FOUR

A Ten-Year Journey of Cooperation

LYNDA GRATTON*

PREPARING THIS CHAPTER has provided a marvelous opportunity to consider the way in which my own research agenda has evolved and how engaged scholarship and action-based research (Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006) has been so central to my working life. Looking back, I see a long and continuous process of questioning where I have learned and continue to learn about a number of topics that are profoundly important to me.

One of the emerging themes in this book has been the extent to which the personal interests and experience of this group of scholars have shaped their research. I am no exception to this. Having spent the first ten years of my postdoctoral career in both a major company and a consulting practice before returning to a full-time post in academia, it is no surprise that my interest is in active collaboration with practicing managers. Like many of the scholars in this book, my initial training was as an industrial/organizational psychologist. My research preference is a combination of case writing, to build a deep understanding, and of diagnostics/instrumentation, to work at a broader canvas and discern the emerging themes. I like to use multiple methods to triangulate on the truth, and like Michael Beer, I am definitely a groundhog focusing on one or two domains of practice. So although I was trained as a psychologist to examine the individual, increasingly I have found myself intrigued by the complexities of large companies, particularly those that operate on a global scale. I find their scale fascinating, and I believe, like my colleagues Sumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran (2005), that they can play an important and valuable part in the everyday lives of people across the world.

There are many phenomena and challenges that are being played out in large global companies right now. The area that I have chosen to focus on is innovative capacity and particularly the way in which knowledge-based task forces, project teams, and other collaborative work forms such as communities or partnerships are being developed to bring flexibility and potential innovation (Gibson & Cohen, 2003; Mankin & Cohen, 2004). For example, at the telecoms company Nokia, I have studied how a team has been tasked with considering how to bring innovations to customers in China. At the global bank Standard Chartered, the challenge was rather different—to integrate a new information technology (IT) system in the back office of four countries. Over the last ten years, I and my colleagues have studied many of these teams. What is interesting is that while the specific challenges they face may be unique, the solutions are often remarkably similar—to bring people together either virtually or in person, often from different parts of the company to work on the common task that requires the effective use of networks and “ecosystems” both within and outside the organization.

The formulation of the problem began in two rather different ways. Back in 1995, I ran a series of strategy sessions along the lines I had described in an early book, Living Strategy (Gratton, 2000). I ran these strategy sessions with many companies around the world and on the human resources (HR) program I have directed at London Business School for more than 20 years. This involved my working with teams of executives to create a “risk matrix”—a means by which they could identify the areas of risk they believed they would encounter in meeting their long-term business strategy. After analyzing more than 20 of these workshop outcomes, what was striking was the extent to which the capacity to support team working and to actively share knowledge across boundaries and to make the connections was seen as the most common area of risk (Gratton, 1996).

At around the same time I designed, with my colleague Sumantra Ghoshal, a senior executive program at London Business School. In it we took six teams of executives from six companies on a three-module program lasting for one year. It was clear that forging links across businesses was a crucial issue. We went on to explore this more in a paper published in Sloan Management Review in 2003 that went on to win the Richard Beckhart best paper award—another point to convince us we were on the right track (Ghoshal & Gratton, 2003). As Mike Tushman and Charles O’Reilly report (2007), we found that these executives programs provided a marvelous opportunity to link research to practice. Again I heard how executives struggled with working within and across teams and actively communicating with each other.

Listening to these various executives and analyzing the data convinced me that this issue was worthy of further development—while also providing the initial energy boost that kept my colleagues and I working on this complex topic for what turned out to be over a decade. Like Amy Edmondson, I was intrigued by the organizational dynamics that affect collaborative research, and it is interesting to see the similarities and differences our journeys took from a similar starting point.

I have described the evolution of this decade of research in two ways—as the actual journey with its various stakeholders and their involvement and later as a series of evolving research themes. Looking back on this decade I am struck by four themes of what we might call action research, themes which will form the backbone to the description in this chapter.

1. Connection Forming. I am struck by how much this decade of research has involved forming a wide range of connections with a whole host of people, companies, and governments. What these connections have in common is an interest in the topic and a willingness to engage in the collection of data and conversation about the outcomes. I am particularly interested in taking a multidisciplinary focus on a single topic. So over time I networked with many different types of people to gain their insight on the topic.

