Blog

Today we’ve started to convert our whitepapers from pdf to their plain text equivalent so you can see the whole paper without downloaded the pdf version. The first one is Building a Collaborative Workplace . You can now bookmark it with Delicious, annotate it with Diigo and we have also added the ability for any […]

Do you have a community of practice with members distributed around the country? Is your community deeply technical and use a suite of technical software tools to get the job done? So how do you keep track of who is doing what, or more importantly, who has done what, so you can get in contact […]

Is it collaboration when you’re sent the yearly performance review spreadsheet and instructed to assess your staff’s performance? Absolutely not; it’s an act of co-ordination. Everyone is working separately to achieve the overall goal of conducting the performance reviews. Only a modicum of trust is required (trust in the system) to get the job done. […]

Organizational silos can often become one of the biggest barriers to collaboration. You may have all the right intentions, collaboration could even be a strategic goal but something still prevents it from happening. Embedding the idea of collaboration as early as possible can make it really easy to build a collaborative culture. SEI seems to […]

Humans have a strong sense of fairness. If two people are given a sum of money and one is asked to divide it and offer the other portion to their partner, if it’s not a 50/50 split the partner is most likely to refuse offer, even if this means that both parties loose everything. And […]

Scientists in Iowa recently reported a breakthrough discovery. They successfully identified the gene (PRICKLE1) which when mutated causes epilepsy. There’s two things amazing about this discovery PRICKLE1 is unique in that it has never been associated with any other disease. The project involved two dozen institutions across 6 countries and collaboration played an important role. […]

Last Friday I ran a workshop for a client on collaboration. I emphasised collaborative practices and behaviours and at one point I introduced the idea of gaining agreement from their team to “call me on it.” As I was describing this idea I noticed a woman sitting up the back shaking her head, her face […]

One of the things people find most valuable about our Building a Collaborative Workplace workshop is that it gives them a good solid understanding of what makes collaboration possible and some practical ideas on getting started. Most people are web 2.0 savvy. They use or know someone who uses a set of tools to share […]

Google is considered synonymous with innovation. How do they create the conditions for people to do great work? It can’t simply be a result of this. I saw Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) talk on the Nature of Innovation. Excellent 3 min video. It’s interesting that at Google, people do not sit in business units […]

Organisations need simple ways to create a common understanding about what needs to be done. Our collaboration framework aims to provide two perspectives: the dashed oval represents the collaboration environment—the container that enables (or disables) collaboration within and between organisations; and a simple process reminding us that in business we must collaborate with a purpose, […]