Beyond a “Black Swan”: the future of collaboration

But though paradigm shifts come with great uncertainty, they also open up a new world of possibilities: providing room for innovation and accelerating emerging developments. The Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) have been exploring the “art of the possible” for the future of collaboration, beyond the Black Swan.

In 2007, statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb described high profile, hard to predict, and incredibly rare events as “Black Swans” (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable). We currently find ourselves in the middle of such an event, one which is having an extraordinary impact on our established social, political and economic paradigms.

For businesses, successfully adapting to these changes means rapidly changing our thinking and practices around how we work and collaborate. Some companies were naturally more ready for a switch to remote than others. But the scale of change has meant that, to a greater or lesser extent, every business has had to adapt fast. This has been no different for the Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE).

The unpredictable nature of Black Swan events makes it easy to get caught up in thinking only about the near future in tactical terms – especially with many businesses finding that their existing planning models are no longer viable. The widespread failure to build uncertainty into business models have led some to argue that this current situation is not a Black Swan, but a Black Elephant: an extremely likely event predicted by experts, which remains unaddressed. However, the difficulty in timing these events and the inherent unpredictability of any global phenomenon makes any situation difficult to categorise definitively.

Regardless, the uncertainty of these situations calls for us to adopt a long-term outlook. Not just in identifying trends, “unknown unknowns”, and facing the “elephants in the room”, but also in looking beyond the event itself – especially because the real impact of a Black Swan or Black Elephant can only be understood once it’s over.

For the ASE, defining the future of our collaborative practice has come in three main parts:

1. Switching to fully remote events;
2. Using technology to create new event types, and
3. Setting up a roadmap to carry our learnings forward.

The ASE’s pivot to fully remote events – events with none of the participants nor members of the ASE team in the same location – was not without its challenges. As a team we had to ask ourselves several questions, about our old ways of working and about our new. Questions such as: What does “fully remote” mean? How do we maintain our agile working practices? How do we enable participants to engage to provide the same level of value output?

These questions mirror those that businesses across the globe are asking themselves about their work: Do we still need corporate real estate? Is working remotely now the default? What are our real operational priorities? What do we now know about ourselves, and what do we do with that knowledge? The ASE already had experience running technology-enhanced events. We brought together 150 people in five locations and across four time zones for an event, as early as 2018. This positioned us well to help companies align on these problems and to accelerate their solutions.

Harnessing the power of “Group Genius” has always seemed more straightforward in person, the MG Taylor methodology practiced by the ASE was designed with a physical environment in mind. However, the success of remote ASE events and digital collaboration has pointed the way towards a new future. The ways that meeting in person can overcome some of the limitations of virtual collaboration have been well explored, but what about how virtual collaboration can overcome physical barriers?

In many ways, we have been forced to reconsider our “common sense”. Why shouldn’t an expert in the UK run a remote upskilling session for colleagues in India or the USA; or vice versa? Why not leverage synchronous and asynchronous working to adapt flexibly to time zones, parenting or busy calendars? The possibility of bringing together all the right people, no matter where they are, to make better decisions faster has always been one of the great promises of technology. Now, we have no reason not to explore that promise. For the ASE, this has meant going beyond using technology as a substitute for “business as usual” and instead exploring the “art of the possible”, using the flexibility and connective powers of technology to create ever more relevant, meaningful and powerful engagements for our clients.

But why stop there? Why not take our learnings about remote working and technology into the “new normal” – whatever that looks like? One way this might manifest, is through embedding digital engagements and physical events into longer programmes of work, to support and drive collaboration throughout. Subject matter experts could contribute from anywhere in the world on multiple occasions without consideration to travel costs, visa applications or an increased carbon footprint. Or, a geographically disparate team could continually align, accelerate and act without having to coordinate travel logistics. This would maximise their efficiency even further when they do decide to meet in person.

To this end, the ASE is already building frameworks to combine the digital and the physical sensitively and responsively to offer the best of both worlds: the dynamism of digital collaboration with the proven efficaciousness of collaborating in person.

After a Black Swan event, things are never the same. But though paradigm shifts come with great uncertainty, they also open up a new world of possibilities: providing room for innovation and accelerating emerging developments. Patterns of work and behaviour may change beyond recognition, and our new understanding of what is possible remotely might revolutionise the way we work together. This momentum to create this future is one of the changes that the ASE is working to ignite.

Author

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Shekinah Vera-Cruz

Shekinah is a Co-Designer in the ASE, with a background in History and Design. She has a passion for thinking in combination about people, systems, and the bigger picture.