Collaborative Advantage – Open Door to Strangers

In knowledge management, there are two forms of knowledge, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is in the form of texts, pictures or videos that we can see and read in books, documents, papers, or computers. This is the part of knowledge that we can capture, duplicate and keep. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is the form of knowledge that existed in our brains. It includes our experience, feeling and skills that we cannot express fully in words, pictures and any medias. Unfortunately, about 85% of our knowledge is in tacit form, hence what we can capture in the medias are merely 15%.

I bring out the concept of knowledge because this is the topic that we are going to talk about in this article. However, we are not going to talk about the knowledge to do something, rather we are discussing the knowledge about our working partners in our collaborative works. When we work on collaborative projects, inevitably, we will be dealing with people we not very familiar with, we are opening our doors to strangers. I do not recommend that you collaborate with strangers. As I have mentioned before, being collaborative does not make us immune from being deceived or being taken advantage.

I think you do not need me to remind you to be careful of strangers. We were taught to beware of strangers since we were young. After all, we are still living in a competitive world. Not all people are friendly and honest. We should not trust the strangers until we really know them and their backgrounds. In other words, we should not trust a person merely based on the written text, emails or websites (explicit knowledge) of the person. No matter how well they are written, you only know 15% about the person. You need improve the 85% (tacit) part of your knowledge about the person. This can only be done through accumulated interactions and communications.

In order to form collaboration, it is essential that we build mutual trust. The people should at least see each other physically or on screens. It is recommended that we know about their family background, and even addresses in possible. If you worry about sharing personal information with your partners, then you have not achieved the trust that you need to collaborate openly. In other word, you have not collected enough of their “deposit” in the “emotional back account with you. Likewise, they may not have enough trust in you either. Hence, the collaboration should not proceed.

I know that that to create emotion bonding takes time. You may think that you do not have all the time in the world to wait for the relationships to form before the project takes off. However, why are we rushing? To capture the market? To beat our competitors? To be number one? In collaborative mode, we do not compete, and we do not rush. We take time to make it right. We will wait until strangers become friends before we move on. It is not as slow as you think. With the advanced communication technologies that we have (Internet, Webcam, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and etc.), we are able to accelerate the pace of relationship building.

There is another point I want to make before you jump into the conclusion that you can build relationship just by using the communication technologies mentioned above. I WOULD NOT want to recommend that idea. I would rather you start your networks through your personal friends. From your close friends, you can know your friend’s friends. It can go on and on, and you have your “Human Web”. There is an interesting ideas about “six degrees of separation” which suggested that everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer (captured from Wikipedia article “Six degrees of separation”). If that is true, you should be able to find your rightful partners in a very short time.

Anyway, what I am suggesting is that you form your “Human Web” through your networks of friends. This must become the basis for you to form collaborative partnerships. Then, we can make use the advance communication technologies to strengthen our relationships. Then, only that we can say that we are forming the real collaborative networks.

We need to open to stranger in order to expand our collaborative networks. However, we need to beware of risks of working with strangers. We need to really know the people who we are working with before we start any collaborative project. In order to achieve the real trust, we should not rush. We should take time to form real collaborative networks starting from our personal connections. By making use of the technologies available, we will be able to widen and strengthen our relationships with our potential partners. Only that we have gone through that process, we can safely said that we have solids collaborative networks that we can depend on to achieve our collaborative objectives.