The Science of Collaboration
In emergent, so-called VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environments, organisations survive by being Adaptive. However, overtime, leaders often realise that having to always react to unpredictable market conditions is not usually the best strategic position to be in the mid to long term in a VUCA environment. It usually becomes obvious that the safest option is to assume a market changer position through Creative Destruction (Jean-Marie Dru, May 1992) ….and that the easiest way to disrupt the market with their products or services is by being innovative.
To develop an innovative culture in an organisation, individuals and teams in that organisation must COLLABORATE in new and effective ways that drive innovative processes which in turn produce valuable innovative products or services that offers the organisation a competitive advantage strong enough to disrupt the market.
Listed in the Agile manifesto as valued more than contract negotiation with the customer, “Collaboration” needs to be treated as a core Agile value not just between customers but between colleagues teams, and leaders in an organisation. The typical goal of most Agile Transformation programmes is full Business Agility. It’s almost impossible for leaders to drive the adoption of Agility without the existence of solid collaboration between interacting entities in their organisations. The target culture change must invite a collaborative mindset behaviour into its new ways of working, values, practices, and traditions. An embedded collaboration culture is therefore the fundamental requirement (or value) to drive Agility.
So, what really is Collaboration?
It’s often a generic business buzz word used ubiquitously especially in the Agile community to suggest some form of aggregate activity by individuals or a collective of individuals with the same goals and objectives in mind. For me however, collaboration is quite simply a “Value adding and Objective oriented effort Alignment by two or more parties”. Those parties could be Individuals, teams, teams of teams, business units, enterprise joint ventures etc. This suggest that if you are collaborating, the outcome must have some form of empirical value that takes the parties closer to their collective agreed objectives.
What does this then mean in the present-day business interactions where collaboration has become a euphemism for been progressive or worse for “Doing Agile”?
This means that, at its most basic level, all true collaborative efforts must be defined by:
1. A clear objective
2. An existing alignment on the objective
3. Evidence of Value add
The value added by the collaborative effort being the most economically important element, as it must be a true Value Add. “True” usually being validated by empirical means (measurable evidence). So, when teams claim to be in a collaborative state (with colleagues or other teams) and can’t point to some clear and agreed-to objective as to why they are using the organisations resources to engage each other, that is “MUDA” (“Waste” in Lean terms). Same goes especially, even when they have the aligned objective but can’t show any evidence of measurable value of the efforts from the collaborative engagement.
When you assess your team’s collaboration status for the existence of these three elements and come out short… simply pivot. Pivot by re-evaluating the relationship with the aim to start pushing for objectives with true value add and if after this evaluation you find none present…. end the engagement and move on.
There are various ways of carrying out these tests without denting trust that took months (and possibly years) to build, as these types of evaluation exercises reside in murky waters business relationships and can be extremely tricky to navigate especially for leaders and teams collaborating with other teams in different business units (or siloes) and ecosystems.
Take away note:
Effective collaboration builds observable synergies by default — So if in your collaborative reality 2 + 2 = 4, then your team is not collaborating beneficially enough to drive innovation.
I run masterclasses specially on this topic where we unpack the complicacies involved and methodically construct various techniques for dealing with these issues and for evaluating new engagements where collaboration is the working theme.
