Collaborative Action offers dedicated research efforts for our clients on their critical business issues and ongoing research on issues relating to organizational change and executive effectiveness.

There are a number of important distinctions to our research process, including:

• Internal Dialogue Access: Collaborative Action tools create an environment that minimizes unproductive filtering of valuable information. Using a powerful set of inquiry methods, CA practitioners are able to establish an open and safe environment while accessing the "internal dialogues" of the participants. Thus, discussions become productive opportunities to explore critical issues, often hidden or difficult to openly discuss, and to create new solutions.
  
  
• Build Respondent Commitment by Maximizing Business Value: Traditionally, in our experience, survey participants frequently espouse the value of the research effort and "role play" commitment in order to be judged a good corporate citizen. The Collaborative Action approach minimizes this phenomenon. Openly discussing this typical pattern and jointly designing with participants ways to avoid it, assures maximum value for everyone involved.
  
  
• Researchers Share Inner Thoughts: CA practitioners are open to sharing their inner thoughts with the respondent about the critical issues discussed, as appropriate. These inner thoughts offer participants a new level of insight and reflection on their critical issues.
  
  
• Participants and researchers design new solutions: Time is allocated to participants and researchers to examine solutions to the critical issues as part of the data collection.

This approach assures that participants receive substantial value for time invested, that the research is not "one-sided" in value, and that organizations receive valuable and appropriate information to facilitate appropriate changes.

Client Research

We offer clients research either as a stand-alone project or as an initial phase of a larger intervention in which clients are asked to measure the business value of their investment and make an informed business decision about subsequent investment.

Because Collaborative Action tools allow us to access clients' typically withheld "inner thoughts" about the research itself, the process has a built-in quality check that assures maximum value and accuracy of the findings. We then use the findings to jointly design tangible, measurable business solutions.

Examples of client research projects include:

1. Diagnosing Hidden Barriers to Successful Design of the Next Generation of a Computer System: A large computer manufacturer contracted with Collaborative Action to identify the hidden, undiscussed patterns that were subtly hindering its effectiveness to design the next generation of computer that would take the company "into the new millennium." The findings were confirmed by the client as accurate and costly and formed the basis of important changes in their design process.
   
   One key finding was that "product planning was a moving target" with a variety of undiscussed and shifting measurements. For example:
   
   
   • There was a lack of clear understanding as to who are the customers, and consequently, confusion about what specifications needed to be met in the design.
     
     
   • There were different views of how product and platform concepts originated.
     
     
   • "There were two sets of goals, the ones you publish and ones you intend to do."
     
     
   • "One VP said cost, cost, schedule; the next said schedule, schedule, schedule."
     
     
   • "[Computer system] was criticized for performance, but performance was never a goal."
   
   
   
2. Consulting Competencies Research: A Fortune 100 company contracted with Collaborative Action to identify the competencies of its top flight consultants across a wide array of disciplines (engineering, organizational development, HR, etc.). The research was designed to build capacity within the company by sharing best practices to facilitate training the next generation of consultants.
   
   The benefits of this approach include:
   
   
   • Reliable data: Individuals are often unaware that what they do in action is not what they recall doing. Via taping and transcription, researchers obtain directly observable data that show what one actually says and does, rather than what one says one does, thus providing greater reliability.
     
     
   • Valid Data: Whenever human beings engage in a dialogue, especially a difficult one, internal dialogues, i.e., uncommunicated thoughts, feelings, and images, typically juxtapose the public conversation. Productively accessing these internal dialogues is critical to knowing what is truly going on, including uncovering the reasoning patterns that lead individuals to produce different behaviors.
     
     
   • Multiple Perspectives: By obtaining the clients' perspectives and internal dialogues, as well as those of the consultants, researchers are able to connect the individual's intention with (1) what takes place in action and with (2) their impact on others.

An Important Finding: Many consultants knowingly or unknowingly adhere to an expert-based model, one that their clients typically reinforce.

• Consultants will often advocate strategies or courses of action, knowingly or unknowingly, even if they weren't exactly sure, based on an unspoken belief that if they didn't advocate, their clients would judge them as ineffective.
  
  
• Clients reciprocate by typically deferring to the consultant, often withholding their doubts about the strategy ("they're the consultants. They must know what they're doing.")

In fact, our research illustrated that the error rate in traditional competency modeling is 45% for consulting practice in general: the most accurate consultant had a 45% error rate in the assumptions made about what the client needed or wanted and what clients actually reported they wanted, detected from internal dialogues.

This means that any tools derived from the data (selection, assessment, development, training, and evaluation tools) would logically be 45% inaccurate due their built in error. For example, if the above discrepancy in the competency model remains undetected, the result would be a recurring cost to the company equivalent to a 45% inaccuracy in matching candidates' skills and company requirements.

Ongoing Research Projects Findings:
In order to expand our knowledge base and to offer additional value to current and prospective clients, we conduct ongoing internal dialogue research on issues relating to organizational change and executive effectiveness. In addition, we publish occasional white papers on issues related to research. We have included data summaries for two of those projects as well as a paper regarding our findings relative to traditional survey methodologies.

• Recurring Barriers to Organizational Learning
  
  
• IT Implementation- Executive Summary
  
  
• Surveying as a Research Tool