Soda - Keeping Curious

In collaborative heaven people get involved because they find their particular project stimulating, energising and downright exciting. See, not once (in what is admittedly one short sentence) have I mentioned the word money. People don’t collaborate because it pays well. Actually that’s not true either. People collaborate for all sorts of reasons and with all sorts of underlying aims, however, the point is, they see a point in collaborating. That by collaborating they can achieve a much better outcome, for themself, for their group, for their organisation and quite possibly for mankind in general.

Working on the principle of a ‘better’ outcome could also result in the accumulation of huge amounts of capital, Social Capital. This potent form of global currency is worth accumulating, and people’s future wealth may well depend on how much social capital they’ve managed to make come their way; as will the company they work for and the projects they choose to devote time to.

Collaboration and social capital might not yet be firmly linked in people minds, but there’s growing evidence to suggest that the Net Generation are well aware of the latter, having leveraged it’s importance by intrinsically believing in the former.

So next time you have one of those ‘Every man for himself moments’, pause for a second, and if it doesn’t feel too much of a Monty Python-moment think ‘Wait a minute, I have high net worth when it comes to social capital, I can collaborate myself out of this mess!’

Go on, get your invitation engine revving on Linkedin, launch your blog and get collaborating on boundaryless project that have a worthwhile outcome. Because remember, you’re never need be alone again if you collaborate.

I just sped through Seth Godin’s book The Dip, which asks you at the end to write down the reasons why you’d quit a project, job, mastering a new sport or musical instrument, or whatever. All the time I was reading The Dip I kept thinking of mass collaboration, and under what circumstances I would quit wanting to be the authority on that subject. Seth Godin considers it smart to quit doing things that have led you into a cul-de-sac, or bore you, or leaves you being average. Few intentionally seek to end up in those states but life can just (often) turn out like that for us. I try and avoid all three, and loads more mind-numbing outcomes, but still find myself doing things which I should really stop, or quit, doing. To give mass collaboration my best shot I should (will) quit:

Watching so much evening TV, spreading myself too thin, tripping-up my capabilities, seeking others approval, forgeting that I am at heart a creative person, limiting my expecations on what I can achieved, thinking that the time or day dictates what you should be doing, finding excuses not to play PS2 games with my son, thinking this blogpost can be done tomorrow, thinking real success and happiness belongs to other more worthwhile people (actually I’m generally a happy soul, I think) daaah, must quit doing that.

Our interest has never exclusively be in just commenting on collective thinking, but rather making it happen. This project has a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy built-in to it, as the more we talk, the more we do, and the more we do the more alive it becomes for all involved.

As mentioned earlier in these posts, creativity and the pursuit of innovation is itself an emergent process, which is what we’re witnessing here. If the initial ‘gift of knowledge’ came from me, then others are adding and growing that gift in true collaborative fashion, taking it to a new place and a much quicker rate than any individual can do. So why should this be so?

Well it’s not because collaboration has become easier (although for the majority it’s natural to collaborate) it rather that the barriers to collaboration, easy collaboration, no-brainer collaboration have all dropped away due to our expertise in utilising the internet, the email and the mobile phone as end to end communciation platforms. These tools have made the job of creation, distribution, redistribution and feedback easy for all of us. Now the genie is firmly out of the box, there’s no putting him back. So where does that leave industries such as marketing going forward? Well, I got my own firm point-of-view on that, as you can guess.

Within Together the mass collaboration team are on a roll. Whilst I’ve been busy getting out there and spreading the message whilst Nat, Nick and the rest of the team are in infrastructure mode, developing the web presence and the overall creative approach that underpins our spin on the mass collaboration story. We refer to mass collaboration as ‘Big Page Thinking’ , a nifty concept thought up by the team, that challenges you with the intriguing question, ‘How many ideas can you fit on a piece of paper? Well we’d say, “Depends on how big the piece of paper is.”

We’re bringing the ‘Big Page Thinking’ idea to life by producing a poster illustrating hundreds of ideas that have come straight-out of the teams’ notebooks. As these ideas literally unfold from a piece of A4 paper to reveal a huge A1-sized poster, we instantly ‘get’ the awe-inspiring implications of involving collective intelligence in developing fresh, innovative ideas.
This work is really bringing the team together and is sparking off fresh ideas on how to carry ‘Big Page Thinking’ out into the brand-world. Individuals have moved from an initial defensive position, that seemed to ask the question, ‘Isn’t that my job to provide clients with new ideas? , to one of “Hey, isn’t it now my task to try and facilitate a new mode of creativity, that, whilst a little scary, is actually an exciting journey into unknown, fertile territory”.

Here’s to ‘Big Page Thinking’ and beyond

We sincerely love our lists when we want to turn business theory into business practice. You could bet good money on the fact that such an engaging activity as collaboration
would have it’s own list of step-by-step actions. So eyes down and look in at the 5 C’s of Mass Collaboration. (This being itself a form of collaboration).

