The Collaboration Challenge
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This document outlines the instructions and rules for a collaboration challenge where participants must build the tallest freestanding structure using materials in a box to hold a marshmallow on top within 18 minutes. It discusses principles for successful collaboration such as defining an ultimate goal, enlisting the right people, leading from the top, and maintaining momentum. The challenges aims to teach lessons about collaboration and working together as a team.
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The Collaboration Challenge
- 1. The Collaboration Challenge Kelly Freeman, Intranet Strategist, Interact #IIC14 interaction interact123
- 3. Your tools
- 4. The instructions & rules! 1. Work together to build a tower using the materials you have in the box 2. Build the Tallest Freestanding Structure 3. The Entire Marshmallow Must be on Top 4. Use as Much or as Little of the Kit as you like 5. You may break up the Spaghetti, String or Tape 6. The Challenge lasts 18 minutes – you must not have to touch, hold up or otherwise support your structure to make it stand up
- 6. The instructions & rules! 1. Work together to build a tower using the materials you have in the box 2. Build the Tallest Freestanding Structure 3. The Entire Marshmallow Must be on Top 4. Use as Much or as Little of the Kit as you like 5. You may break up the Spaghetti, String or Tape 6. The Challenge lasts 18 minutes – you must not have to touch, hold up or otherwise support your structure to make it stand up
- 9. What did we learn from this challenge?
- 10. Principles of successful collaboration Define the ultimate goal Tactics AND tools Enlist the right people Lead from the top Encourage a new mind-set Start right and maintain momentum
- 11. Define the ultimate goal Remind yourself of the definition of collaboration Define what is to be achieved Ensure clarity of understanding
- 12. Tactics AND tools Understand the why before the how Strategy before technology Tools must fit into flow of work
- 13. Enlist the right people Soft skills become critical in virtual teams No bystanders Size matters! Ownership and accountability
- 14. Lead from the top Transparency and vulnerability Willingness to listen and learn Use the tools
- 15. Encourage a new mind-set Reward and recognise team players and collaborative behaviours Answer ‘what’s in it for me’
- 16. Start right and maintain momentum Familiarise and train Kick off event Easy quick win Celebrate successes
Editor's Notes
- 30 secs Many interact customers; both new and established, list 'improving collaboration or 'working more collaboratively' as objectives for implementing a new intranet. One of the challenges they face, and we face with them, is establishing what this really means; both conceptually and in practice and how to encourage collaborative working.
- 2 mins The basic definition of collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce something, so if you want collaborative working to happen in your organisation, the crux of it begins with firstly defining what it is you want produced and who should be working together to make it happen Some of the ways that organisations get it wrong is by not knowing what they want to produce or they unwittingly create the wrong environment for cooperative working to flourish. Quite often there are mixed messages about intranet usage and social tools; with bosses secretly or not so secretly thinking it’s a waste of time. A collaborative process can sometimes feel like it sacrifices your productive work time — time when you could be doing hands-on things like, you know, actually getting the day job done. But effective collaboration can actually reduce the length of a project, by bringing everyone’s skills and talents into the process. By involving everyone on the team in coming up with creative ways to solve problems and increase efficiency, you may come up with a much better way of working going forward. what the intranet allows is a different platform for behaviour that is happening anyway – the intranet can be a more efficient platform for it and put you in contact with experts that you may never have considered before. So the challenge of collaboration is to have a goal and a team committed to achieve it. To illustrate this concept, we wanted to put this into a practical and fun challenge – to show that when you have shared purpose and the means to work together, an outcome can be achieved.
