I spent considerable time working the past two weeks with three different clients developing three different business platforms with three different work cultures in three different geographic locations. Yet they all do their development work , especially mission-critical development work and associated documentation (such as regulatory submissions) in essentially the same way. All three companies engage in cooperative work with very little collaboration occurring at any time in the process. Generally when collaboration does happen it is very, very late in the process and occurs only during meetings to address review comments on documents. That is it for collaboration, a thin veneer very late in the process.
In all three instances, the people I work with believe they are indeed operating in a very collaborative work environments. They sit in dismay listening to my characterization of their work practices as described above. But after we the peel the onion, they begin to appreciate the distinctions of working merely at the level of cooperation versus the level of collaboration. My starting point with clients is to provide an effective working definition of what we at McCulley/Cuppan mean by collaborative versus cooperative work practices.
As a starting point for any discussion we have to examine the fundamental difference between collaboration and cooperation. The line of demarcation is the level of formality in the relationships between departments or stakeholders in the conduction of work to support a common goal, which in the pharmaceutical industry is to bring a new drug or line extension to the market. I tell my clients that collaboration involves these departments or stakeholders coming together and fundamentally changing their individual approaches to sharing of resources and responsibilities as well as ways of working and information sharing. Cooperation on the other hand is where departments or stakeholders maintain their separate mandates and responsibilities, engage in doing most work as they see appropriate (and generally isolated from others on the project) but may agree to do some work together or present work for review by other stakeholders or departments in order to meet a common goal.
To help drive further discussion on just what do we mean by collaborative versus cooperative, I suggest you read this David Eaves post discussing his perspective on cooperating versus collaborating.
Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog
In all three instances, the people I work with believe they are indeed operating in a very collaborative work environments. They sit in dismay listening to my characterization of their work practices as described above. But after we the peel the onion, they begin to appreciate the distinctions of working merely at the level of cooperation versus the level of collaboration. My starting point with clients is to provide an effective working definition of what we at McCulley/Cuppan mean by collaborative versus cooperative work practices.
As a starting point for any discussion we have to examine the fundamental difference between collaboration and cooperation. The line of demarcation is the level of formality in the relationships between departments or stakeholders in the conduction of work to support a common goal, which in the pharmaceutical industry is to bring a new drug or line extension to the market. I tell my clients that collaboration involves these departments or stakeholders coming together and fundamentally changing their individual approaches to sharing of resources and responsibilities as well as ways of working and information sharing. Cooperation on the other hand is where departments or stakeholders maintain their separate mandates and responsibilities, engage in doing most work as they see appropriate (and generally isolated from others on the project) but may agree to do some work together or present work for review by other stakeholders or departments in order to meet a common goal.
To help drive further discussion on just what do we mean by collaborative versus cooperative, I suggest you read this David Eaves post discussing his perspective on cooperating versus collaborating.
Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog
