I wanted to disagree with your Cynefin/TIMN chart, but couldn't. It looks great and I think you've defined collaboration (complicated) and cooperation (complex) accurately.

Collaboration is often done poorly, but it is something you can control, plan for and implement, - it's just hard to do well.

Cooperation is something you can try to enable, but you can't really control it as easily, at least not within the context of social business.

In the deluge of "social business" marketing over the past two years I've seen the term "collaboration" thrown around haphazardly and with little clarity. I've been contemplating a way to clarify the definition and your examination of "cooperation" has hit the nail on the head.

COLLABORATION: 2 or more people working together towards shared goals.

COOPERATION: People or organizations working together to achieve a result that will benefit all of them.

People use the term "social collaboration" to refer to large scale discussion forums and sharing within companies. For example people would refer to this situation as "social collaboration": when someone posts a question about sales collateral and an un-known colleague from across the globe answers that question.

That's not actually collaboration because the two people have different goals, but they both benefit. It is cooperation.

Thanks for this great article and thought effort Harold. Now it's time to inject this perspective into the mainstream discussions of enterprise social software to help people think more clearly about the goals of their efforts.