2. Legitimacy and Company Interest. Although engaging with executives at a superficial level is relatively easy, I have discovered that to do so on a deeper, more time-consuming level requires the development of a program of research that they believe is capable of adding value to their company in a number of different ways. This necessity means that in the design of a research program one has to acknowledge and understand a much wider range of stakeholder interests. In the case on Singapore Ministry of Manpower (MOM) described later, I show clearly the extent of energy required to get buy-in to action research.

3. Surprising Twists. As Amy Edmondson described in her chapter, I am always surprised by the findings and theoretical contribution and the unplanned nature of some of these. One can certainly design a closely argued research project—but sometimes it does not go as you expect. As I will show later, our research with both the Singapore government and Nokia took some unexpected twists. Perhaps the most surprising was the Nokia twist that, as a result of time and cost pressure, we had to shift our whole approach into a community portal (Gratton & Casse, 2010). This was a technique I had no prior knowledge of and would not have been persuaded to use under normal circumstances. However, the result of this unexpected twist is that my research team and I are now very knowledgeable about community portals—so much so that the Future of Work research program I have recently launched is mediated exclusively on a community portal.

4. Combination, Synthesis, and Transformation. What has also been striking is the real value that can be gained by combining knowledge from the academic research with the knowledge of practice. My bias is towards synthesis rather than analysis when studying such complex phenomena. It is in the process of combination and synthesis that occasions deeper, richer, and more useful insights. However, this combination cannot be successfully made without the transformation of ideas as the combination occurs. In my case, for example, I have put a great deal of energy into transforming my own and other academic ideas into a form which is useful, relevant, and exciting to practitioners. This transformation is not simply about rephrasing—although this is indeed important. It is also about thinking carefully about presentation and design. It is interesting to note that the last person to join my research team is not an academic but a talented graphics designer who is tasked with ensuring that the models, tools, and ideas we communicate to managers are visually exciting.

This transformation in bridging across boundaries can also result in self-transformation in the sense of becoming a chameleon (Kilduff & Tsai, 2003). I am aware for myself that in jumping across the boundaries between academia and practice I have to transform the way I speak, the words and concepts I use, and even the clothes I wear. I agree with Michael Beer—being a boundary spanner is definitely a challenge, and like him I find myself being marginal in each of these communities. But frankly, I would have it no other way. As I hope I can show you through my ten-year research journey—being a boundary spanner can be the most exciting, energizing, and innovative place to be.

The Phases of the Research Agenda

Over the decade, the research agenda co-evolved from research insights, the interests and feedback from the companies, and responses to the broader academic developments in related fields. The research agenda has progressed through these three phases as shown in Figure 4.1.

Phase 1: Understanding the Nature of Cooperation

At the beginning of the AIM research initiative, Sumantra Ghoshal and I were both chosen as AIM scholars. We decided to work together to take a closer look at an aspect of integration and coordination that we both found fascinating—that of cooperation. With the aid of a major research grant from the United Kingdom’s Advanced Institute of Management, we were able to explore this issue in greater depth. This government grant was crucial to the research. At a time when there had been a steady decline in public financial support (Sonnenberg, 2004), the U.K. initiative was an important boost to scholarship in the United Kingdom. Also, it is notable that much of the third phase of the work was underwritten by a grant from the Singapore government.

FIGURE 4.1 The Research Timeline

At that time we asked a deceptively simple question: What is the current understanding of how and why cooperation occurs, particularly with regard to knowledge sharing and innovation, and what are the key variables? This was a topic of particular interest to Sumantra, who had argued forcibly (Ghoshal & Moran, 1996) that a focus on opportunistic behavior favored at that time by economists had negated the role cooperation and trust could play. Between 2002 and 2004, Sumantra and I wrote case studies on Nokia (Gratton, Ghoshal, & Donaldson, 2004), BP (Gratton & Ghoshal, 2002), the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) (Gratton & Ghoshal, 2004), and Goldman Sachs (unpublished case). Together these brought a deeper awareness of how cooperation and integration was being played out in complex companies.

