Maybe We are Using the Wrong Words to Describe Collaboration

When we attempt to describe something we are often judge based upon the words we use. Choose certain words and we are considered buzzword compliant or worse, SEO compliant. Choose the wrong words and we are considered out of touch, old school or not ‘cool’. On the other side of the coin, if we try to consider new ideas, or think forward a bit we might be considered too academic or a purist without a strong sense to technological or cultural limitations. What then is the right balance? How do we effectively communicate and at the same time be sure to be heard and found?

Specifically, say or write the words “Social Business”, “Enterprise 2.0” or even “collaboration”, “innovation”, “co-creation” or “design thinking” and many people roll their eyes. “Oh, great another buzzword fest”. I suppose we can still possibly save “innovation”, just a hope. But, aside from that, the rest are too often fodder for power point presentations, executive motivational speeches and fancy conference track titles. That said, the core concepts are very important and we should not allow the hype cycle to get in the way of what we need to get done. The question is, when we write or present these topics, who are we talking to, who is the audience? Are we trying to convince the senior executive or the people in the field, boots on the ground?

I am not going to start throwing around generational monikers (X, Y, Z, C) in an attempt to further confuse. If the goal is to be creative and build something new (as in product, service or concept) and we are trying to describe the value of doing that to people of many ages, backgrounds and job roles, maybe we need a new way to communicate the message. Everyone understands the ideas of teamwork, creativity, working together. When we enter the corporate world is it required to change the names and labels? The following may  not work for everyone, but I believe there is a crowd who might just appreciate the effort.

Remix and Mashup

Say the word Remix to most people under 40 (even some older, but not as many) and the mental image – or mental sound bite –  is clear. A remix is a song that has been edited to sound different from the original. The remixed version might have changed the tempo or pitch, made the song shorter or longer. There is more to it than that, but that is the basic idea. A Mashup is similar in concept, but includes more than one song or instrumental from one song overlaying on the vocals from another. In the digital word, a mashup is a combination of different media, pre-existing creative, all put together. The ideas are similar and well understood, add creativity and originality to someone else’s original work.

(One area I am not going to cover is the legal parts. One, because I am not qualified and Two because I am talking specifically to internal collaborative efforts, ie, one company owns the original works, so it is all kosher.)

Now that I just stated that I am going to ignore the legal issues, the example I am going to use and the basis for the use of Remix is HitRecord. This is a public place to do this and illustrated the example very well. Again, for the sake of discussion, all creative are assigned to HitRecord, thus, no legal issues. The whole idea of working with anyone else internally at your company is to meet a business goal. It might be a new product, a project, a problem or something else – all towards a common goal. We could take a manufacturing / assembly line approach; you do your part, taken from someone who did theirs and hand it off to someone else. Yes, but thinking linear will only get you so far.

We need to Help Everyone to be…

Adaptable, resourceful and make it easy to change. In the world where many grew up (parents and grandparents) people went to work for big companies and stayed there 30 or 40 years. Those days are gone, but nor forgotten. The way I believe that Remix and Mashup can fit into the modern work culture is to allow creativity and fresh ideas to permeate the atmosphere of an organization. In the future, a person’s career will involve many employers, as well as periods of self-employment as part of an ecosystem. Of the modern company is going to survive, it will need to become more like an ecosystem. This approach will give people the opportunity to follow their interests, even as they change over time. The person working for you yesterday, with you tomorrow may be your boss tomorrow. You might one day call this a career Remix, or Mashup, I am not sure. You will take what you know, change the speed, tempo, add a new song or two and dance another day.

Helping means communicating in a language that is understandable, in and on channels where everyone is comfortable – or least willing to learn to adapt. Give permission to others to take your ideas and run with them – Remix them and add their own creativity. When someone helps someone else to learn something or to see it from a new perspective, this may be referred to as mentoring. Mentoring is age independent, anyone can teach, anyone can learn (ie, there is no such thing as ‘reverse’ mentoring). The goal, as a mentor, teacher, friend, peer, co-worker is to help others and help help yourself –

Enjoy the Remix

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A Mashup, is it Possible?

