Stimulate the commitment of your market intelligence community 1/3

Collaborative practice must formulate and deliver a collective and an individual promise.

If you're coordinating a collaborative project - especially a collaborative intelligence project - you may well have been faced with the difficulty of engaging your various collaborators and getting them to contribute. And yet that's the whole point of such an approach: to encourage the opening up of collective intelligence and thus develop the contribution of each individual, with a view to enriching the group as a whole. The problem is that collaboration cannot be imposed. If you're coordinating a cross-functional team, it may even be counter-productive, if not impossible, for you to exert authority.

The difficulty is that collaborative intelligence gives rise to an injunction: ‘give in order to receive’. Give of your time, your expertise, your knowledge, to receive in exchange the fruits of collective enrichment and cross-fertilisation of knowledge. A tempting vision, but in reality, unless you are forced to do so (by objectives imposed by a manager, for example), collaborating on another person's project is a reflex that has yet to be developed.

In fact, in order to exist and endure, collaborative practice must formulate and keep two promises, which can be summed up as follows: ‘I contribute because it is useful to me and helps us to progress’.

1. A collective promise, projecting a vision of a ‘better common future’ in which every employee and the community of employees are drawn upwards, and which encourages us to improve the way we conduct each of our businesses for the benefit of collective efficiency.
2. An individual promise that leads me to circulate, share and combine the resources at my disposal with a group of colleagues, so that in return I can, at my own level, reap my own benefits: saving time, finding solutions to my problems, supporting my ideas and projects, and even enhancing my own status within my organisation.

Collaborate and enrich your market intelligence

Let's set the scene.

You are in charge of monitoring a topic of interest to your company, with the aim of producing deliverables with usable and operational content. This may involve newsletters, competitor fact sheets, benchmarks or exhaustive analyses of your market. Your monitoring perimeter is therefore potentially vast, and your expertise may not cover all the areas you monitor.

That's quite normal, and it's not prohibitive.

To achieve your objectives, you have set up a collaborative monitoring system, in which you rely on other contributors: monitors from your direct team, or even colleagues you have identified in other teams. They will be able to provide you with their specific expertise and enhance the relevance of your content.

These contributors may include an account manager specialising in a particular sector and certain key customers of your company, or a marketing manager with in-depth knowledge of a particular product or service category, or a strategic analyst with a thorough understanding of the challenges facing your company and its markets. Basically, depending on the scope of your intelligence project, many of your organisation's business lines are likely to collaborate on it, enrich it and derive their own benefits from it.

Finally, ideally, you have a collaborative intelligence platform that enables you to automate the collection of information, while facilitating its qualification and the interaction between contributors.

By the way, if you're reading this article, you probably already know that EspritsCollaboratifs is the publisher of Curebot, the first monitoring platform specifically designed to support collaborative monitoring and analysis within companies. If not, you can discover it here and even request a demo!

But cooperation is not something that can be imposed: it has to be encouraged, brought to life and given meaning for everyone involved.

Under these conditions, everything seems to be in place for your collaborative intelligence to shed light on your company's key issues.

But sometimes the machine breaks down. No matter how powerful your tool, its deployment is not a sufficient condition for the success of your collaborative intelligence. Taking the human element into account remains essential, and if your contributors are not sufficiently committed to your project, the promises of collaborative intelligence may be in vain.

‘I don't have the time to contribute’, ‘I've forgotten to do my monitoring’, ‘I don't know how to qualify information’, ‘I don't see the point of sharing the results of my monitoring’... The reasons put forward by your employees for not contributing can be numerous.

To ensure the success of your collaborative project, it's essential to take the human element into account.

This certainly doesn't explain everything, but it's highly likely that your contributors didn't understand the value of your project, either for your company or for themselves.

Bear in mind that a team community, a collaborative project, cannot be decreed; it has to be built, stimulated and maintained.

At EspritsCollaboratifs, we use a number of methods and tricks to increase the commitment of contributors to a collaborative watch.

Here are just a few of them.

Over the coming weeks, you'll find our articles dedicated to stimulating contributions within a collaborative watch. We'll be taking a closer look at some of the leadership practices that can help you maintain the momentum around your project. In particular, we'll look at actions designed to set the benchmarks for your project: you'll need to show each stakeholder in your watch the benefits they can expect to derive from it, the associated objectives and, of course, the rules of the game for engaging contributors.