#2.0 - We can dream alone as much as we like but we collaborate for facing realities. We share our capabilities, knowledge, implementation costs, and delivery, service and support infrastructures for mutual benefit. A successful partnership defines a clear profit model that reduces capital costs, provides clear view of strategies and operations, capitalizes on knowledge and keeps the vision focused on target.
When we fail to collaborate, there can be reduced satisfaction due to unmet promises and increased competition due to delays in scheduled releases. We fail to collaborate when:
1. There’s lack of Information Visibility – This usually exists due to inappropriate policies and results in little or no investment in proper information sharing tools.
2. There’s lack of Information Sharing – This usually exists due to weak culture that doesn’t foster trust among those involved and prevents free-flow of potentially useful information.
3. There’s lack of Dialectic Process – This usually exists due to authoritarian approach towards governance and hurts significantly in fast-paced environments.
4. There’s lack of Grassroots Innovation – This usually exists due to a heavy focus on process refinement for both reducing errors and improving efficiency in delivering results and curtails significantly the free-flow of creative juices for putting together next-generation solutions.
5. There’s lack of Collaboration Tools – This usually exists due to a poor risk management strategy. First when there’re known knowns, we can accurately decide and hence it’s not a risk. Second when there’re known unknowns, we estimate issues and offset them with estimated rewards. Third when there’re unknown unknowns, we face a competition between assessing risks and concentrating on forecasting success. In the second and third cases, people meet others with common interests where collaboration tools can help make a huge impact on how people and organizations communicate and develop ideas, strategies and execution plans that can potentially thwart risk to common interests and realize the individual dreams.
Collaboration is not about defining boundaries of needs and interaction but specifying centers of interests and attraction. Everyone controls their ideas and avails of services at these centers for leveraging thoughts and experiences of others towards enhancing their realities. Successful collaboration architecture is Partnership-based where the centers operate in a self-styled manner and the system provides a Trust-centered culture for creativity, discovery and innovation. One dream is a tool that could adapt to the diverse collaboration needs of our dynamic world. I do feel that SiliconIndia will someday become a center of this global tool.
