Avoid The Traps Of Believing Collaboration Tools Will Help You Innovate

David Burkus hosts a great podcast. He’s good at allowing his guests to speak at length about their ideas. His closing question is to always ask his guests what they believe that many others don’t. Here’s what I'd say:

"Whilst I believe we all have the capacity to make creative connections and be more innovative, there are only a handful of people who have the combination of skill and behaviour to shepherd project teams through the creative innovation process."

Facilitation isn’t easy and it’s significantly harder to undo the work left behind by well meaning, but incompetent people. It gives the whole brand of facilitation a bad reputation; something I’ve written at length about before.

With all the topics to write, read and talk about at present, I’m aware this is article is pretty niche and narrow – if only the French had a phrase for cul-de-sac - but in the world of innovation (of which all businesses need a lot of right now), I’m highlighting a particularly misleading narrative that the way to ‘pivot’ your business out of a crisis is adopting online collaboration tools.

You will NOT change your business for good by putting your faith in online collaboration tools alone. 

The idiom “All that glitters is not gold” is a truism here. Post-it’s are handy pieces of kit for the creative tool box, but in and of themselves do not create innovation in business. Post-it notes do not have the answers for you. And whilst the story of their creation is consultant catnip, poorly used (as they so often are) they cause more bad that good. And yet an online collaboration tool is exactly that – a potentially poorly used post-it note. And here’s why.

Collaboration tools can’t facilitate.

Innovation and creativity need rules and concepts to break in order to work. And you need people who understand the nuances around these concepts. And those people need to be able to break those concepts down into bite size pieces of instruction that people understand, know and then importantly can go and do. In short, you’ll always need to facilitate creativity in business in order for it to yield value and you’ll need people who can manage the different perspectives, opinions, ideas, provocations and behaviours at any given moment. This takes skill. I won't happen in the way an apple falls from a tree. Innovation isn't inevitable. It takes more than hot baths and gentle walks to experience the Eureka moment. and at work, those moments are harder (if not impossible) to create. Therefore a great project team is facilitated. People facilitate. White boards don’t. People make decisions. Agile methodology doesn’t. People have ideas. Collaboration tools don’t.

People don’t learn from instructions, they learn from what instructions get them to do.

Purchasing a business wide collaboration licence and inviting employees to innovate remotely is this generation’s version of 'Monkey, Typewriter & Shakespeare.'

Anyone home schooling right now has realised there’s more to teaching than reading instructions louder and slower. Therefore the subtle art of instruction and inspiration needed to for creative output won’t be lost on you. But assuming the key to an art class is a full set of pencils is clearly false. Yet that’s exactly the promise peddled by the collaboration tool; this mythical digital creature that somehow takes away all the pain from creative conversation remotely. I disagree.

Evidence for this is a number of images online where people are celebrating signs that Zoom or WebEx participants have made such as ‘ELMO (enough, let’s move on)’ and ‘can’t hear you’ or ‘frozen’. For those instructions to be seen implies the conversations are filled friction, frustration and difficulty; the type of environment you need to avoid to do meaningful work and certainly not an environment to invite into the home. If these sessions were being well facilitated, everyone would know what to do, why that focus is ‘to be done’ and importantly how to behave. These are the basics of any meeting, conference call or interaction. And ignoring them, particularly when all our human senses are compromised, is folly. Celebrating how to tackle poor behaviour with signage like this is missing the point; focus on establishing great behaviour ought to be the focus. My belief is before people have even logged in to capture ideas on a collaboration tool, they’re already filled with confusion and frustration exacerbated by bad instruction, over expectation and a rush to ‘get things captured’.

Collaboration tools won’t fit all situations

There are many collaboration tools out there. And to be clear, I have no issue with the tools themselves. But to a hammer, all the world is a nail.

It is never the tool that adds value, instead it’s the application and use of the tool in the right context that accelerates the problem solving process. Without that context being explored properly, the tool has little or no utility.

Consider an accountant working remotely (and let’s face it most of them do, all of the time, or all of them do, most of the time). The tools our accountant uses are excel sheets, emails, the occasional pdf to sign and phone calls to clarify queries. She uses these tools with our business as she does with others. Her collaboration with us is one on one. For her to continue working, she may not need to adopt brand new tools, but instead increase the volume of the tools she uses already.

