Cure for the Collaboration Curse

The cover story in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review is about “Collaborative Overload”. It talks about how time spent on collaboration has ballooned by 50% or more because of business becoming more global and cross-functional. Some people spend as much as 80% of their time in meetings, phone calls, and emails. The Economist ran a story on “The Collaboration Curse” around the same time. It argues that employees are not able to do “deep work” because organizations are shoving collaboration down their throat by forcing an open-plan office setting and a plethora of collaboration tools like Slack and Chatter.

In the information age, the predominant way we “do” anything is on the computer; be it writing an email, or adding input to an application or performing a step in the workflow. Also, there is little that we “do” by ourselves. Doing anything requires collaboration with people in other teams, functions, and companies. Given that collaboration is a must, how can enterprise tools help make us more effective and efficient at collaboration?

Collaboration in organizations around activities is broken because the context where people “do” things is in enterprise software like Marketo, Tableau and SAP while people “discuss” things using software like Email, Slack and SharePoint. The problem is that “discussing” in the absence of the context is very difficult. Imagine the conversation when I send you this picture:

Me: Hey, see how brave this person is.
You: Well, I can see he is crossing a road, but there doesn’t seem to be any traffic.
Me: You can’t see them but there are many tanks lined up, and he is about to hold them up. He will start a revolution.
You: Tanks? Where?
Me: They are about a 100m away.
You: Revolution? What do you mean?

You get the idea? Instead, suppose the picture already had richer context:

We would have a conversation that would be a lot quicker and more meaningful.

Imagine if you could collaborate around a marketing campaign within Marketo, with the rich context, instead of cutting and pasting screenshots or attaching spreadsheets in email.

At Chartcube, we have designed an app that brings the data, the narrative and the conversation in one place. We believe that “in-context collaboration” allows people to be a lot more effective with data.

One could think of three steps in “collaboration” where teams are using data to improve the performance of their business.

Step 1: Data Discovery (getting to a shared understanding of data)
Step 2: Problem Solving (discussing interpretations and conclusions)
Step 3: Decision Making (acting on data by implementing decisions)

Typically, teams do not succeed in getting past Step 1 because switching between the conversation (in email) and context (in spreadsheet) is ineffective. Chartcube allows teams to discover data, problem solve and make decisions without switching contexts.

I believe all enterprise software need to incorporate “in-context collaboration”. I also believe that many new SaaS services will disrupt incumbents by building their product with “in-context collaboration” right from the start. Google docs is disrupting Microsoft Office. Invision app is another example where they have done a rethink of design and prototyping software from a collaboration perspective. It is time that SaaS services for every horizontal and vertical start thinking about “in-context collaboration” seriously.