Collaboration Zones : Transforming organizations through dissemination

Over the last decade, I have been involved in deploying and supporting
numerous collaborative innovation labs or “collaboration zones”. These
are spaces within organisations dedicated to experimenting new
approaches; resolutely focused on collective intelligence and
collaboration between stakeholders from various entities. The
development of these capabilities has been exponential in recent years
and the models vary from ephemeral experiments to enduring initiatives.
All the labs that I have worked on as a Collaborative Designer have their
own specificities, but they all have in common a mandate to transform the
organisation they are part of by disseminating new approaches and
practices across teams, functions, or geographies. This ambition to cross-
pollinate and transform by capillarity is usually central to the model,
however it is often a difficult one to achieve. These labs remain an
exceptional place to foster new ways of doing, thinking and being, but
people that come for a “collaborative workshop” often quickly revert to
the famous “Business as Usual”.

How can we ensure that these labs are not just for show? It requires
continuous attention at all stages of the lab’s life cycle. In this article, I will
talk about Labs with a cross-functional responsibility, but this applies
similarly to Labs dedicated to specific programs.

At the beginning : as an expert in collaborative approaches, I have on several
occasions been on the front line for the implementation of Labs. I have
worked with clients to lay down the fundamentals of this type of
capability, which go well beyond the physical space: building the internal
team, identifying strategic and operational sponsorship, setting the appropriate governance, priority settings and capacity management, feedback loops and continuous improvement mechanisms, etc. The list goes on.
Among all the crucial activities in the early days of a Lab’s life, the cross-
pollination and culture change dimensions are rarely a priority: it is
usually a matter of first demonstrating the effectiveness of the Lab.
However, while exploring the first topics that can be addressed by the
Lab, I pay particular attention to “touch” the largest number of entities in the organisation. There may be a temptation to focus on early adopters, those who use the Lab’s capabilities as soon as the doors open, and those who return regularly. It is natural, as they guarantee recurrent activity for the capability in place, but if we don’t pay attention, we soon find ourselves reaching only a part of the organisation’s stakeholders. A good practice is to monitor the stakeholders who are involved in topics hosted by the Lab and identify the organisational territories yet to be explored. These insights are even worth displaying as a visual dashboard to make a point publicly about
coverage!
Beyond people, the notion of reach also relation to the functional scope of
the Lab. What typologies of issues are you addressing and are there some
additional organisational priorities that you could/should support?

After this initial launch period comes the “run”, which follows several
phases as described by Philippe Coullomb in this article. the Lab’s sponsor team should have set up monitoring tools and mechanisms to evaluate the coverage of stakeholders and business matters. They would also have put in place routines to advocate the capability internally and attract new people and topics to the Lab. Progressively, the lab gains legitimacy and traction,
improves its value proposition and increases its impact. The team operating the lab develops new skills, adopts new tools and methods, and exposes the rest of the organisation to it by small touches.
But what about the rest of the organisation? More often than not, the different ways of working that emerge in the lab don’t take root in the rest
of the organisation. The Lab remains an experimental place, with a specific authorising environment, that only delivers value because of the conditions by experienced designers and facilitators. Most people believe that what happens there isn’t replicable outside of the Labs and as a result, Lab owners struggle to disseminate the new ways of doing, thinking and being.
Driving cultural change through a lab must be a deliberate choice
and requires specific attention.
The Lab needs support the stakeholders who come to use its services in
site to enable them to implement collaborative practices in their day-to-
day work. Too often the Lab team doesn’t ensure project follow-up and
moves on to the next workshops at a fast pace. This can be as simple as
schedule a few follow-up calls to ensure that the “collaboration seeds” are
germinated in your sponsor’s head until some patterns of work become
second nature.
My tips:

• Set an explicit expectation to the lab team to ensure capability
  building across the organisation over time by capillarity.
• Set indicators to monitor knowledge transfer and adoption.

People are key : As always, different people have different appetite for change so you want to leverage the energy and enthusiasm of the early adopters. The most effective way of onboarding them is to bring them in the Lab’s team on secondment to acquire collaborative design skills, until they’re ready to return where they came from and evangelise their colleagues. It sounds simple but it has been a major challenge for the Labs I have worked on.
Their direct manager is seldom eager to let them go and when they are,
the shift in the nature of the work can be perceived as radical and scare
people off: is that really useful for my career?
My tips:

• Identify early adopters with a strong appetite for change and lobby
  actively to get them on-board early as ambassadors.
• Define clearly the benefits of the secondment from a career
  perspective and ensure that internal HR processes won’t play
  against you or the ambassador.

Finally, one of the biggest challenges is the return to the initial
entity once the secondment ends. Your ambassadors will have
changed a lot through this experience so they may struggle to re-
integrate ‘an old context’ and their former colleagues may now
reject them as a ‘foreign body’. At this point, there is a risk of
resignation as the ambassador may consider joining a more agile or
innovative organisation rather than ‘preaching in the desert’. The
key is to anticipate the return to the initial entity and design for it
and the good news is that experience shows that it gets easier over
time.
My tips:

• Upstream, discuss with the ambassador’s manager to ensure that
  the move to a Lab is an opportunity for them as well as for the
  entity itself.
• Design structured learning mechanisms to ensure that ambassadors
  learn as much as possible from the experience and acquires
  tangible new skills. Consider, long-term support such as mentoring.
• Closely support the ambassadors for months after they leave the lab
  for example through an alumni network.

Cultural transformation through the dissemination of collaborative
practices implemented in a Lab won’t happen by default. It is not hard to
achieve but it takes time and you need to be deliberate about it. Whether
you embed that intent from day 1 in the conception of the capability or
add that ambition at a later stage, do it by design!