In one of her recent posts, Betsy Carroll blogged about alternatives to email. Email tends to be misused because of its accessibility and convenience. People end up using it in situations where alternatives would be more suitable. While stressing that email is great for communication but not for collaboration, Betsy discussed alternatives to email and the situations where they would be more suitable. I want to extend her blog post by focusing on emergent collaboration, which I believe is going to be a significant way in which organizations will collaborate (or will need to collaborate) going forward. The idea of emergent collaboration is relevant to our blog because emergent collaboration relies on virtual groups or teams getting formed and accomplishing a task on the fly.

I will discuss the following in this post:

1. What is emergent collaboration?
2. Why is emergent collaboration relevant to businesses today?
3. What facilitates emergent collaboration?
4. Tools for emergent collaboration; specifically, why blogs and wikis are more suitable than email for emergent collaboration.

What is emergent collaboration?

The best way to learn about emergent collaboration is through an example. Visit the initial part of a Harvard Business Review article titled “Collaboration Rules” to get an idea of emergent collaboration. The example under the heading “Tuesday, December 2, 2003” illustrates the emergence of collaboration among individuals after a systems administrator at a university discovered a hacker attack on his university’s server and traced it to rsync, a synchronization tool for Unix/Linux machines. As you read through the example, you will notice a few things. While the goal of collaboration was known from the beginning, there was no prior determination of who the collaborators will be or the collaboration process itself. Nor was there a leader who guided the whole process. The collaboration evolved from a single person’s problem and relevant individuals were engaged when their expertise was needed. The next steps were determined just prior to their execution, taking into account whatever that had happened till then. In a nutshell, emergent collaboration is organic; while the goal of collaboration may be known, there is no prior determination of who the collaborators will be or of the collaboration process. Also, in emergent collaboration, the involvement of individuals and the collaboration processes are adaptive in that they evolve in response to the situation at any point of time. There is no one in particular who directs the whole process as it evolves.

Why is emergent collaboration relevant?

Today, businesses are facing greater uncertainty and complexity. Competition is emerging from industries and regions of the world that were not competing before (e.g., cable companies are now competing with telephone companies). Due to the Internet, business stakeholders (e.g., customers) have a louder and a far-reaching voice. Consequently, issues that any businesses need to address are emerging from unexpected quarters and with greater uncertainty. How can businesses respond to such pressures? When faced with a highly complex issue, a business needs to make sure that it enables collaboration among individuals who can cover the many different aspects of the issue. However, due to the uncertainty with which the business issues arise, it is not possible for a business to plan beforehand who should collaborate and how. Nor is it possible for a business to develop a clear idea of how the collaboration should evolve once an issue is right in front of it. Relevant collaboration will have to emerge on its own and at the right time to enable an effective response. The key thing that a business will have to do is to make sure that it puts into place a system that enables emergent collaboration.

What facilitates emergent collaboration?

An important requirement for emergent collaboration is a shared workspace that is accessible to all collaborators. Ideally, this workspace should include all the important transactions that have taken place among business workers. In addition to helping a group of collaborators learn from past transactions and take the best step forward, such a workspace facilitates stigmergy, i.e., it enables a worker’s contribution to stimulate others to build on that contribution without any direct communication between the workers. Stigmergy facilitates emergent collaboration by not requiring a single person or a leader with a top level view to coordinate the actions of others. According to Francis Heylighen, an example of stigmergy is seen in the Open Source community when a contributor uploads a piece of code to a community site. This posting invites examination from others interested in using that code. If they discover any problems with the software, they either fix the problem themselves or alert the community about the problem, thereby encouraging others to work on the problem. There is no direct communication from one worker to another – the openness or accessibility of all the critical actions by community members enables work to be coordinated among “undesignated” community members who, at a particular moment, happen to have the resources (time and capability) needed to advance the community’s work.

In addition to a shared and open workspace, emergent collaboration requires meta-level information that highlights the significance of the transactions that are occurring or have occurred within a group of collaborators. Since many workers may be making their contributions at any point in time, which of these many contributions should other members be focusing on and building on at that time? How should they prioritize their effort? Meta-level information that indicates the significance of transactions within a group can help a group determine which issues it should tackle first and which contributions should be given more weight than others.

Tools for emergent collaboration

The above discussion provides reasons for why businesses should move away from email as a platform for collaboration. To respond to increasing uncertainty and complexity, businesses will have to put into place systems that facilitate emergent collaboration. Email is not likely to facilitate emergent collaboration. It does not provide a shared and open workspace, nor does it provide the meta-level information I refer to above – at least not without loading it up with additional tools.

On the other hand, blogs and wikis, two prominent Web 2.0 tools, provide the shared and open workspace needed for emergent collaboration. They can also be set up to provide the meta-level information needed to facilitate emergent collaboration. Specifically, blogs and wikis have the linking and tagging features which make them suitable for generating the meta-level information that indicates the significance of transactions among a group of workers. You can see examples of this meta-level information by visiting Wikipedia and clicking on Special pages under toolbox on the left. Under Special pages, you will see a variety of links, many of which provide meta-level information about the Wikipedia community. For instance, New Pages and Recent Changes tell you what the community members are most interested in now; “Pages with the most revisions” indicate what is popular and/or controversial; “Most linked-to pages” show you the ideas or topics that have had the most impact on the community. In a blogging system, a tag cloud indicates the relative popularity of different topics among bloggers. Linking among bloggers indicates who carries weight for a particular topic. With the help of such meta-level information, blogs and wikis can facilitate emergent collaboration among a group of workers by helping them determine if there are topics or events that need their attention and if there is anybody in particular who should be engaged for addressing those topics or events.

A brief example of the usefulness of blogs and wikis for emergent collaboration can be seen in a New York Times article titled Open Source Spying. In this article, which discusses the use of blogs and wikis by US Intelligence Agencies to counter the threat posed by terrorists, the author gives the following example of how Intellipedia, a wiki used by US Intelligence agencies, enabled emergent collaboration in the Fall of 2006: 

…the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act.

In this post, I have briefly touched upon some of the things that are required for emergent collaboration. Besides the right technology, one needs the right mix of leadership, culture, rewards, and policies for emergent collaboration to occur. It is certainly a challenge for a business to figure of what this right mix is and we hope to cover more on this topic in our future posts. What makes it even more challenging for a business to create conditions that facilitate emergent collaboration is that it also needs to enable structured or planned collaboration along with emergent collaboration. How a business can put into place a system that enables both structured and emergent collaboration is still a wide open question with no simple answer.