Cooplexity: A Model of Collaboration in Complexity for Management in Times of Uncertainty and Change

By Ricardo Zamora Enciso

Cooplexity proposes a cooperation-collaboration model for complexity, the result of more than ten years spent in research and five in gathering data. Three action levels are rigorously proposed, alongside their implications, their key factors and the catalysts that have allowed them to appear. What makes the Cooplexity model unique is the fact that it is based on a vast number of observations of synthesized behaviour, through repeated application of the same constructed environment of uncertainty and complexity. In this book the reader will find the key guidelines for facilitating the emergence of collaborative behaviours, as well as a series of conclusions that challenge the classic concepts of teamwork and leadership as they have been understood up till now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781446718643

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CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTION AND GOALS

1.1 Genesis

In 1996 Alberto Izaguirre, then director of training in Dannon España, was looking for training dynamics with the goal of achieving cross-cooperation among the different departments of the company, to improve collaboration. Everybody knows of the communication, cooperation and coordination problems that can arise in departments with different and apparently contrary goals such as the manufacturing and logistics or marketing and sales to mention some classic departments.

The training consultancy company Training Games was then invited to present an offer due to its specialization in creating games and simulators applied to training. This was the motive of the Synergy project, which after one year of design and programming was flamboyantly presented in November 1997. Six months were necessary to adjust the dynamics that were generated with the simulator to training goals. The software was tested and the contents were developed. This way in June 1998, a pilot course was carried out that initiated the first of thirty-five training courses given during 1999 and 2000.

The course became a two-day residential seminar where the participators managed projects making investment decisions with scarce resources. These projects, sometimes interrelated, gave place to group dynamics in which the participants interrelated and took decisions together.

After consolidating the course, in 2001, a process for identifying and standardizing the identifiers of repeatedly seen behaviour commenced. A database was designed for recompiling the information and in January 2002, the observations were systematically registered. Five years later, in January 2007, the period for recompiling data was closed with 52 courses included in the sample. In September 2008, twelve years after the Dannon initiative and ten after the first pilot course, the results of the statistical analysis were provided.

During all these years modifications have been introduced both in the simulator as in the course that share the Synergy name.  The majority of them have been requests from clients that seeingsee the potential of the training sessions and want to go further inexplore its operation and analysis further.

Along the way, Synergy has been imparted in Spanish, English, Italian and Chinese, in American countries, Europe and Asia and in business schools like ESADE or the UTD (University of Texas at Dallas).

Currently it is still a powerful tool for training and assessment being imparted normally to certain size and complex companies or in the classes of some Business Schools, integrated in programs like the ESADE Advanced Management Program.

1.2 Objective

The present work has the objective of proposing a model that allows developing teams from a functional (efficiency) and emotional (affiliation) point of view. To identify it, I will take the basis of the observations taken during five years in a training course for managers oriented to developing teamwork in organizations. Through game dynamics based on a simulator called Synergy, the participants make decisions in an initially uncertain and ongoing complex environment. From observing the mentioned action of the participants, a behaviour pattern is identified that allows proposing duplicable guidelines.

In Synergy, the participants are distributed into four groups. Throughout the game, they have to interrelate to achieve the proposed objectives. The only way of being successful in an interdependent world is by provoking synergies, saving resources that can be used in other projects. This way the entire group becomes a team that has to make decisions together. They have to manage a large number of projects that are individually small with simple decisions but are very interrelated. At the beginning of the simulation, the participants do not even know the most basic rules of the game. Therefore, at the beginning, they should make uncertain decisions. All that allows analyzing decision-making and teamwork process from a platform faithful to reality.

In a historic revision of the research carried out in the last 10 years about the effectiveness of the teams, the main conclusion, is precisely the necessity of accepting complexity, that way responding to modern organizations and defining the process of team development, its interpersonal relations, structures, leadership and dynamics (Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008).

In this context, the objectives that are tried to be covered are:

- Decide up to what point there is a relation between complexity and teamwork.

- Identify the existence of phases through which the birth of team has to pass.

1.3 Context

Although later on I will go deep into certain aspects of the Synergy training course dynamics, of its simulator or of the identified observations, I consider it important to have an initial global vision that allows framing the context of the research.

Synergy is a special course. It starts by impeding access to information by the participants. If any person is invited by the company to participate, he/she only receives the objectives, basic information and logistics. Even more, at the end they are asked to agree to a silence contract to intentionally maintain future participants in ignorance. This way a situation of uncertainty regarding events, contents and program is created. It is unnecessary to say that the derived sensations are not to the liking of the participants because of the feeling of vulnerability they cause. In China, they even tried to condition imparting the course to the elimination of that initial condition. For a high level director, to face a situation with absence of control provokes not always acceptable anxiety.