After Sumantra passed away in March 2004, I continued the research with our colleague Janine Nahapiet, who had already thought deeply about the role cooperation could play in creating organizational advantage. Janine and I began by developing a theoretical model of cooperation and knowledge that became the basis for the team study (Nahapiet, Gratton, & Rocha, 2005). We thought about the impact of cooperation and knowledge sharing at the level of the individual, the team, and the context of the organization (Gratton, 2005). This multilevel way of thinking about the problem was to become the cornerstone of much of what was to follow.

Phase 2: Focusing on Contemporary Teams and Innovation

At this stage, I was joined by a research assistant, Andreas Voigt. We entered the second phase of the research determined to increase our understanding of teams and the relationships between the aspects of the model shown in Figure 4.2 through large-scale team surveys. However, we faced a number of real challenges. The most obvious challenge was that whereas the first phase had been underwritten by a major grant from the AIM, this more practical and action-based phase did not receive a research grant—so participating companies had to make a financial contribution. As a consequence, this second phase of the research became closer to the CEO model of a corporate membership organization. To help us create this organization, we partnered with a consulting practice (The Concours Group) headed by a great friend, Tamara Erickson. The Concours Group had an extensive database of companies engaged with the idea of cooperation and had run contracted research in the past.

The next challenge with this phase was that the extent and depth of the analysis we required meant that the survey we had developed—even in its computerized form—took participants 45 minutes and stakeholders 10 minutes to complete. As we will see later in the MOM study, this was to be a major challenge to creating buy-in to the research.

FIGURE 4.2 The Cooperative Working Model

Finally, we began to learn that for many companies the unit of value and analysis was still the individual and not the team. Although understanding that teams were important to many executives, we observed that for most companies there was no natural conduit for action-based research on the performance of innovative, complex teams. I believe this is a problem for any action research that attempts to observe phenomena that lie across the boundaries of a company.

Despite these challenges, we were able to move to the second phase, where we took a broad view of how cooperation worked inside teams and the impact on the actions and performance of the teams—in particular the impact on innovation. The research question evolved to this: To what extent do these variables impact the performance and innovation of the team? And in what way is this impact moderated, and under what circumstances are cooperation and knowledge sharing enhanced? To understand this, we developed a performance instrument that we used with the stakeholders of the teams, such as suppliers and customers. This instrumentation became the basis of both the research with the Singapore Ministry of Manpower and the large-scale Nokia study we undertook.

Phase 3: Making It Actionable—Teams and Learning

As Michael Beer writes in Chapter 8, Making a Difference and Contributing Useful Knowledge, “Knowing about relationships between managerially relevant variables does not, however, ensure effective action.” He believes the emphasis should be on knowledge that is actionable “that provides guidance for how managers should go about solving problems.” By this third phase of the research, we knew what the problems were—but what we had not yet done was to work with managers to understand how to solve them. The book about the research Hot Spots (Gratton, 2007) had, of course, provided some answers, but I was keen that we become more actively involved. Like Rousseau (2006), I was interested in “evidence-based management.” This approach became the focus of the third phase and required the learning of a whole new set of skills around supporting change.

It was clear that once we had developed the model and observed the performance of the teams we began to see, as others had, that some teams achieved much higher performance (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001). The companies we had partnered with were particularly keen to understand how to increase the performance of teams, and we became interested in team learning. So the final question was the following: Under what circumstances are teams able to learn and increase their performance? To understand this, we had to begin to actively build, pilot, and test tools that we believed would increase the performance of teams using the ideas and theories we had developed.

The challenge I set for myself and the team was to create a set of tools and techniques that could be used by virtual teams as well as colocated teams. As Ram Tenkasi describes in Chapter 11, Integrating Theory to Inform Practice, this third phase required us to create “mastery of the techniques of getting things done in the organization.” Over the period of a year, we did indeed achieve mastery by working with a multidisciplinary team of learning specialists, web designers, graphic designers, and community software experts to create a series of development interventions that could be administered virtually.

The online diagnostic profile completed by team members, team leaders, and importantly, the stakeholders of the team (their customers and suppliers) enabled us to collect baseline performance data on the team. The “temperature check” administered after 60 days allowed us to monitor performance changes. During the 60-day learning journey, teams were coached and presented with a series of learning modules made up of videos, podcasts, articles, and tasks around the model we had developed.

