What a Restaurant Can Teach You About CollaborationWhat a Restaurant Can Teach You About Collaboration

For better or worse, collaboration is a fluid concept, and the value comes as much from how the associated technologies are used as how you think about it. Collaboration can be a linear process with clear beginning and ending points, but it’s just as likely to be organic, spontaneous, or ad hoc. Workers don’t think about collaboration in binary terms, as in “I’m collaborating now, but I won’t be in five minutes.” At the moment, workers don’t have quotas for how much time they must spend collaborating, but of course, that could change.

Businesses are generally risk-averse, but ambiguity has its virtues, and that certainly applies to collaboration. If collaboration was being driven entirely by IT’s vision and/or what the incumbent vendors deem to be the solution, UC would be the universal standard, and workers would have to adapt to it. Of course, we’ve been down this road before with telephony and the world of proprietary PBXs that defined voice communications in the workplace for decades.

The Tyranny of Legacy Thinking

That all changed with VoIP, and it’s fair to say we’re better off due to the innovation that opened up new applications for voice beyond what legacy telephony could provide. The story is the same with collaboration; the conventional thinking begat UC, which provided a better way to collaborate but has never been the ideal solution for all needs. Thinking differently doesn’t require throwing out the old and starting all over. Rather, it starts with listening and watching what people are doing, and then discarding what isn’t helpful, then adding new pieces that are.

Incumbent UC vendors were, for the most part, too heavily invested in telephony to adopt that approach. Coming back to the fluid nature of collaboration, however, new entries like Slack could do that. By thinking about workplace challenges differently, and applying today’s tools to today’s collaboration needs, Slack has adopted a different set of technologies. Slack is not out to bury UC -- it doesn’t pretend to offer a direct replacement -- instead it has focused on a different problem set that falls along the collaboration spectrum.

Further to that, there’s a point of caution here for IT decision-makers. The caveat for collaboration being so fluid is that it can be difficult to tell what the vendors are selling. In the case of Slack, its post-IPO success will ride heavily on Enterprise Grid, and its ability to generate enterprise-grade revenues from enterprise customers. Enterprises spend a lot of money with incumbent vendors around UC because they have genuine needs around collaborative teamwork.

That’s the mindset Slack needs to resonate with, but its approach so far has been closer to what’s needed for workflows and streamlining processes. This is another form of collaboration, and favors a different mix of applications than what enterprise workers typically use with UC. These aren’t quite apples-to-apples comparisons, and IT decision-makers need to discern which use cases are best for UC-style solutions, and which align better with offerings like Slack.

Moving on, Slack’s recent Frontiers conference led to many interesting takeaways, and I’ve got one here that exemplifies what I’m getting at in this post. It would be easy to talk about success stories with enterprise customers, but since Slack is an outlier of sorts, much better is to showcase a very different type of customer. Knowledge workers arguably represent the biggest and best use case, but collaboration is equally important for many other scenarios.

Click below to continue reading: What a 3-Star Michelin restaurant uses to collaborate

Y’know, Restaurants Have Collaboration Too

One of the highlights from Frontiers was with the sit-down chat between NPR’s Guy Raz and chef Kyle Connaughton of SingleThread Farms. What could a restaurant possibly have to do with collaboration, you may ask? That was my initial take, but there’s a reason -- many really -- why Slack has been so successful , and this example is one of them.

I love cooking, but don’t have the Sonoma wine country pedigree to know about gems like this. As we learned, SingleThread Farms is one of only 15 Michelin 3-star restaurants in the U.S., and it’s now on my bucket list. Foodie heaven aside, this lofty perch is central to my writeup, because when you’re this good, your collaboration tools better be as well. That said, this has little to do with the technology, and everything to do with the outcomes that are a big part of the 3-star experience.

