How to achieve results beyond your imagination

Sanoma is a collective mind of over 20.000 individual employees. Until recently, the combined intelligence of a group has been inversely proportional to group size. Why? Because it was just to inefficient to share knowledge, to access what other colleagues were doing, thinking or sensing. Until recently, it has been hard to think and act as one ‘Sanoma-organism’. Caused by disconnection in space and time.

Today, open source, webbased wiki-technology beats these (former) limitations and empowers Sanoma colleagues to form dynamic networks, generating ’smart’ results to compete more effectively and to adapt faster to a changing world.

The Sanoma Wiki facilitates 20.000 individuals to generate valuable group output as a byproduct, without regard of institutional models. Wiki-technology enables the company to coordinate all activities of individual Sanoma employees. Colleagues have - by working together - made the first steps in achieving a positive relationship between group size and the combined intelligence & productivity of the group. Our game-changing objective: Turn a former weakness - Sanoma's group size - into a strength.

The 'only' limitation left in this disruptive process innovation is a widespread, fundamental mindset change....Changing from a 'span of control' to a 'span of support'-mindset....Change an institutional way of organizing into a business culture of working together in true collaboration to achieve common outstanding results....beyond what we have done before.

There are three basic 'working together cultures'. Only one of which is a truly collaborative 'working together culture'.*

The first 'working together culture' is labelled a 'Compliance Culture'. This is when each team member independently responds to the challenge by taking action in her own area. In other words, everyone on the team complies with the need to do something, but avoids working together. For example, A divisional leadership team that was required to reduce overall headcount by 10% to meet the corporation's goals. With very little discussion, each person agreed to cut 10% of the people from their own function and report the numbers back to the divisional controller. While this "spread the pain evenly" approach indeed met the corporate requirement, there was probably a better way.

The second 'working together culture' is labelled a 'Cooperation Culture'. Here again each person develops and implements his own plans, but in this case shares what he is doing with the group. While there is some amount of joint discussion, the focus is still on individual actions rather than a collective strategy. For example, when one technology company needed to increase its sales performance, the districts were all given significantly higher targets. The district managers then went about achieving these targets in different ways. Some increased individual sales quotas across the board; others reallocated resources to higher-potential customers; and still others focused on closing the gap with services contracts. The managers shared these approaches on their weekly calls, and gave each other feedback. But they never created a joint strategy to leverage their combined resources, ideas, and talents. In the end, while some districts hit their targets, the overall numbers were disappointing.

The third 'working together culture' is labelled a 'True Collaboration Culture'. In both of the cases described above, a 'True Collaboration Culture' might have led to a more robust and effective outcome. In the headcount example, the leadership team might have identified specific areas where headcount could be reduced by more than 10%, considered ways of consolidating similar activities into shared service centers, or any number of other possibilities. In the sales example, the district managers might have reallocated resources across districts, created joint campaigns for particular products, or brainstormed many other ideas that could have been quickly tested and possibly scaled.

What's interesting is that neither team consciously decided not to collaborate. Instead they did what came naturally, which is to work either completely or partially on their own.

The reality is that reaching a 'working together culture' of true collaboration is difficult. It requires subordinating individual goals to collective achievement; it means engaging in tough, emotional give-and-take discussions with colleagues about strategies and ideas; and it often leads to working in new ways that may not be comfortable or easy. So given these difficulties, most teams find it easier to talk about collaboration rather than do it.

It doesn't have to be this way. Teams can address their challenges through true collaboration, and by doing so can achieve outstanding results. The starting point however is to make a conscious — and collective — decision to go beyond compliance and cooperation.

Within Sanoma we have succeeded to overcome the - understandable - resistance to this disruptive way of true collaborative dynamic-network-organizing and reached the tipping point. I am confident that the network effect will continue, building valuable group output and achieving results that were once only available in our imagination.

* Source: Harvard Business Review, Teams That Only Think They Collaborate, by Ron Ashkenas, 2011