Collaboration in the Era of Crowdsourcing

By Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3) Mar 29, 2011

Hi Michelle —

We don’t know each other, but I’m working on a new idea. Through our internal collaboration system, I found that you may have expertise relevant to it based on your documents, posts and profile. I’d like to discuss with you what I’m working on, and what I need to help flesh out this concept.

Regards,
Hutch

Imagine getting a message like that. How would you respond?

I’ll relate an anecdote from the corporate world that addresses that question. When I was at BEA Systems, I presented several Aqualogic social software apps to a major financial institution, including expertise location. A person there asked me if Aqualogic supported degrees of separation analysis between two employees. Why? Because he knew that the likelihood of an employee responding to a fellow employee she didn’t know was actually quite low. The degrees of connectedness would be a chain of referral introductions to connect the two employees.

In other words, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it collaborate.

That is the traditional nature of collaboration. A very strong ties orientation. But as Andrew McAfee, Mark Granovetter and others have written, that’s limiting for innovation purposes. The graphic below illustrates the opportunity – and changing dynamics – of collaboration in the era of crowdsourcing.

Let’s examine what collaboration looks like as the nature of work itself changes.

Innovation thrives on diverse inputs

Say you have a problem you need help with. Or the germ of an idea that’s incomplete. Sure, check with the people with whom you’re closest. They do sometimes have the answer. But more likely than not, they won’t. Or they give an answer that kinda, sorta helps. But not really.

It’s not their fault. It’s yours. You’re stuck in the most comfortable form of knowledge-seeking: asking your strong ties. Getting outside that comfort zone exposes you to a more diverse source of information. This happens in two ways:

Access to non-redundant information
Access to alternative perspectives and problem-solving heuristics

I think we can all understand non-redundant information. Accessing broader information than what our close ties give us. How can that be anything but good? It is a fundamental premise of the KM movement.

The second item there, perspectives and heuristics, might be new to you. In his book The Difference, Michigan professor Scott Page describes them as follows:

Perspective: a map from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem or event gets mapped to a unique world.
Heuristic: a rule applied to an existing solution represented in a perspective that generates a new (and hopefully better) solution or a new set of possible solutions.
Someone brings a diverse perspective to a problem if she sees the problem differently. By seeing it differently, she creates a different landscape. Someone brings a diverse heuristic if he knows a different rule or algorithm for finding solutions. So, perspectives are ways of seeing solutions, and heuristics are ways of constructing solutions, ways of moving around the space of possibilities.

Both new perspectives and new ways of exploring a problem are valuable. Indeed, studies show that people whose expertise is in a field outside that of a problem are actually better at solving it.