Forming the Collective Mind: a Contextual Exploration of Large-Scale Collaborative Writing in Industry.

Forming the Collective Mind: A Contextual Exploration of Large-Scale Collaborative Writing in Industry, by Geoffrey A. Cross. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001. 272 pp.

Sometimes it is tempting to start with the end of a book and read backwards. That is exactly what I did with Geoffrey Cross's superb ethnographic study of large-scale collaboration, which was honored with the ABC Best Publication Award for 2002. In the section titled "Locating the Ethnographer" (which is buried in the appendices), Cross, as "the critical instrument of the study," explains that he remains a "reporter-theorist, employing techniques of participant-observation" (p. 248), which he described in an earlier article (Cross, 1994b) and used in his previous book on collaboration, the highly regarded Collaboration and Conflict (Cross, 1994a). His methods draw also on Broadhead and Freed (1986), Doheny-Farina and Odell (1985), and Miles and Huberman (1994). Participation, he explains, took place through "interpretation, reactivity, and empathy" (p. 249). What is astonishing is that he spent 3 solid months, 8 hours a day, at the site of investigation, coded 1,500 pages of audiotape transcription and 500 pages of field notes and documents, and maintained his observer status all the while. The result is a model of ethnographic research and a unique contribution to both the scholarship on collaboration and research in business communication.

We can turn now to the beginning of the story. Cross's chosen site is the Montmanche Corporation (pseudonym), a "financial conglomerate of approximately Fortune-500 size with assets of more than $4 billion and revenues of nearly $2.4 billion" (figures disguised for identity concealment), with some 9,000 employees and 6 million customers (p. 11). Like many U.S. companies in the 1990s, Montmanche was the product of mergers and acquisitions and was an organization attempting to establish a corporate culture while getting rid of duplication; in other words, it was downsizing. At the beginning of chapter 1, "Total Quality Collaboration," Cross provides an excellent overview of changes in management theory in the late 20th century, as Taylorism and scientific management gave way to total quality management (TQM) and the ideas of W. Edwards Deming in particular, and process reengineering.

TQM and reengineering were already playing a major role in Montmanche corporate strategy, and several functional areas were in the process of being transformed. In 1995, at the time of the study, one area, Montmanche Technological Services (MTS), the data-processing (IT) department, had just avoided the outsourcing axe and was engaged in the writing of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the more than 20 other in-house units, which would detail MTS services, provide quality control, and define the relevance of MTS to the future of the corporation. Thus, the SLA, a document to be written by a 20-person cross-functional core team and more than 100 additional collaborators, was essentially an attempt to preserve the jobs of the MTS unit itself.

Previously, as Cross explains, MTS was a "standard hierarchy based on division of labor and isolation of tasks"; the "MTS mainframe, Local Area Network (LAN), and Wide Area Network (WAN) operators ... did not communicate fully with the IT employees in the business units" (p. 12). A focus on tasks, rather than processes, meant that the disparate companies acquired by the corporation were not always adequately served in terms of their IT needs. Meanwhile, throughout the corporation it was clear that there was considerable dissatisfaction with MTS and its purpose. Reflecting a belief in TQM, management seriously considered outsourcing the entire IT operation, which would not only reduce costs but also improve service. Many companies have followed this route by contracting with specialized IT companies, which would then buy existing assets and rehire some of the IT employees. Montmanche called for bids, and MTS submitted its own, severely undercutting those of the outside companies. MTS thus had a reprieve, but only if the SLA, a large-scale collaborative writing project, could be completed and put into effect. The SLA therefore was intended to transform MTS from a "functional to a process-based culture." Cross's book presents a detailed analysis of the writing of that document, but it also gives readers a good understanding of management trends in operation, including the influence of TQM, reengineering, and outsourcing moves.

In chapter 2, "Genesis of a Project," the author gives a full account of all the circumstances leading to the requirement for an SLA. In the past, all services provided by MTS were defined internally and essentially undocumented. The SLA meant that MTS would establish agreements with all IT users throughout the entire corporation, including the various companies, business units, functional areas, or departments. This initiative began with an effort to define all existing processes, and in this chapter we also meet the individuals responsible for the actual work, beginning with the project leader and the core team. We also get a strong sense of the corporate culture and find out the differences between work in the "city," the home of three senior managers, and the "country," a set of low-visibility carrels on the perimeter. During the days I worked for an investment bank, we were all acutely conscious of spatial relationships and meanings attached to the location of offices; it is good to see these locational issues now explored seriously in professional communication research. One of the many benefits of ethnography is that we come to know the players as people with individual personalities, needs, and concerns; as a reader I began to care about what happened to them as I witnessed thirdhand their struggles to succeed. Cross also adopts a narrative mode in describing what happened so that we are drawn into the study. The author quotes from status meeting minutes, and we learn, for example, that the first project leader, Susan, is worried that they "'are still not receiving timely feedback (or in some cases ANY feedback) from some members of the project group'" (p. 28); feedback, of course, that is essential to proceed and especially important for implementing the project's first deliverable, a draft writing process. This first project leader was soon reassigned to manage the reengineering and downsizing of another department, and one of the first moves the new project leaders, Nancy and Rick, made was to move their offices to the "country."

Things came to a head in a critical meeting on Friday the 13th, which the author describes in chapter 3, "The Invisible Elephant." In this chapter, he also provides an overview of the theories behind the concept of a "collective mind," thereby invoking the title of the book. We also learn about all the factors that can work against the formation of a collective mind, which certainly described the status quo of the core team. What became clear in the infamous meeting was that project members did not understand the goal of the project, and that was evident in any attempts to focus on the rhetorical situation; in fact, the meeting manifested outright rebellion against the whole enterprise. Moreover, members learned that they would be evaluated for their performance on the project, which meant that they had to do a good job just to save their jobs. Cross's description of the meeting, which includes everything from what people wore on dress-down Friday to their responses to various attempts to stay on track, makes for very interesting reading and would be a good case study in itself for what can happen at meetings. But conflict and discord can often be useful for understanding root causes, so in chapter 4, "Causes of Apathy, Cacophony, and Anticonsensual Revolt," the author defines the indicators leading to the communication breakdown, as "the group disintegrated from a middling degree of interrelation (joint or reciprocal actions) into chaotic individualism" (p. 57). One major indicator was the continual attempt to stay on the agenda. Cross relies especially on Piaget's (1971) concepts of assimilation and accommodation to account for the failure of the meeting; he then defines the relevant conditions (function vs. cross-function job-role conflicts, media choice), intermediate causes (poor writing process techniques, task complexity, personnel, downsizing/outsourcing environment, quality, conflicting purposes, lack of preparation, accountability pressures, group dynamics, and decision-making techniques), and precipitating conditions (information overload, goals of meeting not reached, fear of extended project, responsibilities not divided, group stress).