- 4 mins total So, under your table you will find a box. In that box you will find: A pack of numbers from 1-10 20 sticks of spaghetti 1 metre of sticky tape 1 metre of string 1 marshmallow 1 pair of scissors Please now put this box on your table and firstly take out the pack of numbers and hand one to each person on your table. 2 mins What I want to do is mix you all up. So you’re not working on this with people you work with day to day. If your number is one, please stand up and make your way over to table 1 If your number is two, please stand up and make your way to table 2 If your number is three, please stand up and make your way to table 3 And so on – we want you to connect and work with people you don’t work with every day. Leave the rest of the contents in the box on the table. 4 mins
- 1 min Build the Tallest Freestanding Structure: The winning team is the one that has the tallest structure measured from the table top surface to the top of the marshmallow. That means the structure cannot be suspended from a higher structure, like a chair, ceiling or chandelier. ✦The Entire Marshmallow Must be on Top: The entire marshmallow needs to be on the top of the structure. Cutting or eating part of the marshmallow disqualifies the team. ✦Use as Much or as Little of the Kit: The team can use as many or as few of the 20 spaghetti sticks, as much or as little of the string or tape. The team cannot use the paper box as part of their structure. Break up the Spaghetti, String or Tape: Teams are free to break the spaghetti, cut up the tape and string to create new structures. The Challenge Lasts 18 minutes: Teams cannot hold on to the structure when the time runs out. Those touching or supporting the structure at the end of the exercise will be disqualified. You may wish to use your own timer on your phone – but we will give you periodic reminders throughout the challenge. NO GOOGLING, BINGING, YOUTUBING or internet searching of any kind! If you are seen doing this, you’ll be disqualified
- 1 min Build the Tallest Freestanding Structure: The winning team is the one that has the tallest structure measured from the table top surface to the top of the marshmallow. That means the structure cannot be suspended from a higher structure, like a chair, ceiling or chandelier. ✦The Entire Marshmallow Must be on Top: The entire marshmallow needs to be on the top of the structure. Cutting or eating part of the marshmallow disqualifies the team. ✦Use as Much or as Little of the Kit: The team can use as many or as few of the 20 spaghetti sticks, as much or as little of the string or tape. The team cannot use the paper box as part of their structure. Break up the Spaghetti, String or Tape: Teams are free to break the spaghetti, cut up the tape and string to create new structures. The Challenge Lasts 18 minutes: Teams cannot hold on to the structure when the time runs out. Those touching or supporting the structure at the end of the exercise will be disqualified. You may wish to use your own timer on your phone – but we will give you periodic reminders throughout the challenge. NO GOOGLING, BINGING, YOUTUBING or internet searching of any kind! If you are seen doing this, you’ll be disqualified
- Would anyone like to share their observations or learnings,? At first, the task seems simple but actually pretty it hard. It really forces people to collaborate quickly But a couple of interesting facts: Kids do Better than Business Students or Executives : On virtually every measure of innovation, primary school kids create taller and more interesting structures. This is because kids spend more time playing and prototyping. They naturally start with the marshmallow and stick in the sticks. The Business School students and execs spend a vast amount of time planning, then executing on the plan, with almost no time to fix the design once they put the marshmallow on top. The assumption in the Marshmallow Challenge is that marshmallows are light and fluffy and easily supported by the spaghetti sticks. When you actually try to build the structure, the marshmallows don’t seem so light. There are some other ideas that we can take from this challenge that I’d like to share with you now
- When I first saw the exercise and did it myself, I came away thinking that there was so much that could be related to how many businesses view collaborative working and I narrowed these into 6 basic categories
- One of the main reasons collaborative efforts fall is unclear goals. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you find a route there and how will you ever know if you’ve succeeded? Remember, the definition of collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce something. So in order to be successful we must first establish what we want to produce. With this task it was clarified up front what the outcome should be – a free standing structure made from the materials in the box with the marshmallow on top. Right from the start of the exercise you knew what it was that you were trying to work together to produce. If I had said, make *something* out of what you’ve got in front of you, it would have been ambiguous in terms of what success would look like. No doubt there would have been a lot of discussion about what to make, rather than getting on with discussing and agreeing how to make what you’d been asked to produce. Remember the kindergarten kids? They totally had the end goal in mind – building a structure to support the marshallow – putting that first. The business execs and students? Forgot about the marshmallow and made an assumption about its size and weight. They were more focussed on the procedure than the outcome. It is fair to say that ambiguity is the enemy of clarity and having unclear or non-existent goals will severely hamper your collaborative efforts. It generates distrust and uncertainty and can lead to people working against each other instead of with each other. So the first step on any collaborative path should always be define the outcome and understand the ultimate goal.
