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You want to work with someone. You have a common interest, there are obvious and significant benefits to a collaboration and you have all of the online/offline tools and resources you could possibly need. But it just doesn’t really work. Why?
Collaborations involve human beings. As most people have experienced (or at least heard stories about), two people who are the ‘perfect match’ can go home telling friends all about their ‘worst date ever’. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, people who are perfectly suited just don’t ‘click’.
Surely it wouldn’t be illogical to suggest that the ‘click-factor’ complexity exists in the formation of other types of relationships like collaborations? If so, how can we understand more about this ‘click-factor’? Does it concern psychological compatibility of individuals, ‘personality’ traits of organisations, a mixture of the two or perhaps something else altogether? Whatever the answer is, I think that human factors play a larger part in determining which collaborations are successful and which aren’t, than we think. Learning more in this area, can only be beneficial.
A whole dating industry thrives off the difficulty people have in finding that ‘click-factor’. Do we set up a ‘dating agency’ to help partner organisations go through the process of finding the relationship that ‘clicks’?
By David Simoes-Brown, Sep 3, 2008
Hi Jonathan,
>But it just doesn’t really work. Why?
We’ve been working away on some solutions to these issues ourselves. For me, they lay at the heart of success or otherwise in a personal and professional context. With regards to organisations, it is very much about the optimisation of these intangible factors that makes the difference.
You might be interested in a post I wrote on these ideas as applied to collaboration at http://www.fourgroups.com/blog/archives/24/the-tension-in-collaboration/ and on some simpler examples looking at recruitment and team building for example;
http://www.fourgroups.com/solutions/recruitment_strategy.html
http://www.fourgroups.com/solutions/team_building.html