Workspring: Hosted Collaboration-as-a-Service?

The Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design (a top program intersecting design, strategy, and business) - recently showcased Workspring in an event. Workspring is the creation of Steelcase, which is traditionally in the office furniture business.

According to the website:

"Workspring introduces a new way to work away from work. Discover a truly productive retreat—infused with local flavor, equipped with collaborative tools, and designed with your goals and your comfort in mind."

What Steelcase has created is an environment in which you can take your team away from the often stagnant office environment and into a space that is designed for creativity and collaboration.

Workspring's model makes me wonder about the potential for hosted digital collaboration environments, places where - based on your collaboration needs - tools and services (Workspring has session managers that create the space you need) are put together to promote the success of your team. Managers could move beyond what their IT folks can support and into collaborative spaces that are designed for their goals and with support staff that can help to promote success.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for a Wave app here?

Who is AssetMap.com?

Last week one of our research fellows came across an intriging site; Assetmap.com Her discovery likely resulted from getting sick of hearing me drill into our project teams that "Every good project begins with an Asset Map."

For the last few years, every time I transitioned from ideation to realization of a thought I always constructed what I called an "Asset Map". This could take the form of a digital mind-map, a CRM account, or most likely a google docs spreadsheet. Whatever tool I deployed, the intent was always the same; help myself or a team visualize the "assets" (contacts, infrastructure, collateral, etc) currently at our disposal, or within two degrees of aquiring. Nothing especially profound, just extremely useful.

It never ceases to amaze me what happens when you get 3-5 capable people brainstorming about a big idea or project, then have them all take the time to put to paper their relevant "assets". Seeing the glimer in each others eyes and the collective understanding, "Yeah, we can totally do this" will never get old for me, especially as the projects get bigger and more bold.

Then here I go, thinking I'm the only tool ridiculous enough to regularly use a buzz-term like Asset Map, when these guys go and make a business out it. Their pitch is brillant, and irresistably simple, with subtitles like "Discovering Better Connections" and "Every Project is a Puzzle". The boiler plate on their one-page site reads:

The pieces of this puzzle are the ideas, skills, materials, relationships and other assets that must be assembled for success. Assetmap builds online tools that help you and your team inventory the assets you have, visualize your wider network of resources, and find what you're missing. We work....to help people with common interests and complementary needs find one another.

And these guys aren't messing around, with clients like Social Capital Markets Conference, Skoll World Forum, MacArthur Foundation, Ugandan National Fair Trade Association, and Northwestern University. With industry boundries blurring and market realities rapidly evolving, people trying to solve important problems are going to have to get really good at coalition-building, interdisciplinary management, and project mobilization. It's probably going to take organizations like AssetMap to help networks realize their potential.

Our research fellow sent a quick email asking for more info on AssetMap.com, and ended up with a polite email which essentially said: "That's neat, who the hell are you?" All is well though, we look forward to hearing more of AssetMap's exploits and successes in the near future.

Great Social Information Design Case: Aardvark

Great design is crucial for social information systems. It's arguably even more important than with other information systems as a core requirement is motivating users to participate through the addition of content. Make the design difficult to use and people will be less likely to participate.

There are plenty of examples of great social information design and we're going to be discussing some of those in upcoming posts. If we're lucky, we'll find some principles emerge that anyone designing a social information or collaborative system can learn from.

With that introduction, the first case study is a company I've written about recently called Aardvark. Put simply, Aardvark is a chat based Ask-a service. That description doesn't do it justice, however, as Aardvark takes the Ask-a service to new heights with intelligent mining of your contacts as well as your contacts contacts. They've developed an excellent chat based interface as well as seamless email integration to make the service extremely compelling. Let's take a look at some of the key design features that make Aardvark fly.

Collaboration as Mindset: Installment 3

Brett,

I'm focusing on some of the areas of your post that I had immediate thoughts on.

In your reply and within the 'Mechanics' section, you said the following regarding the scenario I painted in my original post:

This is not an impossible scenario to overcome, but it would require explicit negotiation and radical transparency regarding intentions from both parties to avoid miscommunication and misunderstanding.

I agree that the scenario is not impossible to overcome and that explicit negotiation would be required in advance to the extent possible to provide decision making frameworks for the Executive to use. I'm wondering though if that would be enough or if even with the most explicit agreements and transparency (defined as symmetric visibility into decisions that executive makes by both organizations?) it would work. The problem is that it seems inevitable that one of the parties will ultimately feel disadvantaged by a decision made by the Executive. Perhaps what is needed in addition is a formalized conflict resolution process that will split value when that value is challenged as contravening the agreements. I wonder if the costs of such a conflict resolution system could be borne by the organizations in smaller scale collaborations as it would certainly increase the cost of collaboration. There's also the question of whether such a process should remain between the collaborators or if it should involve a neutral third party. If the latter, one might want to preclude any formal legal actions as part of the process given their (as you point out) adversarial nature.

In the 'Marketplace' section of your reply you say:

Also, does the market being served, whether by you, or potential competitor, still result in a net-gain for society? (i.e., making government more efficient, reducing industrial waste, innovating higher education, etc?) If so, one can take more comfort in a mindset of collaboration, because even if you don't win, or you win less, good things are happening. However, if no meaning is derived or good produced as a result of your participation in an industry other than personal financial wealth-creation and general increases in efficiency, there are no logical structures to encourage collaboration.

I'm not sure the evidence of past successful collaborations bears this last point out. It is possible to list several successful collaborative ventures such as joint research and development ventures, co-authorship of works by multiple authors, or even collaborative management of natural resources that are based entirely on selfish aims by the collaborators alone. The key to these collaborations is the fact that the parties do not possess something alone that they do together. I think that setting "net-gain for society" as a necessary condition for collaborations goes against cases we've seen in the past. That said, I think that having a gain that credibly extends beyond and in addition to personal benefits likely does make the collaborators more likely to succeed.

In the 'Mindsets' piece of your reply, you say:

If both parties operate with the assumption that their counterpart will in bad-faith exploit a weakness in the collaborative arrangement, it will usually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ask any attorney about why this mindset is important and they'll tell you that it's because although participants don't want to think about it at the beginning there is a high likelihood that any partnership will end or that one or all of the participants will have grievances against one another that cannot be resolved with simple discussions. The way this has been presented to me is that the "business people" want to just get the deal done to gain the benefits but that they don't carefully think about the ramifications if things don't go as planned.

All that said, I think that you're right that if the partners start with bad-faith as assumed this can set the collaboration up for failure by sowing the seeds of difference as opposed to commonality. More importantly, it can reduce the creativity with which the participants come to the entire negotiation process. One approach to reducing this "bad actor contamination" (not removing it) that is often taken is to have representatives (often attorneys) and not the actual participants negotiate such that any of those bad actor assumptions are held by people who will NOT be co-creating within the collaboration.

How else can we look at this "bad actor" mindset when we have the reality that enables people to feel that they can comfortably invest themselves and their resources into a collaboration? Assuming that all other participants will act to maximize collective benefits (within and beyond the collaboration) isn't realistic to me as it seems to beg for free riding.

Response to "Collaboration as Mindset": Markets, Mindsets, and Mechanisms

Samir,

There are many turns to take in response to your "Collaboration as Mindset" post, so I'll start by highlighting some questions that come to mind.

Mechanics - The beginning structures of a collaborative relationship are critical to its success. The structure must build trust, encourage innovation, and incentivize equitable (not equal) production/contribution, and establish explicit expectations (what are the consequences of success?) The mechanics you outlined for a successful collaboration look like a minefield from a financial incentives standpoint. It creates a confusing world for the Executive in question regarding where both work (clients, projects, etc) and ideas should live as the two organizations evolve. If an interesting innovation came to bear, expectation ambiguity between the two organizations regarding who wants to do what could implode the entire collaborative relationship. This is not an impossible scenario to overcome, but it would require explicit negotiation and radical transparency regarding intentions from both parties to avoid miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Marketplace - One factor for the structure and mental approach to a collaborative opportunity is a careful consideration of the marketplace in question. Is this a niche and mature market, with only a few key actors and a small customer base? If so collaboration with similar organizations may not make sense. But what if the market is large, emergent, and unlikely to ever be dominated by one actor regardless of maneuvering? Also, does the market being served, whether by you, or potential competitor, still result in a net-gain for society? (i.e., making government more efficient, reducing industrial waste, innovating higher education, etc?) If so, one can take more comfort in a mindset of collaboration, because even if you don't win, or you win less, good things are happening. However, if no meaning is derived or good produced as a result of your participation in an industry other than personal financial wealth-creation and general increases in efficiency, there are no logical structures to encourage collaboration.

