Collaboration & Creating Value

Some of the most effective and interesting ideas I have worked with museums to implement have been strategies and ideas borrowed from outside the museum field, helping educators & others to widen their horizons and spark creative juices.   Building on last month's post on teamwork and collaboration within the museum, let's look outside the museum walls to a recent publication focused on how that internal collaborative spirit can actually work to create value.

In author Evan Rosen's book, "The Culture of Collaboration:  Maximizing Time, Talent & Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy,"  he explains how and why collaborative tools can motivate us.   What follows are what he considers the ten cultural elements present when collaboration is working.   In his words...

Trust - To exchange ideas and create something with others, we must develop trust.   This is a challenge, especially in competitive organizational cultures.   Nevertheless, we must get over our fears and develop trust if we are to collaborate freely.

Sharing - Hoarding information prevents the free flow of ideas and therefore sabotages collaboration.   Sharing what we know improves collective creation by an order of magnitude and therefore makes everybody more valuable.

Goals - Taking the time to agree on goals at the beginning of a collaborative project pays off exponentially by providing the impetus for shared creation.

Innovation - The desire to innovate fuels collaboration.   In turn, collaboration enhances innovation.   After all, why collaborate just to maintain the status quo?

Environment - The design of both physical space and virtual environments impacts innovation and collaboration.

Collaborative Chaos - While all people and organizations require some order, effective collaboration requires some degree of chaos.   This chaos allows the unexpected to happen and generates rich returns.

Communication - Collaboration is inextricably linked with communication, both interpersonal and organizational.

Community - Without a sense of community, we often lack comfort and trust.   Therefore, community must be present for effective collaboration to occur.

Value - The primary reason we collaborate is to create value -- reducing cycle or product time, creating a new market, solving problems faster, designing more a marketable product or service, or increasing sales.

For museums to meet competitive challenges, they must change the internal culture from competitive to collaborative....The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA even included this descriptive sentence in their job description for a Chief of Education & Interpretation during a recent search..."The Peabody Essex approach to its mission moves beyond silo thinking and instead favors crisp execution in partnership among its various leaders and departments..."