Transitioning from email to collaboration platform

Transitioning from email to collaboration platform is a difficult problem.  Technology of deploying collaboration platform is easy.  What is difficult is getting people off from email and have them start using collaboration platform to start realizing the benefits of shared virtual group page.

As I wrote earlier in my blog post, I have been thinking about this problem for a while.  This week, I've decided to look into a simple module that would make this transition easier.

Minimal Viable Product is a simple one.  As an email user and collaboration early adopter, I want to start posting emails with long To and CC list to an internal collaboration system.  The system will keep track of single master copy of the email thread and recreate the thread by timestamp.  That's it.

Email as messaging system

I ran into Sachin Agarwal's blog about how email is the de-facto standard messaging system of Internet.  I totally agree.  Email is a very simple tool that everyone understands.  Although I hate using email as collaboration tool, email has its killer use case, and it is here to stay.

I can think of the following compelling reasons why email is not going away.

Motivated reasoning

In the context of the psychological theory of motivated reasoning, this makes a great deal of sense. Based on pretty indisputable observations about how the brain works, the theory notes that people feel first, and think second. The emotions come faster than the “rational” thoughts—and also shape the retrieval of those thoughts from memory.
- Chris Mooney @Mother Jones

Motivated reasoning is a term that describes how our emotions shape the way we think about things, even before we have chance to rationalize about them.  It's a fancy way of saying that we feel first then look for a reason to back up our feeling.  Great marketers know this, and have been using it to market us things that we don't really need.  By making us feel certain way, we are not rationalizing why we need to buy things.  Instead we feel that we have to get it.

Communication != Exchange of information

"Communication is a learned skill...  They [people] are mistaking exchange of information for communication." 

- Richard the caller to KQED Forum

Last week KQED Forum had 1-hour segment discussing online dating culture.  During the call, one caller named Richard called in and made the above comment.  It was in the context of how communication tends to happen over electronic medium, and that is not necessarily the same as communicating with people in face-to-face meeting.  The caller was suggesting that there are who aspects of communication that we don't think about too much these days, and we need to practice to get better at it.

It gave me a pause.  Communication as exchange of information sounds logical, yet it feels like there are some things missing.  What could be missing?

Education is teaching the love of learning

When I finished my graduate school and joined a startup, I thought I was off to a good start.  I thought my degree afforded me to push my idea.  I thought my graduate degree was a proof that I could think analytically and gave me an endorsement to pursue my ideas with little or no collaboration.

I was dead wrong.  Not only did my degree mean very little in terms of working at a startup, but also I realized that my ideas were often wrong.  And it took me repeated failures over many years to see this fact.

Now that I look back at my first 15 years of my career, I can say that one of the biggest mistakes that I made many times was not collaborating more with people around me.  Somehow I had mistakenly thought that the most creative thoughts happened when I was alone sipping my coffee at my desk.  Wrong again.  It turned out that creativity and innovation are a collaborative process, not a light bulb flash by single stroke of genius.

Where did I go wrong?  Why did I have to relearn to work with my coworkers?  It was simple.

Product Idea: Email to collaboration

I get 140 - 160 emails a day.  Most emails have multiple recipients.  Rarely I get an email that is addressed just to me.  Only automatic alerts are sent just to me.  Others have often a dozen recipients.  What's interesting is that recipient list gets longer as the email thread drags on.

I'm sure that you've seen many.  Someone sends you an email.  You respond and copy someone who might know the answer.  Recipient starts copying someone who might add to the conversation.  Each time new recipients are added, the email thread gets longer.  Message gets buried.  Dozens of emails are littered across many individual inboxes.

We already know how to fix this.  Answer is to use a collaboration system.  Instead of attaching Word doc with edits, sending a pointer to the central collaboration server where the up-to-date version is hosted is the answer.  And it works well when collaboration happens with well defined task.

Think again; you are replaceable

It may be a shocker for any star player.  But here is the truth.  

You are replaceable.  

By believing and acting like you are not, you are not only failing to perform at your peak, but also doing a disservice to your team by putting your ego ahead of team's objective.

Everyone is prone to make this mistake.  The more talented and dedicated the person is, the more likely he is to fall into this trap.  I admit that I was totally one of the victims.

It's true that you are unique as individual,
but your contribution is replaceable at work.
Act accordingly.
Source: http://venting-is-good-for-you.tumblr.com/

Collaboration does not happen with deploying a tool

I believe that we gain more by sharing more.  By actively sharing insights and perspectives we can collectively create greater values than sum of its parts.  Collaboration is not a zero sum game.  It is one of the reasons why I decided to update my blog every day.

More than ever we need people who can collaborate with each other.  Collaboration takes experience and skills.  It's not a process that rewards single star player.  In order for collaboration to work smoothly, participants must have experiences working with others and putting collective goals ahead of individual agenda.  To operate effectively in that environment it takes skills to navigate around politics and foster constructive communications.