Without getting into the weeds, SingleThread takes the farm-to-table dining model to another level, and it’s not just about the food. Of course, the food is paramount, and Kyle explained the bigger concept where SingleThread isn’t just a restaurant, but also an onsite farm where much of the food is grown, and an inn for those who want a more immersive experience. At the risk of this becoming a travelogue, the vision shared by Kyle and his wife Katina is to provide an authentic, unique, and highly-personalized dining experience that goes beyond anything you’ve ever seen.

That’s the promise, and Slack plays a pretty key role in delivering it. No doubt Kyle could have gone on much longer with Guy, but here are some great examples to consider.

Think about all the things that could go wrong here without the right tools. You could still have a good dining experience, but it won’t be 3-star. There’s an endless amount of orchestration going on here, and the SingleThread team does it day in and day out. Unlike the workplace, where collaboration is one part of your day, the routine here must be sustained without fail.

Whatever technology is being used, the bar is very high, and to me, SingleThread is a great validation for Slack’s vision. As noted, Slack may call this collaboration, but it’s really about workflows and processes. The staff -- team, really -- at SingleThread performs so well mainly because these workflows are the job, and it’s the same every day. Is this a form of collaboration? Absolutely, but it’s different from how it’s defined based on what UC vendors are selling. As such, references to SingleThread being “collaboration” should be taken with a grain of salt -- that’s fair -- but more importantly, IT decision-makers need to take a critical view of how vendors are positioning their offerings in this space.

Click below to continue to next page: What can enterprises learn from this?

That aside, what can enterprises learn from this? I’ve got three quick thoughts.

1. Focus on the outcomes not the technology

Collaboration takes many forms, and it’s too easy to define it based on the technologies being used. A telephony-centric platform will produce one type of collaboration, while a video-centric platform will produce something different. Slack’s raison d’etre is to be the hub that integrates an endless stream of applications, and end users will cherry-pick what’s best for the task at hand.

More importantly, the takeaway is to start with the end in mind and work backwards to support the collaboration efforts needed to produce that outcome. With SingleThread, the objective is for diners to have a relaxing experience, and everything that goes on around them needs to be -- and appear -- effortless. Again, in collaboration parlance, that means removing friction from processes.

2. Understand processes, then identify the tools

Meticulous attention to detail is a big part of being a 3-star experience; the above examples just hint at what the end-to-end process entails. Workflows in the office are no different, and when the various steps and tasks are clearly delineated, it becomes much easier to determine which applications are needed. As mentioned earlier, take what you need, and discard what you don’t. Just because a UC platform supports dozens of applications, you don’t need to use them all.

High-performing teams have figured this out, and they’ll know better than IT what the right mix is based on the need or process. Success with collaboration solutions shouldn’t be predicated on having the greatest number of workers using the greatest number of applications. SingleThread seems to operate like a well-oiled machine, and nobody is talking about wasting time with emails, playing phone tag, or showcasing their multichannel skills. They’re using the right tools for job -- nothing more, nothing less.

3. Keep the technology transparent so workers can use creativity when collaborating

This was a key message that Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stressed at Frontiers. At SingleThread, Slack is just there in the background, enabling these real-time communications flows that tie all the pieces together. You wouldn’t normally connect that to foragers roaming the forest floor, but this creative approach to using technology to organically improve processes and workflows reflects what Slack is all about.

During Frontiers, Stewart talked about how “people don’t know they need Slack,” and that the “big challenge is finding alignment that turns groups into teams.” It’s worth noting that Slack is just one of many enablers that SingleThread uses to get those outcomes, but workers aren’t focused on Slack itself, or trying to adapt their workstyles to fit the platform.

Just as they work as a team to bring all the right ingredients together for a great dining experience, Slack makes it easy for them to use the right applications for a great collaboration experience. That’s how Slack sees collaboration, where technology empowers workers “to become stakeholders,” as Stewart said at Frontiers.

Enterprises don’t behave this way as a matter of course, but Slack’s success clearly indicates there’s an appetite to start thinking this way. If this sounds like something your enterprise should be doing, my advice would be for your team to make a booking for SingleThread to experience this firsthand, and tell them Jon sent you. Better yet, save me a seat.