HQW Do Writers Really Collaborate?

Writers begin to collaborate when they go beyond compromise, democracy, and cooperation to work directly together, USing ekC- tronic tools for support, but, for best results, employing our full range of emotional and social perceptions, in direct h u m a n

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Context

I and several partners have spent more than six years learning to collaborate with each other as we created manuals, demos, and online help for companies such as Apple, Canon, Claris, Fujitsu, GO, and an alphabet soup of startups. We have done this under real deadlines, with real products. We were not in a Freshman Composi- tion class, or a lab being tested; we had to deliver.

Our aim was to pool our talents, to work together on planning, outlining, writing, and production, so that the end product would reflect more perspectives, fewer unconscious mistakes, a better structure, and a more polished surface than documentation we had produced before, working as individuals on a team.

We discovered that to attain that aim we had to outgrow our tendencies to settle for compromise, democracy, and mere cooperation.

Beyond Compromise, Democ

In a compromise, both sides give up something they sought, and sometimes build in mutual checks and balances, so the result is less than ideal, often self-contradictory, and sometimes downright fusing. In collaborating, you don’t give up, you argue things out U

you really reach agreement.

Compromise, then, is a bargain, a deal, a contract in which both sides give up part of what they want in order to get something that’s not really the best they could get, or the ideal, but is OK.

Outside forces sometimes force a team to compromise. But within the team, if you want to collaborate, you cannot proceed by a series of compromises; you have to give your all, and not hold back.

Collaborative teams, when they work, do not proceed by democratic vote, either. They struggle to reach full consensus, even though that takes longer than voting.

Unlike Congress, writers working together collaboratively cannot afford to harbor secret reservations that show up later in footdragging, passive resistance, and confusion. When we do manage to go beyond compromise and democracy, the results show a noticeable integra- tion: all the pieces fit together.

We have to go beyond cooperation, too. When we cooperate, we work together, but we each produce and, at least psychologically, own our own product. We retain our separate styles, we can usually identify’lwhat we d i d and”what they d i d in the final product, and, significantly, we retreat to our own rooms for much of our work.

y , and Cooperation

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Cooperating leaves us independent. For instance, you write one chapter, and I edit it lightly; then I write a different chapter, and you edit it lightly. We keep our distance; you’re in charge of your chapter, and I’m in charge of mine. We negotiate changes, we suggest things, as delicately as we can, and then live with whatever the other person does. We do not, really, merge our best thoughts in every part of the

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work. That very independence, I think, often leaves the documenta- tion uneven, partly undigested, not thoroughly thought through, perhaps even chaotic in patches.

Much of what goes under the name of Computer-Supported Collabo- rative Work actually just aids cooperation: improving electronic mail to everyone on the team, creating schedules together, editing each other’s work quickly and efficiently.

Cooperating means we can continue, subtly or not, to compete with each other, making our own “individual contribution,” earning our own merit raises, building our personal resumes.

Collaborating means working together so thoroughly that you no longer own any part, any chapter, any sentence. You laugh at a joke, and someone else points out that you were the one who came up with it in the first place. You forget who did what, and instead of protect- ing your own turf, you put your efforts into improving what you are delivering to customers.

But you have to work together in person. You have to see the other people, sense what they are thinking, in order to move forward together. To keep from getting bogged down, you have to be able to interact quickly (picking up the other person’s cues, responding immediately) and you have to turn down the noise (resistance, inability to articulate ideas in the task domain, pet peeves, distrac- tions). Such speed and efficiency depend on direct human contact. All intervening media, even the ones with the highest bandwidth, slow down the interaction, because they filter out what we can perceive in a second, when together. Real time, in this case, is the speed at which two people can interact in person; everything else is just time delay, and too many little slowdowns result in massive frustration, and people refusing to participate further.

So the best collaboration takes place in person, with direct contact, where you can see the other person’s expression, hear the tone of voice, stop in mid phrase, interrupt by waving your hand. After talking directly, an online conference seems like marching through a swamp in the dark, using typed messages to guide your steps.

But you don’t have to work together in person the whole time. Plenty of work can still be done solo. But crucial decisions must get made together. For instance, you might collaborate to reach agreement on the main forms of access to help, and then ask the graphics person to come up with drafts of navigation buttons, to be discussed in depth at next meeting, tested, critiqued, bashed around, and redone by all. There’s still a role for the individual coming up with the broad strokes of a new idea, bringing it in to go over in detail with team, without owning it, protecting it, and preserving it from modification.

