Building a collaborative workplace - Anecdote

Description

Today we face an entirely new environment for innovation and getting things done. The days of the lone genius quietly toiling away in pursuit of that Eureka moment to revolutionise an industry are all but over. We are now in the days of asking and listening to our customers and working with them in our innovation cycles. Innovation demands collaboration. So does production. In the past we could focus on a single task in an assembly-line fashion, handing our completed activity to the next person who would in turn do the same, until the job was finished. Now the jobs change fast, requiring learning new skills rather than merely repeating the old. We have to seek out people who have other pieces of the puzzle and work with them to tackle increasingly complex issues at a much faster pace.

In November 2002, a large number of atypical pneumonia cases occurred in Guangdong Province, China. By July 2003, just seven months later, this new virus, known as SARS, had infected over 8,000 people in 26 countries and resulted in 774 deaths. China’s initial reluctance to share information is considered a significant factor in the rapid spread of the disease and the initial failure to control its spread. In March 2003, when it became obvious that SARS represented a global crisis, a network of 11 leading laboratories in nine countries formed to collaborate in identifying the cause of SARS and how to combat it. The network was connected by a shared website, email and daily teleconferences to identify the SARS coronavirus. Research was shared in near real-time. Within one month, this international collaboration was able to discover the new coronavirus that caused SARS and swiftly complete the genetic sequencing of the pathogen. It had taken the international community three years to ...

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