"The Speed of Collaborative Communities"

I found this http://wiki-management.com/blog/ by searching Twitter. This is a blog dated 15 November 2010.

Rod Collins, the author, talks about horizontal vs vertical - - he is referring to how organizations, well, organize themselves. Some organizations are vertically organized and managed in vertical silos. Others are moving towards a more horizontal alignment where teams of people across verticals work together to solve issues.

That's what we do at work - we solve problems. We come up with solutions. If there were no problems, we wouldn't have jobs.

Take Minnesota State University, for example. This organization solves the problem of education. There are people who want to learn and MSU provides a solution. However, like most educational organizations, MSU is likely vertically organized. There are likely many different educational disciplines, all fighting for funding, all pining for students. Depending on many factors including the economy, marketing effectiveness, political climates, even worldwide events, one discipline may be edging out and may have more students, more funding, than the others.

In the late 80s and early 90s, I remember not being able to get into computer science classes - they were perpetually 'full' - semester after semester, year after year. While all these students were focused on computer science, other disciplines were perhaps suffering from smaller enrollment, less funding. What would happen if the disciplines collaborated horizontally instead of being siloed vertically?

This might mean that the English department and the Physical Education (PE) department collaborate to find a solution to a particular issue. Or maybe they just continue to work on opposite sides of the field, and start to have conversations about resources. Perhaps through horizontal collaboration, the English department finds out there is an Olympic hopeful swimming the Butterfly at the speed of sound who always wanted to write a book about his experiences - but he doesn't know where to begin. At the same time, there may be hundreds of cooped-up, stressed out, burned out English majors in need of some PE outlet. A couple of courses about the physiological makeup of the body might help them learn the importance and benefits of de-stressing.

By collaborating horizontally we find things out about each other that we didn't know before. We find things out that we didn't know that we knew or that we wanted to know. We become richer.