COLLABORATION 4.0

Collaboration 2.0 – Collaboration expanded by the web
Collaboration 3.0 – Real-time collaboration over multimedia platforms
Collaboration 4.0 – Going beyond the activity of collaboration

This year’s agenda of the World Economic Forum centered around what is being called “The 4^th Industrial Revolution”. The term refers to the accelerated development and intersections of multiple technologies and disciplines such as nanotechnology, the Internet of Things, Big data, 3-D printing, and many others.

This process is having a central impact on business, social and political models. We are already feeling the impact in things such as Pokemon-Go, the recent political campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, the trend of online retail and the 3-D printing of human organs. All of this requires that we take a look and change the way we understand one of the most important cornerstones of this new Industrial Revolution… Human Collaboration.

For decades (centuries, actually) we have seen and managed collaboration only as an activity and have never fully realized the fact that it is also a system, and one of the most critical systems dictating the performance and results of teams, organizations and entire nations.

Imagine a group of highly skilled scientists and technicians from diverse fields getting together to work on a joint development project, they are all brilliant and willing to work together, but it turns out they all speak different languages! The result would be a standstill of the process until they could begin sharing common words, and later a common language; Only then would they be able to proceed and reach their aims and full team potential.

Collaboration as it stands now is facing much the same situation when individuals and teams collaborate across individual, professional, cultural, generational, and geographical barriers they face the inevitable human diversity barriers to establishing high-performance collaboration.

Whatever the means we use to transmit information, we will do so based on our particular perceptions and assumptions, and that information will be interpreted and acted upon by others based on their perceptions and assumptions. It doesn’t matter if you are face-to-face in a meeting room or if you are typing and texting with others miles away, the onion will be there hindering true high-performance collaboration in day-to-day operational reality.

That is where the awareness and understanding of the collaboration as a system, and the means to formally align and operate it, will become first a huge competitive advantage and later the norm of operation; just as has happened with quality, production and many other systems.

To learn more about COLLABORATION 4.0, you can read my post on Linkedin Pulse here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/collaboration-40-system-alberto-garcia-jurado