January 2014

In December I described the difficulty (and the risks) of attempting to predict the future more than a few years out. This month I am going to ignore my own good advice and speculate a bit about where we might be heading. However, I’m hedging my bet by relying on a comment by science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here – it just isn’t evenly distributed.”

So my predictions about tomorrow are built solidly on several “signals” we can see right now, today.

I will start by referring you to a very powerful TED talk by Don Tapscott, a well-known futurist, author, and insightful thinker. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to spend 18 minutes listening to Tapscott’s “Four Principles for the Open World.”

The talk was delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland, in June of 2012. As of January 2014 it had been viewed almost 65,000 times.

I encourage you to watch the video because I find Tapscott’s insights both compelling and inspiring (if not completely original). In brief, he identifies four core elements of the richly interconnected world we have created and now live in:

1. Collaboration. With the Internet we can communicate with just about anyone we want to, anywhere in the world, almost instantly, and at very little cost. Tapscott suggests that actually the Internet is more than “just” a global communications platform; it’s actually becoming a global computation machine that we are all, together, programming. And we use it to produce ideas and information (and even things) together.
2. Transparency. Anyone with an Internet connection can find out almost anything we want to know – again, almost instantly. Organizational decisions, P&L statements, business processes, patents, even internal correspondence (think of Julian Assange of Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and the NSA, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s staff emails) – all are essentially accessible online. This level of transparency changes the game in more ways than most of us have yet to understand.
3. Sharing. This is about more than transparency. Sharing involves giving away “proprietary” information to create a bigger pie that all can share in. IBM gave away millions of lines of Linux code to enable crowd-sourced innovation, and ultimately reaped far more in profitable revenue than it ever could if it had kept all that code under wraps. Other examples of sharing that has become economically attractive include ventures like AirBnb, Zipcars, and Proctor & Gamble’s open-sourcing of product research.
4. Empowerment. All this information access and transparency is also leading to a dramatic “leveling” and sharing of power – whether that power is inside organizations or in the public sphere – think of the Arab Spring, or even Tiananmen Square. Those uprisings and revolutions came about because of information access and sharing. Who could have predicted that a simple text messaging system limited to 140 characters would have enabled “the people” to overthrow unpopular governments?

These are very rich, complex, and powerful ideas. I’m convinced that understanding their implications will give you a meaningful advantage in facing tomorrow. However, I want to focus on just one idea today (but I promise to come back to these four principles many times).

One of the best results of publishing this newsletter is the many wonderful people I have met because of my writing – often people I would never have connected with in a more traditional world.

And one of those new friends is Bob Tiell, Director of Career Services & Workforce Development at Jewish Family & Career Services (JFCS) in Louisville, Kentucky.

Bob responded enthusiastically to one of my earlier articles about adult learning, and we have struck up a long-distance friendship driven by our common interest in the processes and techniques that foster personal and organizational growth. Recently Bob and I chatted about the fundamental importance of collaboration in today’s economy.

I have paid plenty of attention to collaboration for many years, but my focus has generally been on person-to-person collaboration –in particular on how digital tools have enabled us to work effectively with peers and colleagues who are located somewhere else (what many call “virtual” or “distributed teams” and “distributed work”).

Much of my work has involved helping organizations establish distributed work programs that enable their staff to be fully effective when they are away from their primary workplace. For me, learning to manage distributed work is an important baby step on the way to creating organizational cultures that value trust, respect, and empowerment over “command and control.”

But Bob reminded me that collaboration is equally important at the organizational level. In his world there is a continual need to seek funding for community-based organizations like JFCS in order to provide career management, training, and support to their clients and the workforce at large.

What’s new today is that many of the funding sources (foundations, charitable groups, public agencies) are doing their best to stretch their limited resources by encouraging grant proposals that come from several agencies who are committed to working together to provide complementary services to their constituents.

Bob’s insights are important:

• funding agencies and donors now commonly expect proposals to come jointly from multiple community-based organizations;
• because the timetable for completing proposals is often tight, it is important to build ongoing relationships with potential partner organizations well in advance of specific proposal opportunities;
• sometimes potential partners are also in competition with each other (at least for some if not all of their respective services); and
• this is all a new collaborative environment, so everyone is learning together.

As Bob describes it, “This amounts to a tidal wave for us; we’re facing a mandate to collaborate with folks we may not know all that well, and with whom there can sometimes be turf issues.”

How to cope with this new world of “forced” collaboration? Bob reports that the most effective approach he’s discovered so far, beyond just building good relationships, is to make the collaboration agreements explicit and even somewhat formal. “For joint funding proposals we mount, we are learning to document our respective roles and expectations on paper. That may sound somewhat bureaucratic, but we’ve found it’s an essential step to being successful.”

The lesson is profound if relatively simple: don’t take anything for granted. Collaboration takes work, but it can produce significantly higher value for everyone.

And it strikes me that Don Tapscott’s “open world” offers wonderful new opportunities for creating value, but that value only comes at the price of learning to collaborate – to trust, to be transparent, and to share. When we work together helping each other achieve complementary goals, we're all better off.

 

 

 

Please contact me for a free conversation about how you can create value through collaboration that enables you to thrive in the age of networked intelligence. 

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