When I wrote the 7 Pillars framework in 2005, it was always my intention to write more about the higher level aspects of collaboration in organizations. For attendees at any presentations or workshops when I talked about the 7 Pillars, usually there would be questions like “What about a search pillar?”, or “What about this other thing?”. My answer was generally along the lines of, “I have a sneaky answer to that: those are not team-level pillars, but rather something greater.” Well, the time has come to finally write the higher level things, and I’ve called it the “Four Foundations of Organizational Collaboration”.

First off, a bit of philosophy. I believe that “collaboration” means that people have an objective or outcome to be collaborating towards. Collaboration is outcome-relevant, not outcome-irrelevant. Thus when people in a team “collaborate”, they are using their individual skills and abilities to achieve an outcome together that is greater than what they could have achieved working alone. The same applies when people in a “group” collaborate — be that a community of interest (the outcome is doing or understanding the shared interest better), a community of practice (the outcome is doing the practice better), a working group, or so on.

There is a problem, therefore, when we talk about “organizational collaboration”. It’s my view that people don’t collaborate at the amorphous “organizational” level … the purpose of “organizational collaboration” as such is the identification of opportunities for people to collaborate in teams, in groups, in projects. The higher level collaboration creates a context and baseline through which collaboration can be brought down and made to work between team / group / interest members.

For this reason, my view is that organizational collaboration is basically about two things:
(1) people signalling what they are working on or thinking about, and
(2) the ability to quickly and easily form non-project groups and teams to explore ideas better.

In other words, organizational collaboration is about creating opportunities for people to discover other people who may be able to help with specific problems, issues or projects.

Over the next (at least) four blog posts on organizational collaboration, I’ll outline the Four Foundations framework. I look forward to your feedback and thoughts.