The Nature of Collaborative Work 

Collaborative work typically requires a team engagement or cross-boundary collaboration. Such activities are often unique, infrequently repeated, or have high levels of variation or complexity - driving a need for strong human interactions during both the design and the implementation.

What is the true nature of collaboration? Let's start with the way people naturally organize their work together.

Take an emergency situation where the local river is starting to flood. What do people do?

 

First, they tap their social network of friends and family to gather on the river bank. Very quickly people step up to play different roles. One person volunteers to be a Traffic Controller to direct people around the flooded area. Another might volunteer to be a Sand Bagger to shovel sand into the sandbags. Someone else says, "You are all going to get hungry - I'll be a Food Provider and bring lunch and coffee."

 

People naturally self organize around roles, quickly negotiate how those roles need to interact and they get the job done.

Role-based exchange networks are the natural way that people organize and collaborate to create value and achieve outcomes. In such a network every single person executes a chosen role. Through that role they provide value contributions to others and receive value in turn. Further, as long as people experience a sense of reciprocity and perceived value or accomplishment from the interactions - people will stay engaged.

The majority of collaborative work does not require highly structured project and case management, nor does it need to be replicated through detailed business process design and management. This is particularly true of knowledge work, where there are many variations and options that require human decisions.

Modeling collaborative work as a value network provides a way for people to quickly define their roles and ways of engaging in any focused activity, from routine tasks to the challenges of working together as communities or industries. The mapping approach is intuitive and easy to learn, as it reflects the way people naturally negotiate their roles and responsibilities. The modeling encourages peer to peer accountability. It provides a way to make human interactions - and the value the value they create - visible and manageable.

Moving to role-based collaborative work presents a challenge for talent management. There is one overriding structural issue that is often acknowledged but rarely well addressed - the organization chart.

The way human interactions are typically represented in companies is the organization chart, usually represented as a hierarchical reporting structure. The value of the organization chart is that it provides a structure for budgeting, performance review, allocating resources, and more.

But the actual work flows all over the place, between the lines and in informal networks. Companies may be experimenting with matrix types of structures, but this often creates more problems than it solves.

Value network modeling meets the challenge of role-based resourcing by showing exactly how the work intersects with the org chart through the specific defined roles in every work activity.

A role is different than a job title. A role represents one of the many different hats people wear on a daily basis. Someone might be a project planner one day, and the next day be in the role of technical advisor, or strategy developer. Even a matrix organizational structure does not really accommodate the multiple roles that people play.

Companies moving into value network models of collaborative work often will create role taxonomies that work with the more formal organization chart and job structures. They define the roles within the different networks, projects, work processes, teams, and learning communities that cut across the organization. They link those roles with competencies and skills sets. People are then pre-qualified to play certain roles in different internal- and external-facing value networks. The capacity to link employees or contingent workers with multiple roles significantly increases the resourcing options for an organization.

This approach means people still have a "home base" in a regular department or job function, but they can be allocated much more flexibly to different roles as needed. Work can be resourced as the need arises and as work activity changes. When filling less formal roles, this more structured role-based work approach can bring a much needed level of transparency and fairness to what are often ad hoc or friendship-based decisions. See more in Roles and Participants in the Mapping chapter.

At a very fundamental level organizations are simply collaborations of people focused on common goals. The Value Delivery Model group within the standards body of the Object Management Group (OMG) is moving toward a view that organizations can be modeled as sets of roles and collaborations (value networks). A defined collaboration can be a functional unit, or any cross-boundary group such as a council or team. There will be more forthcoming on this in 2011-2012. The value network community is very active in standards efforts to move toward more networked ways of modeling work and organizations.

In this video Verna Allee explains how value network roles can be integrated with the organization chart.

TOP OF PAGE

Next page: All Work is Networked