Innovation Jam 2008 has been a massive exercise in network collaboration staged this week by IBM over 72 continuous hours when the sun didn't set. To give an idea of scale, after 55 hours (which coincided with my third jam session) it had attracted over 58,000 logins and almost 20,000 “posts” - roughly four times what this blog has attracted in a year.

The basics of the event were that individuals from all over the world could register and participate in the world’s largest staged continuous discussion on four primary themes (Built for Change, Customers as Partners, Globally Integrated, and The Planet and Its People). Let’s call it the online global equivalent of K-Rudd’s 2020 Summit that was held in Canberra back in April. 

While a large percentage of the participants were internal IBM’ers there was certainly no shortage of end-user participants from corporate and government organisations throughout Asia, Europe, North America and Canada.

The premise was simple. Either start a conversation thread relevant to one of the above topics or respond to someone else’s. Beyond that, and a few rules on attribution and solicitation, and jammers were largely left to their own devices.

Of course, at times, if you thought about it too hard it did have that eerie feeling of white-coated technicians in Armonk or Boston looking at us from behind one-way glass to see if we would actually breed when put in the same room together. But, knowing that it was essentially experimental collaborative research in motion you tended to turn a blind eye and just get on with the job.

Part ideas factory and part chaos theory, my impression of Innovation Jam has been largely positive. It went a long way to highlighting the potential of networked collaboration that I most recently wrote about in One wiki to rule them all. But it also raised new lines of thinking for me about what actually happens when organisations turn new collaborative tools on themselves.

Based on my own efforts, I had made 12 posts after 2 visits which by the time I’d come back on day 3 still seemed to be a reasonable effort. Some people had posted over 30 times, most under 5. About half of my posts had received responses from the network and one had even been chosen by the Innovation Jam gods as a “hot topic”.

Whenever I go to a multi-day conference I don’t try to walk away with 20 insights. Two or three is generally enough. In that vein, here are three valuable lessons I learned from Innovation Jam 2008.

Lesson 1: Be one of the first to post. Unbroken conversation threads are great for browsers but challenging for collaborators. The network had spoken. No one was interested in about half of what I had to say and a few were really interested in some of what I had to say. It was also apparent that being the one to start a conversation “thread” meant that you were more likely to get a true reaction of your ideas. Why? After time there was just so much posted content that data mining discussion threads was a real conversation killer. Well, maybe it is fairer to say that all that content is great if you are just “browsing” but a little time consuming if you want to contribute.

Lesson 2: There is a point of diminishing returns in limitless discussion threads. Really long threads started to turn into Chinese whispers (no pun intended). That is, after 10 or 20 posts I found that the discussion had gone off topic and lost value. 

Lesson 3: Rhetoric and anecdotes lose their meaning without a physical storyteller. Both language and cultural nuances are a major challenge to collaborating across the borderless enterprise and as an analyst, so much of my collaboration and communication with customers essentially hangs on clear and concise descriptive story telling. While it was an incredible experience to jam with people from all over the world, simple linguistic and communication exercises such as rhetorical questioning (posing a thought as a question without necessarily seeking a position) were ineffective. For example, I posted a few "rhetorical" questions that were taken literally by the network - and therefore missed the point. For example, I posed the question “As an organisational tool I've tried to define the composition of a virtual environment. Any suggestions?” in an effort to engage some discussion on common understandings and application of virtual environments, only to receive responses telling me it’s a non-physical environment that lives on the internet. At least that’s what they think in China. 

For me, Innovation Jam was a wonderful experience and highlighted that social and professional networks are immensely powerful tools for those who choose to participate. While Innovation Jam was at times chaotic it was also an unquestionably rich and rewarding experience to finally see some of what has been written about for 2-years being put into action. Well done IBM.