Collaboration

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration is when two or more individuals work together to accomplish a common goal or outcome. The common purpose for which two or more individuals combine energies to achieve can result in remarkable, successful, and unexpected outcomes. The scholarly works of Muzafer Sherif and Stephen R. Covey provide great examples of the need for collaboration.

Why Collaborate?

In the 1950s, Muzafer Sherif showed that rivaling youths were willing to cooperate together when motivated by "superordinate goals." While superordinate goals resulted in cooperation, the boys realized that they needed to collaborate in order to successfully achieve mutually desired outcomes. Superordinate goals inherently describe collaboration as they are only achieved by the contribution and cooperation of two or more people working together.

Stephen R. Covey, in his influential book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, outlines seven imperative habits for interdependent effectiveness. Habit 5 – Principles of Mutual Understanding – describes the collaborative principle of seeking to listen and understand another person, their situation, and concerns in order to establish a working communication. The common understanding obtained in Habit 5 leads to Habit 6 – Principles of Creative Cooperation – which is a way of working in teams applying effective problem solving and decision making. As team members value differences, build on divergent strengths, they leverage creative collaboration and innovation. The resulting collaborative synergy is the result of the whole being "greater than the sum of its parts."

When is Collaboration Important?

The scholarly insights of both Sherif and Covey emphasize the need for individuals to often come together and collaborate. Such collaboration is the result of individuals recognizing the need for mutual goals or outcomes. Collaboration requires cooperation among individuals. Without cooperation, collaboration will fail to generate remarkable, successful, and unexpected synergistic outcomes.

Who is Collaborating?

Our society is inherently built upon the principles of collaboration as individuals seek mutually desired goals and outcomes for survival and promotion of culture. Society is the sum of social relationships among groups in a structured community of people bound together by customs or traditions, institutions, or nationalities. The collective sum of individuals collaborating is what forms the heart of our society and culture. The resulting collaborative efforts can be seen in art, music, publishing, business, education, science, and technology.

Where is Collaboration Occurring?

Today, social media has brought together individuals on the World Wide Web interacting and sharing information. Social media applications are collaborative platforms facilitating communication among individuals. This communication can be synchronous or asynchronous, yet always provide increased collaborative immediacy between participants. This increased immediacy excites individuals to interact facilitating collaboration. Interactions can be based around any number of motivations (e.g., greater creative expression, friendship), but regardless of the reasons individuals interact, the power of online collaboration is evident in social media.

The scholarly works by Sherif and Covey emphasize the importance of collaboration in our culture and society. Covey's work has particular relevance in business as teams collaborate for mutually shared goals or outcomes with an "abundance mentality" or "abundance mindset." With this mindset, team members recognize that their collaboration does not threaten their own business success, but rather, the group's success is dependent upon sharing resources and success.

Mindjet's Collaborative Mind Mapping Software

As the need for collaboration in business is emphasized, software has been developed to facilitate collaboration. For example, Mindjet developed collaboration software using mind mapping techniques. Mind mapping allows individuals to order and structure thoughts through diagrams representing concepts, ideas, tasks or roles that are arranged around centralized themes. The mind map visualization expresses the common thoughts of its creators. Accordingly, the mind map becomes a collaborative tool facilitating workplace communication and team work.

Mindjet's mind mapping software, MindManager 8, is complemented by Mindjet Catalyst allowing collaboration in an online workspace. With MindManager 8 and Mindjet Catalyst, teams are able to enjoy collaborative benefits of mind mapping and online file sharing.