BUILDING THE COLLABORATIVE:THE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVE ENERGY

& THE CREATION OF “SWAGGER”-- Further thoughts about a new model –

The thoughts I presented in the Death of the Company and Birth of the Collaborative have stimulated some very positive reactions from a broad swath of people. I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people who have entertained these thoughts react favorably (sometimes very favorably) to the general theme of the collaborative as an organization versus the current organizational structure of the company. But their favorable reactions also beg numerous questions.

The non-stop harangue of internally- and externally-created new questions that confront the company trying to create something new, together with dealing with the reality of making lots of mistakes as you go about that process, invades an enterprise’s culture. The more the enterprise is involved with creating new things (a market, a product, a service, a model, etc.) the more self-doubt exists and the more mistakes are encountered, with greater impact to the culture. In the case of the “extreme start-up” (the enterprise with few if any role models, such as those using the collaborative structure), the constant questioning is along the lines of: What have we not done right? What are we doing wrong? Why is (or, isn’t) this result happening? When you think about it, those questions aren’t particularly upbeat. Just imagine waking up every morning thinking about yourself with such questions; you’d pull the blankets back over your head and go back to sleep.

But the company that avoids such questions and sacrifices new initiatives for the sake of avoiding a potential mistake are actually putting themselves in a position certain to fail – at a minimum, it certainly won’t succeed in the same way as the company that creates something new.

Because the collaborative is a new organizational structure – in fact, one in a nascent state – there will be an inundation of questions, ranging from the minor issues of how certain procedures are assigned and completed to major issues such as the strategic direction of the enterprise or how fees are to be set and profits shared. That means the people (at least the current pioneers) engaged in creating a collaborative, by definition, exist in an environment of “downer” questions.

But why are these questions downers? I think the answer is because mistakes and uncertainty are, themselves, considered negatives, and that means if you are always focused on the negative, you’ll be negative, and that’s the downer. You don’t want to be negative and you don’t want your enterprise’s culture to be negative. Great, that leaves you with a major dilemma: You want to be innovative but you don’t want the

negative energy that is integral to the innovation process. What do you do? Well, if you want to be innovative there is only one option: accept the negativism. That leaves you with another critical issue: Can you accept the negativism as a positive?

Imagine the possibilities that arise when negativism is seen as a positive. Instead of shying away from making mistakes, you hurdle into them as fast as you can (constrained by intelligent management of resources). Instead of seeing the mistake as something you try to hide, you share it as quickly as possible with your colleagues so they can avoid the same mistake and offer their ideas as to what happened, why and how to solve it. That’s all good. That’s an upper, not a downer. Collaborative builders must adopt that attitude.

The Concept of “Swagger”:

Unique models encounter unique mistakes and develop unique solutions; as that happens, the enterprise itself becomes more unique, and that uniqueness can be leveraged beneficially for the enterprise in the form of what I call “swagger.” This can be an amazingly important and valuable asset.

Here’s why and how swagger is created:

The most important thing to understand about “unique mistakes” is that you can’t see them coming. Think about it: a cash flow problem is a well-defined mistake. You can see a cash flow problem emerging well before it becomes a reality. There are established best practices for how to monitor the evolution of a cash flow problem and how to deal with it if and when it can’t be preempted.

But you cannot see a new problem emerge. Because it is new, by definition it is not identifiable. There are no established leading indicators. You can’t see coming the problem that never existed before. Furthermore, you may not even know you’ve been hit by a problem until the symptoms become so obvious that you can’t miss them – that does not preclude the possibility that the problem may have existed and been incubating for a long time. The first inclination once you’ve realized that some vital body part has been bitten is to identify it in terms you already know: “Oh, we wrote the marketing copy too long,” or “We should have adopted a different bonus plan,” or “The branding is all wrong.” But along with those sorts of questions it is necessary to ask: “Is something entirely new happening here?”

If the answer to the question of whether something new may be happening is even just “maybe,” it’s important to begin the most difficult task when it comes to benefitting from mistakes: defining the problem correctly. Once the problem is defined, a solution can be considered. But if the problem is defined incorrectly, the solution may become (as John Caswell points out often) a brilliant solution to the wrong question. Unfortunately, the only way you can determine if the problem has been correctly

defined is by determining if the proposed solution actually exerted at least some influence in mitigating or solving the problem. If the influence of the solution is none-to-modest, rather than concluding that the solution was wrong it should prove more beneficial to consider whether the problem was correctly defined. Once the problem is really understood, developing a successful solution is relatively easy.

Thus, the problem of answering unanswered questions, coping with mistakes, or contending with unique problems is a process of: define the problem, develop a solution for the problem, test the solution, re-define the problem, re-craft and then re-test the solution, and repeat and repeat until the quality of the definition and the solution achieve an acceptable enough level so that you can move to the next unanswered question, mistake and unique problem (assuming they aren’t already on your agenda).

That is the culture that will characterize the early collaboratives precisely because the core role models have not yet been developed, all the problems haven’t been identified, and collaborative builders to a large degree still do not know what they do not know. But there is one thing that is a certainty: a productive and palpable uniqueness will grow in collaboratives involved with inventing new models.

As collaboratives identify new problems, they will discover that to solve new problems they will have to do so in a way that is consistent with their core values. For example, an enterprise that is committed to billing their services on the basis of the value they provide rather than how busy (or not) they are cannot develop solutions based on how much time something takes. That is just out of sync with the core values and the culture of the organization will be stressed, perhaps fatally. Because different values influence collaboratives as opposed to those that influence companies, as noted in my first article on collaboratives, the solutions adopted – and that includes the enterprise’s taken-for-granted everyday processes and rules-of-the-road – will be quite different from what we have come to know as company fundamentals. For example, as I wrote in the first article, a collaborative is managed with the idea that financial results are the consequences of the culture and quality of lifestyle and work-style for the members of the collaborative, whereas a company is managed with the idea that the quality of lifestyle and work-style of employees and bosses are consequences of how well the company manages itself when pursuing financial results. The consequence of such a fundamental difference in value can be enormous in numerous ways.

As the collaborative creates more and more of its own solutions, it becomes more unique. The collaborative and the company are similar in that they are both organizational structures, just as an oak and a pine are both trees. But the collaborative grows up different, looks different, finds fertile ground elsewhere, requires different resources to flourish, and so on, just as pines and oaks differ from each other. As collaboratives begin to prosper and grow both in numbers and success, those associated with collaboratives will understand why they are prospering. They will know it arises directly from their uniqueness – their willingness to reject what have been taken as

immutable laws of business since the emergence of the manufacturing economy. That sense of exceptionalism will lead to a “swagger:” a sense of confidence that will imbue every component of the enterprise. There is no replacement for the benefits that come when a group of people moves together with the confidence that they are onto something uniquely right.

It is important to remember that the swagger is greater in direct relation to how truly unique the enterprise is. Thus, the swagger is a direct result of confronting the downer questions that lead to negative energy. Accordingly, energy both positive and negative, must be considered as one force, just as Yin Yang must exist as one unit.

That will become clear to those involved with collaboratives – both the good part of this and the bad part of it. It will also lead, ultimately, to those who are pioneers with collaboratives to begin to adopt their swagger. That swagger is still premature because the collaborative model needs a lot more meat on its bones. But it’s coming. The company will die; the collaborative will be born and will grow as the preferred organizational structure of the knowledge economy.