Even though technologies will come and go and organizations will continue to battle with adopting social collaboration for many years to come, it is a concept that is unstoppable. So why is it unstoppable and what’s the driving force behind it? I will try to answer that here.

TippingPoint.jpgIllustration by Luc Galoppin

First, let’s zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture.

Today, jobs primarily consisting of knowledge work typically make up 25 to 50 percent of the workforce, and in some industries a lot more. For many of these knowledge workers, collaborative and complex problem solving is the essence of their work. At the same time their work environments are changing and becoming more and more complex due to such things as increased time pressure, telepresence, increased specialization and virtual teams.

Much of the improvements made during recent years have relied on the use of information technologies as a means to speed up processes and reduce costs by automating -- preferably eliminating -- the manual work involved in transformational and transactional processes. We have used information technology primarily to remove people from the equation of a successful enterprise. Now we suddenly need to do the opposite; attracting and empowering talented people to reinvent enterprises and make them adapt and thrive in an increasingly competitive and changing environment. That is quite a dramatic change.

Knowledge Workers Are Disempowered

As a knowledge worker operating in a complex and highly collaborative environment, there are many things that limit my productivity, efficiency and creativity, such as:

  • It is hard for me to find out who knows what and whom I could ask for help or information.
  • There are too many places to look for information and I might not even have access to the ones that contain the information I need.
  • I constantly have to check for new updates and spend a lot of time and energy on looking for information and answers.
  • I do not know much about what is happening at the office when I am not physically present.
  • I have to spend a lot of time waiting for other people to tell me when it is my turn to contribute.

It is often said that knowledge workers spend about 2 days per week on things like these, just getting ready for work. Something needs to be done about it.

Collaboration Is Harder Than We Think

Research by MIT Professor Tom Allen presented in 1977 revealed that when people are more than 50 feet apart (16.6m), the likelihood of them collaborating or communicating about work more than once a week is less than 10%. Based on proximity, we are not likely to collaborate very often if we are more than 50 feet apart.