It is the same for your people and your projects.

Focus less on what new tools your people need, but instead what is the job they are being tasked to do.

It is unlikely that prior to the lock down, all your projects and all your project teams warranted online collaboration tools. If they were, great but did the tool add value or was it the team?

Output of group work is rarely an all hands activity at the same time, but instead one or two people taking notes and recording the momentum as project team sessions happen. Ultimately documentation sits with a few individuals or project managers. And idea generation at its best is not with brainstorms, but instead when project participants have had time to incubate their thinking. Collaboration tools seem to promise that all hands working together make light work. For cleaning a kitchen, digging a garden or washing a car, then the analogy is true. But for developing insights, generating ideas and mapping project implementation, the opposite in my experience is the case. Every project is different. 

And now more than ever, people’s ability to think straight is incredibly compromised. Start with the problem and not with the tool.

Collaboration tools don’t give you the answers.

Providing a collaboration tool will not create collaboration or an answer any more than shutting 12 professional adults in a blank room, telling them they can write freely on the walls and hope they all get on instantly whilst generating the blueprint to utopia.  The tool might be there as a device to capture innovative thinking, but it won’t create innovation. The tool might be a way to organise work but it won’t generate output to organise around. And the tool may be a great way to help synthesise insights around customer needs, but it won’t yield insight around what consumers think and feel. Project team members do that. And before we were all forced to work at home, the most popular tool to help generate insight and ideas was an oral briefing given by someone who had line of sight over an issue and who connected questions to observations in the real world. 

Rarely (if ever) did we solve a problem by staring into our monitors really hard or moving a cursor across a screen. Why then are online collaboration tools asking us to exactly that?

Collaboration tools are filled with features that aren’t of any real value.

I also see great emphasis on the features associated with the tool – the ability to change the size of the virtual post-it, or the colour and font of a note you’re making. This, I believe, adds no value.

it’s akin to selling Mozart a coloured fountain pen to capture his next concerto.

It doesn’t matter what size or colour the insight is captured, but instead it’s the quality of the insight you want to craft.

Granted for documentation, fluency of communication and perhaps to easily access info for the for the future, the ability to cross reference, colour code and caption is useful, but leading the story of collaboration tools with the benefits of features isn’t compelling. Focus on what you want people TO DO and then ask yourself “Does this collaboration tool do a better job than our current alternative?” I have a feeling, thousands of hours of brilliant creative capacity is being wasted each hour across the world choosing the colour of a font on canvases no-one will read. 

The mistake is to assume having online tools will immediately give you the answer to collaboration and thus innovation; it doesn’t. 

And worse still is the underlying narrative that in adopting these tools, you’ll somehow innovative you and your business out of the Covid-19 lockdown crisis brighter and better.

No. It won’t.

Your brain will do that when inspired and engaged.

And I’d much rather be in the company of someone who had a plan and could explain it to me easily and quickly than someone with ‘all the gear and no idea’.

I get teased by my other colleagues who say I’m a bit of a Luddite when adopting tech, but I’m not. I’m simply saying to the guy with the new steam engine in 1780 “that’s cool, and I love how it plants seeds at speed and thus liberating all the villagers from back braking work on the fields and wow, I really like the different colour handles you can choose too, but I’m the village vicar serving a nervous community and I’ve also got some hens who need their eggs collecting each day, how does your machine help me?”

Bringing that forward to April 30th 2020

“That’s cool, and I love how it allows you to import a photo on the screen with one click and that we can all see what Claire in Seattle is typing in real time and wow, I really like the different fonts you can choose too, but I’m trying to implement a three year SAP programme involving 16 countries across 4 time zones. I’ve 30 separate project teams all working on how to shift to a digital first offer for our 8000 users. I need ideas. Has it got ‘the answer’ button?”

I avoid the term best practice as I’ve seen brilliance from people who break the norm. We can all learn from observation of both good and bad instruction. I bring you some of those insights to help develop your unique leadership style.