Friday, September 3, 2021

Innovateviacollaboration

As long as humans are unique, their mindsets, perception, opinions, views, and cultures, etc, are equally unique and diversified. That results in both collaboration and competition depending on the context and situations.

Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. Nowadays, organizations become hyper-connected and interdependent. The functional, geographical, or industrial borders are blurred, collaboration happens in that space between people in relationships receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and caring for one another's needs and activities to unleash collective potential. 

There are many reasons to collaborate and there are numerous ways to collaborate for achieving desired results and amplify collective human impact.

Strategic collaboration: Collaboration today is less about mere information and document sharing and more about brainstorming and leveraging collective intelligence to drive strategic change. People are encouraged to break down silos, seek out help, brainstorm fresh ideas, and co-solve existing or emerging problems. Collaboration in the business requires a much higher degree of innovative thinking than the competition and winning. Collaborating with entirely like-minded people probably won't bridge cognitive gaps to yield innovative results. The more diversified the team is, the more strategic and innovative the collaboration can turn out to be.

Therefore, business leaders today must be able to foster a workplace that thrives on cross-functional communication, collaboration, and social interaction in building business competency. They empower people to take initiatives, team up, without constant distractions or unhealthy internal competitions. They understand and recognize that everyone plays a "piece of the pie." Encourage “teamwork,” and give everyone a voice about how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. In practice, every collaborative team has its own unique “aura” and practices, thus, each team is different and produces varying results.

Real-time collaboration
: Thanks to the emergent collaboration platforms and technologies, the era of face-to-face, hierarchical management, and top-down communication, something that is reassuring to many traditional managers, is beginning to change. In fact, collaboration becomes a whole lot easier and real-time if you start to leverage powerful technology tools to make formerly invisible patterns of social interaction more visible, and apply quality information analysis to boost social engagement and foster collaboration. Technically, real-time collaboration is now all about real-time sharing, transparency, active listening, on-time feedback, two-way trust in the wisdom of the team, giving proper credit where it is due and constant experimentation.

Building and sustaining dynamics in a workforce are about collaboration with everyone at any level. Cross-functional and real-time collaboration becomes the new normal. It is an important perspective of Change Management empowered by digital tools and relying on a winning combination of face-to-face and virtual platforms. It involves the creation of interactive multi-channel communication and dynamic sharing processes to generate awareness about the new business reality and accelerate the speed of changes. Whenever people feel respected and needed in an organization, they are highly engaged in their work, encouraged to participate in collaboration activities, and contribute to achieving business goals and objectives.

Ecosystem collaboration: The digital era upon us is about mass collaboration. The increasingly virtual and dispersed nature of organizations and the growing workforce of employees receptive to the emergent technologies are two factors redefining collaboration practices across the business ecosystem. Every collaborative team will be different and hence, produce different results. Don't expect your collaboration to be the same, and find your own balance and you will find your innovation. High mature organizations treat employees, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents to co-create ideas, co-solve complex problems via cross-boundary interrelations, interactions, and mass collaboration.

Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific business, ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that collectively seek to create differentiated offerings and capture multifaceted value they could not reach alone. Many companies have never been better positioned to engage in multi-industry ecosystem collaborations. But few have broken out of the static industry box. When organizations orchestrate a broader ecosystem beyond functional, business, or even industrial borders, culture clashes as much more different management styles are required to move to higher-performing dynamic ecosystems with seamless collaboration and knowledge transfer innovation.

As long as humans are unique, their mindsets, perception, opinions, views, and cultures, etc, are equally unique and diversified. That results in both collaboration and competition depending on the context and situations. Healthy competition catalyzes innovation and cross-boundary collaboration is the route towards intellectual harmony and collective problem-solving. So collectively, we can make progress significantly.


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