Twenty-First Century Collaboration

Post 1. What’s changed?

If a team is a true team, i.e. it is a group of people striving to achieve a common goal through interdependence, then it needs to collaborate.

Collaboration consists of three elements, all of which, with some cunning contrivance, begin with C:-

- Creation- activities such as problem definition, ideation, idea development, problem-solving, planning, designing, decision-making and similar

- Coordination- activities such as task identification and definition, task allocation, setting timelines and deadlines, agreeing discussions with/engagement of  parties outside the team and similar

- Connection- the development of relationships and perception of each other as people, demonstrating strengths and weaknesses, developing influence based on experience or expertise)

Historically, most of these activities happened in meetings; they were synchronous, they occurred at the same time since a meeting is a multi-way interaction between a number of parties. 

OK, sometimes these would be 1:1 meetings, but more often they’d be larger groups.

Why?

In the past:

• most work teams, and their internal customers, were co-located in the same office building, or at least the same country. Meetings were an efficient and cost effective way to achieve all three of the constituent parts.
• technology didn’t really support the ability to rapidly collaborate: emails took us some of the way, but group emails, threads, reply vs reply-all became a log jam
• physical proximity allowed meetings to happen frequently, at short notice, and even…
• … informally- the famous ‘watercooler meeting’.

Historically, the remainder of our collaborations took place via phone calls. Again, they were largely synchronous, since a phone call is a two-way dialogue 

However, today, we have some very different dynamics: 

• Many of us are part of ad hoc teams, so we just don’t have that much opportunity to develop deeper relationships. 
• Many teams are made up of employees of the customer, and suppliers/freelancers; this erects ‘ethical walls’; situations where some information is not available to certain people which means that certain topics are off-limits in discussion or document sharing
• Many of us work with team-mates in several different time zones, which renders regular and frequent meetings, in person or even virtually, difficult or nearly impossible. This also makes it difficult to simply revert to one-to-one phone calls.
• Many of us are part of a team that may only meet once a year….or even never!
• And when we do meet, it is much more likely that we’ll meet virtually via a screenshared online platform such as Zoom (other meeting platforms are available!)
• When we were all in open-plan offices we could be collaborated with at the drop of a metaphorical hat. As more and more of us work largely online, we are increasingly setting ‘focus time’, so we are less accessible for unplanned and ad hoc collaboration.

So what?

This means that we need to change the way we collaborate. 

Just ‘having fewer meetings’ or even ‘having better meetings’ isn’t going to work- sure, it’ll help, but it won’t overcome an 11 hour time difference, or the fact that some team members can’t travel.

We need to move away from the  meeting-as-the-default-approach, to more “asynchronous” collaboration.

In the next post we’ll look at some of the practical “how to” elements of this as well as some of the paradigm shifts we need to make in our perceptions and expectations.