collaboration

Five for Friday (26/5/17)

Five more nourishing morsels I’ve spotted this week:

  1. LocalGovCamp is back this September in Bristol. Find out more and sign up for the ticket lottery here.
  2. The Disappearing Computer – Walt Mossberg’s last column is a great read on the future of computing
  3. Put employee experience at the heart of the digital workplace – interesting presentation on deploying communication and collaboration technology in your workplace
  4. Digital skills in the workplace – I’ve decided to give this rather dormant LinkedIn group a kick to see if there’s any life in it. If you’re interested in digital skills and confidence at your organisation, do jump in.
  5. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying HBO’s Silicon Valley recently. If you have Sky Atlantic, you can binge on it. Here’s the first season trailer to whet your appetite:

These have mostly all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

On collaboration

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Euan Semple writes:

I have always said that the first step to real collaboration, as opposed to just having a shared space to stick your unreadable documents, is having the self awareness, the humility, and the courage to admit that you need help.

Too right!

Back when I was a local government officer, I used to be involved in things like local strategic partnerships – only the first word was, I think, accurate.

Anyway, various ‘delivery partners’ would turn up to a meeting, pledge to do something collaborative – i.e. something they were going to do anyway – and then go off and do it on their own, as they always would have done. Three months later, this activity would be announced at the result of partnership working and collaboration.

Am sure everyone reading this will have seen this happening, and as Euan says, no file sharing platform is going to fix this.

Instead, a sensible collaboration conversation ought to look like this:

  1. Decide on shared outcomes – are they really shared? are they really outcomes? Much of this is about aligning interests – all organisations should be open about their motivations and why they are collaborating. Then, through some enlightened self interest, it ought to be possible to plot a course that meets everyone’s needs, including the people all the partners are trying to help.
  2. Map what every organisation can bring to the table to help achieve those outcomes
  3. Identify the gaps. Is there another group who could meet those? If not, are they collaboration-killers? Can you still achieve your shared outcomes without those skills or resources? If not, you might need to reboot. Important: don’t pretend you can do something you can’t!
  4. Come up with a framework for organising and measuring activity and how it maps across to your outcomes, so you know whether you’re succeeding or not and can pivot accordingly
  5. Only meet if you really need to – and only have those that need to meet turn up – no agenda stuffing, or meat in the room
  6. Have an open way of reporting progress, through an online dashboard, say, so that everyone can see who is doing what and how much of an impact it is having.

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #3 – collaboration is key

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Mary McKenna brilliantly facilitated an excellent discussion on collaboration – why it is needed, why it hasn’t worked that well up to now, and how that might be fixed.

Some great input came from FutureGov‘s Dom Campbell, who spoke about the some of the challenges trying to implement their Patchwork tool across multiple agencies.

There was also discussion of the limitations of the traditional approach to partnership working – overly bureaucratic, slow to make decisions, agencies working individually to deliver what should be shared objectives, really boring meetings, and so on.

What’s needed is a more agile, responsive and flexible approach to working in partnership to deliver shared outcomes.

This needs to mean organisations sharing people, resources, systems, data and more – and not just tick-box style partnerships.

What’s also vital to to this working are grown up conversations are needed about who can deliver what with the resources they have. This is no time for pride.

Five for (Good) Friday – 18 April 2014

linksFive for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading.

  1. On a quest for the future of enterprise collaboration
  2. The best training ever
  3. The Right Mix – review of task management apps
  4. Socialogy Interview: Anne Marie McEwan
  5. Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation
Did you know that WorkSmart has a Pinterest board where loads of cool stuff is shared?

We also now have a LinkyDink group which will automatically email you links to read everyday!

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