Cairo (from Step Two Designs) is talking about her recent work with the WWF on collaboration.

6 key ideas about collaboration in organizations … serendipity, relationships (face-to-face meetings are really important), compelling need, engage emotionally, remove barriers (to usage), and experience.

Exploring these ideas:
– serendipity … creating opportunities to connect people. The tools are improving for doing this, but it is often through people that this happens.
– relationships … how do you model collaboration within the organization? Need to have the relationships and the experience to do this. Need to find people who model collaborative behaviors, eg, writing a blog, having a FaceBook account.
– compelling need … the business driver for collaboration … clear recognition of this.
– engage emotionally … finding and sharing stories about what works across the world. Eg, in human-elephant conflict and ways to solve this, and linking up the different WWF’ers around the world who need to know about this.
– remove barriers … for making it easier to uploading reports … how do you do that when you have irregular power supply and dial up speeds? How does this change the dynamics?
– experience … need the find the people who have the experience to drive these initiatives?

Cairo blogs at cairowalker.wordpress.com.