Collaboration as a State

Collaborative working is the ability to quickly search for optimal (or near-optimal) solutions to new problems.

Think for a moment about the following choices -

• Search for an answer in a database of all knowledge OR ask the right colleague who might give it you in a second
• Make everything available to everyone OR ensure that a person has the right tools to seek the information they need at any time
• Devise processes and tasks to achieve predictable outcomes OR allow the folks responsible to share and seek information to achieve required outcomes

These are admittedly choices on a continuum and not binary decisions — but they highlight a very common misconception about collaborative working. Collaboration is not about multiple people being involved. Nor is it about predictability or speed.

Collaboration is leveraging organizational knowledge to solve problems that haven’t been encountered before.

It is about

• A finance person working on the payroll, talking to the right person in legal on how to handle remittances to a new offshore developer
• A developer working with folks at marketing to understand and fix low home page signups
• A sales guy talking to an engineer about the technical flaws in competitor’s products to convert a key account
• The exec team working with different functions to lay out the strategy for entering a new market

The key word in all these is that someone is trying to solve a problem that has never been encountered before. There are no processes for this. No playbook or guidelines. But somebody might have encountered a similar problem but maybe in another context. A collaborative organization helps by not re-inventing the wheel.

Collaboration is about initiating conversations, and not scheduling them.

Because the problems are new, conversations cannot be scheduled. A weekly meeting often might be a waste of a developer’s time. But sometimes, a daily meeting might even be less than required.

Collaboration is about directed conversations, and not giving each person a loudspeaker in a public square.

Everyone shouting their problems and solutions rarely leads to good solutions or even the identification of the right problems. It might even distract folks who are solving problems without needing to engage others. Sometimes the most collaborative thing to do would be to not collaborate at all.

Collaboration is communicating with evidence, to sometimes override individual and functional priorities.

When a ship is on fire, the strongest people are best utilized in fighting the fire. Their jobs, on any other day, might be to clean the deck or cook the food. But it doesn’t matter on this day. But they have also first know that the ship is on fire and that they can help.