Finally! Collaboration Explained.

The Three Fundamentals of Collaboration

It’s mid 2016 and I am in a room with 20 people from a huge diversity of backgrounds – from biologists to engineers, municipal councillors to landowners – to lead discussions about how to improve the use of water in an area likely to experience incredible pressure on its water resources. Some of us have travelled hundreds of miles; others live close by. This is our last meeting in a series of ten, as we finalize the outputs of months of collaboration: more than twenty full-consensus recommendations for improving how water is used. As we finished each one, we stick it up on the wall in the community hall where we are meeting. By the final few, we are cheering every time another post-it gets smacked up on the wall.

What made my group’s work collaboration? Why were people advocating for what we did and how we did it for years after the group’s work was complete?

People everywhere are referring to themselves as collaborators … job descriptions or business proposals highlight collaboration as an essential skill. Collaboration is a popular term. It’s in the top one percent of lookups on Merriam-Webster. It seems while we intuitively understand what collaboration is and the value of it, we fumble when we have to translate the concept into practice.

Over years of working in collaborations of all shapes and sizes, including the one I describe above, I see collaboration as having three fundamental parts: purpose, people, and ideas.

1)    Purpose

Collaboration is about achieving something together.

Now, I’m sure you just rolled your eyes and thought “no kidding!”, but purpose and how you define it is critical.

Collaborative groups don’t just spring up spontaneously to solve problems or do cool things. Somebody sets them up … gets them organized. And the tendency is to define the ‘problem’ before ever engaging a collaborative group … to have it all figured out in advance. This is SO the wrong approach.

What’s needed most for collaboration is general direction. Trust your collaborators to define the purpose and then participate ... be part of the discussions so that you can actively speak to your perspective just as you've asked your fellow collaborators to do. It’s highly likely that the collaborators can define the problem better collectively than you can by yourself.

2)    People

Collaboration is about connecting people ...which is also, arguably, the hardest part of any collaboration … getting people to put down their shields and “show up” to work on a problem or be creative. While there are probably a hundred ways to look at how to connect people, I see it as three basic things that set the foundation for all of the other tactics. Culture, values, and empathy. (Yes, there’s a pattern of things in threes).

The purpose of culture, described by Daniel Coyle in the podcast Cracking the Code on Company Culture is to find ways to navigate hard problems together in a connected way. He goes on to explain that the biggest platform for building culture is … building safety, because safety gives you that sense of certainty, because you know you’re connected.

Sounds a bit like collaboration, doesn't it?

Establishing and maintaining the safety to fully express yourself and be vulnerable inside a collaborative group is critical to its success … in fact, I think safety is more critical in collaboration than inside an organization. Without safety, there is no collaboration.

And then … our values drive how we collaborate. In her book Dare to Lead, Dr. Brené Brown defines values as a way of being or believing that we hold most important [page 140]. In collaboration, we are seeking to find ‘the way’ to uphold everyone’s values. It’s not this OR that … it’s not a trade-off discussion. Collaboration is about upholding values for everyone. As soon as someone feels they have to give up or compromise on one of their values … collaboration becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

The last piece of my connecting people triad is empathy, which seems a little like the ‘how’ you create safety and uphold values. But empathy is really about creating understanding – seeing through the eyes of another.

Again, I turn to Dr. Brené Brown. Empathy, she says, is not connecting to an experience [of another person], it’s about connecting to the emotions that underpin that experience. Collaborative empathy can only happen if it’s safe … it allows people to understand the values of the others in the group. Understanding values is key, but doesn’t spontaneously happen. At least with people I’ve encountered until now in my life, people introduce themselves and follow their name by listing their core values.

3)    Ideas

The third part of collaboration is connecting and building ideas. Without this, there is no collaboration.

I’m sensing another eyeroll. Collaboration is a creative endeavour – about finding novel or new ways to solve an issue. To my mind, this is the one fundamental that differentiates collaboration from teamwork.

To do this, you rely on the experience of the collaborators to bring together ideas that haven’t been brought together before. Or build on existing ideas with other perspectives. Steven Johnson speaks in his TedGlobal 2010 presentation Where Good Ideas Come From (on his book by the same name) to the point that ideas come not from individual “Eureka” moments, but rather from the moments when people connect on their ideas or their mistakes.

One way I’ve used to connect ideas is the ‘what if?’ question. “What if we tried this with that?” This one question can break some of our mental barriers to looking at something from a new perspective.

What’s really cool is that, sometimes, the ‘what if’ moments can come at the weirdest times – from a completely different context – like someone talking over lunch about a documentary they watched the week before. You just never know what could trigger someone saying, “Hey! What if we tried that over here? We could …”

These three fundamentals … purpose – people – ideas … are essential to collaboration. Without all three, there is no collaboration. It’s a bit like baking a loaf of bread without one of the key ingredients: yeast, water, flour, or salt … you don’t get bread. And, of course, when good collaboration happens, you can achieve results you didn’t realize were even possible.

My water use group embodied all three of these fundamentals. We set out knowing water use was a ‘hot topic’, but it was the group who defined our specific purpose, made it super clear, and then we constantly checked ourselves against our purpose throughout all our work.

Our meetings were safe, supportive, sometimes irreverent (okay…maybe more than sometimes). People expressed their values and actively sought another’s perspective. In one case, one of our collaborators, Bob, was absent from one of the sessions. Somebody pointed out that if Bob had been there, he would have wanted us to think about the topics from one particular perspective. I can’t emphasize enough the significance of that event. Having one person make sure someone else’s point-of-view is considered in their absence demonstrates the effectiveness of the group and the member’s ability to work together.

Finally, our collaboration would not have been complete without the melding of ideas from everyone to create some particularly innovative ways of dealing some specific water issues. Most ideas didn’t survive, but the ones we took across the finish line were a reflection of everyone in the room.

If we look at collaboration in terms of purpose, people, and ideas … we can begin to move beyond an academic understanding to seeing more real collaboration in all aspects of our work and home lives.