By Oscar Berg, Future Office Evangelist
February 15, 2011 - 2:57 AM
Imagine that you are dealing with a burning problem which you are not certain how to solve. You might be on to a solution, but you are not confident enough that it will work to invest your time and energy in exploring it further. Besides, you are not certain that you have found your problem’s root cause. You might just be missing some piece of information to understand the problem correctly.
What do you do?
You ask someone to help you.
In many environments or situations asking for help – and being able to receive it – is not as easy as it first might sound. The reasons why it is difficult may vary, but often it is difficult due to any or all of these reasons:
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You don’t know who to ask because you don’t know what skill, knowledge or information is needed.
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You might not know enough people that you can ask.
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You might not want to disturb those that you do know, especially if you are not sure whether or not they can help you in the first place.
Say that all of the above are true in your case. You have to find the expertise or information needed without knowing what kind of expertise, information or person to look for, and you need it fast. And you don’t want to waste time and energy of the people your personal network in vain. So, you quickly evaluate the options you have left:
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Email your question to everyone
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Get your question published on the intranet
The first option, to email your request for help to everyone is simply out of the question. Your email would likely be irrelevant and be seen as occupational spam by most people who would receive it. Your personal reputation might be at risk, especially since you cannot describe what you are looking for in a clear a precise way. Besides, there is no way to email everybody except for adding everybody in the corporate address book as recipients. The ability to send e-mails to the group with all employees has been restricted to top-level executives and communication department.
Asking the intranet team to publish your question on the intranet is also not something to consider. It's just not that important and universally relevant. Besides, the intranet is primarily seen as a platform for one-way communication and the chance that someone would click on your email address and send you a mail is likely low. Although there is an intranet area reserved for news and information related to your own department, it won’t help you much to publish it there since they expertise you are looking for might be anywhere. Anyway, no one really cares to visit that area on a regular basis.
So, you go back the drawing board again. Depending on what kind of person you are and the nature and urgency of your problem, at this point you probably either continue to work on analyzing and solving the problem on your own, or you decide to make the effort to make some phone calls, send some emails and approach people you know to ask them for help, which likely means that they will need to forward your request for help to their own personal networks and coordinate any responses they get.
Now imagine that you would have access to an open platform where you can post your request for help without spamming colleagues who are not interested in your problem in the first place but still reach everyone in your organization, where you don't need to know who you can help you in advance, and where you can clarify any in dialog with your colleagues. You are not limited to the strength and size of your own personal network and you can involve any number of people, with any kind of skill or knowledge, from anywhere without having to know any of them beforehand.
You might end up getting helped by an engineer in China who you've never met, a woman in marketing who works at your office but whom you never talk to because she's a marketing person, two interns who are writing their master thesis on a subject relating to your problem, and a colleague you already know but who you didn't consider asking because she's busy with this big project of hers. Yet, they all think helping you is worthwhile. Maybe they already have some potentially relevant information or knowledge readily at hand. Maybe the effort to share it is so small they don't even consider it to be an effort. Maybe they hope to learn something by participating. Maybe they like to solve problems. Maybe they just like to help colleagues who are in need of help. Maybe they like to get recognized for helping other colleagues.
Who will help you, what position they have, what language they speak, where they are located or who they come from is of minor, if any, concern. What is important is that they want to and believe they can help you, and that you share a platform that allows your request for help to reach them and that makes it as easy as possible for them to help you. That's the essence of social collaboration.
UPDATE: A feedback that I just got from my Twitter friend Kelly Craft on this "collaboration utopia" post is that it does not point out "how those results shoulda/coulda/woulda been filtered for optimal collaboration value". I think that will make an excellent follow-up post, and an excellent example of social collaboration where I am get insight into important issues or aspects which I probably should have adressed!
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