Stu Downes

I must credit Phil for starting this train of thought in my head.  He had some thoughts around Maslow and collaboration, for those in CSC and customers I’d recommend asking Phil to present his thoughts.  But it immediately triggered a thought.  Back in 1994 we had a superb lecturer in our final year at uni -  a real motivational guy.  He had to be!  They stuck him in front of all the final year science and engineering undergraduates to give us a semester about management and project management.  I still remember the main assignment he set and going off to research motivation, I was really excited by what this dude Hertzberg had to say.  He was a dude because he really stood for the fact that we all need some things but those things actually dissatisfy, yet other things really act as satisfiers, take a look:

Much better description here.  But Hetzberg being the great guy that he was also realised that the two are linked, you have to deal with dissatisfaction factors while trying to emphasise and work more on satisfaction.  Enough of my drivel -what has this got to do with collaboration.  Well I feel the same is true in that collaboration tools offer both dissatisfaction and satisfaction:

There are essential tools for collaboration which we hate.  Graham talked recently about the concept of email being addictive, you need it for the odd “win” but like gambling most of the time you “lose”.  We need email as its always going to be an essential form of asynchronous communication, even Luis still gets some and I have great respect for his attempts to remove it completely.  For me satisfaction from collaboration comes from using tools to allow excellent interactive remote meetings, co-creation of content and actually delivering things, talking about those things, building links with people and maintaining strong professional relationships.