Successful collaboration is the accelerator to most human progress, whether in business, politics, culture or in almost any other area of endeavour. Our love as a society for celebrities makes it easy to forget that most major human achievements are the result of collaborative effort among what can often be a large group of people bringing their varied talents to bear on solving a problem.
When it comes to organising and managing business meetings, the notion that success derives from the strong views and charismatic personality of just one business leader dies hard. Yet the sheer complexity of todays market environments, coupled with the enormous amount of information that must be processed and absorbed by executives at all levels of an organisation, often in real time, puts a greater premium on collaboration than ever.
The recently-elected new coalition Government in the UK might be seen as symbolising the importance of collaboration, especially when some particularly difficult problems need to be faced. To take another example, BPs response to the Gulf oil spill has required it to bring together experts from a wide range of disciplines.
All organisations of any size have to confront the challenge of collaboration on a daily basis, especially when they face major challenges. At a practical level, meetings of up to a dozen people are usually small enough to be held in a straightforward and even traditional way such as around a table. In the world of music, for example, jazz combos have usually only around nine musicians or fewer, because the improvisations of individual members need to be readily picked up by other members and their own playing adjusted to suit whats happening.
But when challenges require inputs from, and action by, more than a dozen people, and especially when some of the people involved are joining the process via remote communications such as video links, serious problems start to arise that can quickly cause havoc to an organisations determination to confront the very challenges the collaboration is trying to solve.
Where the aim is to derive maximum benefit from the skills and talents of the people involved, the ideal must be that everyone involved participates and makes an impact.
Of course, its occasionally necessary to hold meetings where this isnt the case, and where the aim of the meeting is simply to disseminate information. But todays communications tools make such meetings increasingly unnecessary, as the information can readily be delivered to people individually by phone, email or via a website.
The gatherings that really matter; those that propel an organisation forward and unleash its full potential as a competitive entity, should be truly co-operative efforts that seek to harvest the input of everyone involved.
Except that all too often this isnt what happens.
Instead, either a large-scale meeting fails to do what its supposed to do, or what takes place is a series of ad hoc task groups that can seem to last forever and lack co-ordination. Or, as a last resort, what occurs is a dictatorial top-down crisis intervention.
In practice, few meetings involving much more than a dozen people - and conducted according to traditional principles involving lots of people around a large table or in a meeting hall - achieve their potential. Most such meetings feature one, or more, of the following problems:
• people are not heard (frequently because they are not in fact given a real chance to speak)
• people miss the main point or only connect with it tangentially
• the business leader or the senior management team is too dominant and is seen as stifling, or indeed not even encouraging, discussion
• people end up agreeing with things they dont agree with, because the atmosphere of the meeting makes them feel its safer to keep quiet than to disagree or instigate debate
• people go away without a clear idea of what they are supposed to do afterwards and why, and certainly feel no ownership of the solution.
Of course, there may be organisations that actually want their large-scale meetings to be like this. But such organisations would be dictatorial in their outlook and management style and unresponsive to vitally important change in the circumstances within which they operate.
Such dictatorial organisations usually weaken themselves by refusing to face facts they dont want to face, and in practice are likely to prove highly vulnerable against concerted onslaughts by competitors who do face facts.
Besides, what on earth is the point of hiring and retaining talented people - and everyone knows how expensive that is - if an organisation isnt extracting the full benefit from their input? The people an organisation employs are employed precisely because they have something significant to offer. Indeed, in most organisations people lower down the corporate hierarchy are closer to customers, suppliers and technical reality than the senior management team is, so the input of those people lower down the corporate hierarchy is vital.
Organisations that dont fully involve everyone in crucial decisions and actions are precisely the ones that compete in their inevitably tough markets with blinkers on. And, because organisations arent horses, if they wear blinkers they arent going to win any races.
