Sometimes we can get a little paralysed by our urge to plan. I was recently working with a group responsible for coordinating works in partnership with others across a diverse and complex system. The client has a fabulous knack for creating “Playbooks” for action, describing in detail the approach for a range of tasks and projects. They are good planners and they do this important work well.
Detailed plans are invaluable when there is certainty around what needs doing and how it needs to be done. But I was invited to help them collaborate and in this realm there is less clarity and little certainty.
As I often do, I threw up a slide at one point listing some characteristics of a collaborative mindset. The one that seemed to jump out for my client was Less plan. More act. It sparked a discussion about what this means.
When thinking about how to collaborate with others it can be tempting to invest lots of time and energy in creating the collaboration plan. Yet while planning is good, I like to say that we can talk about talking to stakeholders, or we can talk to them. In other words, we can plan to engage or we can engage and when asked, I always encourage the latter.
Less planning, more doing. Less thinking about how to collaborate, and more getting started tomorrow. If you are uncertain how and why and what, then those are some good questions to get started with.
Of course, getting started when you don’t have a clear and detailed playbook can be a little unsettling. This is why I get to this discussion in the context of the mindset. Doing things differently requires us to think differently. Authentic collaboration requires us to think more like collaborators and less like traditional project managers.
Are you thinking like a collaborator?
If you want to check the state of your collaborative mindset, take a look at our simple assessment tool.