- In the challenge you just completed, the tools were pre-defined as was the ultimate goal. The challenge was how you worked together with what you had available to achieve that goal. It will come as no surprise to you to hear me say that tools and particularly technological tools are important (we are at an intranet conference, of course I would say that!) but to drive engagement there needs to more than just tools. There has to be strategy before technology. Tactics before tools. What are we trying to achieve? How will this benefit staff and make their lives easier? Can this impact the bottom line? How? One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is thinking that to achieve collaboration, they just need collaboration technology and they rush to pick a shiny new collaboration platform without developing a strategy which understands the “why”. Understanding the why before the how is crucial for the success of any collaboration initiative. You don’t want to be in a position where you have deployed a technology without understanding why you have done so. If you don’t understand why you have it, how on earth is anyone else going to be able to understand? Policies, procedures, job roles and responsibilities will have to change if you want to embed the use of collaborative tools into the day job. Throwing everyone in an online room together, with no clear leadership or specific goals will turn your collaboration efforts into a big waste of time. How often have you heard people in your organisation say, “oh we’ll just start a forum to get people talking”. Great. About what? For what purpose? What do you want to know as a result of the discussion? Is a forum the right tool? Collaborative working isn’t something that just ‘happens’ because you provide access to a discussion forum! Implementing online collaboration tools does take time and often they are seen as an additional task or requirement for employees because they have not been set up in a way that fits naturally into their flow of work. Basic stuff like having employees use multiple usernames, passwords, and log-ins make it just that little bit more difficult and time consuming to use. Email – the enemy of collaboration - on the other hand is right there. Everywhere. On their phone, on their tablet, on their laptop. Faced with difficult or easy, it’s a no-brainer to guess which one they choose to use. Work out what you want to achieve, choose the tools to fit the job, make it easy to access and use and make it the job, not additional to the job.
- Getting the right people on the team is critical to success. How often have you seen teams, both virtual and physical, thrown together without thought or planning? Getting the size, structure and the skills of the people involved correct are all predictors of virtual team success. It goes without saying that you need people with the right ‘hard’ skills – I bet many of you wish you’d have had an architect or structural engineer on your team in this challenge! And of course what is needed will vary according to what you are trying to achieve. But soft skills are very important for virtual teams and those working cross-functionally. Self-direction and communication skills are key. Online collaborative working cannot happen with just one person or a few people providing input – everyone involved must be signed up and willing to participate. Everyone needs to be made responsible for sharing information and updating others. There is no room for information hoarding when working in a team. It is everyone’s job to communicate to everyone else. There is merit in the phrase you have to be in it to win it. The information you get out is only as good as the information you put in. People start to resent people who take out a lot but never put anything worthwhile in. Care should be given over the size of a team. The bigger the team the more issues around co-ordination and communication result; rising almost exponentially as a virtual team grows. In a large team, the risks for overlooking someone in a communication are greater. Few things erode trust faster than being out of the loop. Of course, if you use a tool like Interact teams vs emailing and meetings then the chances of this happening are greatly reduced. The best virtual team is small at it’s core. Where special advisory is needed, opt this on an as needed basis rather than include these people in the entire team. If the majority of the activity taking place has no relevance to someone they will disengage and then when you need them they may not be willing to re-engage. For similar reasons, you should avoid including ‘honorary’ team members, you know the ones you feel you should invite for political reasons but in reality they won’t input much if anything. For a virtual team to work, everyone be working toward the goal and there should be no bystanders. You should also make the team members responsible for achieving the goal. If they don’t have personal and professional accountability, there is less incentive to care about the outcome. That is not to say there should be catastrophic consequences for failure; that type of ‘management by fear’ is deadly to productivity. Fear or threat can impair analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving. If people are afraid of the consequences of failure their ability to solve tricky problems disappears – right when it is needed the most! Encouraging people to own the issues and work to overcome difficulties can only help them refine and hone the end result. So small core team, as needed specialist outside help, no bystanders, accountability for the successes and failures.