Core - donating a ‘gift of knowledge to kick the whole thing off
Contribute - get people involved with differing skills and viewpoints
Connect - the more combinations a community can create, the more innovation there is
Collaborate - this works best when there’s responsible self-governace
Create - we’re talking mass social creativity that thrives on many creators and differing skills

Looked at as a whole the 5 C’s process can be applied to any emergent phenomena, such as innovation (the key competitive advantage in business) and it’s associated behaviour, creativity. It’s interesting to note that the rapid development of the Web by millions of prosumers has been brought about by the same inbuild process we adopt for creating objects in the real world. Looked at in this way, the Web appears to be as much a product of all of our creativty as it is of technology.

I’m a bit behind the curve ball on this one seeing as Stephen Johnson’s book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software came out 5 years ago, but I’d just like to draw your attention to the emergence phenomena that pops up time and again in the reading I’m doing on ‘mass collaboration’. For a concise definition of this phenomena I’m tip my hat to R Keith Sawyer’s book ‘Explaining Creativity’ (another example of an emergent phenomena).

“Emergence
Concepts are combined in a complex system of higher level concepts, and each of the component concepts is itself changed
by its participation in the higher concept. Because the parts change when they are combined together, the new concept can’t
be understood by breaking it apart into its component concepts and studying them in isolation”.

Now, doesn’t that just about describe how open source projects and wikis come into being and evolve in the first place? As I said, you can also apply this concept to the process of innovation, which could be why the self-organising web is bringing out the creative in us all, because both systems are a mirrior image of the other.

Were revolutionaries of old just a cut above the ones we have today? I ask this question because listening to Radio 3 (the serious classical one)on the way to work this morning, I learnt that Beethoven’s overture ‘Egremont’ was the leitmotif for the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Played excessively and insistently by Hungarian radio, it became the rallying anthem of the popularist moment, inspiring students to take to the streets, with a spirit of renewed nationalism, to defend their country and their rights against the Soviet ‘invasion’.

In the course of absorbing this fact, and no doubt inspired by the Beethoven piece being played, I wondered why modern nationalist movements (scary concept) no longer call upon the emotional and intellectual input of a Smetena or a Sibelius or a Dvorak to provide themes to stir the heart and unite the people. (Perhaps because a lot of contemporary serious music doesn’t concern itself with all that melodious, romantic, heart-stirring stuff).

As much confined to history as the nationalist movements they supported, these musical ‘revolutionaries’ found inspiration in their country’s past and its attachment to its physical geography. Folksongs were religiously collected, long-forgotten nationalist heroes revived and the long-discarded landscape rediscovered. Akin to a brand that’s lost its way going back to basics, many a late nineteenth and early twentieth composer dug deep into their nation’s psyche to conjured-up past achievements to inspire people to a better future.

With reference to my post yesterday, if your next project could benefit from having a soundtrack, then why not raid the music store and pick-up a few stellar examples that ram home the point that there’s nothing quite like a good bit of music to inspire humans to achieve greater things. Come to think of it, why doesn’t music feature more in corporate life, especially in those visioning and positioning exercises so beloved by marketing directors? Think of Smetena, Sibelius and Dvorak as supreme examples of repositioning gurus, (there’s a new thought) who used the medium of abstract sounds to convey brand essence. Now that sounds like the basis of a good idea to me, when you’re next lost for words to decribe what you’re all about. Why not try music instead. Shostakovich, for some unexplicable reason, works for me.

For the last week-and-a-half I’ve been focused on writing a presentation, which turns out to be a 60 slide eulogy to the virtues of mass collaboration. I say ‘turns out’ because I’ve ended up at a different place to my intended one. Things often happen like that. And it feels as if the light’s gone on. Collaboration topics such as collective intelligence, self-organising, ‘wisdom of the crowds’, wiki workplace and open source, have all fallen into place in my mind, sweet words that seem to flag an energing trend that’s only now beginning to get on the corporate radar.

Like the development of the web itself, there seems to be a serendipitous force working here. For instance, I’m was in a bookstore the other day (no news there) when I , ‘by chance’, came across a couple of recently published books on the subject of mass collaboration, one of which is ‘WE-THINK’ BY Charles Leadbeater. (I’m 30 pages in at the moment, and really enjoying his style and insight). The point is, you think you’ve discovered something new, having unearthed a gem of a subject, ‘the quarrel of the age’, only to find it popping up all over the place. I’ve decided this is due to that old adage ‘Great minds think alike’. Where as ‘Wikinomincs’ and ‘WE-THINK’ introduces us to the mass collaboration phenomena, and it’s early exponents, I want to take this subject out to brands, as a way of getting them to start to work with the notion that reaching outside of their organisation can have unseen, positive consequences.

Having finished the initial presentation, I’m using all that thinking and converting it into a workshop. I want to create sessions that looks at the future of collaboration on the web, the wiki workplace and how we can bring self-organising teams together to develop new products and services. So I’m in the market to hear from anyone out there with some great examples, suggestions or ideas regarding collaboration that I can feedback into the workshop process. I’m also looking to bring in people who are currently working in a collaborative way to achieve a goal; be it in science, medicine or the corporate environment. So if that sounds of interest then I’d love to hear what you’re up to. Using collaboration to create the mother of collaborative workshops, seems, well, the best way of creating a collaborative workshop. So let’s collaborate, and you could well end-up with your own collaborative workshop product that gets others collaborating.