Rather than build another corporate membership organization, I decided in this phase to work with a smaller number of organizations who were prepared to work in a more experimental way. In particular, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower and Nokia became deeply involved with piloting the learning journey. My thinking was that we did not, as in Phase 2, need to collect a great deal of data; instead, we needed to form a strong learning relationship with a small number of organizations prepared to take the risks with us. These two cases and the learnings from them are described later in the chapter and, as you will see, we were very fortunate in our partnership.

Findings and Reflections: The Nature of Cooperation

The first phase of the research began with a literature search and the development of a set of ideas that became the model of cooperation and knowledge sharing in subsequent research. During this first phase, the case writing on BP, Nokia, and Goldman Sachs enabled us to observe cooperation and knowledge sharing as it is naturally embedded in the day-to-day activities of employees. From the case observations and the analysis of the literature came two sets of ideas that formed the basis of all the subsequent studies: the first was the multistranded nature of cooperation, and the second the embedded nature of cooperation.

The Multistranded nature of cooperation

Our first perspective was that to understand why and how people cooperate and share knowledge, we had to look at a number of overlapping fields of research to create an integrated, multistranded perspective. Specifically, we came to believe that four areas were important to individuals and the teams that they inhabited (Gratton, 2007). (1) However motivated to cooperate an individual may be, the actual act of cooperation is more likely to occur when they and others are engaged with a task, a question, or a vision that excites and motivates them and forms what we called the “ignition.” (2) Although this point of ignition could potentially pull people together, the opportunity for them to be innovative also depends on the extent and breadth of networks held at both the level of the individual and at the level of the group. We called this “boundary spanning,” and it has its roots in the work of the network analysts. (3) The ability to then actively exchange ideas and contacts within these ignited networks depends on the habits and attitudes of individuals with regard to cooperation. We called this “cooperative mindset,” and its roots are within the literature on cooperation. (4) Underlying these networks and habits of cooperation are a series of what we called “productive practices” that ensure and enable the ideas and creativity of the team to actual translate into performance and innovation. In particular, we focused on the competencies of conflict resolution, commitment making, and creating opportunities for reflection.

The embedded nature of cooperation

At the same time as developing the model for how innovative cooperation could take place in teams and communities, we also examined cross-boundary cooperation in three companies. We wrote cases on what was called the process of “peer assist” at BP, on the modular structure of Nokia, and on the complex cooperative people practices at Goldman Sachs. In each company, we interviewed around 20 people and took a close look at the organizational structures and practices. What was very clear from these case studies was that the capacity and motivation to work with others in a cooperative manner was embedded in the whole context of the organization. Like Susan Mohrman and her work at CEO (Mohrman, Mohrman, & Tenkasi, 1977), we came to the conclusion that a full understanding of organizations required three levels of focus, which was, in turn, particularly crucial to an understanding of cooperation and boundary spanning.

The first level was the individual. It was clear, for example at Goldman Sachs, that much of the elaborate selection process with its multiple interviews was solely focused on shielding the company from highly competitive and self-orientated individuals. This finding was corroborated with the personal psychology literature, which had drawn attention to the cooperative personality that is more “other centered” than “self-centered.” However, we also observed in these cases that when individuals at Goldman Sachs or BP came together, the teams they created also had cooperative norms of their own. This second level was the team. Our observations had shown clearly that the norms and expectations of the team influenced the cooperative attitudes of new joiners and of those who had been in the team for some time. The research on teams had made the same point, and so we realized that any model we created would have to have a team element. The third level we observed was that of the organization. As we studied these three companies, it became clear that for an individual’s natural propensity to be cooperative, if indeed it existed, to become an activity of acting cooperatively depended a great deal on the signals they received from the organization. We heard many people tell us, for example, that the individual reward structure reduced their capacity or willingness to cooperate. We also heard how positively influenced they were by the role models from senior executives.

These two observations of the multistranded and embedded nature of cooperation led us to create the working model shown in Figure 4.2. Although this model has been refined and understood further, it has remained the touchstone for all subsequent research.