- In your challenge, did any natural leaders step forward? What type of leader were they? Someone who took control and set everyone else specific tasks or someone who kept the overall team on track but let each person input their ideas and suggestions? If we look at traditional manager/employee dynamics we see managers sitting at the top of the organization with access to all of the information needed to make decisions. They’d go to board meetings and they’d know the inside information. That was their job; to make decisions and dole out orders. Rarely would they consult anyone, let alone their direct reports. They were employed for their expertise and knowledge and those ‘beneath’ them were mere learners employed only to execute tasks set. But the knowledge and skills gap between today’s managers and their reports is much smaller and in some cases non-existent. Managers need softer, people based skills like leadership, influencing, listening, sharing, guiding, coaching and encouraging. To be successful today’s managers have to believe in sharing information and collective intelligence not keeping their staff in the dark and certainly not barking out a series of orders. From an employee engagement point of view, staff who know why they are doing what they are doing and how it fits in with wider organisational goals are more engaged (and therefore more likely to give discretionary effort) than those that do not. So leaders must be open and transparent and human! They need to show that they are vulnerable and don’t have all the answers. What’s interesting is that many managers are schooled entirely to the contrary and are taught to be the opposite of vulnerable; to always have a shield up and to make sure staff don’t see any cracks in the armour. However, in this scenario being vulnerable isn’t about being weak it’s about being courageous enough to say I don’t know it all, you may have better ideas than me and these are valuable and contribute in reaching our goals. Alongside this leaders are the most powerful instrument in facilitating behavioural change and leading the way in using the tools available to you on your intranet; they need to be the ones on the ground level using the same tools that the rest of the employees are using. There is no way that employees will change and evolve unless they see their managers doing the same. We are tribal and have a strong sense of needing to belong and fit in. If we look to our leaders and they are non-adopters, we will also be non-adopters. As an aside, there is a fine line to be trod; you must lead by example but equally, learn when to get out of the way. If you try to enforce and police every discussion, every idea then you can stifle. So get the ball rolling, establish the goal accountabilities then let them get on with it whilst dipping in to keep the focus on the end goal in mind, keep the discussions on track, and help make ultimate decisions about how things move forward. So a culture of openness, honesty and trust is key.
- OK, so we’ve defined the goal, we’ve got the right tools, the people we need, they know their role and accountabilities and we’ve got a leader engaged and ready to foster collaborative working. We’re all set right? Not necessarily. Many employees ask – what’s in it for me? Whilst employee collaboration can have tremendous value to your customers, employees are not always focussed on the overall corporate value and benefit of company initiatives. But they care about how things will impact them on an individual basis. So if your leading messages on the use of collaborative tools are all about how this will give your business distinct advantages they may care less than if you explain how using the intranet make their jobs and lives better. You need an answer to the question “What’s in it for me”? Reward and recognition also has a big impact. If your organization focuses on rewarding employees for individual performance as the main driver of success then it will become quite hard to encourage employees to share and communicate with each other. Why would they want to? What’s in it for them. There is nothing wrong with rewarding employees for great performance but it’s also crucial to reward teamwork and this is particularly relevant in a cross functional project team where the lines of leadership are blurred. In this scenario, evaluating team members on their contributions to the project and use of the collaborative space you have provided encourages the desired behaviours. For example organizations can make a percentage of an employee’s bonus tied to how well they collaborate with their co-workers. You can use your interact analytics and a person’s influence score to look at how much they’ve contributed to the intranet or indeed a specific project group. Using interact rewards is also a great way to measure whether an employee is a team player. Allowing anyone to reward anyone else for going above and beyond and contributing something worthwhile is not only a very public recognition, but how many rewards someone have received and indeed given can be worked into their annual appraisal as an indicator of whether they connect with others and share. Even allowing people to reward others for anything generates a connection which unconsciously translates to ‘because I like you I want to help you’ and that kick-starts trust and co-operation which in turn translates to “I’m willing to make small compromises or sacrifices for you”. Not for the greater good. For you.
