Elements of Collaboration: 74 patterns for collaboration success

posted 10:58AM Aug 03, 2007 with tags bestpractices collaboration creativity patterns productivity tips by Lars Trieloff

Yesterday I finished my latest article "Elements of Collaboration" that is a collection of 74 patterns for collaboration of knowledge workers. I've gathered tools, methods, social software and social behavior patterns related to creative collaboration and presented them as an periodic table of elements.

elements of collaboration

I hope this collection of tools and methods is a help for orientation in the vast area of collaboration and productivity for information workers.

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What is Free-form Collaboration

posted 02:24PM Jul 13, 2007 with tags collaboration creativity patterns productivity sharing by Lars Trieloff

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".