Do Be Do Be Do Collaboration
To do is to be (Kant)
To be is to do (Neitsche)
Do be do be do (Sinatra)
So goes the undergraduate joke. But whatever these three famous philosophers may or may not have said, the joke reveals something important about collaboration. To be a collaborator requires us to do collaboration. And to do collaboration we must be collaborative.
Or to put it another way, authentic collaboration requires us to both think and act like a collaborator.
So far so obvious. And yet I see many organisations professing to do collaboration without having recognised the requirement to be different. And so they:
- Get their stakeholders in the room but retain control over key aspects of the conversation, such as the scope, the problem to be solved, who is invited, what data are relevant, who’s voice is heard, and so on.
- Ask for feedback in the name of collaboration, when they are more accurately consulting.
- Reserve the right to ignore or downplay collective decisions.
- Send the (often mostly female) customer engagement team out to ‘collaborate’, while retaining decision-making powers within the (often mostly male) 'core Divisions' of the business.
Authentic collaboration requires a shift in mindset as much as it does a shift in practice. Or to paraphrase our three philosophers: Real collaboration with real people on real problems requires us to do and be and do and be and do collaboration.
So does your organisation strive to be collaborative in order to do collaboration?
Isn't it great that we disagree?
Why disagreement and divergent views are the essential raw material of collaboration, to be embraced, acknowledged, even celebrated.
Recently I was involved in a project to find a solution to a challenging policy question. While running a workshop with stakeholders I did what I often do and asked each of the 40 people in the room to write down on a sticky note what they think is the problem to be solved by this policy. As is always the case, within 10 minutes we had 40 quite different views of the problem (and some 'solutions') on the wall for all to see. We went to a lunch break and the client came up to me and said something like “that's the problem. Everyone has a different opinion and we can never agree on anything!”.
Back in the workshop after lunch it was clear that the client’s view was widely shared. We disagree! We will never get alignment! This collaboration thing is doomed!
I understand this view, but I believe that the much bigger problem is that we see these differences as the problem. Because I’ve learnt that the 40 different views in the room are the raw material from which a great outcome will be generated.
As usual, my message to collaborators at this point is “isn’t it great that we all see this differently”. And I genuinely believe this for a number of reasons:
- Different opinions decrease the likelihood of ‘group think’ while making something novel more likely to emerge.
- The more differently we see this situation the more likely it is that we are capturing the bulk of relevant issues and concerns and opportunities. If we see things in a narrow way we are probably missing some important stuff.
- The fact that we see the situation differently makes working together more important. In other words, it builds the argument for more collaboration, not less.
- Inviting the difference helps us all see that we have a place in the discussion, that our views and experiences are relevant, even essential as part of the full picture.
- Acknowledging differences and working with them is a great way to build trust among collaborators. Listening across differences helps to build relationships.
So, the next time your collaborators express differences of opinion and are seeing things differently, you can feel ok to step into that difference and draw on it to create something that none could have thought of alone.
ChatGPT's take on Collaboration
Chat GPT was asked to explain the value of authentic collaboration. Here is it's reply, in full and unedited:
Authentic collaboration refers to a process in which individuals or groups work together towards a common goal by sharing their ideas, knowledge, and skills. The value of authentic collaboration lies in its ability to generate innovative solutions and foster a sense of community among team members.
Here are some key benefits of authentic collaboration:
- Diverse perspectives: When people from different backgrounds and experiences collaborate, they bring different perspectives and ideas to the table. This can lead to more innovative solutions and creative problem-solving.
- Improved communication: Collaborating requires open and effective communication, which helps build trust and respect among team members. It can also reduce misunderstandings and conflicts, leading to a more productive and positive work environment.
- Increased efficiency: By sharing knowledge and skills, team members can accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. Collaborating can also help to streamline processes and eliminate redundant efforts.
- Personal and professional growth: Collaborating with others can provide opportunities for learning and development, as team members can learn from each other's strengths and weaknesses. It can also help individuals build new relationships and expand their networks.
Overall, authentic collaboration can lead to greater creativity, productivity, and job satisfaction. By working together towards a common goal, individuals and groups can achieve more than they could on their own.
What do you make of this summary? It seems hard to disagree with any of it, but at the same time, I know that there is much more to say in answer to this question. Meanwhile, are you living up to ChatGPT's expectations of your authentic collaboration?
