On the edge of network the communication is very restricted; one has to make the best of it and focus on the essence of the communication. Scenarios of interaction greatly help; expectations are clear, and focus is on whatever the subject of interaction is. Almost all productive collaboration on the edge is easy to classify in well-defined scenarios. Scenario is among three most important success factors of collaboration on the edge.
The luxury of high-bandwidth communication (again, I use the bandwidth in a broad sense to describe richness of communication between people) brings about the freedom of unstructured communication. Nothing like blabbing about all and nothing around a watercooler, popping by coworker’s office for a nice chat, or leisurely chatting about with friends in a quiet cafeteria. Good things often come out of that (and it becomes less and less of a time waster when compared to people’s surfing habits and TV).
The legend has it that Bill Gates insisted all Microsoft’s software developers should work in company’s Redmond offices, to be able to meet face to face and interact freely. To a large extent this is still part of their culture and some people believe one of the more important drivers of their success. Cusumano and Selby have a great account of this, highly recommended reading. Mr. Gates obviously understood the issue of rich and engaged communication in the complex realm of software. (Though now that the company is more bloated employees are farther and farther apart; certainly a factor in Microsoft’s plunge towards faceless mediocrity we’re witnessing).
Engaging people in rich communication equally applies in other fields of human endeavor: company office spaces will never go away completely; and that is why conferences and trade shows are important and popular happenings. For the long time to come we’ll remain face-to-face creatures, nothing will truly match the good feeling of human-to-human interaction, if ever.
On the edge of network, the bandwidth sharply drops*; all the richness of shared context and culture go away and the chance for misunderstanding goes up proportionally with the breadth of communication. Scenario based interaction increases our chances of success: limited to a specific activity, participants’ expectations are better aligned. Equally important, the need for negotiation, “what’s in it for me, what’s in it for you” goes away as most people tend to understand most scenarios, and it is generally more efficient to explain things in conceptual terms.
For example, a typical scenario would be commenting on a draft document: an organization engages a group of recognized independent experts to provide input and comment on an important public document. One group comes up with the draft text and then asks for input. The bulk of the work usually requires tightly knit group (the inside); input from each expert is expected to be significantly smaller compared to the work of writing the report, and thus it is easier to engage people across the edge. Processing and summarizing the total input will again be done in the high-bandwidth setting, helping the quality of the final product.
Another scenario is reference library: a department wants to put together a collection of most important, reference documents for their area of work to make sure all collaborators have centralized access and ensure everyone is on the same page as much as possible. Again, the tight group does bulk of the work, communicates it across the edge and welcomes comments, suggestions and improvements.
Other known scenarios involve things like sharing documents, organizing a workshop (and its follow up), time-limited discussions (for example 4 weeks discussion, 1 topic expert per week, summary document in the fifth week).
So far we’ve seen about 15 or so of these clear scenarios that people tend to engage in. We have only had one generic type of “community” to offer, yet people tend to engage only in one specific scenario; that is how we came to see all this. As a rule, the more successful a community is, the more focused it is on a clearly defined scenario.
Joshua Porter very eloquently talks about a primary pivot as an important success factor of an online community or a social network, corroborating our findings.
Another Porter, Michael, talks about challenges of market globalization in his seminal work Competitive Advantage: the more global you go, the more focused you have to be. This is the exact principle behind scenario based collaboration: communicating across the edge is “going global,” increasing the scope and breadth of the engagement. Your message must be much more focused if you are to succeed.
Collaboration in development sector is cross-cultural and communication is very sensitive. Using scenario-based collaboration greatly increases chances for a successful and productive collaboration.
*Please note that I am not limiting the concept of the edge of network to just electronic collaboration, though this is what we’re applying it to the most. A family dealing with neighbors is a typical case of the tight network (the family, a network) engaging across the edge (or the fence to be more precise in this case). Trust is low, shared context and values are usually not of any help and thus the “bandwidth” is restricted: one has to be careful what and how to say it not to offend others.
