What is Active and Passive Collaboration?

When a group of people need to come together to achieve some common objective, it’s somewhat of a no-brainer that collaboration is going to be necessary. Lately I’ve been giving some consideration to some of the common modes of collaboration and they seem to fall fairly cleanly into two distinct categories which I am going to refer to as active and passive. For the sake of clarity, let me provide some definition and examples to be clear on what I mean by this:

Active Collaboration refers to situations where the collaborators are interacting in real-time, and are focused on the tasks currently facing the group. It has nothing to do with whether Internet-connected technologies are being used as a means to achieve the task.

Some typical examples of online collaboration include:

• In-person meetings
• Telephone conferences
• Virtual meetings (such as WebEx and LiveMeeting)
• Instant messaging

Passive Collaboration refers to situations where the collaborators are interacting, but on an ad-hoc schedule and with varying levels of priority implicitly given to the tasks within the scope of the workgroup.

Some typical examples of offline collaboration include:

• Email correspondence
• Physical mail correspondence
• Centralized repositories and workspaces (such as those included in SharePoint or Groove)
• Internet forums or discussion groups

The one caveat to the examples above is that these are all tools that have have an intended purpose. However, people have an interesting tendency to adapt the tools they have to their own needs (even when when this flies in the face of the intended use of the tool). I would say that such behaviour has transcended corporate culture to a degree, where workgroups collectively adapt collaborative tools to allow them to function.

Example #1: Using email as an “online” facility – this happens when members of the workgroup are constantly monitoring their inboxes, focusing complete attention on incoming messages, and maintaining the mindset that the sender is behaving the same way. Delays in responding are perceived as inconveniencing the other members of the group.

Example #2: Using instant messaging as an “offline” facility – this can be achieve by sending messages with a common understanding that a fluid conversation is not desired. Instead, many workgroups use this as a lightweight way of tracking discussions, even though “conversations” may span several hours or days.

Employing Appropriate Modes of Collaboration

Understanding whether your organization leans towards either online or offline collaboration is one key dimension that will help guide the strategic direction in this area. If workers tend to just stick to what they prefer, rather than what is appropriate, that may also be cause for concern. Inefficiencies by individuals can quickly proliferate across the group; the chain really is only as strong as its weakest link in this case.

Online collaboration is appropriate when:

• Attendees are required to actively participate
• Full focus is important on a single topic or sequence of topics
• Several small interdependent subtasks need to be completed by different contributors over a short time frame
• Decisions need to be made and relayed immediately across the workgroup
• Tasks need to be completed that involve active input from multiple people

Offline collaboration is appropriate when:

• Individuals need to complete some work on their own prior to returning back to the group
• A piece of work is being done continuously or repeatedly by multiple individuals (eg. shift workers)
• Time zones make it difficult to conduct extensive online collaboration sessions
• Information being generated is intended for demand-based consumption

One reason that collaboration strategies often fail in implementation is that a conceptual jump is made from “our organization would benefit from a collaborative strategy” to “we are going to buy Product XYZ, which should meet our needs”. But often very little is done at the business level in terms of being able to bridge those two statements. There is tremendous value in understanding the maturity of your organization’s collaboration strategy, and then determining a desirable end-state maturity level.

Hopefully this discussion will help you start to assess what mode of collaboration is already ongoing in your enterprise, and if it is appropriate for the type of work being done.