Communicating is not collaborating

I was at an interesting experience-sharing event last week where the speaker popped up "Collaboration Tools" on the screen. Whenever I see collaboration my neurons start to fire because I believe this is the key to successful team performance.

And so I was paying full attention when he explained that in his organization, many of the younger employees were steering away from email but using the "collaboration tools" Line or WhatsApp pretty much all the time. And that's when my neurons went in overdrive. Do business leaders really believe that Line or WhatsApp, or emails for that matter, are evidence of collaboration ? It is maybe useful to distinguish communication from collaboration ...

Communication is exchanging information. With modern tools, I can communicate with 100s of people at the same time. But getting a "read" message in Line or WhatsApp does not mean anything but that. It does not mean "I received your message and will act on it". So although Line and WhatsApp may be cooler than email, not much has really changed.

Collaboration is when people work together to a common objective. And that does not work with 100s of people, and although communication is important, it is very different from collaboration. Collaboration requires people to be really connected and for things to actually get done.

If Line were a collaboration tool, there would be loads of great collaboration going on all the time, most of it on the BTS skytrain system in the morning. Exchanging information is good but don't confuse this for things actually getting done.