Canvas-first collaboration wins
Activity-first tools dominated the last 20 years, but their reign has come to an end. Extending a warm welcome to canvas-first collaboration.
I love me a good collaboration tool. And I have a lot of opinions about them. Why? Because if your work is like mine is, collaboration tools are your work home. And… shocker… I care about where I live.
Understanding collaboration tools
There is a spectrum for business software:
On one end you have more structured workflows supporting enterprise management activities
And on the other end you have tools supporting more unstructured, creative collaboration
This creative collaboration end is what I want to talk about today. Creative collaboration boils down to these activities:
Defining - Defining and coordinating units of work. The core activity is typically a table or list entry e.g. task
Create content - Execution of those units of work. For each task, create content document in appropriate form tool e.g. spreadsheet, text doc, slide, design tool
Communicate - Communicate throughout before, during, and after definition and creation activities via email, instant message, memo, etc.
And all of these activities happen fluidly. In many different orders with starts, stops, and changes of direction.
Collaboration tool silos
Yet the tools we’ve grown up on at work don’t support this fluidity. The typical organization I’ve been a part of has operated as such:
Defining units of work - pick your favorite task tool - Asana, Trello, Smartsheet
Content creation - spreadsheets, text documents, slide presentations, design files
Email for important communications
Slack for synchronous and less important comms
What’s the problem here?
Separate tools, each organized around its core activity i.e. activity-first
Resulting in silod collaboration activities
Let’s take Slack for example. Great messaging tool. And while it’s trying to be “Where work happens”, it’s still where messaging happens. Or message-enabled tasks & content happen. But it’s message-first. Messages are the organizing activity of the tool.
They’ve made efforts to integrate the collaboration stack by embedding 3rd party tasks and content tools. But these collaboration activities are downstream of messages, treated as second class citizens. And if you want to context switch from message → content or tasks, you end up leaving the app.
Productive collaboration requires full context of all define, create, and communicate activities. But when a tool is organized as activity-first, the end user has only that activity’s full context. Which means partial collaboration context.
Work canvases
Enter the work canvas. Rather than an activity-first organizing principle, there is a new breed of tool that is activity-agnostic. These tools are canvas-first. A blank space upon which you can add units of work (tables, lists, tasks), create (tool native) and embed (3rd party tool) content, and communicate seamlessly in one place.
In canvas-first tools, define, create, and communicate activities are all treated as interoperable first class citizens. These canvases support the fluid nature of projects by enabling full context & activity switching regardless of which activity step you’re working on.
This is the future of creative collaboration at work.
Players and adoption
Who are building these tools?
Pioneers like Notion, Coda, and ClickUp have been building canvas-first for years. And as of writing this each of these companies are worth in excess of $1B.
Incumbents like Google (announcing in May 2021) and Microsoft (announcing just this week Nov 2021) are also heading in this direction.
How is adoption going?
Pioneering canvas-first tools have been taking market share in both younger companies and within teams of larger organizations. But I have yet to see a large organization go wall-to-wall with a canvas-first tool.
But now that enterprise-trusted vendors such as Google and Microsoft are bringing their versions to market, I expect we’re not far off. Their offerings will also be very compelling as they can embed their own native (vs. 3rd party) task, content, and communication tools right on top of their canvases. These tools are already widely used throughout enterprises which give them a big head start for winning the next era of collaboration software.
I for one am excited for this new way to work.