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Good Thinking
By John Canfield
Management Consultant
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Collaboration is currently all the buzz. Right along with creativity and innovation, everybody’s talking and writing about it. While it may be a great idea, the challenge and the enormous business opportunity is to learn to actually do it. And do it in a way that it actually a makes a very positive difference to you and your business.
In my general reading and discussions, it seems most people think of collaboration as merely gathering people or resources in one place, real or virtual, and then doing work. And doing work in the way they know how, which is often the same way that generated the frustration that encouraged them to collaborate.
Don’t settle for thinking that collaboration is just coordinating or assembling data resources or people. My current best definition of collaboration, and theme of my Good Thinking Series second book, Collaborate – Tools and Techniques for Productive Meetings (Amazon) optimizes two crucial components: Effective decisions and cooperative support. 
In this diagram, the Avoid, Accommodate, Compromise, and Compete behaviors are less than optimal. You might even think of these behaviors and the results they generate as waste, right along with Taiichi Ohno’s seven sources of waste, the main targets in any serious Lean initiative. In many organizations the thinking that drives these sub optimal behaviors are treated as neutral options. “Oh, Louise? Don’t mind her, she’s just that way.” In collaborating organizations Louise may be identified as a competer, a high performer individually and with his teambut not working well with other parts of the organization. The net result of her leadership to the organization as a whole is negative. Louise needs to work with the whole organization or find another job (paraphrased from Jack Welch).
Good or not-so-good decisions, that’s easy. But working deliberately to build buy-in, to treat it as important as the decision itself, that may be new. To consider from an earlier article in this series: A team of three competitors is part of a multiple event relay race. The next leg of the race asks the team to do the following:
There are two issues here: Pick a fast boat and then row the boat fast enough to win.In some organizations, once the decision is made, some people step to the sideline to see if the decision is a good one. I encouraging people to accept that you’re in the boat you chose, now do everything you can to make this choice a success. Getting out into the middle of the lake and complaining about the choice of the boat is not helpful.
The primary driver to the buy-in coordinate is “people support what they help create” (Marvin Weisbord). Engage the team in such a way doing the work of considering and selecting alternatives that they are very likely to support the results of their work.
Referring again to the diagram, notice the line that runs from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. I think of this as the conflict line. Now remember from earlier articles I am making the case that conflict is just the recognition that there are options present. If everyone in a meeting was in agreement on a decision, there would be no conflict. With different points of view about the decision, we see conflict. This is good when handled well. In the lower left quadrant, team leaders work to smooth over differences because people are taking the differences personally. The lower left quadrant is the artificial harmony quadrant.
At about half way up this line, the team members have learned to think differently about conflict, and actually want to add some options so they can make a better choice. Here they do not take the differences personally. The upper right quadrant is the robust dialogue quadrant.
So productive collaboration is better than compromise which I think of as a sort of a personal best of C-, “I’m OK with a tie” thinking. Teams can learn to think and behave more productively by learning to collaborate productively.
The key strategy to drive your team up the conflict line towards productive collaboration is to promote and provoke dialogue, a deep conversation that considers many options non-judgmentally, and helps a team learn what they need to know to either solve problems or create new products and services. To my experience, the way to promote and provoke dialogue is to ask great questions. Effective tools and techniques provide the process and content for these questions. Earlier articles in this series summarize how great questions engage the prefrontal cortex, where executive functioning takes place, providing useful and logical thinking that often generates much better decisions. The twofer here is to conduct the dialogue in such an engaging interactive way that the meeting’s participants build their own buy-in.
Productive collaboration is the key skill set that drives effective teams to improve business performance. Working through hard issues, not taking differences personally, getting past politics, creating three, four and five solutions when you thought you only had one. To my thinking, that’s collaboration.