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The Power of Onlyness: Harness the Power of Ripple Effects with Virtual Collaboration, with Nilofer Merchant, Marketing Expert and Author, “The Power of Onlyness”
Collaboration is often viewed as this soft fuzzy thing, when it can be really specific. So I use the analogy or metaphor of the watering well. And leaders quite often think about holding ideas as their idea. And collaboration– the way it works is if it’s the idea. So how do you hold it in such a way that people can pick up pieces of it and take it as their own? So you need to actually make it more clear how to share.
And so one example that I love is when you can post a strategy of an organization online and have people comment and ask questions about it. I was watching a team at Google do this, and somebody had posted, here’s where we’re going in the next year, here’s all this thing. And there were something like 900 comments. It got classified, like– I don’t actually believe this is the right direction, to– I have all these questions as to how this would possibly work, to– I understand this but I don’t understand that– this range of question. It’s public. Imagine what that looks like. And what it allows you to do is to then be able to say to, let’s say, a product manager– instead of you saying to them and green lighting for them what they should do, you can say, how does your product fit into the strategy?
And it allows people to come together in a really different way where ownership, agency, power is widely distributed within the organization because you’ve shared enough online. And quite often leaders hold onto things and when they could actually make it so that, hey, pick it up– make it your own, and let’s go do this thing together.
Let’s just take an innovation example. If you had an idea for the next-generation wheel, and you brought it out into the world, if you were going to go to Ford, they would try to figure out how to put you in a box. But if you had this idea of the teleportation pod or something, could you find the other people who were interested in that same thing, where you wouldn’t be forced to conform to that organizational construct? You could. Forming around that idea that mattered to you, you could find the other people who care about the same things– that next circle out– and then you guys could actually create that ripple effect. And so this distributed network model actually lets you have more original ideas, and it lets you have breakthrough ideas without having to fit into existing models, and it lets you have the kind of scale we haven’t been able to do before. So that’s why it matters today and that’s why it’s so relevant to our economy and business.
It’s funny– a couple of years ago, I was at a Fortune Conference, and I said, the one thing everyone’s going to be using universally is Slack, because it allows all this traffic that’s currently showing up in inbox and it’s ineffective to show up in a way that actually allows you to act on it at work.
We do this weird thing when we’re in meetings where we show up and we update each other, which is, in my opinion, one of the stupidest ways to spend time. Because I’m like, I can read. I can read faster than you can tell me. So can you please just download for me in one way, and then when we’re together, let’s actually spend the time negotiating things, understanding things, being curious with each other about things. And we ought to use our time much more about that interactivity and then figure out how to download. And Slack is one of those great tools that lets you balance those two things.