Blogs.cisco: In his article Collaboration: The Long Journey, Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Solution Manager, Enterprise Social Software at Cisco asks: "After 15+ years of deploying more and more tools, we need to ask ourselves – why haven’t organizations realized the level of breakthrough collaboration necessary for them to excel?

In his insightful list of recommendations (such as his noting the "need to expand the portfolio of collaboration tools to include unified communications, social networking, pervasive use of video, and smart devices"), the one I found most welcome was this: "...we need to think of collaboration foremost as something that is not defined by tools at all. Collaboration is better thought of as a relationship among its participants. Connecting people to people is the core of collaboration – tools simple mediate their interactions."

There was one other consideration, however, that I think needs to be added to his well-informed, and valuable list: incentives. Collaboration, to be sustained, has to be rewarded. All too often, the rewards for successful collaboration go to the "boss" and not the team members. Sooner or later, team members wise-up, ultimately to the point of either avoiding participation in so-called collaborative efforts, or, worse, to sabotage them. For collaboration to be successful, the organization needs to recast itself in a collaborative model, hierarchies need to be flattened, reward and recognition to be distributed fairly and equitably.

© Bernie