Collaboration is not something new. However, the context within which it now takes place is new.  Collaborating in a fast paced changing environment, or collaborating in times where uncertainty is a constant, is a very different kind of discipline.

The use of a collaborative approach in solving major challenges is very fast becoming the principal measure of how customers, consumers, and clients make sense of what to purchase.  I can see a time fast approaching when collaborative strategy, practice and culture will in fact be strong indicators of the entire ethics of an enterprise.  Those who wish to go it alone will be at risk of projecting values (and by association their business brand) that will not be supported by new consumer tastes and attitudes. Collaborative practice will soon enough become as much an ethical as a business imperative.

In a way, today’s consumers (consider in particular Millennials) will soon become leaders and key decision makers.  And they will seek to connect with those entities (commercial, government, community sector, etc.) that allow them to enact their values; values they have intrinsically relied upon to survive and grow.  Collaboration is very much a part of those values. New generations of leaders will, like those preceding, inherently shape the world in accordance with their world view.  History, and to some extent sociology, teaches us that a generation or a section of community that has to work hard for legitimacy will work even harder to maintain it.  To some extent this explains the perennial issues of cultural, socio-economic and political change.  If there’s one thing that can be learned from past events, it is precisely the fact that the collaborative approach has been ignored at the expense of short sightedness (which by and large is easier to manage and is more appealing to a larger section of the population).

The new generation that is building its place under the sun has learned that global connectedness has enabled collaboration as a serious strategy whose legitimacy is not rooted purely and exclusively in the ideals of self-interest.  In fact, collaboration is a medium that bridges altruism and self-interest in a way that we have not witnessed in a long time.

With new collaboration, what matters is the concentration of skills and capabilities that are needed on a daily basis in any enterprise serious about its future.  It is almost absurd to think that there will be a successful enterprise (be it SME, government agency, NFP or a large corporate) without strong links to, and practice of, what some refer to as Collaborative Intelligence (CQ).  CQ has been around for some time and soon any business with low CQ will face more rigorous competition. Consumer product and service offerings of these businesses will have serious limitations in appeal.  After all there are only so many points of difference one can find between green and red apples.  What will increasingly become an area of competition will be the means of production of those apples.  Values thus will be shifted from the taste and price of an apple, to the identity of the producer.  It is in that space that collaborative intelligence, or CQ, will play a much more critical role.

The diagram below by Stephen James Joyce explains how CQ relates to other forms of intelligence.

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