Exhausting Lessons in Communicating Across Barriers
As my wife will attest, I’m not a French speaker, but I do have a (very) basic vocabulary. This means that communicating when in France can be quite challenging, sometimes embarrassing, often hilarious. It struck me that my struggles to communicate in a foreign language are a little like the struggle to communicate with those who think differently to us in everyday life.
For example, I have a client in the stakeholder engagement team of a large utility. Their communication struggle tends to be with the internal infrastructure team who design and build the pipes, who come from a different background and see things through a different lens. Sometimes the teams feel like they are speaking different languages.
So what can a month in France teach me about that challenge? Well, despite my limited French I did manage to communicate using:
- Multiple channels, sometimes writing things down, even using facial expression and hand gestures to get my meaning across.
- I listened as loudly as I spoke. I concentrated very hard on what was being said to me and invested a lot of energy in clarifying meaning.
- Most importantly perhaps, I was highly motivated to communicate, as only being stranded on a rail platform in a foreign land can motivate a person. I wanted to understand and to be understood. I cared deeply about what was being said to me.
For my client this means trying diverse channels to deliver and receive messages to and from the engineers. It means really listening. Asking rather than telling. Being curious and wanting to know how ‘they’ see it.
Communicating in a foreign language is an enjoyable challenge, but it can be completely exhausting, which probably indicates how much I was investing in trying to communicate. I know that working with collaborators can be exhausting too, but perhaps that’s an indication of your commitment to working authentically with others. Working across barriers is tiring, but worth it.
The photo is of Estaing, one of the many beautiful villages we walked through on the Way of Saint James.
Whose Story Is It Anyway?
Over the years I’ve had a number of experiences that left a lasting impression on me, supercharging my belief in the value of doing ‘with’, not doing ‘to’. One such experience taught me that it really matters whose story is being told and who is telling it.
In this instance I was contacted by a local Council, asking me to facilitate a couple of public meetings to discuss Council’s proposed rate rise. The two meetings had already been scheduled and advertised. They were expecting a pretty negative reaction from ratepayers and were looking for someone to “manage the room”.
It was a pretty constrained and uninspiring brief, but in the few days prior to the first meeting I hatched a plan that, I hoped, might make the process more meaningful and useful to all.
The first public meeting arrived. I did my best to ensure Council made its case clearly and that ratepayers were heard. Council told their story of budget pressures and the need to repair things such as roads and bridges. After everyone had been heard I asked everyone to indicate their level of support for the rate rise, by placing a sticky note on a ‘spectrum’ from very low to very high. As expected, people on the whole didn’t want to pay higher rates. No surprises there.
Then before closing the meeting I called for some volunteers for a working group that would meet the following week with Council to dig deeper into the rates issue. We left the meeting with a dozen or so volunteers, many of whom were quite actively opposed to rate rises.
On the appointed day the group convened at Council and began a day of sharing, listening, questioning and learning. The day included a bus tour around the city to see first-hand the problems with existing infrastructure. The netball courts were unsafe. Rusty guardrails on the mountain road were no longer fit for purpose. The century-old wooden bridges were desperately in need of replacement. Stormwater drains needed work.
Working group members came back from that trip saying things like “I didn’t realise how bad the mountain road is” or “I had no idea it was so expensive to replace a drainage culvert”. At the same timer, Council staff heard stories about hardships among the community and the surprising expenses that small businesses faced.
The next evening we all went back for the second public meeting. This was another large event, open to all community members. This time, members of the working group were invited to share their experience and what they had learned. While much of the detail was the same as Council had already presented, these community members were telling their story. They spoke about their roads and bridges, and their kids who need safe sporting fields.
Was it received differently to Council’s story? Definitely. The final act of the process was to once again ask everyone at the meeting to indicate their level of support for the proposed rate rise on the same spectrum of support. And wouldn’t you know it? This time around, the majority was in favour.
When stakeholders get their fingerprints on a process, when they are extended the respect required to learn together, they are able to write their own story about the dilemma, rather than accept someone else’s. And this story carries a different power.
Whether you are the CEO of a Council, a Health Care organisation providing services to clients, or a manager with a team to work with, inviting your stakeholders to write their own version of the story can be an essential component of success.
Oscar Winners, Net Zero and the Skills Gap
Everything, everywhere, all at once is a great title for an Oscar-winning movie but according to one commentator it’s also the essential approach for progress towards a low carbon future.
