There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience.
The above quote is from an article in the Observer, Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics. Given gender is one of the most visible and obvious differences between people, it is hardly surprising that over time men and women have been conveniently put in their respective boxes. So it is refreshing, nay liberating, to hear that, according to Cordelia Fine in her new book Delusions of Gender:
There are no major neurological differences between the sexes…..behavioural differences between the sexes are not hard-wired at birth but are the result of society’s expectations
To take one of the examples oft leaped upon by followers of the John Gray/Men are from Mars & Women are from Venus school of thinking, namely linguistic ability of boys vs girls, the differences are not as marked as you might think. Work by Robert Plomin, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, “found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children’s verbal development is due to their gender.” Well who’d have thought it….. All those times I have said to my wife that I wish she wouldn’t give me so many things to do at once because I am not as good at multi-tasking as her… I will just have to blame it on social conditioning or conversely, re-wire my brain a touch.
On a more serious point, if something as entrenched as perceived gender difference can be found wanting, to what extent is it time you deboxed your own thinking about men and women, or indeed other differences that you are convinced exist? IT & Sales? Marketing & Finance? Creative & Production? Customer & Client? CEO & Cleaner? Politician & Citizen? Cat & Dog?… If you are certain there are differences, where is the evidence, what assumptions are you basing your beliefs on, and what are the differences that really make a difference?
Following on from a workshop I did for the Business Community Partnership yesterday, I felt inspired to pen this piece. Not because there isn’t anything out there already (I have linked to a few useful resources at the end), rather because what is out there tends to focus heavily on technology and is painfully weak on the relational aspects of human collaboration. And that is a significant shortcoming of much of what has been written, given that all human collaboration is inherently relational, regardless of context. In part this is because most organisations are comfortable talking about technology, and less so when discussing relationships.
So this post is an attempt to redress the balance, to bring into the light something that deserves more attention, and to offer some practical advice. My intention is that it will be of use to organisations, teams and individuals (e.g. freelancers, consultants etc) who may be thinking of entering into a collaborative relationship.
Oh, and I told a porky. I have 13 tips, but 10 always sounds much snappier, don’t you think?…
13 Tips for Collaboration
Agree what you want to collaborate on and why.
This may sound obvious, but it is surprising how often collaborative partnerships fail to define the question(s) they hope to answer.
Common purpose.
Without a shared vision and purpose, you are not going in the same direction…And make sure you are clear about the value exchange.
Who are you collaborating in aid of?
Customers, end users, clients, stakeholders… who will benefit? Continue Reading »
One of the great debates around decision making concerns intuition versus rationality, or to put it another way what we know to be true through ‘gut feeling’/'inner sense’/'knowing’ etc, as opposed to what we believe to be true once we have considered all available data. I don’t hold to the view that it is a case of either/or, and at the very least, context has a lot to do with whether a particular mode of decision making is appropriate. For example, if a car is coming at you at 50mph, weighing up data for too long might not be wise, whereas choosing a pair of shoes might require assessing foot size in relation to said new shoe, even if gut is telling you that lemon chiffon is sooooo you but they only have it in a size 6.
Yet this is not a semantic point, given the prevalence and valuing of intuition in business, politics and indeed many social contexts. You cannot move on the internet for advice on “how to develop your intuition”, because after all when it comes down to it we just know what is true and what isn’t.Ummmmm…… Maybe not.
The audio for the second FitForum.org interview with David Coleman is now available. Some background: David is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He specializes in, amongst other things, online community and social network marketing & development, community management and various related fields. He is the author of 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.
Building on our first conversation a few weeks ago, we moved on this time round to cover:
Where now for collaboration? In the context of the economic downturn, and reduced budgets for OD in general, how do collaboration specialists make a strong business case for what they do?
Measuring the impact of collaboration – what is ‘impact’? And how easy/difficult is it to balance the impact that a business may wish to achieve with what individuals experience?
Leadership and collaboration – to what extent is collaboration seen by management as ‘something that other people do’?
Educating organisations in how to move to new collaborative models: what are the most effective ways of doing this?
There is another chance to hear collaboration thought leader David Coleman talk on Wednesday 11th August. The recent FitForum.org event with David was so fruitful and relevant to the wider field of human relations in an organisational context that we have invited him back. He has agreed to join us next Wednesday, 11th August, at 8am Pacific Time/4pm UK time.David is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He specializes in, amongst other things, online community and social network marketing & development, community management and various related fields. He is the author of 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.
How can I join in?
The interview and Q&A will start at 4pm UK time (GMT +1hr).
The dial in number is + 1 712-432-3100 and the code is 152585. We’ll also be recording the call.
One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.” – David Dunning
I recently asked Paula, my wife, a question: “What do I think I am competent at doing that you think I am, in reality, incompetent at?” Now this could have opened a whole can of worms leading to a trip to see my therapist and a collapse of fragile male ego, but thankfully she restricted herself to commenting on my washing up. Namely, whilst I think I am competent (enough) she is of the opinion I suck at it….. I mulled this over, and decided “Naaaah, she’s wrong, I can wield a dishcloth with the best of them.”
