Collaboration Independent Research Project

1. Introduction

People collaborate to tackle problems which are larger and more complex than any individual's capabilities.
However, not every collaboration can go beyond simple addition of individual works; a few Great Groups[OG] perform extraordinary works, while others do "good" jobs.
From time to time, there emerges a group of people who work together to achieve amazing feats.
These groups are usually relatively small, highly motivated and stocked with very smart people.
They achieve more than anyone could have expected.
Their legacy includes such groups as Edison's researchers, Walt Disney's animation team and the members of the Manhattan Project.
When writing about such groups, Warren Bennis coined the apt term "Great Groups."[OG] The awesome creativity and thinking power of Great Groups makes them very desirable.
If the inner workings of such groups could be examined and understood it might be easier to create environments more hospitable to the creation of Great Groups.

2. Traditional Great Groups and Emerging New Models of Great Groups

Distilling Warren Bennis' work, there appear to be some common attributes most great groups share.
The first is that they have a good, strong leader.
These leaders can have widely varying styles, but they share a handful of qualities.
They have a passion for hiring excellent people and a knack for finding the right work for those people.
They provide a good working environment for the group and shield the group from external pressures of bureaucracy.
In addition to such a leader, the Great Group is composed of very talented, highly motivated people.
Often driven by a common enemy or unifying principle, these people are extremely focused on the task at hand.
Personal relationships and social life outside the group are often neglected.
Being able to work on such a team is such a rush that the work is its own reward and lends its participants a sense of being important.

These talented workers need to work in an environment conducive to their success.
This frequently isn't a nice office building with air conditioning.
Many of these groups succeeded in fairly unpleasant places to work.
The critical factor is that they are isolated from the pressures of the larger organization and left with substantial freedom.
They also need the proper equipment and funding to get their work done.
When a Great Group is rolling, the environment is energized, usually fun and often sexually charged.
A final part of this environment is the need for group members to be able to have their work reviewed.
In some instances, like at Disney, the leader would be the most demanding critic and drive the group towards excellence.
Other groups would rely on peer reviews to accomplish the same goal, Xerox PARC for instance.
In this sort of environment, a Great Group can flourish.

Unfortunately, creating this sort of environment is rather difficult.
The greatest challenge is finding and recruiting the top talent that is needed.
This requires hiring many people who are near the top of their respective fields and are able to work well with others.
For an organization intent on creating such a group, they are often burdened with putting this team in an area separated from the rest of the organization.
Often this means getting a separate building.
If this is achieved and the leader is good enough to create the proper environment, there is a chance that the group will click and do extraordinary things.
However, the obstacles are very serious.

One recent Great Group stands in contrast to many of the others.
This is the group that is responsible for Linux.
The Linux operating environment started as a side project for Linus Torvalds ten years ago and has since become a serious competitor for everything that needs an operating system from embedded devices to desktop computers to mainframes.
This was done while deeply entrenched players in the market were considered unbeatably, except perhaps by one another.

This group operates in a different manner than the other great groups that have been discussed.
It does not require its leader to protect it from a greater organization because no such organization exists.
This group is an organization unto itself.
There is a central core of workers who appear somewhat similar to a normal great group.
They are fiendishly passionate about the work and make considerable sacrifices for it.
They are also a collection of highly talented people.

However, unlike other Great Groups, this rich talent pool does not dominate the group.
Instead, widespread use and code contributions from individuals around the world provide the bulk of contributions to Linux.
Some of this comes from interested individuals; other work comes from interested corporations.
The key principal is that the Linux group is able to achieve great things using a relatively small core of people who would otherwise be the right type, but insufficient in number and resources to form a Great Group.
These people, build on the work of many, many others who are not as devoted and would likely not qualify as potential members of a great group.
They are much more normal people.
The recent growth of the internet, logged email threads on the like has provided the environment where this organization model can thrive.

The Linux model is attractive and on the surface may make it seem like Great Group creation is much easier than it once was.
It has several detractors though.
The first is that seed work must be created by a talented group of people.
A cause must be either addressed by this seed or created by it.
This cause has to be powerful enough to attract the large extension of the group that will provide large amounts of effort.
If such a large group can be put together, the core members must be able to manage the information flow to and from the wide flung contributors.
Perhaps the largest disadvantage though, is that the corporate world will struggle to take advantage of creating such groups.
The need for openness of information will destroy efforts to generate the intellectual property Great Groups are so good at creating.

What is needed is a new model of Great Group that can leverage the benefits of the Linux model while functioning well in corporate environment.
This model must support a small core of excellent people with Great Group mentality who are lifted to greatness by the work of normal people.
The core group will function as leaders and thinkers for their project, but will need to use the entire company as an extended pool to receive ideas from.
This model should be able to take advantage of people who are both physically near the core group and those who are distant.
The core group must be set up as special enough that they will devote themselves wholly to the project but their support staff will be more effective if they are also able to feel special because of their relationship to the team.

Another motivational problem in the corporation is finding an enemy or cause for the group.
Frequently, the big enemies of a corporation are irrelevant to some parts of the company and so corporate propaganda must be customized to best motivate each group it wants to be Great.
The final challenge in the corporate world will be to somehow bring the group within the corporation while leaving it in tact.
It will have to be protected from the interference of upper management as well as too much input from other people in the company.
A basic outline of the differences between the models discussed is below.

Figure 1 is hypothesical curve of group's size and performance.