- If any of you in the room have had governance consultancy from myself or Steven in the last year or so, you’ll be familiar with the phrase Culture trumps vision Yes? I will give a pound of my own money to the first person who can explain what this means….. In simple terms vision is telling people what you are going to do, culture is doing it! So in order to successfully collaborate you need a continued focus on how you do what you are doing. If you take your eye off the ball and slip into the old ways, all your progress in changing how you and your teams work may slip away and you end up back at the beginning. A few slides ago, we looked at the importance of getting the right people on the team and not just randomly throwing people together in an online space and hoping for the best. At a basic level, you need to familiarise and maybe formally train users on how to get most and the best out of the tools you want them to use. Moving forward, if you are creating a new project virtual team, who don’t know each other, haven’t worked together before then there is a lot to be gained by organising a physical kick off event that focuses on teamwork, collaboration and innovation. Perhaps you might like to get them to build the tallest tower possible using only spaghetti, string, tape and a marshmallow……just a thought…. Exercises like the one you completed today helps increase the rapport between the team and to establish that its ok to share new approaches, try untested ideas, fail, re-do and get better. Remember what we said earlier about being vulnerable and not having all the answers? Exercises like this, show that it is ok to not get it right all the time. After this exercise, I wonder whether you may network with people you may not have approached and going forward be more inclined to ask and answer questions from one another on the community – all because you built a tower out of pasta together! Maintaining momentum is equally important and there are two quick ways you can prove to the team that their collaborative efforts are working: Firstly, engineer a quick win. A first challenge that can be easily achieved in a short space of time that everyone can contribute to Secondly, celebrate your successes along the way – not just at the end when the ultimate goal has been achieved. Shout about what you’ve done and how using your online collaborative platform helped you achieve it. Publically hold up those that exemplify the behaviours your organisation say they want others to emulate.
- So to recap Define the ultimate goal The definition of collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce something. So in order to be successful we must first establish what we want to produce. Tactics AND tools Simply installing social tools or a social intranet and expecting good things to happen by magic fails most of the time. What are you trying to achieve and how can technology best assist you? Understanding the why before the how and this will give you the basis for choosing the right tools. Ensure the right people are involved That you need hard skills is a given. Focus on people’s soft skills like communicating and self-directing. There is no room for information hoarding in a collaborative environment. Everyone on the team is responsible for achieving the outcome, there should be no bystanders or observers. Leadership The skills gap between those that manage and those that are managed is smaller. Leaders need to believe in sharing information and collective intelligence not keeping their staff in the dark. They need to show vulnerability in order to allow their team to do the same. They need to use the collaborative tools provided as well as asking the team to do so. Encourage the right mind set Answer the ‘what’s in it for me’ question. Reward and recognise not just individual efforts but teamwork and collaborative behaviours. Allow peer to peer recognition and embed it into formal appraisals. Start right and maintain momentum At basic level, familiarise and train staff how to get the best out of the tools you have provided. If creating a team, consider a physical kick off meeting and include teamwork/collaboration exercises. Set an easy, early goal and celebrate publicly. If you can get these things right, collaboration becomes less about negative challenge and more about postivie change. Thank you