Mindsets - If your goal is maximize exclusive value in a marketplace to a point of dominance or near dominance, collaboration is a dubious endeavor. While working together with organizations in parallel industries or markets still remains possible, you exclude yourself from realistically working with the very people that would foster the most productive collaboration. Time and again, you see clusters of people and organizations that share intellectual traditions, instincts, goals, motivations, and capabilities almost never working together because of the desire to achieve or maintain exclusive advantage.

Even industries born out of egalitarian aims (NGO's, non-profits, foundations, etc) you see even less co-creation and co-innovation. This is where the problem really becomes evident. A disproportionate amount of NGO's time, focus, and infrastructure are devoted to one thing: preservation of the institution. Because resources are scare, and the donor pool is limited, NGO's focus less on the people they set out to serve (and even less the people that work for the organization) than they do on activities, stories, reports, and micro-innovations that will be seen as appeasing potential and current donors.

With preservation of the institution remaining the default paramount priority, participants rarely ask: Should this institution exist? Is it doing its job? Could someone do it better and will they? How much is the Leaderships' ego driving this initiative or lack thereof? This is clearly ground for another discussion.

Another critical component that defines collaborative parameters are the motivation of the participants. For an optimal collaborative arrangement, those involved should have complementary "external motivations", or motivations for acting that serve something larger or outside the organization they derive profit from. This doesn't mean that self-interested motivations must be absent. Rather, they should be coupled with other desires such as "Regardless of personal outcome, it'd be great to see this idea implemented or project developed" or "I really like this person or organization that I'm negotiating with, and seeing them succeed would be a positive outcome for me as well" or "This is important work, and society needs it immediately” A sense of shared urgency and importance, as well as mutually beneficial motivations and outcomes lubricates collaborative dialogue. This is why you see some of the most amazing projects and agile collaborative frameworks blossom from crisis. Things happen because they must, and a shared destiny is already palpable.

If both parties operate with the assumption that their counterpart will in bad-faith exploit a weakness in the collaborative arrangement, it will usually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I call the "bad actor bias" completely alters the way someone approaches conversation, negotiation, opportunity, and ideation, and is also the default legal instinct when entering business collaborations. Trust is the missing link in most of these relationships, and if you can find a triangulating artifact, or truth, whether it's faith in intention, family connection, or a healthy track record of collaboration, businesses can enter an entirely new realm of what's possible to achieve.

Expertise Based Question Routing

A core theme for me in my study of collaboration technologies has been transferring tacit human knowledge from the siloed "wetware" of our minds into sharable digital media. One of the best interaction models we've found as a species to get knowledge out of someone is the question. Pose a question to the right person and you're likely to get the information you need.

Often, though, the hard part is finding the right person to ask. Here are some approaches used today:

1. No targeting. The idea here is to ask as many people as possible in the hopes that one will have at least some knowledge about the question. An example here might be asking a question to your Twitter followers or Facebook network. The idea is to make your information need explicit and available to as many people as possible without time spent focusing on a limited more suitable set.

2. Targeting based on coordinating structures (e.g. ontologies). Systems can offer the ability to focus targeting by providing a shared structure for those with questions and those with answers to leverage. An example of this is Yahoo! Answers as well as a site that I was involved with called GradShare. The ontologies in these systems enables those who would answer a question to navigate to the questions that are most likely to draw on their expertise.

3. Targeting based on personal knowledge. Characterized by reliance on personal knowledge of an individual and their areas of expertise, this approach is the most common and is based on an ability to both match a question with the expertise of a personal network as well as the ability to successfully engage the targets once found, including management of any social dilemmas such as trust.

Finally, a new breed of system is emerging that is perhaps best exemplified by a small firm called Aardvark. The approach that Aardvark and similar services takes is to use coordinating structures such as tags but also to use technology to classify the match between the question and the potential respondents and the to route the question only to those people who get high relevance scores. It doesn't always work but I've been using Aardvark for some time now and it's regularly asking me questions about where I live - which is easy enough - and what I know about (Startups) - which is not so easy. I've never filled out any questionnaire from Aardvark about my expertise so somehow they are able to determine that I have expertise in Startups and then send me related questions from strangers.