Often it is enough to have a couple of experienced individuals out of team of several to make the collaboration work effectively.  The leader must be the person who believes in the collaborative process and has experiences managing the collaborative discussion.  Without the committed and experienced leader I've seen many collaboration fizzling out without synthesizing a new idea and how-to steps.  Collaboration is an obstacle course where individual team member can either become hindrance or aid.  It's the lead and experienced team member's job to spot these signs early on and navigate around them.

Fragmented enterprise collaboration tools

A: “What collaboration tools do you use?"

B: “We have Sharepoint for corporate policies and HR; Connections for product team; Jive for product marketing team; Github for engineering team; and some teams are using Yammer.  Oh, we also have Salesforce Chatter for sales team, and our marketing team is active on Facebook Page, Twitter, LinkedIn and Wordpress blog.”

I have been asking people who work at enterprise to name their collaboration tools.  The answer is almost always not one tool, but multiple collaboration tools.  I then ask if they have a plan to unify and agree on single collaboration tool.  Again the answer is almost always no.

Clearly it's counter-intuitive to have separate islands of collaboration tools.  Collaboration tool, by definition, is meant to make communication and working together easier among team members.  Instead of using multiple tools segregating users, it makes much more sense for an organization to choose one tool where everyone can be available.  More users will create network effect, and collaboration tool will be that much more valuable.

But that's not the reality.  Why is this the case?

Why collaboration is a must

Today I had a chance to think a bit about why we need to collaborate.  Simply put, we need to collaborate because all of us have unique perspective.  Everyone brings their own background and different assumptions to the table, and companies cannot afford to learn these lessons again when there is someone in the team who can steer them clear of the obstacles.  It's too costly to ignore and suppress people from sharing their ideas to create the best possible strategy.

There are three aspects in implementing this highly effective collaboration in an organization.

How social media will change the way we work

With 1 billion Facebook users and counting, end users have bought in on social media to keep up with friends.  So how would that change the way we work?

There are many changes to come.  But we are still far from seeing the full impact of social media to enterprise.  Here is where we are moving to and why the changes are coming slow.

Creative process

Sir Ken Robinson defines creativity as applied imagination.  He talks about creative process through which individual imaginations are applied to solve a useful problem.  I agree.

He has been talking about changing our education system to rise to this new challenge.  Education should not be about creating artificial competition among students.  Instead it should be encouraging each individual student to tap into their passion and to think critically for themselves.

I've been a big fan of what Sr Ken Robinson has been preaching around the world.  If you haven't seen it before, it should provide nice sidebar conversation around the power of collaboration.  After all, creative process involves people, and quickest way to get to the applied imagination is through collaboration.

Pitfalls in implementing creative process

Yesterday I blogged about how good ideas are created through creative process and collaboration.  Often good ideas are found in pieces which would then have to be put through collaboration to make it complete.  Only then the idea will be ready for implementation.

It sounds all simple but in real life it's anything but.  There are many pitfalls that will derail this creative process.  I want to share a few that I have seen.

Good idea comes from collaboration

No one has monopoly on good ideas.  Although everyone knows this, it is a different matter to make use of these wealth of good ideas in your organization.  What's interesting is that ideas are often they come in pieces.  It's up to the team to get all ideas on the table, and assemble them to synthesize the best idea.

Why I Believe Social Network Is Future Of Communication Platform

I was having lunch with my coworkers yesterday and talking about some websites that were still using static HTML to render their content. While describing them, I said they looked like they were from 1990's. Then I quickly realized that it was only 1995 when Netscape popularized websites, and most websites were developed after 1996. That was just 16 years ago.

Since the birth of graphical world wide web technology to allow people to communicate each other and share information have been evolving in dizzying pace. Pagers have been replaced by mobile phones, mobile phones by Blackberries and Blackberries by touch-screen iPhones. Email which quickly became de-facto electronic communication standard evolved to become webmail, then mobile messaging, and recently to microblog messages called tweets.

Abusing the power of email to the max;
how many of these group emails do you get a day?
(Don't worry, I know better not to send this particular one,
but I've done my own share of group replies)

But businesses still rely on face-to-face meetings, phone calls, conference calls, and emails to get our work done. As most of US economy has shifted to service industry, most of us derive our value from communicating or collaborating with other workers. Although some rock star programmers might be reluctant to admit, we spend our better part of day communicating and collaborating, not coding.

It's safe to say that most businesses would come to its knees if mail server is down and emails do not get delivered. We've become so dependent on email for almost all communication activity that we do, it's fair to say that our day revolves around email.

The problem of email is that it's meant to be private exchange of information between two parties. It's built using postal service analogy. There is a sender and there is a recipient. Message travels from one person to another. The message is not public, and is not meant for sharing with other people. In fact sending too many mails and asking them to reshare is prohibited by law (chain letter anyone?). Well, same applies to email.