Findings and Reflections: A Closer Look at the Model

Over the next year we were able to examine the model more closely in the Cooperative Advantage Research Consortium, which was launched with involvement from 15 company members in partnership with a U.S. research/consulting practice, The Concours Group, directed by Tamara Erickson. What we had in this research was data from over 20 teams based on the perceptions of the team leader and the team members. Crucially in a process of measurement, reflection, and conversation, we went back to each company to discuss their perceptions. We found this activity to be immensely important. For example, in the case of Nokia we held a workshop in Finland attended by 25 senior executives involved in knowledge and innovation. Over the period of one day we were able to show the data and gain their perceptions about what was happening and why it was important. These practices of co-creation often lead to new insights for both the executives and the research team. Looking back on this phase of the research, I perceive three insights that have stood the test of time.

1. The Antecedents to Cooperation. We had seen in the development of the model that to truly understand cooperation we had to bring in the individuals, the team, and the organization. We became fascinated by the antecedents of cooperation. Analysis of the data allowed us to observe the factors we had included in the model, whereas the cases broadened our understanding. The article about the antecedents of cooperation was published in the Harvard Business Review and became an important way of describing to executives what it was we believed in (Gratton & Erickson, 2007).

2. The Development of Fault Lines. Often in our conversations with members of these complex teams, team members described how frustrated they often felt about the lack of knowledge transfer across subgroups. We realized the transfer of knowledge was a particularly pressing challenge for the diverse teams many companies were constructing. At the same time, the literature on fault lines provided some useful insights into why knowledge transfer failed to occur. So we began to analyze the team data on the basis of the diversity of the team members and the extent to which fault lines had emerged. We found that, indeed, under certain conditions fault lines did emerge but also that a certain sequence of leadership styles reduced the negative effect of this condition. Again, publishing rapidly in the Sloan Management Journal created a broader conversation (Gratton & Voigt, 2007). At around the same time, I wrote an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal about managing virtual teams that created a series of long conversations with people all over the world.

3. The Nature of Organization Cooperative Signatures. As Sumantra and I wrote the cases in the earlier phase of the research and talked to the wider group of executives about cooperation, we began to see that there was no “one size fits all” with regard to how cooperative teams were put together (Gratton & Ghoshal, 2005). For example, Nokia teams had a complex social architecture that enabled them to cooperate across boundaries, whereas RBS had invested considerable sums in offices that encouraged people from different functions and businesses to meet and exchange ideas. From this observation evolved the idea of a “signature process.” We showed that when considering a concept such as cooperation, an executive team had both to bring in good practice from outside and simultaneously create and shield a set of practices or processes that were unique to it and difficult for others to imitate (Erickson & Gratton, 2007).

Findings and Reflections: On Learning and Performance Boosting

In the third phase of the research, our interest was in developing tools that would actually increase the performance of teams. During 2009, we were able to work with over 30 teams to pilot these ideas. The data from the teams in Singapore were positive. After the 60-day learning period, the temperature check showed that 40 percent of the teams had been observed by stakeholders to significantly increase their performance, while 30 percent were observed to moderately increase their performance. We were able to analyze the conditions and experiences of those teams who increased their performance most significantly, and of those teams that had failed. We found four aspects that impacted their capacity to learn and increase their performance:

1. The Power of Healthy Teams. We found that those teams that learned the most did so from a foundation of team health. When a team entered the learning journey with strong cooperation and a capacity to resolve conflicts, they were more likely to increase their performance in the eyes of the stakeholders.

2. Involvement of Stakeholders. Those teams that learnt the most actively engaged their stakeholders in their development activities. This is an interesting aspect since most traditional developmental activities in organizations do not actively bring in stakeholders.

3. Real Tasks. Those teams that learned the most typically focused on real developmental tasks during the 60-day learning period. This aspect suggests that it is wise to select tasks that the whole team can engage with and which link outwards to the stakeholders.

4. Create a Virtual Learning “Signature.” The far-flung nature of many of the teams made it difficult for them to come together, so there was much emphasis on virtual learning. We found that there was not “one size fits all” in terms of what works best. Instead, teams that boosted their performance developed their own “signature” based on their technological sophistication, their preferred way of learning, and the technological norms of the company (for example, whether the company had a shared learning portal).

During 2008–2009, two major projects changed the nature of our research as we engaged with two “early adopters.” One was Nokia, where we were able to work with over 100 teams in a very short period of time; the second was Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, which became a significant supporter of the research.