But what if I really am that bad, or equally deluded in another way, say as a parent, or professionally? Surely I couldn’t be that unaware? Well, actually, research shows I could, and so, Dear Reader, could you. I sense an immediate reaction to that statement, along the lines of “but I know what I am good at and where I need to improve, and I most definitely am not incompetent thank-you very much for asking”. And that is not the same thing. This is a step beyond whether you are merely at stage one in the conscious competence learning model, which illustrates the relative awareness individuals have of their ability to learn new skills. Continue Reading »
The audio for the recent FitForum.org interview with David Coleman is now available. Aside from the uninvited guests (Brighton seagulls: the noisiest in the world?….), it was one of the most rewarding for me on a personal level.
Some background: David is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He specializes in, amongst other things, online community and social network marketing & development, community management and various related fields. He is the author of 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.
So what did I learn?
The big thing for me was the observation that most organisations need a ‘Collaborative Shift’ in terms of how they see things in this arena. In other words, in order to develop successful collaborative projects and teams, there needs to be a fundamental change in the mental models that organisations adopt. Fundamentally, they need to look at things holistically. Easier said than done, particularly given the silo structures and craving for certainty that configures much of the thinking of executives and managers. Yet it surprised me that, even after 20 years in this field, David’s experience is that organisations typically see issues of collaboration as being all about technology.
The extent to which emotional and relational intelligence is necessary for effective collaboration seemed to me logical, although again this is not a link I suspect many organisations would make, let alone address with an explicit intention to develop people in order to enhance collaboration. The default strategy, in David’s experience, is to default to investing in technology.
We began to open up the role of fit and chemistry in collaboration, and the relationship to the notion of ‘liking’. There was not sufficient time to explore this, so we hope to have David with us again in the near future. Other themes to emerge during the interview, and there was a lot of good stuff in here, were:
The importance of taking a holistic view on collaboration , without which the chances of success are minimal.
The TCOP Model, one of the main tools in David’s work. Listen to the interview for a fuller explanation – it is worth it. The numbers in brackets are a weighting:
Technology (1),
Culture – OB (2),
Economics (3),
Politics – managements’ behaviour (4)
The recent addition of a fifth dimension: Space, defined as the local context the individual finds them self in .
The difficulty of quantifying the benefits of collaboration.
The FitForum.org, of which i am a co-founder, has an event this coming Monday. Join in, or listen to the interview on the site afterwards….
The recent Football World Cup in South Africa provided a number of remarkable examples of what happens when collaboration and interpersonal fit works, and when it is truly dysfunctional. If the teams from France and England offered fine examples of dysfunctional collaborative relationships, then Germany’s team was the polar opposite, as was that from the USA. And the coalition government in the UK is, arguably, an on-going collaborative inquiry….
Following on from the interview with Collaboration Specialist Kjetil Kristensen, we are delighted to have another thought leader in this field with us shortly. David Coleman is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He specializes in, amongst other things, online community and social network marketing & development, community management and various related fields. He is the author of 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.
We hope to be able to drill deeper into the relational nature of collaboration, and the significance or otherwise of ‘fit’ in this context. We may even talk football…
How can I join in?
The interview and Q&A will start at 5pm UK time (GMT +1hr).
The dial in number is + 1 712-432-3100 and the code is 152585. We’ll also be recording the call.
I was listening to a debate on the radio the other day between two politicians, one Conservative and the other Labour. They were discussing reports that some Government departments may be required to make cuts of up to 40% in their budgets, and it was a heated conversation to say the least. Now this is an emotive topic, and, depending on your view as to whether financial institutions globally are going to pay their fair share of the deficit back through a Tobin tax or similar, or believe that the public sector has become way too big, you will probably run to one or other of the barricades currently being constructed.
As the Labour politician harangued his opponent, I was struck by his repeated insistence that the reason for all these cuts was mainly ideological and had little to do with the need to reduce public debt; for him, Conservatives are hard wired in their desire to roll back the state, whatever the impact on people at a local level. But things are rarely that simple. For example, arch skeptic Ben Goldacre helpfully drew my attention to a recent article in the British Medical Journal on How cognitive biases affect our interpretation of political messages. Authors Martin McKee, professor of European public health, David Stuckler, research fellow, note:
There is considerable evidence that people presented with balanced arguments place weight on those they already agree with, exhibiting what is termed confirmation bias. Continue Reading »
I ran a workshop at Brighton University recently on the theme of Responding to Change. The participants were mostly recent graduates, and all were entrepreneurs of one sort or another. A minority had experience of working in organisations, in particular the public sector. One section of the workshop involved exposing them to several of the main models that have influenced organisational thinking in the field of managing/leading change, giving them an opportunity to critique them and relate them to their own experience. I began by asking them to compare the following:
