chris Collison in a slide show on knowledge transfer. I've adapted his framework to describe the types of behaviours knowledge users exhibit before, during and after working on a problem as well as the specific actions they could take with the collaborative tools available in my workplace.

Collison's framework is pretty straightforward; individuals or teams start with a goal, they then apply knowledge to work on the issue, ultimately arriving at some result. As they move toward realizing their intended outcome, they have opportunities to learn before, during and after the process of using their knowledge to address the issue. The behaviours associated with learning before, during and after using the knowledge, I have called "knowledge pull", "interactive" and "knowledge push" to represent the principle way that knowledge flows between the person or team doing the work and the captured knowledge base. The specific actions I have listed are from the perspective of a policy analyst working in my organization with the online collaborative tools at their disposal. All this is of course qualified by the caveat that online collaborative tools are not the only way to interact with the knowledge contained in people and networks. One could, after all, walk down the corridor and talk with one's colleagues. However, since I have been asked to provide input on the ways collaborative tools could help engage employees in my workplace, that is where I have focused my thoughts. As usual, any comments or questions are welcome as this is still very early in its draft stage.

What can collaborative tools help me do?

I've occasionally heard people comment that they feel overwhelmed by all the different online collaborative tools now available in the workplace. More specifically, I think they mean that with so many different tools available, they don't know what they would use each tool for. Without understanding the purpose of a tool, or the task that it could help them accomplish, they are unlikely to invest the time to learn about it.

So, I tried to organize the tools available in my workplace into themes with a specific emphasis on some of the tasks each tool can help you accomplish.

This is still draft, but let me know if I have forgotten anything or if it could be arranged in a different way.