Conscious Collaboration

Collaborative teams are different from ordinary teams. They don’t work together regularly. They come from different parts of the business, or from outside it. They bring different training, experience, skills and culture. The differences are the point. They are the reason the team exists at all. They are also the reason collaboration so often fails. Putting diverse people in a room and assuming they will collaborate is the most common, and most expensive, mistake leaders make.

We need to revisit how we collaborate

Typical ad-hoc and longer-term collaborative teams include problem-solving teams, project management teams, senior management teams at all levels, innovation and open-innovation teams, change design teams, inter-departmental groups, and customer and supplier liaison teams. In every one of these, differences in ways of working get amplified at exactly the moment you want people to exploit their different skills, insights and perspectives.

Lacking shared methods, shared skills, and shared priorities is not the foundation for magically working well together. So it is not surprising that we end up needing to build a consistent approach and a shared mindset, rather than expecting them to appear.

Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It needs support. To make successful collaborative teams, for an hour or a project or the long haul, we need to provide the means to help people make the jump to conscious collaboration.

Why worry about collaboration anyway?

The reason now is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Hyper-connectivity has produced a surge of distributed knowledge, lower barriers to market entry, and shorter product development cycles, alongside more pressure and stress at work. Meanwhile, years of efficiency and effectiveness projects have made organisations very linear, very transactional and less able to respond quickly to change. There is more change to come.

To bridge that gap we have to use the innate talent of our people, and of those across our wider networks, much more effectively. Conscious collaboration is what bridges the gap between the traditional rate of learning and the pace of external change.

Why aren’t current collaborations fit for purpose?

Historically, results have not been great for change and collaborative projects. Delivery rarely meets the anticipated vision. There are many interconnected reasons. Three matter most.

1. Collaboration is ‘nebulous’

There is often nothing for ad-hoc and diverse teams to get hold of. Nothing solid to guide and support collaborative activity. With no support or facilitation, collaboration becomes slow, clunky and inefficient. No-one is sure where to start or how to progress. There hasn’t been a framework for collaborators to follow together. The result is a loss of focus and momentum, with people worrying about why things won’t work rather than how they could work better.

2. People don’t have the necessary mindset

Collaboration requires specific skills and a more open, sharing style. More emphasis on listening, accepting and building, rather than the critique-based mindset we often adopt when making decisions. Behavioural and collaboration skills are rarely taught or practised in a way that becomes a daily part of how an organisation works. Without those foundations, trust is hard to build, especially with people in distant locations or with very different skill-sets. The lack of trust reduces sharing and limits the value available from a more diverse group.

3. Poor exploitation of technology

Collaborative activities usually cross organisational boundaries, sometimes outside them entirely. Technology has an important supporting role. The platforms have matured well, but without the motivation, behaviour changes and structure, that power is rarely used. Versatile but complex systems like SharePoint are not as conducive to collaboration as they look on paper. As operational and regional boundaries are crossed, the differences in IT systems, access controls and operating models lead to friction and frustration. We cannot hope that technology alone will fix collaboration issues. It has a role to play, just not the one usually assumed.

How to repair the process

To repair collaborative activity we have to make the process conscious. Add ‘bricks’ to counter the nebulous nature of it. Three things, deployed together.

1. Introduce common process and methods

Adding process and methods to collaboration means that everyone can work to the same beat within the same operational structure, no matter what their day-job is or where they are located. The structure is created by short snippets of process, usually fewer than five steps, that guide the team and show them what to do, when, who with and how. The snippets are independent of the length and nature of the task. They don’t interfere with or replace existing project or meeting methodologies. At the end of the collaboration, the process is archived once the output is agreed. That clears the concentration deck ready for the next collaboration.

2. Develop a collaborative mindset

Teams need to talk a similar language and share behavioural approaches and skills to collaborate effectively. A lot of the recent talk has been about a growth mindset. That is the minimum an organisation needs to encourage in its staff. A collaborative mindset builds on the growth mindset. It is an active approach to people working together, no matter where they are, what their skillset is, or where they come from culturally.

A collaborative mindset can be taught. It includes the necessary language and an appreciation of the skills, experience and cultural diversity of others. It includes the trust and the communication needed to surface assumptions and overcome dogma. Additional tools that make collaborative working effective and efficient are embedded to support each stage.

3. Exploit IT effectively

Set up structures and behaviours to properly use the technology platforms that support collaboration. This becomes a greater issue as the physical and operational distance between departments, organisations or specialities widens and distributed methods are employed. Ideally the technology framework should be templated and structured, so that the infrastructure for any new activity can immediately support the team’s work consistently and seamlessly. Existing tools can be reconfigured, or new integrated tools deployed.

An effective framework includes discussion channels, task management, simple workflow, templating, collaborative document creation and control, and external reach to customers, suppliers and partners. Platforms like SharePoint are flexible and widely available, but they usually take time and IT support to set up. Cloud-native SaaS platforms like Huddle and Glasscubes make collaborative infrastructure available to everyone in a collaboration, including outside the organisation. The Sensandu approach isn’t tied to any particular toolset. We can advise on better use of what you already have, or specify a new one.

Templating, meaning a pre-defined structure of IT services that can be quickly replicated, is what makes the framework deployable at speed.

Education, meaning making sure everyone understands the power each part of the model adds to the success of the activity, is what makes it stick. People need a fresh understanding of how to use technology to support collaboration.

Delivering conscious collaboration for the 2020s

Training and support are focused on three areas:

• Mindset
• Process
• Technology

The exact composition, focus and sequence vary with client needs. Initial workshops deliver key foundations, with facilitation and coaching on specific projects. These learning sessions are supported by coaching and mentoring and deeper facilitation for more expansive engagements.

Like a muscle, collaboration needs exercise to reach peak performance. A collaborative mindset, structured collaboration process and supporting technology together make it easy to start, run and complete projects, which is what delivers the benefits of a collaborative ethos. Whether the timescale is a single morning’s project or one that runs for months, the simpler it is to do, the more often the collaboration muscle gets exercised.

Once conscious collaboration is ‘installed’, co-creation, adaptability and organisational agility follow.

Scalability

The framework can be introduced into a single team or across a whole organisation. Once installed, the extension of its application is quite organic, and will eventually enter the ‘DNA’ of the organisation.

A note on what happened

Sensandu was a 2018–2019 venture I co-founded to commercialise this thinking, with workshops, brochures and an in-progress training-and-tools platform. The product was ready to launch when Covid-19 lockdown hit in March 2020, and the venture was paused. The framework itself remains live in my practice. The Cynefin influence, the ‘snippet’ approach to process, and the maturity model continue to inform my work as a CTO and consultant. It connects directly to the Idea Mining framework I have developed since.

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