In the latter half of 2008, we worked with a number of companies to establish communities of practice. In training the people with key roles in the communities (such as the coordinator, core team members and those with support roles outside the communities) a common question arose…”what do we do first?” Of course the answer […]

When I was at IBM leading the software services group in Melbourne I suggested in one of our leadership meetings that we should introduce a set of group-based incentives. I was howled down and accused of being a communist. I’m not kidding. While I know fact, data and rationale alone cannot persuade someone to change […]

The beginning of the year is a good time to take stock of where things are going and try and get a handle on the macro trends affecting our work. For me that means enterprise collaboration in all its forms. Here are six major trends that will encourage leaders to take action and help their […]

On January 16, 1920 the National Prohibition Act came into effect in the United States and all intoxicating liquor was banned, and so began the black market in alcohol. Even before the ban was set in place I’m sure racketeers had plans to take drinking underground and at the same time any chance of the […]

If you haven’t discovered Twitter yet, here’s a good introduction from the Common Craft show. I’ve just started using Tweetdeck to keep track of the Twitterers I’m following. So far it looks great. A few thoughts on Twitter. It’s a mistake to think Twitter is only for reporting the minute detail of one’s life, which […]

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 […]