Between 12 and 16 persons are invited and when entering the classroom they find a game board on a table in front of a computer and some other elements. They are distributed so that their immediate companions are not their usual collaborators and the presentations start. The course is initially organized around a game board to shortly pass on to interaction with the business simulator.

The entire group is subdivided into four subgroups. If they all belong to the same company, each subgroup takes the part of a department, area or affiliate. Each department is identified as a game unit, like a player generally speaking. That way each player really represents a department formed by 3 or 4 participants. Later on, when I refer to individual playing, I will be referring to a department as an agent with independent capacity for making decisions.

For two days they will combine playing and reflection in a cyclic manner to improve their knowledge and evolve in their relations. In fact, the training activity group is divided into cycles, each one of them with a different objective.

The first cycle will analyze, as it could not be in any other way, management of uncertainty. The explanations and experimenting will provide knowledge in this first phase. They will then pass on to interrelate in a second phase. The intensity of the derived interrelation processes like communication, cooperation, and coordination will increase as the game cycles pass. At the end, the level of complexity is at its highest and all the participants are interdependent for reaching the proposed objective.

The simulator as an engine simply reflects the decisions that the participants should invest in a group of initiatives or projects, sharing scarce resources to obtain a given benefit. The resulting benefit of that investment of resources is not necessarily considered as economic but rather in a wider sense, even though it is numeric and automatically known by the participant. They can therefore modify their strategy in accord to the results they obtain.

As the course evolves, patterns of behaviour appear and even though they vary with the groups, they do maintain a common denominator. Thanks to that behaviour indicators can be identified that, following an observation protocol, have led to the database on which the study has been carried out.

It is especially relevant to note that this database reflects the interactions of approximately 600 directors grouped into the 52 training courses that were subject to the same experience during 5 years.

The study empirically shows that teamwork as a collective collaboration activity has significant relevance over obtaining improved results when interdependencies exist. Notwithstanding the use of measurement instruments in qualitative research, qualitative observation and the conclusions derived from it are also important.

CHAPTER 2.

TEAMWORK

2.1 Introduction

Preindustrial society was based on skills. A skilled worker became specialized in a production process covering it from start to finish. She/he accumulated all the information, all the knowledge, all the process. With his/her ability and experience, he/she was capable, with time, of reaching higher levels of development. That knowledge and ability, nevertheless, were personal and costly to transfer. The production process was slow and individualized.

Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) started a process for transforming society that was characterized by the division of work. Henry Ford refined the Smith concept of dividing work into small repetitive tasks and created the mobile assembly line or the production line. He took work to the worker. By dividing it, Ford made work much easier, but complicated the process of coordinating people and combining the results to obtain a perfect car. Much later Alfred Sloan created the prototype of the administrative system. He took control of GM, and improved the system created by Ford establishing a more global system, identifying it as mass production. Sloan applied the Adam Smith principle of dividing work to administration. The executives did not need either engineering or manufacturing knowledge; there were specialists to supervise those areas. They needed financial expertise. The new marketing specialists and financial managers potentiated the work of the company engineers. A person now did not do anything else than a portion of the process, his/her knowledge is easily obtained, his/her function is replaceable, the production process is faster and it becomes mass.

Nowadays, known as the information and knowledge era, technology is universal easily obtainable and little differencing. The product has little margin because competition has squeezed the production processes so much that the solutions have also become common. Fusions, acquisitions, globalization and outsourcing have been adequate answers up to now and during the optimization process. We have gone from mass products to universal products. In addition, it is that same universality that is now drowning current consumers in their fight for differentiation looking for design, identification, service and personal treatment. Clients are self-conscious of their power, and demand their individualism, provoking movements that should be attended to by companies.

This situation stimulates even more somevarious ongoing processes already underway.even more. Companies centrefocus on their core business deviating, outsourcing all activities that isare not strictly necessary.part of their primary expertise. Manufacturing, logistics, legal counsel, data processing, even human resources are externalized. The result is what we could call the extended company. Limits of the companies are unclear and include parts of their suppliers that are now called partners. These partners are really like specialized units of the company that optimize that specialization with different clients. The bottom line is that this organization in clusters is the natural consequence of the super-specialization caused by competition. The truth is that organization in clusters is also internally reproduced. The difference is that if externally it is functional, internally it is done by projects.

Clusters in turn, help to increase the interrelations of economic agents, of complexity, of knowledge interchange, of universality.

