I was involved in an interesting discussion today. The group was trying to determine how to be more effective at driving collaboration in their organizations. This discussion has been going on for a long time. The emergence of social media has rekindled it by providing a new arsenal of tools from which to draw.

But it struck me that we might be asking the wrong question. In fact, I think we might have fallen into a common trap. Often, when people aren’t performing as expected, our first instinct is to “enable” – create tools, training, or processes for our people.

I’m not opposed to tools, training and processes. Good organizations give their people the resources they need to get things done. But, there is something more fundamental. Instead of asking, “how” people collaborate (and focusing on the tools), perhaps we can find a better answer by asking “who collaborates?”

Your people collaborate all of the time in their personal lives. They do it without all of the fancy tools, infrastructure, and processes that you make available to them. Even at work those people collaborate. They just don’t always collaborate on the things that you want. Think of the last time you rolled out a major change initiative. I’d bet that your resistors found incredibly effective ways to collaborate and resist the change. They probably found “experts” who could build the case against the change; they located others with similar points of view. And, they coordinated the message so that there was a focused, unified force resisting the change. Just like at home, they probably didn’t rely on your collaboration infrastructure to make this happen.

So, if it’s not the infrastructure driving collaboration, what does? Let’s go back to the question of “who” collaborates? People who collaborate the most have three things in common: shared goals, passion/engagement, and an opportunity to collaborate. Consider Wikipedia. The shared goal was the building of an open-source encyclopedia. The passion was whatever topic interested the individual making the contribution, and the opportunity was the Wikipedia site. Simple. So, why can’t we replicate that?

Many organizations focus their efforts on the “opportunity part”. They provide tools and website to allow collaboration. However, without passion or shared goals, people don’t seek opportunities. No one uses Facebook or Twitter just because they are available. They use them to further their goals and interests.

Recent research on workforce engagement sheds some light on the problem. A large percentage of people simply are not engaged in their jobs. They don’t have passion for what they do. Their leaders fail to create a compelling vision or story in which they want to participate. They are doing a job. The aren’t bursting with excitement over talking about the last customer complaint they handled, the status report that they wrote, or the team meeting in which they just participated. Many are probably trying to do the minimum required to get the job done satisfactorily.

Similarly, few leaders create simple, clear, shared goals for their organizations. At best individuals and departments have disparate goals. At worst, they have competing goals. In either case, people have little incentive to collaborate since, in the absence of shared goals, collaboration generally comes at a cost to one of the participants.

Perhaps it’s time to take a step back to the basics. There is no silver bullet or killer app that is going to solve our collaboration problems. Your people collaborate. They just don’t collaborate on the things that you care about. So, instead of giving them a new tool, why not try to get them to care about those things as well?