Clearly guided by a few musical mashups that I have been listening to recently, I wondered if it would be possible to create a mashup blog post. Thinking out-loud here, this could just be one long, run-on sentence that will make little sense in the end. It might be fun, or a bit of a waste of time. I suppose, you will be the judge of that – after all, the experience is yours to have, not mine to give. What it does for me is illustrate that as much as we would like to believe that things are getting simpler due to technology, they are in fact getting much more complex.

What was old is new again and the Internet of things is leading the charge in 2013. Everything is connected including people. Pretty soon a Facebook post by my wife, complaining about the cold weather, will turn up the thermostat in my house. Of course, if we move this the collaborative enterprise, then analytics and bigdata would need to be involved, and the temperature the office would need to be decision set by voting through streaming software, such as Yammer, Chatter, Connections or Jive. If we are talking about the temperature of the store, say Walmart or BestBuy, then of course, the voice of the customer would need to be integrated with the personal preference, the collaboration software as well as the input from Lithium, GetSatisfaction or Telligent. Thank you to Nest for making all of this possible, though I am not sure this is what they had in mind.

While we are on the subject of collaboration, it seems that email has nine lives and that the death of email has been a bit premature and/or greatly exaggerated. The amazing thing here is that the moment a new email thread is created with more than one person on the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ line (no ‘Bcc’ here, please) then you have created an ad hoc collaboration event, which we have all been doing for years, little did we know (what is old is new again!). Another fun form of an adhoc collaborative event is the #hashtag. Now, these are not always ‘ad-hoc’ as TV and the movies are trying to push some out there, but during sporting events some do spontaneously pop-up, which are fun.

Now, if I want to make a conversation public, then I can share some of the thoughts Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ (where I can Like, RT or +1, respectively). If I decide to create more visually based sharing, then the sharing would need to be more along the lines of Instagram, Flickr or Multiply and if I am really adventurous then maybe even YouTube. I am not only thinking about the workplace, we are collaborating at home as well, think about music and movies, YouTube, NetFlix, Hulu, Pandora, Spotify; each an entertainment play, with stickiness coming in the form of, yep, social sharing, community or whatever your favorite name might be. Myspace fits in here somewhere, making a comeback of its own, though I am not so sure we will see a lot of Napster nor Friendster.

I do need better filters (sorry, not photo filters), so that I do not suffer from information overload. This filter will of course be cloud based, as a hybrid solution will not work, nor will a complete on-premise solution. As my information needs grow, the elasticity of the cloud will make sure that everything is just fine and all of the information will be seamlessly stored in either Box, DropBox, SkyDrive or a Google Drive. Once all the information is stored and I decide I want to write a crazy blog post (yeah, sorta like this one) I will be thankful that Evernote is close at hand, then I can transfer my thoughts from there to WordPress, Posterous, Blogger or Tumblr where I will link to from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and schedule all of this through Buffer – did I leave anything out? Yes, if I want to comment, Disqus is an important part, I suppose. funny that I have made it to this point without even a mention of the most popular protocols of all, Skype, Chat, IM and SMS. Where do they fit into the conversation?

Something I forgot is that I need something to create my word cloud for all of the topics that I hit in 2012, otherwise, my infographic will not look very professional! Going back to email, I need something to organize my inbox; you know, the 3 Gmail accounts, the 2Yahoo accounts, Live, Hotmail and the AOL account I will never admit in public that exists. The question is, in 2013 is it going to get better, or worse? Are we going to invent more terms, more niche platforms, more things to remember – yeah, probably, but it will be fun, right? Finally, we will be doing all of this, on a daily basis from at least 4 devices each, with form factors from 3×3 to 48×72 and operating systems including, but not limited to Android, iOS, Win8 and a few others, as well.

Excuse me, I need to run, the phone is ringing!