The Role of Tools

We can lay the foundation for collaboration with convivial tools, and sociable routines. As suggested by Ivan Illich, in Took for Convivi- ali ty, a convivial tool is one that lets you use it to add meaning and design to your work, whereas an unconvivial tool is one that forces you to follow its quirks, bend to its will, and submit to its conven- tions, no matter what, (“Type Y or N”), in order to wheedle out asmall transaction, such as booking an airline ticket.

The new tools make more collaboration easier, but do not guarantee a thing. Groupware products help disseminate information quickly among team members, routing and filtering the flow, managing the MB 9.4/461

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flow of work through devices such as version control and document management, providing an environment for conferencing among people who are not physically meeting together, setting up a sched- ule for the whole team. Helpful as they are, such products reveal an assumption that people are going to be in different locations. In that sense, these products encourage cooperation, and, at best, support the people who need to communicate well between actual periods of collaboration. For instance, some programs make it possible for each person to control the other’s screen. That’s a start. But it’s not the same as working together, in person.

Ironically, the tool we found served us best for collaborative work, in person, was an outlining program. An outlining program lets you focus on alternative structures (gestalts) of the material. You can quickly create one snapshot of the Number One Heads; then switch to a different structure, while the other remains in mind; so you can compare two possible structures quickly. This process is very differ- ent from the gradual accretion of topics that most of us go through when developing an outline from scratch, by ourselves. Just as the invention of spreadsheets encouraged MBA’s to try out all kinds of what-if scenarios, outlining software lets youtry out various phrasings for headings, various organizations, discarding one, trying another, without wasting the time you’d spend, in a word processor, cutting and pasting, then reformatting.

Large screen displays are another “accidental” tool they enable the whole team to see the ongoing development of the outline or text, so they can participate fully. You see your idea put into position immediately, and you can critique it, see it from a distance, look at it in context, accept someone else’s suggestion, and go on. That’s very different from the kind of markup you do in a paper-based review meeting when someone comments on the structure of a chapter, and you write a note to look at structure later, and then go back to your Herman Miller partition to consider the possibility. Sitting around a large screen, with one person acting as recording secretary, or people passing the keyboard back and forth, each person can make suggestions, see the effect, examine structure all at one level, go down to depths, come up, even compare drafts.

In general there is little support for real face-to-face collaboration. Most so-called collaboration is asynchronous, sequential, and dis- tant: one person finishes a draft in one office, sends it to another person elsewhere in the company, that person reads it alone, and sends back comments for the author to consider or &scard. Leslie Olsen, who interviewed 125 authors of National Science Foundation proposals, says that “the technology has not provided to collabora- tors anything close to the degree of interchange, stimulation, and speed accomplished by people working together in the same room.”

Such environments put much more stress on language and intellect, screening out the contributions that can be made by full human interaction. Under such stress, language often becomes purple- cheeked, exaggerated, or overblunt, and cryptic. As in so many of the early computerization projects, what’s lost is human subtlety, socia- bility, speed, and substantive forward progress. So I urge developers to create more tools for face-to-face work.

Sociable Routines

In addition to better tools, you have to agree on routines that help everyone work together in person, and at a distance. You need to agree to work out your schedules, and rearrange meetings, so that

there are big blocks of time during which you can all get together. (This seems easy, but causes lots of cries and whispers of protest). You need to work out who will record and how; for instance, do different people take over a single keyboard, or do you all have access to the same screen? You need to develop consistent ap- proaches to filenames, version control, templates, styleguides, all the mechanisms that keep you from losing a draft in a black hole.

The key is regular meetings, with full debriefings, so no one squirrels information away, or postpones fessing up to some problem. Unlike a conventional “team meeting” in which everyone reports progress, collaborative meetings take a problem-solving approach, to take up the question, and solve it, within the meeting. Yes, that takes longer. But the product is better.

Conclusion

The best collaboration involves direct observation of the other person, listening to what is said, challenging it immediately, arguing to a real conclusion, and observing, as well, all the nonverbal cues to monitor the ongoing emotional and social agreements. Instead of encouraging our culture’s trend toward increasing personal isola- tion, we should make it easy (and efficient as a business activity) to work side by side. To collaborate, you just have to be there together.

DUIN, Ann Hill Computer-Supported Collaborative Writing: The Workplace and the Writing Classroom Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 5:2 April 1991 ILLICH, Ivan Tools for Conviviality Berkeley, CA 1977

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