The Collaboratory® is an IBSAIL designed system which is installed into a client organization to enhance intellectual capital. The Collaboratory has a physical location within the organization. It's staff's mandate is to stimulate, nurture, and support personnel and organizational creativity, innovation, and imagination. (As Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge.") The staff utilizes processes such as Strategic Gaming, Scenarios, Mindmapping, and tools such as the Growth Through Space and Time Matrix-Maps© to facilitate innovative solutions and proactive planning within the organization. The IBSAIL system assists the organization in becoming a creative and collaborative learning culture. Intellectual capital is the primary engine which makes organizations' financial capital, capital equipment, and natural capital more valuable, and the organization profitable and successful. Intellectual capital is underutilized and often stifled by the corporate culture. IBSAIL's programs assist in unleashing the creativity and innovation which lie dormant within organizations.

Relational Organizational Diagram

Collaboratory Mandate

Establishment of a Collaboratory

Collaboratory Operations

The establishment of a Collaboratory® within any business or organization establishes a center which acts as a birthplace for creativity, innovation and transformation and creates breakthrough paradigms, processes and structures for the successful navigation of organizational chaos and change. A Collaboratory is an evolutionary design studio based on organic models of natural systems, a business, a natural and social science workshop, and a communications center which assists an entire enterprise in becoming a Masterful Organization™.

Since the 1920's, the strategy of diversification, supported by stringent planning and control systems and based on division, provided the basic foundation for organizations of all types. Though this strategy worked well for many years, its effectiveness has been deteriorated due to global changes in markets, technology and competition. The daily work of the average employee has become highly fragmented. The means by which many organizations have attempted to solve the problems created by major change such as "reengineering", "inversion of the organizational pyramid", "employee empowerment", and "stretch targets" address the effects of the problems but do not address the problems at a causal level. An article in Fortune Magazine states that, "Executives are recognizing that incremental goals, however worthy, invite managers and workers to perform the same comfortable processes a little better every year. The all-too-frequent result: mediocrity ", and "many companies now perceive that they must perform far better to prosper - or even, in the long term, to survive." One industry leader is quoted as saying that "If you don't demand something out of the ordinary, you won't get anything but ordinary results." The creation of a Collaboratory within an organization reflects a major shift in the thinking and behavior of organizational leadership.

Depending upon the size of the organization, availability of space and other pertinent considerations, the Collaboratory has a physical location within an organization and is properly designed and supplied for enhanced creativity, productivity and communication. At least one person within the organization holds the responsibility for managing and staffing the Collaboratory and works within the Collaboratory full time. Ideally, three people act as the balancing legs within the Collaboratory. These Collaboratory leaders must be highly creative individuals who are mature learners, excellent facilitators, possess good interpersonal and listening skills, understand the power of the "union of differences," and have a profound ability to instinctively recognize patterns and new knowledge. They will facilitate training throughout the corporate culture with respect to creative thinking and problem solving skills, communication skills and evolutionary visioning processes. Their work will facilitate the organization's ability to project creative and innovative thinking into the future, allowing the organization to constantly transform. Smaller organizations with staff and space restrictions will create a Collaboratory in more "virtual" ways, with all organizational participants filling varied roles as they create a highly synergistic, flowing collaborative environment.

One of the most prevalent misconceptions, occurring largely unconsciously in organizational thinking today, is that, due to a global paradigm "shift", transformation is a "big job", a "large leap" which needs to occur in order for an organization to survive and thrive in a changed world, and that once that transformation has occurred, everyone can relax and all will be well. The greater reality is that the paradigm "shift" is, in fact, a paradigm "expansion" which requires that human beings and the organizations they create become willing and able to view transformation as an on-going process, not as an occasional product.. The Collaboratory serves as a core from which continual organizational learning, creativity and innovation constantly support personal and organizational transformation which, in turn, nourishes the organization and its participants and sews the seeds for ongoing growth, change and prosperity. Thus, creative change and transformation lose the onerous, stressful connotation so common today, and become a safe and normal way of living a more exciting, productive, fulfilling life.

