Collaboration Quiz
by Patti Anklam
Colleagues Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk from Anecdote, along with Nancy White have pleased a teaser on the Anecdote site about their work-in-progress on collaboration. They offer a quick quiz on collaboration capability.
[Update: The full paper Building a Collaborate Workplace is now available.]
They have made a useful distinction about three types of collaboration: team, community, and network, which enables them to offer a quiz with yes/no answers in these three categories. I like the quiz and I like the distinctions even more, as they actually offer an historical perspective on collaboration.
- Teams (a defined set of people working on a focused deliverable), and the importance of teams to workplace performance. Our workplaces were full of books on teams, training, and team metaphors.
- Communities (in which the boundaries are more loosely defined and there are more likely to be shared learning goals rather than fixed deliverables). We became conscious of communities and working with communities in the mid90s, as the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger spread through the knowledge management community.
- Networks (undefined and unbounded groups of people who contribute to and draw from the value produced by the network as a whole). We are still in the early stages of understanding and harnessing networks in organizations.
Tools have evolved — or made possible — each of these levels. Project management tools for teams, collaboration software for communities, and Web/E2.0 capabilities for networks. Here’s one of the network questions from the quiz:
- People can recount stories of where they have found information from someone else’s book-marks, blogs or wikis that made a significant contribution to their work. True/False?
Funny, we couldn’t even have asked this question a year ago.