I think that an algorithmic approach to expertise finding and matching to improve question routing is an excellent idea and will be a major trend in the future of peer to peer information systems. Good matching increases answer quality, likelihood of particpation (I'd imagine), and future participation (both by the asker and the answerer). The impact within corporate environments or within professional communities (e.g. imagine a doctor being able to ask a question and getting an answer from a colleague they do not know that is dead on) could be substantial.

Collaboration As Mindset

I was involved in a negotiation recently that raised an internal question. Is collaboration a mindset? Specifically, in addition to the mechanics of collaboration, must there be the correct mental framework within the minds of participants in order to create the opportunity for that collaboration to be successful? Here's the dilemma that prompted the question.

Two organizations (OrgA and OrgB) exist and both pursue the same market (MarketC). For FirmA, MarketC is its sole market and for FirmB it is one of a handful. FirmB possesses a rich network within MarketC but FirmA does not. FirmA has a proven product and process in MarketC, FirmB does not but is working on it. An executive at FirmB seeks to become an executive at FirmA in addition to his position as an executive at FirmB. Does this raise a conflict of interest in the fact that the companies were both addressing MarketC? It seems to and thus precludes the ability for this executive to work for both firms.

On the contrary, was the response from the executive. FirmA, he said, can benefit substantially from FirmB's network and FirmB can benefit substantially from FirmA's product and proven process in delivering to that network. Instead of seeing a conflict of interest, he continued, it was more appropriate to see an opportunity that would raise the tide for all parties, most especially the customers of collaboration between FirmA and FirmB. Further, the fact that the executive would be part of both organizations would facilitate the collaboration through cross-fertilization and improved information flows. In terms of how that executive should manage conflicts such as allocation of time, ideas, and potential customers, that would need to be detailed in advance and agreed to by both firms such that the executive could be in a position to allocate to the "best" Firm for the customers.

This is a long story I know, and I have yet to parse whether it is either viable or the best example of what I'm talking about when I say "Collaboration As Mindset" but what struck me is that this executive had a valid point. Instead of thinking about firms or individuals seeking to maximize their exclusive advantage, collaboration needed to be framed as thinking about how parties can work together to offer something better, to solve more problems, to create more insights, to engage and empower more people, and then to have value flow to them accordingly. If done correctly, that value will be more than what they could have accomplished on their own. In other words, both companies could be better off with a collaborative approach that re-framed success as exclusive advantage to success as sustainable co-advantage.

That shift in mindset made me look at the challenge of collaboration differently. I've gotten used to thinking about enabling collaboration as requiring architectural or technology based solutions when in fact it may just as equally - or perhaps even more - be about shifting a mindset from the historically dominant one based on absolute exclusivity to the collaboratively enabling one based on shared benefits and limited exclusivities.

The Power of Being Cute

A fascinating experiment from ITP on getting a robot from point A to point B in New York City. A highly successful approach is to have a simple robot that just goes straight but with a cute external appearance and a clearly visible statement of its goal location. Bottom Line: Strangers intervene to get the robot to where it needs to go. In one case, 29 random people helped a robot cross a park.

More here:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/tweenbots-cute-beats-smart.html

Equally amazing is that in multiple runs, the robots always succeeded in reaching their goal and were never damaged.

Twitterviews

Not sure if this is a new term in the English language, but if it is it's going to stick. George Stephanopolous (jeez, hard spell!) is doing a Twitterview with John McCain on Tuesday of next week. Q and A is still going to be limited to the 140 char max so should be a really interesting study in the extent to which message really is medium.

If done correctly, this is just a fantastic example of how different communication types (e.g. public two party interview) can traverse technologies.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090313/ap_en_ot/twitter_stephanopoulos_mccain

One issue I have with the approach is that you actually have to follow both George and John in order to see the interview. Seems a more persistent relationship than I'd have hoped when all I want is the transactional value of seeing the Twitterview.

Open Publishing

As per usual, Tim O'Reilly is making a strong case. This time it's in favor of thinking about the complexity of free. He's specifically applying his thinking to the world of publishing and noting that he's successfully monetized the attention from free content to:

• Sell books;
• Establish a topic as relevant and credible to then sell books;
• Sell tickets to events, the interest for which was generated by free content.

I've embedded the video below. In the beginning he outlines a role for publishers that is both dead on and inspiring.


Tim O'Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.