The Evolution of Collaboration

The idea of collaboration has become increasingly uncertain. Will we collaborate with people in an office, sometimes under duress, as managers unsure about their ability to drive results to enact policies that force people to return to the office, often with a threat to their future promotions and wage increases? Will we collaborate with people remotely, leveraging the opportunity to expand the knowledge and experience along with geographic and temporal diversity to create innovation opportunities through increased serendipity? We will collaborate not just with humans but with intelligent agents that offer information, interpretation, clarification, and perhaps innovation within the framework of traditional collaborative activities like brainstorming.

The fact is, we already collaborate in all of those ways. The world is complex, and from moment to moment, job to job, we experience collaboration in different ways. Collaboration has always been a catch-all term that covers all of the ways humans and work together. If we are honest, we have collaborated with non-humans for millennia, as we worked with horses and oxen to plow fields and carry heavy loads, used birds to deliver messages, and employed cetaceans as weapons.

Artificial intelligence is another dot along a continuum of ways humans leverage other intelligences, often by crafting technology that transforms their inherent abilities into more valuable skills that we can apply. In the case of AI, we have repurposed computers, once the purview of pure logic, and taught them not how to process data differently but how to use their processing power to anticipate our needs based on the questions we ask, how to craft near human responses to queries that offer answers mundane and productive.

Artificial intelligence will not eliminate humans from the collaborative equation. AI has no yearning or motivation to strive to inspire, no desire to embark on adventures, to challenge convention or to craft something new. Left on its own, without human intervention and nurturing, AI would be inert. It only achieves anything because we ask it to achieve.

AI research strives to emulate the human brain, to capture the magic of synapses and neurons, the chemical-electrical pulses that fire through them, and the reconfigurations that happen every second of every day as we experience, reflect and remember.

Artificial intelligence does not mirror individual intelligence but collective knowledge. It may now run tasks classified as unsupervised learning, but the results of that learning often require human intervention to correct misinterpretations, to fill in gaps that lead it to wildly speculate about things that do not exist in a knowledge base, and to curtail them from reflecting back our biases, and our darkest impulses.

Tools like TeamBrain allow humans to explore our mental maps, organize and debate, dive deep when necessary, and note passing thoughts that we leave for another time. TeamBrain allows us to visualize multi-dimensional relationships between ideas and concepts that more accurately reflect our complex world than do documents, spreadsheets, or linear narratives coming from chatbots.

Teams need a place to call home. That place is not a water cooler or an office. It is not an ephemeral virtual whiteboard, a collection of mail inboxes, or a Salesforce Slack or Microsoft Teams channel. It is not to be found in the punctuated day of Zoom or Webex meetings. Teams need a place that can root their curiosity and support the retention of the ideas they present themselves or how they may relate to one another.

Teams need a place that reflects their collective intelligence, drives value through serendipity, provides value anywhere and everywhere, does not require coding or APIs to deliver on its promise, has access to AI when needed, and can be shared globally at the click of a mouse.