Today is April 20 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you rely on collaboration?”
Successful people rely on their ability to engage in planned as well as unplanned opportunities of collaboration.
Paul W. Mattessich, Marta Murray-Close, and Barbara R. Monsey co-author a leading text in the field entitled Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd Edition: A Review of Research Literature on Factors Influencing Successful Collaboration.
They include a list of 20 factors that have repeatedly proven to have influence on the potential success of collaboration between multiple organizations known as The Wilder Collaboration Factors. A few examples of the 20 factors and statements include:
: History of collaboration or cooperation in the community
: Agencies in our community have a history of working together
: Trying to solve problems through collaboration has been common in this community.
: Collaborative group seen as a legitimate leader in the community
: Leaders in this community who are not part of our collaborative group seem hopeful about what we can accomplish
: Others in this community who are not part of this collaboration would generally agree that the organizations involved in this collaborative project are the “right” organizations to make this work.
Excellent research on the power of collaboration is also found in Keith Sawyer’s Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration.
Sawyer found that innovation is often the result of collaboration among disparate groups of people, not the lone genius so often portrayed in stories.
Collaboration often drives creativity because innovation generally emerges from a series of events over time.
Sawyer found five key ingredients to successful collaboration:
Execution over preparation: The most innovative teams spent less time in the planning stage and more time executing. They improvised instead of planned.
After the fact: Innovation emerges from the bottom up and is often unpredictable; and it’s often only after the innovation has occurred that everyone realizes what’s happened.
Identifying new problems: The most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than simply solving old ones.
Diversity drives innovation: Groups are most effective when they are composed of people who have a variety of skills, knowledge, and perspective.
Culture provides foundation: New technology helps, but it won’t make an organization collaborative without the right culture and values in place.
As author Sir Ken Robinson noted “Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.”
General Magic is one such example.
General Magic was an American software and electronics company. The original project started in 1989 within Apple Computer, when Marc Porat convinced Apple's CEO at the time John Sculley that the next generation of computing would require a partnership of computer, communications and consumer electronics companies to cooperate.
Known as the Paradigm project, the project ran for some time within Apple, but management remained generally uninterested and the team struggled for resources. Eventually they approached Sculley with the idea of spinning off the group as a separate company, which occurred in May 1990. In 1990 Marc Porat, Andy Hertzfeld, and Bill Atkinson in Mountain View, California founded it.
Apple took a minority stake in the company, with John Sculley joining the General Magic board.
The company achieved many technical breakthroughs, including software modems (eliminating the need for modem chips), small touchscreens and touchscreen controller ASICs, highly integrated systems-on-a-chip designs for its partners' devices, rich multimedia email, networked games, streaming television, and early versions of e-commerce.
Many Silicon Valley luminaries worked at General Magic either at the beginning or early on in their careers, including Tony Fadell, Andy Rubin, Andy Hertzfeld, Pierre Omidyar, Kevin Surace, Marc Porat, Kevin Lynch, Steve Perlman, Phil Goldman, Peter Nieh, Marco DeMiroz, Megan Smith, and John Giannandrea.
According to former General Magic employee Marco DeMiroz, it was the "Fairchild [Semiconductor] of the 90s."
It is generally seen as the fountain from which much of today's smartphone and online communication and commerce technology.
The award winning documentary General Magic was released in 2018 and offers an extraordinary behind the scenes look at the collaboration required to launch today’s technological revolution.