One of the articles for recommended reading comes from the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. This is what the site is about: ‘NCDD provides resources, programs, and networking opportunities for a rapidly growing community of practice dedicated to solving group and societal problems through honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action.’ There are lots of great resources – take some time to have a look. BTW the article is An Introduction to Collaborative Technologies.

The other article is Managing the Unexpected by Weick (remember systems theory) and Sutcliffe and, like the other article is very brief. Weick and Sutcliffe discuss decision making in times of crises and identify companies that have good systems primarily due to the nature of the organisation. One of their recommendations is to shift decision making from the leader(s) to the experts.

This reminds me of Bob Suttons discussion about the way NASA (described as a ‘dysfunctional bureacracy’) made decisions – leaders made decisions contrary to recommendations by those with the expertise in the subject area. This occurred, in part, because of the hierarchical nature of the organisation, the requirement to follow procedure and chain of command. He compares NASA to the US Civil Aviation Authority which has an much better safety record due to its system of accident and incident reporting.

More details can be found in the book Sutton co-authored with Jefferey Pfeffer called ‘Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense’. Simon Caulkin quotes a relevant section from the book on systems “bad systems do more damage than bad people, and a bad system can make a genius look like an idiot. Try redesigning systems and jobs before you decide that a person is ‘crappy’”. So, we need good systems/processes that support effective performance. You might hire an expert but if the system does not support them, why bother?

[This paragraph was added after posting] Just in case you think I might be putting a positive spin on using technology to assist collaboration, have a look at this post at Anecdote.