Strategy consultant Jessica Lipnack’s message to companies that are spreading increasingly across physical, social and cultural borders as part of the globalisation process is crystal clear. Fortunately, there are collaborative solutions to help them on their way.

by: Tobias Hammar

photography: Christer Ehrling

“In the vast majority of cases, people no longer work with other people who are located close by. The borders are often physical, but there are also borders between different time zones, organisations, hierarchies and companies that are working together. If you work in a service group or as a consultant or in almost any project, you may report to one person and deliver to another. At the present time, we are all slightly schizophrenic,” she says.
“This explains why collaboration between the people in companies and working groups is becoming increasingly important. I am convinced that collaboration is going to be the principal success factor for companies in the future. It makes no difference how brilliant the staff are or how fantastic your products are – if you don’t adopt collaboration as a core strategy for success, you will never succeed.”

You run the NetAge consulting company together with your husband. What do you actually do?
“Collaboration is the nucleus of our business. We help companies to make sure that they have the right structures – organisation design, engagement strategies and behaviours – in place to enable people to collaborate. We act as advisers, we work directly with company management teams to create strategy and learning that stimulate collaboration and we develop software that other companies produce and market.”

So, how can people collaborate more effectively across borders?
“A few years ago, we conducted a study, in collaboration with two business school professors. It was published in the Harvard Business Review and it found that telephone conferences and Virtual Workspace are the best platforms for building a good collaborative environment. You can then naturally go into greater detail, such as good headsets for your phone conferences, good menu systems for your virtual project rooms and so on.”

What makes these systems so good?
"Their simplicity. The majority of video conferences, for example, are terrible. They add little. The bandwidth that is needed to set up really good video conferences is normally outside the investment capacity of most companies. This will naturally change, but, at the vast majority of workplaces, normal telephone conferences are without question best.
“Virtual Workspace is good as it gives your project group a shared space on the internet. You can orient yourself more easily in cyberspace when it’s easy to find updated versions of the documents without having to paw through your e-mail. Just think about how easy it would be if you knew where to find things quickly for all the projects you’re working on!
“At the same time, it’s important to remember that the technology represents just a small part of the work. We often encounter companies that have invested an enormous amount of money in the right collaborative solutions – but things still don’t work. Interest has to focus on sociology rather than just technology. After all, it’s people who have to be stimulated to collaborate.”

Which other collaborative solutions do you recommend? 
“Well-established tools such as Instant Messenger and various kinds of Knowledge Management System are so obvious that I hardly need mention them. They are straightforward, constructive and easy to use.
“E-mail is different. In the study we conducted, we found that people thought that e-mail was not a good way to for teams as a whole to collaborate. Don’t you find that surprising? It emerged that e-mail requires a whole raft of rules and regulations to function effectively. Otherwise, it actually obstructs collaboration. You know – attachments, cc, reply all, language problems, difficulty interpreting what people mean, ‘did you get my e-mail?’ and so on. This also applies to other tools; we need rules and principles governing the way they should be used, otherwise they won’t.”

What is driving the development of collaborative solutions?
“Globalisation and technological development. Technology companies are constantly developing new products that make it easier for us to communicate. At the same time, knowledge and skills have been spread all over the world, as large numbers of people have emigrated to every corner of the globe.”

Will it ever happen that we won’t need to meet physically in the future?
“Why not? I don’t mean that we should stop meeting. I love spending time with other people. But it isn’t always practical, especially if your skill base is widespread. I was surprised when our research revealed that most of the 54 working groups we studied had never met in person – and yet the results they produced were outstanding. Then there’s the economic aspect. Large working meetings are very, very expensive.”