Principles of Collaborative Work

In my experience working with clients and in working with the great people at Innovation Labs, I think there are some key principles that can change a working dynamic to be far more creative and productive. Whether it’s a meeting with two people for an hour or 100 people for a week, here are a few things that I think make a huge difference.

1. Design the Work

“Design” is a word that is being thrown around these days as a mindset in how to approach problems in an increasingly complex world. While there is ongoing and healthy debate about how exactly that manifests in the business world, when it comes to creating opportunities for breakthrough and accelerated work there are ways of creating different types of interactions with people and information that can make that happen. A typical meeting or workshop is not designed for emergent, accelerated behaviour. By thinking about how to “stir the pot” in a different way, it’s possible to design for emergence in the same way that great products seem to be designed to have all the right functionality and avoid any extraneous parts so that the experience is greater than the sum of the components.

2. Work Big

This principle is certainly gaining in popularity. Dave Gray talks about this quite a bit, as does Alex Osterwalder. The idea is simply that you gain a different perspective by being able to see an aerial view of your work. This means working on big whiteboards, walls, big tables. Flip charts and laptops are the opposite of this principle because of the “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon. Lots of interesting, lateral connections can be made between ideas when they’re visible.

3. Parallel Process

Perhaps my biggest pet peeve with typical meetings is that everything happens in a serial manner. People gather around a table and there is a linear agenda that everyone has to go through, even if 80% of the material doesn’t apply at a given time. What a waste of time. With a bit of design, it’s possible to figure out some of the key topics that have to be addressed and with 3-5 people working on those topics at the same time, so much more can be accomplished in the same period of time.

4. Create and Iterate Narrative, Financial and Visual Models

The most complete (business) models contain these three components. The narrative and financial parts are fairly obvious. A written business plan and accompanying spreadsheet are common place but the visual part is pretty rare. Illustrating relationships between concepts or stakeholders can, in the words of Dan Roam, make the complex visible. All kinds of post-industrial business models are very complex and require a conceptual understanding that only a visual model can surface.

5. Produce Tangible Artifacts

One thing that I try to work towards with my clients is to decide on what it is they want a collaborative session to produce as a result of the work. Project plans, creative briefs, organizational models are all things that are tangible. Discussing an advertising strategy is good, producing storyboards is even better. The great thing about this exercise is that the planning requires a sharp focus on the part of the client.