More than one solution

There was a very mixed reaction to the interpretation I'd used in chapter 9 for applying collaboration. It seemed to mean different things to different people. Stephen Townsend, a student from Australia, recognised that it can take different forms when he wrote:

I thought I already understood the collaborative learning thing, but this chapter delves into a whole new level.

I've participated in a few "collaborative learning" programs, and I can separate these programs that I've participated in into two types: One is a system where the (learning) outcomes are already defined, and everything is all very structured. This was in the case of our "Business Week". It was a week of team based collaborative learning focussed on business - we all split up into teams and each team was a company. It was all very structured - no matter what our responses were, there was a set program that was acted out step by step. Since none of us knew anything about business - each 'company' was given a mentor. They were discouraged from telling us exactly what to do, but at the end of the day - they knew all the answers and we didn't.

The other type of program I participated in was developing a multimedia kiosk with two other students. We didn't know any programming languages, and hadn't done anything like it before. We were given the task and our computing teacher suggested we try using the multimedia authoring application "Director". However, he didn't know how to use it any better than us, so we were forced to teach ourselves and share what we learnt.

The goal set for us was to develop this multimedia information kiosk for the school, and we were given free reign over all the other hundreds of decisions that had to be made. From start to finish it took us 3 months to complete the project (outside of class hours). This type of collaborative task has no structure - there was no way to predict what the end product would look like, both the function and the interface changed from week to week as we learnt more and more about lingo. There was no leader - each of us settled on our own area of 'expertise', and developed it.

In terms of which type of program was most effective (the aim was to give us new skills and knowledge), the flexible approach wins hands down. However, even the structured collaborative approach beat the pants off the standard teacher/classroom experience. So if this is paralleled in any way in the business environment, I can see why collaborative strategies are so powerful. I really liked this chapter

Stephen Townsend

For me, the most surprising reaction to the last chapter came from Dr. Ted Panitz. As I'd used one of his conceptual building blocks (the distinction between cooperation and collaboration) I'd expected him to concur with what I'd written. Instead, he was of the opinion that I was misusing the principles of the collaborative learning process. He wrote:

I think the use of collaborative learning as described in chapter 9 has gone a Bridge Too Far. Specifically, to call for collaboration without ever asking the participants to meet face to face is a contradiction of collaborative learning paradigms. Also to focus all the decision making in one person flies directly in the face of both collaborative and cooperative learning paradigms. The intent of collaborative learning and collaborative decision making in business is to harness the power of the group, enable members to contribute their expertise to the group and receive feedback from the group.

The process is much like brainstorming and strengthens each individual in the group as well as providing many perspectives from which a consensus will arise. There is a great synergy obtained through the collaborative process where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

<snip>

...the organiser would make the final decision as to what should be included, but I can assure table members that if the process is run properly the final decision will be very close to the group's consensus. It may take a little longer for a conclusion to be reached and things like conflict resolution and personnel agendas need to be dealt with, but the consensus response will be much better than an individual decision. The idea of consensus decision making is the real paradigm shift.

I see another contradiction in the approach Peter suggests, where one person makes all the decisions by pulling together information provided by individual experts. Peter provided an excellent analysis of how technical experts manage to hold companies hostage by the way they share their information and how they complicate systems which they then must deal with. How is the proposal in chapter 9 any different?

If the entrepreneur building an e-business calls upon experts only as needed then he/she will fall into the same trap or worse because there will be no sharing of ideas or critiques of ideas from outside observers. Also, these experts are very cunning in their attempts to make businesses dependent upon them for their expertise (I hope we all are for that matter). I doubt they would be inclined to come into a project, solve all your problems and simply leave, even if their compensation was substantial. Some consultants do work this way by providing turnkey operations, but even they calculate their fees based upon a one time effort and often expand the time frame to meet their budgets.

,snip>

Even in the industrial model when companies use teams they are following a cooperative model not collaborative one because the charge of the team or problem the team is dealing with is controlled by the bureaucracy and the participant interaction processes are supplied by a facilitator. In a collaborative process the members share power equally and contribute equally in the decision making. This is indeed a major contradiction to our current system and hard to accept unless one has experienced the incredible results which come from a collaborative group.

Ted Panitz

Dr. Panitz's post illustrates perfectly the kind of problems that can occur in email discussion groups. I thought I'd been using his mental model. In fact, we had totally different models in mind.

Dr. Panitz sees the collaborative group as a mechanism for melding disparate ideas together, combining the views, knowledge and experience of all participants to evolve an agreeable common solution. My view is quite different from this because I see the point of collaborative discussion (as explained in terms of soliloquies) as producing not a single solution. but, several solutions.

In mathematical equations where there is more than one unknown, there can be several equally correct answers. For example the equation consisting of "x divided by y equals two" can have an infinite number of equally valid solutions - with x able to be any value as long as it is twice the value of y. Something very similar happens when a business problem has many unknown or unknowable factors involved: there can be very many equally valid possible solutions and there is no way of knowing which of them will be correct.

Using collaboration to provide a consensus produces a single solution which might subsequently prove to be incorrect. This can easily happen in the e-business environment where technological developments and unpredictable competitors' strategies can radically alter the playing field. My idea of a collaborative environment therefore is not for the collaborators to arrive at a consensus but to arrive at as many different solutions as possible.

There was much puzzlement and protest at my starting this book off with a few lessons in probability theory, but, this shows the reason why. The experiments with the roulette wheel showed that when playing in a non zero sum game, where everyone can be winners, it pays to have many smaller gambles rather than a single big bet. The consensus opinion represents the big bet because once the consensus is arrived at, all the money and effort goes onto that single solution - which may turn out to be wrong. On the other hand, the collaboration that offers many solutions is a far more efficient way to play the game even though it would at first appear to be inefficient.

Another misunderstanding that must be cleared up is the idea that an auteur or entrepreneur weighs up the various options and the opinions of others to make some kind of rational decision. In the world of e-business it cannot work this way because nobody, not even the auteur or entrepreneur, is in a position to give positive judgement on the alternatives that are available. In an environment of unknowns, uncertainty and unpredictable competition the auteur or entrepreneur doesn't make decisions: the optimum strategy is for them simply to generate as many options as possible commiserate with the circumstances.

In other words, the auteur, or entrepreneur will arrange for as many different paths to follows as is practical with the resources at their disposal. Like a poker player, they don't play the game to win any specific hand, they play to win as an outcome of many different hands.

It is not about decision making and judgement. The appropriate strategy in an e-business environment is to be aware of all the different possibilities and play them concurrently. Solutions are eliminated as and when they are proven non viable - not as a result of any rational decision making process. In this way, it can then be arranged that the real decision makers are the clients or customers and the role of the auteur is to create as many different choices as for them as possible.