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Anecdote

Anecdote is a place to better understand learning, change and knowledge sharing. And you can tell by our name that we believe in the power of narratives.

When should we collaborate?December 2

Is it collaboration when you’re sent the yearly performance review spreadsheet and instructed to assess your staff’s performance? Absolutely not; it’s an act of co-ordination. Everyone is working separately to achieve the overall goal of conducting the performance reviews. Only a modicum of trust is required (trust in the system) to get the job done.

So, is it collaboration when you meet with your team to work out the performance review process? Not quite. Here we are co-operating with our colleagues to deliver a task that we all know needs to be done. When we co-operate there is often a medium level of trust involved (trust in each other’s competencies and character), the value of the activity tends not to accrue directly to the participants co-operating and, in most cases, someone else is driving you to do it. [1]

So what is collaboration then? It’s when a group of people come together, driven by mutual self–interest, to constructively explore new possibilities and create something that they couldn’t do on their own. Imagine you’re absolutely passionate about the role that performance reviews play in company effectiveness. You team up with two colleagues to re-conceptualise how performance reviews should be done for maximum impact. You trust each other implicitly and share all your good ideas in the effort to create an outstanding result. You and your colleagues share the recognition and praise equally for the innovative work.

Getting collaboration-ready from day oneDecember 1

Organizational silos can often become one of the biggest barriers to collaboration. You may have all the right intentions, collaboration could even be a strategic goal but something still prevents it from happening. Embedding the idea of collaboration as early as possible can make it really easy to build a collaborative culture. SEI seems to have taken that idea seriously.

Collaboration requires fairnessNovember 27

Humans have a strong sense of fairness. If two people are given a sum of money and one is asked to divide it and offer the other portion to their partner, if it's not a 50/50 split the partner is most likely to refuse offer, even if this means that both parties loose everything. And of course when it's hard to really to split something exactly down the middle (like a piece of chocolate forest cake) then the you-cut-I-choose method is the only fair approach. Interestingly if a computer makes the split people are most likely to accept whatever proportion that's offered. We don't expect computers to be fair. So don't fall for the lame excuse of, "the computer says no." They're just playing with your psychological foibles.

This sense of fairness has a strong bearing on how we rate our satisfaction with our collaborators, and therefore the collaboration's long-term success. We care more about the process of fairness than the outcome. In one study of car dealers and their relationship with the car manufacturer, the biggest factors in satisfaction were not the transactional details of inventory quality or how good a deal they were getting but how the manufacturer behaved towards the dealer. Did they take the time to learn about their unique operation and market, were they treated with respect

Scientific discovery and the value of collaborationNovember 24

Scientists in Iowa recently reported a breakthrough discovery. They successfully identified the gene (PRICKLE1) which when mutated causes epilepsy. There's two things amazing about this discovery

• PRICKLE1 is unique in that it has never been associated with any other disease.
• The project involved two dozen institutions across 6 countries and collaboration played an important role.

Dr Bassuk (the lead author) found that whether on-campus or international, collaboration was essential to the success of the research study.

"By sharing and analyzing data sets, we realized there was a common mutation in the PRICKLE1 gene in the family members with this form of epilepsy," Bassuk said.

To verify that the mutation might be related to the epilepsy, the team needed to test it in an animal model. This next step to find a suitable animal model involved a surprising coincidence: Bassuk, who had only recently joined the UI, realized through online research that the PRICKLE1 gene in zebrafish had been previously identified by another University of Iowa researcher, Diane Slusarki, Ph.D., associate professor of biology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"I walked across the river to Diane's side of campus, and we designed an experiment to test the human mutation in the zebrafish," Bassuk said. It was 'Iowa luck.'"...

"We never could have done, or could continue to do this type of research, with just

What is the leader's role?November 23

I was reading a presentation on collaborative behaviours in nursing and came across this great quote.

The most critical aspect of leadership is the desire and passion to lead, the capacity to deeply reflect on and learn from leadership activities, a willingness to step out of one’s comfort zone, and the ability to build and use relationships for some constructive good.