The difference between collaboration and co-creation
People can work together in two distinct ways: collaboration and co-creation. The difference is crucial when trying to understand the core of Agile ways of working.
Collaboration
If people work together, collaborate (from the Latin col and laborare), they have a tendency to all have their own agendas and goals. These goals have to be matched and more often than not, one person’s gain is another person’s loss. People have to give and take and compromise to come to a solution.
Tactics that are used to get their way in collaboration by people are:
- being loud,
- use a lot of jargon to claim authority,
- using positions of authority,
- backroom politics,
- selective sharing of information,
- favoritism,
- and many more.
Everyone comes in with their knowledge, experience, skills but due to all the powerplay that is needed to win in the arena of collaboration, we do not get the most out of people and the way we work is not very nice. This way of working is not empowering and it doesn’t tap into the creative potential of a group of people. Al lot of energy is wasted on powerplay and good ideas might fail to surface because of the closed mindset this system creates. The creative potential of two or more people coming together is so much bigger than the creative potential of a single person but it is stifled by this way of working. These patterns are counter-creative, dark patterns. That is why we need co-creation.
Co-creation
At Google, they did a lot of research into the creative potential of people working together. One branch of Google, Google Ventures, that invests in startups, created a method (Sprint) to work together better based on their research into how good teams work and what limits creative work in groups. They found that:
- you need to have a shared vision to co-create,
- you need to think in questions instead of problems and solutions,
- you need ways of working that level the playing field for supplying input so the loudest voices don’t get the most attention,
- you need to create psychological safety for people to open up,
- you need good guidance and coaching to facilitate the process in a way that manifests the values of co-creation,
- you need to make stuff and not just talk.
Maybe the last point is the core of co-creation: creation. It’s in the name! The mindset, the framing, the way of working should be that the people in the group are creating something together. Making shifts the whole game. In a lot of collaborations, people are thinking up all kinds of things without the responsibility of execution — often times also without the experience of creating. If everyone is involved in the creation, if everyone sees themselves as a creator, if ideas are accompanied by prototypes, things start to shift. All involved become equal. The further people are distanced from creation, the harder it becomes to co-create in a creative manner.
Micro-management
I heard this story about how Steve Jobs thought about micro-management. Everyone is afraid of micromanagement, every manager is taught to delegate. Steve often got involved in very small details of products. But he was not micro-managing, he was meeting the people that were working on the details as a peer, not as a manager telling them what to do. He was co-creating. He was willing to back up his ideas with action.
Agile ways of working
You can see a lot the the values and ways of working from the Sprint method in Agile ways of working. Agile starts with a shared product vision, user stories are questions that the development team designs solutions for, refinements and retrospectives are with the whole team so everyone can give their input, scrum masters make sure the process is in line with the Agile mindset. The Agile mindset is a mindset of co-creation that is very different from traditional collaboration.
In traditional collaboration, there is no shared vision, no psychological safety, no mechanisms to make sure the loudest voices don’t get all the attention, no making by everyone. Every time you feel like you are in a win-lose game, every time you observe power play tactics, you know you are in traditional collaboration and you know that this way of working does not leverage the creative potential of people working together. In the factories of the 19th century where the traditional ways of working together were invented, this was not deemed efficient but the world has changed and the old ways need to be questioned.
Of course these new ways of working like Agile, Lean Startup, Sprint, etc. require a different attitude, an attitude that is open instead of closed. It also disrupts hierarchical thinking and power structures. Personally, I love the mindset that everyone is a designer. That creates equality, engagement in creation, and shows that everyone involved has an impact on the product. In the end, it’s a job for leadership to create the environment that get the most out of the potential of people. If I were to summarize what is needed for co-creation it would look something like this:
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