What is Free-form Collaboration
The term "free-form collaboration" is heard quite often these days, but still there it is not made clear what free-form collaboration is and why it is more important today than ever.
Free-form collaboration means that team members are not bound to typical transactional workflow process like managing a customer's request, but instead that they are seen as rational and responsible adults who need freedom to work creatively, to innovate, to design and to invent that can find their own workflow of dealing with tasks, in which order, in which way, with which priority.
Being a creative knowledge worker means that the same path can hardly be gone twice because every creative challenge is a new one. As a result, no strict and fixed workflow processes should be enforced, because they are not able to deal with the exceptions as intelligent humans are (and these exceptions happen all the time).
But free-form collaboration means more: It means freedom to work with the best team members for a job, regardless of department or company affiliations, regardless of city or country of origin. It means freedom in place of collaboration, some knowledge workers prefer to work from home or a café instead of their office. Do not force them into places where they are unproductive.
For more information, see the entry "What is free form collaboration" in my collection of "elements of collaboration".
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I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at