What Almost Everybody Gets Wrong About Collaboration

I've used dozens of collaboration systems... none of which really stood out to me. It wasn't that they were difficult to use, it's that none of them actually solved the human problems that limit our ability -- and our desire -- to actually collaborate.

It wasn't until recently that I came across a talk from Clay Shirky, which explained pretty well what was missing... Clay spoke about human nature and software and asked a very important question: why do some kinds of sharing work well, while other fail?

Well... one reason is that according to anthropologists, there really is no one thing called "sharing." We humans -- like all primates -- have three distinct ways that we share... and our brains are wired to do different things based on what kinds of sharing we are doing.

For example... I want you to imagine that a little old lady is walking up to you on the street. She makes direct eye contact, and gestures that she has a question for you. I want you to take a deep breath and genuinely imagine that she asks you one of the following three things... and take note of your emotions:

1. she asks you for money,
2. she asks you to help her cross the street,
3. she asks you for directions to the bus stop

If you are like most primates, your initial gut reaction to #1 is something like "NO! MINE!" Your gut reaction to #2 is "eh... OK..." And your gut reaction to #3 is "Absolutely! I'd be happy to!"

Why??? All three are sharing, aren't they? Not quite... millions of years of evolution have wired us to react differently to different kinds of sharing. The examples above each demonstrate one kind of sharing:

1. Sharing Goods: the gut reaction it to feel bad when you give somebody else your goods... because then you can't use them anymore, and you might not be able to replenish them. Even generous people have this initial reaction.
2. Sharing Services: people are more generous with favors, because they don't lose anything physical... merely their time. However, before sharing your time, everybody does a little mental math. Do I have the time? Is this worth my time, or should I delegate to somebody else? Shouldn't I be compensated for my time?
3. Sharing Information: people are most generous when it comes to sharing information... it takes little measurable time, it costs nothing, and sharing information makes us feel good. We feel good, because we feel like we've helped out one like us, and made the world a better, more knowledgeable place.

Clay used the example of Napster to illustrate his point... it took a goods sharing problem (can I have your CD?) and a service sharing problem (can you make me a mix tape?) and turned it into an information sharing problem (can I download all your already ripped albums?). People were sharing their albums online because it made them feel good.

Like monkeys with iPods...

The problem with most collaboration software is that collaboration software relies too much on "service sharing" to get people to take action. I post some information on a place for "sharing" and to make it better through input from others... but in order for that to happen, first you need to read it and understand it. That's sometimes not a big deal, but in many cases it's a significant time investment.

To make matters worse, some of these systems even make it difficult for you to do the mental math for you to determine whether reading my document is worth your time... Is this for an important project? How important? Do you need my expertise for all of this, or just a few pages? Should I be charging your department for my time? Not only is this still a "service sharing" problem, but a pretty tough one at that...

Ideally, a good collaboration system would obey the 2 minute rule. Getting information is still something of a service... but if it's a service that can be performed in under 2 minutes, it will probably "feel" more like an information problem... which makes it more likely to be done. If it takes more than 2 minutes, then it feels like a service problem, and then we're back to the mental math problem...

Getting down to the 2 minute rule is tricky... you could opt for a system like Aardvark, which tries to match simple questions with the right person to answer it... Alternatively, you could force people to jump through a few hoops first before asking a question; essentially making it easy for people to answer your question. If people can estimate the difficulty of the task and the value provided by the solution, then it's easier for them to do the mental math for the tougher problems.

Neither of these are new concepts... in fact bug tracking systems for successful open source projects use a blend of both. They'd have to, or their entire model would collapse! Although I have yet to see any enterprise level collaboration system truly adopt these concepts... probably because the enterprise is something of a captive audience. If you're lucky youll have a system that focuses on ease-of-use and good training... but adapting to human behavior isn't always high on the list. Would people still use your collaboration system if you didn't pay them? Probably not... which usually means a problem...

Hopefully the big push to "Enterprise 2.0" solutions will get more software companies thinking about making software that's a natural extension of human behavior... Maybe in a few years we'll have Aardvark for the enterprise... but I'll take my standard curmudgeony "wait and see" attitude ;-)