Chief Collaboration Officer? Chief Social Officer? Chief Cognition Officer? Chief Conversation Officer?

Morten T. Hansen and Scott Tapp, Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer?

Companies need an executive responsible for integrating the enterprise — a Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO). Increasingly, companies are embracing collaboration as part of their strategy to grow, by cross-selling products to existing customers and innovating through the recombination of existing technologies. But this won’t work unless employees work effectively across silos — across sales offices, business units, sales, product development, and marketing.

And who’s in charge of such an effort? In most companies today, senior executives are still responsible for their unit — sales, marketing, HR, division A, division B. Yes, they are told to be team players and work with their peers. But that is often not enough. You need someone to look after the whole, by taking a holistic view of what is needed to get employees to work across silos.

You may say, “sure, that’s the CEO’s role.” True. But the CEO cannot afford to spend too much time on it. The CEO needs someone more dedicated to the effort — a Chief Collaboration Officer. So who should that be? We’re not proposing a new person — yet another (expensive) executive in the C-suite.

Calling what goes on when people are connected by social tools to ‘collaboration’ is like calling the experience of going to college ‘studying’. There’s a whole lot more going on.

I completely agree that businesses need to have someone take the horizontal view as various functions and fragments focus each on their own operations. But, collaboration is too narrow a term to characterize what we have learned from the social web, and how it might help integrate the enterprise.

Calling what goes on when people are connected by social tools ‘collaboration’ is like calling the experience of going to college ‘studying’. There’s a whole lot more going on.

I am still strongly in favor of the idea that larger companies should have a full-time C-level executive work on building a social culture. But, again, Chief Collaboration Officer put the emphasis on the wrong aspect of what’s involved.

As the social revolution is being accepted (at last) as the most innovative aspect of the web’s explosion in the last five years, the idea of the social business is gaining ground.

Yes, many of the tools that are emerging in the open social web are collaborative in whole or in part, but many are focused on other aspects of social connection online, like community, crowdsourcing, ecommerce, geolocation, and many others.

I suggest the term Chief Social Officer, therefore.

Hansen and Tapp go on to ask which of the now traditional C-level roles might take on the responsibilities of Chief Collaboration Officer (or in my version, Chief Social Officer).

In some companies, this subsumes the CIO role, because the value of a solid platform for social connection trumps other IT activities. Yes, the company needs accounting, purchasing, sales, marketing, and other IT capabilities, but increasingly these vertical, functional tools need to be integrated into a horizontal, social framework, where people work and connect.

Likewise, the way we work is changing, too, as we adopt new tools. Kenneth Boulding said ‘We make our tools and they shape us,’ and that is perhaps nowhere more true than in the adoption of social tools.

The new normal for business involves the use of streaming communication applications, social media, collaborative intelligence, and sentiment analysis, most of which did not exist five years ago.

The business world now has grasped the power of network effects: that the value of a network grows exponentially with the number of nodes or users increases. That is business 101 nowadays.

With the empirical evidence from open social networks, business is moving quickly to apply the network effect to people-based business operations. But actually digging into the social dimension upends some conventional, industrial era assumptions. For example, recent research has shown that that raw intelligence is not the most critical factor in group productivity. Adding a highly intelligent person to a group involved in a difficult task does not increase the likelihood that the task will be accomplished. It turns out, according to Anita Wooley of CMU:

What mattered instead was the social sensitivity of individual members, the proportion of women (who tend to be more sensitive) in each group, and a balanced participation of conversation.

So the capability of a group to assimilate a challenge, and effectively respond to it — or, social cognition — depends on many factors, and less on individual IQ than we might assume. And anything that can increase social sensitivity — either through demographic balancing of groups, or tools or training to help balance conversation — will benefit the company’s resilience and rapport.

So perhaps it should be Chief Cognition Officer? A senior executive that puts practices and technologies in place to make the company smarter? Maybe bridging IT and HR functions?

I am sure these musings won’t make an impact on the mainstream readers of the Harvard Business Review, who are conservative as cats, and most likely to accept the Chief Collaboration Officer idea and title, and reluctantly at that.

But then, they haven’t come full circle to the deepest understanding of network effects: that knowledge, reason, and values are emergent properties of social systems, of people connected. As David Weinberger once said, ‘There are no smart people, only smart conversations.’ And a business is best considered as a network of conversations, as Gregory Bateson observed, way back in the ’60s.

Maybe Chief Conversation Officer?