The organization will benefit enormously by having as many employees as possible participate in the workings of the Collaboratory. Collaborative participation will create, in a short time, the very real potential for the growth of a learning culture and will provide a process/structure for cross-pollinization of information, knowledge and transformative ability. According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Revue on the subject of the changing role of top management, senior managers of today's successful enterprises are "less concerned with controlling employees' behavior than with developing their capabilities and broadening their perspectives" and "have moved beyond the old doctrine of strategy, structure and systems to a softer, more organic model built on the development of purpose, process and people." Because Collaboratory leadership recognizes that there are multiple creative intelligences in addition to core competencies and a need for personal fulfillment, individual members of the organization will become much more empowered within their own spheres of influence and responsibility and will become more creative and valuable to themselves and to the organization, thus increasing corporate intellectual capital.

The Collaboratory is a communications center, sending and receiving information to and from all parts of the organization and is responsible for facilitating an organization--wide learning culture. As the connecting bridge within the organization between and among management, teams, and all organizational members, the Collaboratory facilitates creative alliances within the organization. Time and space are collapsed by the use of information technology, creating a new corporate form, the Virtual Organization™. According to Samuel Bleecker in an article from The Futurist , these new corporations "will increasingly be defined not by concrete walls or physical space, but by collaborative networks linking hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people together."

The Collaboratory also facilitates creative strategic alliances with individuals and entities outside of the organization. The rigid structures of yesterday's world are giving way to life in "virtual space." Boundaries between nations are dissolving, as are boundaries between organizations, institutions, governments and individuals. Organizations are becoming ever more "invisible," virtual, transitory - evolving and changing each day.

One of the reasons that the United States' corporations are having trouble in the global marketplace is that they have not yet become capable of mentally and imaginatively architecting for themselves a new role and place in the virtual territory of a global business culture. How do people, including executives, re-image their organizations and their own participation in the new "virtual space" when their mental constructs are still mired in the mind-set of the Industrial Revolution? Due to their "expanded window" of understanding and vision, Collaboratory leaders and participants have an ability to assist in the creation of virtual enterprises, collaborative, integritous relationships, which are innovative, productive and beneficial to everyone involved and which generate a value-added component to the new products and services born of collaborative participation. In an article for the Harvard Business Revue, Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls this "a company's collaborative advantage" and goes on to say that "in the global economy, a well-developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive leg up", that these collaborations "are living systems that evolve progressively in their possibilities. Beyond the immediate reasons they (corporations)have for entering into a relationship, the connection offers the parties an option on the future, opening new doors and unforeseen opportunities." She also states that "in every case, a business relationship is more than just the deal. It is connection between otherwise independent organizations that can take many forms and contains the potential for additional collaboration. It is a mutual agreement to continue to get together; thus its value includes the potential for a stream of opportunities."

As organizational leadership changes its behaviors and belief systems, its priorities and ways of thinking, and as Collaboratories proliferate throughout organizational, institutional and governmental cultures, the vastly increased learning and transfer of information will create transformed environments in which collaborative intelligence and creativity lead to the creation of new knowledge and understanding which leads to human and organizational fulfillment and wisdom. This will result in a greater sense of collaborative partnership, relationship, connection and community, all of which increase profitability, promote more effective communication, increase morale, create more comprehensive product and service design, and ease the inherent difficulties of managing organizations, particularly during periods of chaos and rapid change.

The establishment of a Collaboratory within an organization and the subsequent rewards of collaborative learning, exploration and production give birth to Masterful Organizations, vastly enlarged arenas of human fulfillment and productivity in which the creation of prosperity and a strong sense of purpose lead to a view of transformation and change as a natural, continuous, productive, friendly and stimulating adventure. Thus, this adaptive methodology, installed within corporate America, continually gives birth to Masterful Organizations™ and results in enhanced abilities to function in the global marketplace.

The Institute for Business and Social Architecture International, Ltd. is available for consultation to assist in the design and implementation of a Collaboratory® within a client corporation.

Masterful Organizations is a trademark of the Institute for Business & Social Architecture International, Ltd.

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