I recently attended a thought-provoking panel session hosted by the Institute for Sustainable Futures (my alma mater as it happens), where global specialists on transition planning and implementation talked about the road ahead. It was more than a throwaway line from a panellist that everything, everywhere, all at once is what we need to be doing. Reaching net zero is hard and requires all hands to the pumps.
We heard that what is required is a “global collaborative effort to scale up” the transition across all sectors and all countries. That got my attention, along with the ensuing discussion about the economy-wide shortage of skills necessary for helping companies transition to low carbon operations.
What are the skills of doing everything, everywhere, all at once to meet our Paris commitments? Obviously there are a lot of technical skills required, such as scenario planners, financiers, electricians and a thousand others. Yet I believe there is a less obvious capability that will be needed and that is the suite of skills required to work across business-as-usual boundaries to make the systemic changes needed. These include:
Systems thinking as we grapple with whole supply chains and circular economies to find smarter ways to do more with less.
Experimental mindsets we will need in order to try things that just might work (and just might not), and to learn as we go.
Relationship building, essential to making the connections across networks of stakeholders, even where we are in competition for resources, market share, scarce dollars and scarcer people.
Customer, community and stakeholder engagement required as we bring the whole system into the room (figuratively and even literally) to co-create new ways of doing business.
To do everything, everywhere, all at once we will need an awful lot of collaborators, which raises some questions: Where are companies going to find people with these skills, and where are people going to learn those skills? Where are you going to look?
I'm making my own small contribution to closing the skills gap in April, with a short workshop on the core collaborative skill of co-defining the dilemma. Check it out and book .
Is there something other than 'othering'
The big news in Australia this past week has been all about AUKUS, the agreement between Australia, the UK and the US, at the core of which is the plan for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines.
All the talk of “us versus them” around this announcement got me reflecting again on our human talent for tribalism. I can’t help observing that there is a whole lot of ‘othering’ going on out there. No doubt I’m guilty of it myself. My question is, can anyone point to a single example where positive and constructive outcomes have arisen from othering, from highlighting differences and perceived negative traits of the other group, of defining ourselves as ‘not them’? Is there one single example from anywhere? Ever?
Surely we can find a constructive way to deal with our ancient animal urge to represent them over there as bad or threatening and us over here as good or under threat from them?
This doesn’t mean we should be naïve or wilfully blind. Rather, I think it asks us to be wilfully curious, stubbornly open minded and doggedly open hearted about the motivations and interests of other people. Perhaps even to have our ways challenged and shown to be imperfect, even as ‘their’ imperfections seem so apparent to us.
My work on a daily basis is about supporting diverse people to come together around challenging and sometimes controversial problems. It would be impossible to make progress if we focussed on differences and continued to expect ‘them’ to behave badly. Rather, success comes when people choose to listen to each other and recognise that nobody holds the ‘truth’ in its entirety; when they walk together in mutual uncertainty and collective willingness to find a way together.
The world is a challenging and sometimes dangerous place and perhaps there is a need for more submarines. But for sure we could use more investment in building bridges between peoples. Bridges sometimes do fall, but doesn’t history show us that ‘othering’ is a road to nowhere?
Diving in to a collaboration mystery
“It has been great just to spend time on this together. We so rarely come together like this.”
“I was pretty sceptical walking in but having been a part of this workshop over the past few days I feel quite positive. It has been a very useful.”
When I hear comments like these from participants in workshops I’ve been facilitating I find it gratifying of course. But I also find it a little frustrating. My automatic thought is “if it’s so useful, why don’t you do this more often?”
I can’t remember when participants last found that the time spent working together in the room wasn’t useful. So it has always puzzled me that workshops with diverse people from across the organisational system aren’t a regular thing. I know I am biased but they feel so self-evidently productive from where I sit.
The quotes above are both from senior leaders in state government at the completion of a set of workshops I recently ran. Over three days this group tackled the task of creating a high-level plan for a new bit of complex policy. It is challenging work involving some quite challenging concepts and practices, yet after three days they felt they had made excellent progress.
So why aren’t workshops among senior people more of a thing?
I put this question to the project team, who had so ably helped to design and facilitate the sessions (big shout out to them). Their blunt reply was that “most workshops are pretty crappy”.
At which point it all made sense. Why would busy leaders want to come together for those terrible ‘talkfests’ we keep seeing? In their shoes I would run a mile too. Yet the opportunity cost of not coming together regularly seems very high, when I consider how productive diverse groups can be. Not only do they foster new ideas but they build shared understanding and much greater ownership of and commitment to the outputs. Doesn’t every leader want that?