Case No. 1: A Government-Led Initiative—The Singapore Ministry of Manpower

In early 2008, I was approached by a number of civil servants from Singapore’s MOM to engage with them on teams and innovation. At this time, the concept of innovation was becoming a major government theme. The following is how Leo Yip, the Permanent Secretary of the MOM, described it:

It is interesting to note how these civil servants found me. As I was to learn, from 2007 onwards MOM had sent out groups of civil servants around the world to look for innovative practice around human capital. These government officials had embarked on a rigorous analysis of the key ideas in the field of human capital and had attended most of the major human capital conferences in Asia, Europe, and the United States. In 2007 the book Hot Spots (Gratton, 2007) had been published, and later that year I was the keynote speaker at the Human Resource Planning Society (HRPS) conference in Las Vegas. As a consequence, I was asked by the Singapore government to visit the country as a senior visiting fellow to the civil service. This position had a defined role created to bridge the gap between academia and practice in the field of human capital.

During the week I spent in Singapore, the Ministry arranged a series of breakfasts and a workshop with chief executive officer’s and heads of HR from Singapore companies and other companies based in the region. Following the visit, I was asked to submit a proposal for the engagement with the ideas of cooperation and complex teams I had described in the book Hot Spots. As Leo Yip described it:

The research team then wrote a proposal to engage with teams, to understand the drivers of innovation, and to determine whether there were indeed differences between the data for the Singapore teams and that which we had collected for teams outside Singapore. By accepting the proposal, MOM agreed to financially support the piloting of the team process to 30 teams in Singapore with the assumption that these teams would be drawn from 10 companies, to actively engage with the research team to encourage these companies to join the pilot phase, and to ensure that MOM also participated. In the proposal, we agreed to prepare a report on the findings of the diagnostics in the 30 teams and to present these findings at the 2009 Human Capital Conference in Singapore.

From September 2008, MOM began to approach companies to participate. The process of adoption of this innovative practice was initially planned to take September and October. In reality, engaging companies to sign up to the diagnostic and the 60-day learning journey we had designed was still taking place in January 2009. In total, MOM team approached around 25 companies to participate. By January 2009, seven companies had confirmed their participation. Those that participated wanted to create or deepen relationships with MOM, valued the opportunity to network with other local organizations in Singapore as part of the program, believed that collaborative forms of working or innovation in general were key priorities on their strategic agenda, or valued the opportunity to trial comprehensive team development program tools at low cost compared to market rates because of MOM sponsorship.

However, even with a financial incentive, many companies chose not to participate. Generally their reasons were they had no bandwidth with regard to time and resources to market the initiative internally and find participating teams. At the same time, the economic downturn in the region resulted in resources being focused away from longer-term challenges to the more urgent short-term issues, while worries about the time commitment played a part. Finally, since this program was a pilot, there were concerns about the lack of client references or case studies that would illustrate how increasing team performance had been successfully implemented in other companies.

Despite these concerns, by February 2009 MOM had increased the number of participating teams to 28. They had achieved this level of participation through assiduous marketing of the work, a dedicated team within MOM, and inclusion of four of their own teams in the practice.

The Singapore data, combined with the data from the Nokia teams, enabled us to refine the original model and create a more insightful and contextual view of why and how people within and across teams would be prepared to cooperate, to share knowledge, and ultimately to innovate.

Case No. 2: Large-Scale Single Company Adoption—Nokia

In December 2008, we were approached by executives to work with Nokia on the rollout of project-based structure and learning in one of Nokia’s key businesses. This was part of a long-term research relationship with Nokia that had developed over more than a decade. Nokia had been associated with our research from the beginning. They had been members of the initial Cooperative Advantage Research Consortium and had allowed us to write a case on their innovative organizational strategy. In part, the partnership developed through the resonance of ideas. In his review of the Hot Spots book, Hallstein Moerk, Executive Vice President, Global HR, had this to say:

Both Nokia and MOM perceive themselves as innovators and so are well framed when it comes to thinking about innovative practice. This “innovator” mindset also means that both organizations are well networked outside the corporate boundaries by actively engaging in communities of practice where they come across new ideas. One possible reason for this mindset is that these “boundary spanning” capabilities and values have been developed in other parts of the business or organization. For example, the technologists of Nokia are encouraged to work closely with university teams. Similarly, the Singapore government has made many commitments to outreach. As a consequence, “organizational muscle” has developed around scanning the environment for innovative practice. Both Nokia and MOM approached us, whereas we approached most other companies.