There are plenty of expensively-organised business meetings where people would quite literally have been better off chatting to each other around the coffee machine over business issues they feel important, rather than being tied up for a day or more in a meeting that was ultimately devoid of inspiration, of opportunities for everyone to take part, and of a chance to share vital experience.
A second approach is to appoint cross-functional task forces with relatively few members – few enough to allow good interaction – to address crucial elements of the problem. Unfortunately, this leads to uncoordinated solutions that usually charge off in several directions at once. This approach also tends to be quite slow as the task force meetings usually take place at widely-spaced time intervals.
No wonder, then, that top managers get frustrated as the crisis intensifies. The organisations response is seen to be slow, sporadic and disjointed. So the organisation enters crisis mode and starts issuing top-down edicts based on a limited understanding of the coal-face realities, to the frustration of everyone lower down.
Instead, the process should provide the genuinely thrilling experience of feeling that one is involved within a creative, dynamic, fulfilling, inspiring organisational entity that is bigger than you are and yet greatly values your input, is ardent to get it and will make you in turn eager and proud to give it and to act on the results.
That is the ideal, and its what needs to happen when organisations face life-challenging complex issues.
The technique of Syntegration, whose name derives from a combination of the words synergy and integration, has been designed, and refined over two decades, to effect a significant and revolutionary change in how organisations arrive at decisions and implement them.
Syntegration marks a significant break from traditional large-scale meetings. Instead of simply grouping everyone round a table or in a meeting hall, Syntegration interconnects up to 40 people and twelve key topics with one another in a way that encourages full participation by everyone in each of the topics.
For more than 40 people, additional Syntegration groups can be created so that everyone is involved. The aim of Syntegration is to open up new possibilities in dealing with complex, dynamically networked problems whose common feature is that they can only be tackled as an interconnected whole, and it does so in a short intense period of time.
The core and driver of the Syntegration method is a cybernetic communications process that derives from brain research which shows that reasoning consists of the sparking of neurones that trigger off other neurones and so on, all interconnected by a web. The Syntegration networking architecture reproduces the geometry of a shape such as the 20-faceted icosahedron, a physically stable structure with five struts to every node and a pattern of interconnection that ensures ideas spread quickly around.
The geometric web at the heart of the Syntegration allows up to 40 people to interact with something like the harmony and precision of a symphony orchestra, fusing their entire knowledge, creativity and collective intelligence and talents into working together in the most constructive harmony.
A symphony orchestra works because it has externally imposed disciplines – the orchestral score and the conductor – that a jazz combo doesnt. In a Syntegration the externally imposed disciplines are the orchestration of the meetings and the facilitators of the Syntegration. Just as a symphony orchestras conductor doesnt usually produce any sound, the Syntegration facilitators do not directly produce any ideas or action proposals, but help the people involved in the Syntegration to be fully involved in everything.
Syntegration is being used increasingly in Continental Europe, and frequently with considerable success. For example, after a Syntegration meeting - at a large German utilities provider – that spanned close to four days and involved more than 30 people, a director of the utilities provider said:
We urgently needed to identify what we had to do to generate additional revenue of at least 30 million euros a year and to expand by at least three percent a year. We found Syntegration to be a magic wand; the result has given us highly effective new directions that have the support of everyone who took part in our Syntegration meeting, all of whom felt profoundly involved in the decision-making process.
With all organisations facing increased complexity and multiple challenges that have to be tackled in a joined-up way, especially in todays difficult trading conditions, looking at new ways of interaction makes excellent sense. This is especially when these new ways of interaction speed things up – as Syntegration does - rather than slowing them down.
Because your competitors are likely to continue ploughing the dry furrow of slow outdated ways (large-scale meetings, multiple task forces, and top-down crisis management), the very fact that you are taking decisive steps to involve everyone at your organisation in confronting your most challenging issues should give you a significant and sustainable edge from day one.
Keith Roberts, Malik PIMS md
020 3161 4000, keith.roberts@malikpims.com
www.malikpims.com
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