The message seems clear. Nobody wants to waste time in a talkfest, and poorly-managed meetings have given all workshopping a bad name. But a thoughtfully designed and facilitated ‘workfest’ is a different beast. While I understand the impulse to avoid poor meetings, a great workshop always adds value.
At least I now know why workshops aren’t more common; People are understandably scared of wasting their time. So my next question is how can organisations best avoid poor meetings and boring talkfests while finding ways to do productive work together?
Hmmm…that’s a good topic for a workshop…..
The image is of a game of Underwater Hockey, a great sport that was a big part of my life at one time. If you haven't played it, go and check it out where you live. Like all team sports it involves lots of collaboration, and successful teams are more than the sum of their parts. photo credit Caleb Ming for ESPN
The Diamond Ring of Decision-making
Complex problems require a different approach.
In my I wrote about Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making, which has always helped me think about what authentic collaboration feels like. It can be hard work.
The diamond shows us that after some ‘groaning’ we get to a point where we can converge on an outcome or outcomes, which has always been very encouraging. Yet I also know that when confronting our more complex and intractable problems the reality is that we rarely get to ‘the answer’.
For example, improving water quality and management at a catchment level is one of those ‘forever’ problems that never really go away. Catchments and all that goes on within them are an ever-evolving suite of dilemmas, dynamics, pressures and responses. We can always improve what we do, but the problems are never ‘solved’.
So what does this mean for the diamond of participatory decision-making? As a map for visualising how we tackle complex problems, perhaps the diamond is actually a circle. Rather than getting to the end, we continuously cycle back, through periods when our thinking is diverging and periods when our thinking is converging.
I have tried to illustrate this idea here.
I see this journey as a cycle of learning. In a way we never leave Kaner’s ‘groan zone’. Rather we recognise that when dealing with hard problems we are always sitting with uncertainty, incomplete knowledge, unintended consequences, different worldviews and different ideas. While outcomes are always important, our overarching approach is not about finding ‘the answer’ but about constantly finding new questions to ask and new ways to test our understanding and our ideas. Dave Snowden of fame suggests we “probe, sense and respond” in the complex domain. That is, we test ideas. When we find things that seem to work, we do more, building on success while always watching for signs that this is no longer delivering.
One way to look at this cycle is to see that it is groaning all the way down! But let’s embrace the complexity and reframe our approach from groaning to growing, from solving to learning, from convergence on the answer, to convergence on ideas as we go.
Perhaps this is the diamond ring of participatory problem solving?
From Groaning to Growing With Your Collaborators
“It was hard today. It felt like we did more arguing than anything and I’m not sure we made any progress!”
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard comments like this from clients. I’ve made the same comments myself from time to time. You may have too, because, let’s face it, working with diverse groups on difficult problems can be hard. We seek agreement, decisions, progress, but can’t seem to avoid frustration and exasperation as we ‘wade through treacle’.
Groan!
And those times that make us groan feel like failure. “What am I doing wrong?”
But what if you and your collaborators saw the tough times as the most useful times? What if you reframe that experience as not groaning but growing?
Yeah, I had the same reaction. But then someone pointed me to the Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making from Sam Kaner. This little framework gave me a whole new way to think about the collaborative journey and the role, even the value, of what Kaner labelled the groan zone.
What Kaner showed me was that the groaning is necessary, not evidence of failure. The tough times are the mother of innovation, invention, inspiration. That is, when we are groaning, it tells us we are doing the difficult work of collaborating on hard things together. If it was easy we would have solved this ages ago. If we are disagreeing it shows that this is important to us. And if we are challenging each other, we stand a chance of learning something new and finding novel solutions together.
Our fight or flight instincts are strong, and we tend to shy away from conflict, or do anything to avoid going there. But a quick look through clearly shows us that the urge to avoid the groaning and get to the decision is itself the thing to be avoided. When working together we need to allow time and space for divergent thinking where new ideas and new questions emerge. We need to allow time and space for convergent thinking where we get to agreement and answers. And the journey from one to the other is through the groan zone.
Yes, collaboration on complex problems is hard work. But that groaning you hear is the sound of old ideas fading and new ideas emerging. It is the sound of exploration. It is the sound of growing. Enjoy it while it lasts.