In autumn 2008, the corporate learning group at Nokia was putting together a “booster program” designed to increase the performance of their teams in one of the Markets businesses. The program was ambitious. It had to cover all 5,000 employees of the Markets business unit, encourage cross-functional and cross-hierarchical working, and be ready to roll out across the world in the space of three months with a relatively low budget.

The design team recognized that the traditional form of initiating top-down change would be too slow and would ignore the capacity of emerging technologies to allow employees to be part of the solution. The social network technologies that are rapidly emerging on the back of Enterprise 2.0 tools created the environment for Nokia’s long-term commitment to employee involvement to play out in a faster, more paced manner.

On the basis of this, the learning group decided on a blended solution with three main streams of activities: the team diagnostic would be made available to 100 of the teams; following this, all team leaders would attend a two-day face-to-face workshop with team leaders; finally, the 60-day learning journey was morphed into an online social network community. The two-day workshops were run in locations across the world (including Beijing, White Plains in the United States, Helsinki, London, and Dubai) with about 100 potential change leaders in each. Having completed the workshop, the 700 participants then returned to their teams to engage them in the ongoing process. At this point, the online community came to the fore. Working with specialist partners we designed an intranet site accessible to workshop participants and all employees of the Markets business. The online community was designed to provide information on team performance; but importantly, it was no longer a one-way communication channel. Instead, it was also capable of hosting conversations and communications with senior managers and exchanging information and ideas with content experts and community members.

This innovation to our 60-day learning journey proved very successful. All 5,000 members of the business participated in an open dialogue between community members, frontline employees, and senior managers about the real challenges, concrete ideas, and required support (Gratton & Casse, 2010). The online community created real opportunities for anyone in the business to be active and to make the company agenda their agenda. We found that many people elected to steer discussions that interested them, post content they thought others would find useful, create groups of like-minded people around specific topics, or raise igniting questions or issues. At the same time, others preferred to react to the ideas in the community or even to remain silent users, preferring to read and take in information. The online community also ignited a whole host of unintended actions. For example, one team in Germany took the initiative to invite 100 colleagues to an empty hangar where they shared material from the booster community and facilitated a question-and-answer session.

The senior team at Nokia has always espoused cooperation as a means to tap into the wealth of knowledge and experience of employees. What’s changed in the last five years is the way that community-based technologies can facilitate and speed this process. The booster online community enabled senior managers and content experts to frame the initial comments and set the tone. It was then possible for the community of employees to decide how best to implement these ideas. Indeed, we found that employee discussion threads quickly moved from commenting on the direction to more practical ideas on how to make the changes. After six months, over 3,000 discussion threads had been posted. Many discussion threads were in the form of questions or described the context under which employees saw the changes possible or difficult to achieve. These discussion threads reduced repetition and meant that the conversation always moved forward across boundaries.

Reflections on Nokia and MOM

In my work with both MOM and Nokia, a clear action-orientated research base has been grounded in a collaborative partnership. In both cases, we were able to meet many of the criteria Tom Cummings describes in Chapter 18, How Business Schools Shape (Misshape) Management Research, which is on action-orientated research; both sides were involved in all stages of the research, and there was a high degree of openness, mutual trust, and respect. However, these two studies progressed in rather different ways, and in the following two sections I illustrate these differences and what we learned from them.

MOM: The Challenge of Active Company Involvement

One of the most crucial challenges of this type of action-based research is engaging companies, and as we have seen throughout this collection of chapters, it requires the development of strong social bonds to create high-quality relationships. The research with MOM illustrates this very clearly.

The case of MOM is a good example of the sheer energy that is required for this type of research to get off the ground. It took over six months of dedicated follow-up from the research team and our MOM partners to make this work. The companies who joined the research had various reasons for doing so. Some simply saw it as an opportunity to create or deepen relationships with MOM; others valued the opportunity to network with other local organizations in Singapore as part of the program; whereas some saw collaboration and innovation as key strategic key priorities and valued the opportunity to trial the methodology at a relatively low cost. However, even with these incentives, many companies still chose not to participate, through lack of time, the need to focus on more short-term issues, or concern about joining a pilot.