Figure 1: hypothesical curves of groups' size and performance

The dashed curve indicates normal group's performance.
Because there are limited number of great talented individual, a normal group has to add average or less talented individuals into the group.
Scalability issue also prevent them from increasing performance by adding more participants.
In Great Groups indicated by thin curve and thick curve, when their performance reaches a certain threshold, the performance booms off by being a Great Group: high motivation and intensed collaboration.
Their high motivation and intensed collaboration lead positive feedback to the group so that their participants get higher motivation and more intensed collaboration to achieve greater works.

The difference between traditional Great Groups indicated by thin curve and new Great Groups in thick curve is scalability.
In a traditional Great Group, the leader has to find and add good talents to the group and keep the group reasonably compact to prevent individual from bereaucracy and overhead of communication.
Because overhead of communication is proportion to squared number of people[MMM], it virtually defines the maximum size of the group.
On the other hand, new Great Groups, such as Linux Community, take benefits of scale using computational technologies such as the internet.
Even if a new Great Group cannot break the "Great Group" threshold by only great talented individuals, the group incorporate normal people with supressing communication cost by using collaborative technologies, to hit the threshold.
However, after they reach the limit of scalability of collaborative technologies, they will loose their performance or get another technology to adapt to larger scale.
For example, Linux community has gotten too big to capture bugs and todo lists by hands. Their solution is to use computational support tool to keep tracking problems so called bugtrack system.

In future, computational technologies must support (1) taking benefit of scale , diversity and distribution of a group and (2) reducing overhead of the scale. Such computational technologies will be discussed in the next chapter.
The table 1 shown below describes the summary of comparision among traditional Great Groups, Linux Community and future Great Groups.

3. Concepts and Systems to Support New Model of Great Groups

In this section, we are trying to establish a tentative strategies on how to build up a great group or excellent group which consists of a core of highly talented people and a wide range of regularly talented people. Such a great or excellent group could exist in coorporative or non-coorporative or academic environments. Based on the characteristics that have been demonstrated for both traditional great group and Linux open source group, we summarized some requirements which we think are essential to produce a great or excellent group in future.

(1) A core of highly talented people to act as the leader for the entire group

In every case we examined, this is the truth that a great group starts with a great leader. In our model, the leader could be a single person or be represented by a core of people. At first, the leader should have a clear vision for the mission of the group. This is especially important for the group that have a mixture of both talented and regular people. Unlike the traditional great group whoes every member is a genius, member of the excellent group is more dependent on the leader. The role of the leader is not to control every member's action, but to create an environment that encorages freedom of though, promote a free flow of idea-exchange, and nourish creativity. He should not be a power-hunter, but be a server and guider for every member of the group. The leader should be a super-organizer who know not only how to build up a group but alos how to produce a system to sutain it.

(2) High motivation and moral for every member

In order to be highly productive as a goup, every member should have a strong motivation and a clear goal toward the mission of the group. This is crucial in order for the gourp being highly efficient and minimizing the internal conflicts. We believe that several factors should be considered to achieve this goal.
First, the whole group should be unified under a common goal which facinates and excites every member. Often, it is achieved by creation of a specific enemey who must be overcomed to achieve the mission. In real world, such a enemy is most likely to be one of the main competitors of the coorporate, and is formatized either by the corporate propagranda or by the leader of the group. Second, every member is given equal opportunities to contribute to the project so that everyone feels he/she is important for the success of the project. Third, in order to sustain the motivation, members should believe that their work is a reward and they have fun in doing that. The final factor to keep the motivation is that members should be more self-directed and be able to learn on demand.

(3) Good working environment

This is very important since most of the excellent group in our model work in coorporative environment. In order for every member to perform at his/her maximal levle, he/she should be protected or shielded from any distruction of bureauracy. Ideally, under coorporative environment, it can be best achieved by putting all the members in the same building to make the group in an isolated island but with a bridge to the mainland. Meanwhile, the group should be provided with an working enviornment that can energize member and make works a fun. An essential factor for the excellent group is the convenient and meaningful communications among its members. The leader of the group should ensure all the necessary tools to make the exchange of the ideas amongs the members be as effective as possible.

(4) Make the system an open source to attract external ideas

(5) Implementation of critiquing mechanism

In order to keep the group in the right direction during the entire project, the appropriate critiquing sysetme should be set up. In our model, such a critiquing can be made between peer to peer (P2P), boss to peer (B2P), peer to client (P2C) and boss to client (B2C), peer to other exteranl resouce (P2X) and boss to other external resource (B2X). We believe, in order for critiquing to have an effect monitoring effect, the critiquing mechanism should be implemented periodically. To ensure that, both local and remote communication should operate seemlessly.

In addition, technologies which improve scalability are also required to support new model of Great Groups.
Organizational Knowledge Management systems, with good filtering technologies which delivers right information to right person at right time, will play an important role for scalability.
EDC-like collaborative systems which combinate physical meetings and virtual ones will also be demanded.

Conclusion

In this project, we discussed essential factors of traditional Great Groups introduced in "Organizing Genius"[OG] and compared them to Linux community as a newly emerging extra-ordinary performance group.
We found that the Linux community takes benefits of scale, while traditional Great Groups have limitation of scalability.
Computational technologies are the differentiaters of the new models and still has potential to lead not only scalability but also more flexibility and diversity of collaborative groups. Finally, we propose the conditions that is required to transform an ordinary group int a great or excellent group

References