SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU FALL 2019 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 83Collaborate Smarter, Not Harder
Rob Cross, Thomas H. Davenport, and Peter Gray pp. 20-27No question, collaboration allows companies to
serve exacting clients more seamlessly, respond
more quickly to changing environments, and
innovate more rapidly. But when an organization
tries to boost collaboration by adopting a new
formal structure, technology, or way of working,
it often adds a steady stream of time- and
energy-consuming interactions to an already
relentless workload, diminishing instead of
improving performance. Employees struggle with
increases in email volume, the proliferation of
new collaborative tools, and expectations of fast
replies to messages — with deleterious effects on quality and efficiency.
Even though employees are acutely aware that they’re suffering, most organizations don’t recognize
what’s happening in the aggregate. With increasing pressure on organizations to become more agile,
there is also a tendency to swamp employees with collaboration demands in pursuit of a networked
organization. People have, on average, at least nine different technologies to manage their interactions
with work groups. The result can be overwhelmed and unproductive employees, sapped creativity, costly
restructurings, and employee attrition.
Fortunately, through analytics, companies can improve their collaboration efforts in five key ways:
scaling collaboration more effectively, improving collaborative design and execution, driving planned
and emergent innovation through networks that cross capabilities and markets, streamlining collabora-
tive work by diagnosing and reducing collaborative overload, and engaging talent by identifying social
capital enablers of performance, engagement, and retention.
REPRINT 61105Improving the Rhythm of Your Collaboration
Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer pp. 29-36Leaders help establish the rhythm for their organizations’ and teams’
collaborative efforts. For at least a century, they have done this largely
by planning working-group meetings, huddles, one-on-ones, milestone
reports, steering committee readouts, end-of-shift handoffs, and so on.
But collaborative rhythms have become much more complex and less
controlled in recent years, given all the digital tools at our disposal, along
with email, texting, messaging, and the profusion of meetings that haven’t
gone away. Collaboration has gone omnichannel — and orchestrating it
has become a major challenge.
Given how hyperconnected most people are now at work, is more col-
laboration simply better, as we tend to assume, or should organizationsEXECUTIVE BRIEFINGS
FALL 2019 • VOLUME 61 • NUMBER 1For ordering
information,
see page 4.