An Australian consultancy, Anecdote, have recently published a very interesting paper on Building a Collaborative Workplace with Nancy White. There are some excellent sections, especially on what the authors call community collaboration – essentially communities of practice. The section on team collaboration was less compelling for me as seemed to duplicate generic team building rather than deeper collaboration which for me, has an intrinsic learning element – personal, team and organisation. At a broader level, the paper seems to see collaboration as an approach based on information flows and knowledge exchanges but the paper has less on the how collaboration could (should?) generate new capabilities for an organisation. But I think I need to re-read the paper as there is a lot to digest – good stuff (and an interesting company in general)
Peter — ohh, lots of more juicy things to write about. I am nodding in agreement with your comment about the importance of learning in teams. YES YES YES!!! Write more!
Hi Nancy – thanks for the feedback – & yes, I’ll be writing more on this. Thanks for the encouragement