Nokia: The Power of Co-Creation

In the case of Nokia, the buy-in came rapidly because the concepts we had developed could be used as part of a planned intervention. However, unlike at MOM, where we were able to run each team in the way we had designed, at Nokia we could not. We had to make immediate adjustments to the study. These took a number of forms. First, we had to substantially increase the computerization of the process; next, we had to develop a volunteer process because we had the resources to diagnose only 100 of the potential 700 teams; and finally, we had to strip out much of the coaching aspects of the 60-day learning journey and transfer the modules to the community portal.

However, from these rapid adjustments we learned some important lessons. The development of the community portal encouraged us to work with a host of specialist partners to design the intranet site, thereby learning skills that we took with us to our current study on the future of work. We also discovered a great deal about the interface between research and communities, and I began to realize that online communities could provide an important tool to the research community. We were fortunate that in working with Nokia we partnered with a team who understood this impact of online communities and could work closely with us to develop our own skills—this was truly co-creation in practice.

The Research Journey Continues . . .

The research journey continues in terms of the community, in the companies involved in the work, and in the development of new ideas. By late 2009, we were engaged with the following areas of research:

Singapore. MOM has agreed to increase the numbers of teams involved in the 60-day learning journey to 60 over the next six months. In many cases, these are companies that are now working with clusters of companies. At the same time, the findings from the initial Singapore research have created a case study that has enabled a number of companies to begin to work actively with teams in a developmental process.

Nokia and the Broader Community. Our co-creation with Nokia and the Finnish portal designers became an important part of the development of the 60-day learning. What we learned from Nokia was the importance of pulling together a broader community of individuals and teams to really boost performance. We also saw firsthand the importance of using an “igniting question” to act as the catalyst for development across the community. As a consequence, in October 2009 we were able to build both a learning community in Singapore for all the teams and also a community for ten teams in British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). At this point, we are monitoring the community aspects in both Singapore and the United Kingdom.

More Sophisticated Analysis. With data from more than 100 teams from Nokia, we are in a position to start using more sophisticated mathematical modeling on the data set. Our colleagues at London Business School are beginning to work on this data set.

The Future of Work Consortium. Supported by the MOM, we launched in November 2009 a worldwide conversation about the future of work, which in a sense was a natural development of the work on cooperation. Twenty-four companies (including Nokia) have entered in the debate, with over 200 executives from China, Singapore, India, South America, the United States, and Europe. We are partnering with our Finnish portal designers again and expect this to be a very exciting research journey.

Reflecting on what I have learned over the ten years of this research journey, I am struck by the importance of finding something that truly interests, energizes, and engages you. Without that, the whole piece can became a real drudge. I would also highlight the importance of boundary spanning between academia and practice. It is not an easy boundary to span—and you certainly have to be something of a chameleon. But the combination of academic rigor and theory building combined with the real life challenges and insights from executives can be truly wonderful. These broadenings of networks also can bring marvelous combinations.

Reflecting on this journey leads me to absolutely agree with Tom Cummings’s argument (Chapter 18, How Business Schools Shape [Misshape] Management Research), that business schools have the opportunity to be places where different forms of inquiry prosper and productively interact. As a professor of management practice at London Business School, I have a wonderful opportunity to participate in action research and yet still be seen as a fully paid-up member of the academic community. The benefits of interaction are clear. For example, the data we are creating from our action research are currently being analyzed by my colleagues at the school using statistical analyses that are not within my competence domain. It is this opportunity for diversity and collaboration that I believe holds the key to the future of action research.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lynda Gratton is Professor of Management Practice at London Business School where she directs the school’s Human Resources strategy program. She is the founder of the Hot Spots Movement (www.hotspotsmovement.com), a worldwide community dedicated to bringing energy and innovation to organizations. Lynda is the author of 6 books and over 10 articles and was rated by the Times as one of the top 20 business thinkers in the world. Lynda’s current research interest is the Future of Work, on which she is directing a worldwide research consortium in a co-creation process involving more than 30 companies and she is blogging about her experience at www.lyndagrattonfutureofwork.com.