Therefore, if the internal organization is articulated by projects and the differentiation of organizations depends on their capacity to add value for the end user beyond the product, we rapidly turn to dependence on human teams to achieve results. When machines and standardized processes are no longer capable of adding value to the company offer, the limelight is passed to the people that form it. In fact, we are entering an era where dependence on teams and not on individuals is more and more pronounced. Only multi-disciplined, trained, tight-knit, motivated and coordinated teams are capable of managing the interrelations and complexity that affect the different areas of organizations.

Therefore it is very important and of maximum priority, to turn the rudder towards the consideration of collaborators (internal and external) as a fundamental part of business success. At this point, it is necessary to have a development model of teams in accord to the special characteristics of the times we live in.

2.2 Teamwork

2.2.1 Groups and teams

The first particularity we find is the indistinct use of the terms group and team. In literature, we find this indistinct use between group and team on numerous occasions referring to the same concept. The difference resides more in the origin of the use than in the meaning that each author gives it. Thus, the use of the term group is more widely used among researchers and academics when they refer to terms like group cohesion, group dynamism, group development, etc. On the other hand, team is used more by those authors linked to organizational behaviour and to management in general, when they refer to teamwork, team building, team effectiveness, high performance teams, etc.

2.2.2 Definition of team

When an author wants to differentiate between the most simple and general notions of group-like association, of another more concrete for team, he/she usually refers to the degree of cohesion between its members. Carron and Hausenblas define their study groups as two or more individuals with a common identity, with common objectives and goals, that share the same destiny, that show structured interaction patterns and ways of communication. They have common perceptions about the structure of the group, they are personal and instrumentally interdependent, they have reciprocal interpersonal attraction and they consider themselves as a group (Carron & Hausenblas, 1998). Therefore a second important factor appears, as well as cohesion, the common objective. One of the most relevant figures of the Tavistock Institute, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, in his analysis of groups and referring to the common objective, coined the concept of Work Group especially identifying the objective pursued by the group when carrying out specific tasks (Bion, 1991).

A second definition of team is that offered by Jon Katzenbach who defines it as a small number of people with complementary abilities, committed to a common purpose, approach and performance objectives, for which they consider to commonly responsible (Katzenbach & Smith, 1992). In this case, the common purpose inherent to any group has another added dimension, the shared responsibility.

Based on the present text I propose the following definition that has clear contact points with the previous ones:

A team is a small number of interdependent persons that are spontaneously and naturally coordinated, with the motive of a common project, thanks to a feeling of membership resulting from a determined level of cohesion, making decisions based on shared knowledge.

2.2.3 Origins of the teamwork concept

David Buchanan² tells us about the origins of the teamwork concept (Buchanan, 2000). The benefits of an organized collective action had been evident for anybody throughout history, but it was not until the XX century that teamwork came to the attention as a management technique. The benefits of teamwork were identified in the 20s by investigators of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board (IFRB) to reduce boredom and increase results. The effects of work on the mood and on productivity are key elements in the findings of the Hawthorne studies, (Whitehead, 1938) (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).

In spite of everything, the contemporary concept of teamwork appears in the 50s as a consequence of the work of the assessors from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. Later they have been rediscovered by different authors until our days among which we can highlight those related with the movement called Quality of Working Life (QWL) in the 60s and 70s and among them, Richard E. Walton who in the 80s described the difference between control strategy and commitment strategy. The first, oriented towards control, appears at the beginning of the XX century in answer to the division of work in small fixed tasks. The objective of this traditional model is the establishment of an order and exercising a control that assures efficiency.

Frederick W. Taylor was the true father of the model with this scientific management. The commitment strategy appears towards 1980 at the hand of companies like General Motors, General Foods or Procter & Gamble, demonstrating the success of cooperation policies with trade unions. In it, work posts are designed in a larger way, combining planning and implementation to improve operations and not only maintain them. Individual responsibilities change in accord to the changes in work conditions and frequently are the teams, those responsible for the results. With relatively flat hierarchical structures and minimizing difference in status, the coordination and control depend on the shared objectives and it is the experience and knowledge, more than the formal position, that determine the influence.

Under the commitment strategy, the expectation of results is high and serves, not to define minimum standards but rather ambitious objectives capable of emphasizing continuous improvement and of reflecting market demands. Consequently, compensation policies reflect less the old work evaluation formulas and more the importance of the group achievements, the larger scope of individual contribution and the growing importance or questions like balance, the sharing of benefits or shared property (Walton, 1985).

2.2.4 Teamwork characteristics

The students that occasionally participated in the courses defined teamwork as the result of a series of qualities