Better Together

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”- Charles Darwin

In 2009 one aspect of my business was being the “Online Collaboration Consultant” and I was commissioned to create a course about online collaboration. The course was based on my online collaboration model where I mapped three dimensions of collaboration: meeting, being and working. The introduction I wrote read:

“In practice the use of online collaboration tools is not widespread despite the technology being established and offering significant benefits.”

The world has moved on a lot in 14 years and particularly post-pandemic people are familiar and comfortable with using online meeting tools (meeting), messaging each other (being) and asynchronously editing shared documents (working).

However, there remains a lot of untapped benefits for us in our online collaboration. I am not advocating for online only work, rather I think we can improve our online collaborations that are now firmly established as part of our working lives,

The opportunity is to proactively work with our collaborators and invest time to experiment with untapped potential from the tools around us to enhance our work experience and productivity.

• Meeting we can move beyond having online video calls
• Being we can create shared groups to stay connected
• Working we can create richer workspaces and even synchronously collaborate!

To get better though, like with any change, it will require taking some risks, trying out new approaches and also being persistent to realise the benefits. Are you ready to try better online collaboration?

Online Collaboration Model

Jason Reed – 2009