@ShortBlue kicking off this session on Collaboration

Discussion threads/topics/themes are:

– Is collaboration becoming the new “C” buzz word? A bit like how everything is now “agile”.
– Let technology help you do what you would already normally do
– Collaboration shouldn’t be an initiative. It’s something we should normally be doing in our day jobs and not just for comms people.
– Thinking that the barriers are technological, but it isn’t. It’s the culture that causes the barriers. But you have to make sure it’s the right technology.
– It’s also about leadership. Do people have time to collaborate? Are they given time to collaborate?
– Don’t need to collaborate on everything, but it’s about having appropriate collaboration at the right time
– In a survey about what collaboration meant to them, response were: Is collaboration about rationalising and cost cutting? Collaboration can be costly.

Culture Change
– Collaboration initiatives can be seen as top down (negative), but to get a culture change you need the top down leadership.
– Are there any examples of managing cultural change in government? The whole group was struggling to come up with any positive examples.
– Cultural change is exceptionally hard, in public and private sector

– Technology is part of the solution to help collaboration, but it’s not going to happen over night. It’s going to take time, the right technology and logistics need to be in place to allow this to happen slowly and over time.

– A barrier to change/collaboration is getting bogged down in governance, legislation which turns people right off and disengage. But, examples of good collaboration is where people bypass these rigid structures and collaborate through blogs and twitter. Can we promote these non formal ways of communications. Could this be used to help collaboration and change?

– Decision making – what if you have a structure free organisation? Where does the buck stop if there is no rigid structure? There needs to be someone who is a leader, who will make decisions otherwise it’s hard to make a decision.

Public Service Organisations and Subservience
– Do we need the public sector to be subservient to the public? Like, the customer is always right. It’s about feedback loops. Getting engagement from the public back to the public sector organisation, that seems to have broken down. It’s also about, if feedback is given then it is actually acted on and not ignored.

– One good example, is the Apple Maps fuck up. Feedback was listened to and acted upon almost immediately. But when you bring politicians into the mix, that’s where it gets complicated and inaction occurs.

– Is the fragmentation of the Public Sector as a result of outsourcing is this an additional barrier to collaboration?

Listening
Actually, it’s all about the listening. How good are we at actually listening?
– An organisation that isn’t listening, isn’t collaborating.
– Staff need to learn to listen internally, and also externally and acting on what they hear. Agreeing on what actions to take to listen, learn and adapt. But staff also need to be empowered to act.

– the NHS example, there the government paused to “listen” to NHS staff on the NHS reforms, 100,000’s spoke, but there was very little evidence of “listening”. Which in the end has actually devalued the art of listening. People have lost their trust in the government’s ability to listen to their views & feedback.

– Listening – it’s something we learn as a child, it’s a basic human skill. But when organisations “listen”, it’s not the same, there is an agenda to their listening. For organisations it’s about identifying risk, or negative stories about them, monitoring messaging boards etc.
– Old traditional comms channels & processes aren’t keeping up with social media channels. There is a disconnect in many organisations.

Wrapping it up. Time to catch what’s left of the first half of the Scotland vs Wales 6 nations game!

Update: Just been pointed to http://willmcinnes.com/book-culture-shock/ from @edwards_tim looks like something that all of us in the room should have a wee look at.

09 Mar This entry was published on March 9, 2013 at 2:08 pm. It’s filed under Engagement, Leadership, Strategy, ukgovcamp and tagged collaboration, engagement, people. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.