Current Focus: Collaboration

Collaboration is the act of working together with one or more people in order to achieve something.

In many fields, effective collaboration is increasingly important due to complexity, challenge and opportunity.

• To move forward or innovate, it’s necessary or desirable to work with others that add knowledge, value and resources. Notice how many new “hyphenated” fields have emerged to explore how fields interact. Biomedical engineering, bioinformatics, econophysics…
• Increased collaboration is not only being required in traditional work groups, but with new types of workers, business partners, suppliers, and even competitors around the world. In many industries, pieces of the production puzzle are being separated out and sent to partners who can do them most efficiently and then being reassembled later, requiring new levels of collaboration outside of traditional structures.
• Communications technology provides new opportunities and now allows us to easily collaborate not only face-to-face and elbow-to-elbow with colleagues in the workspace literally down-the-hall, but through teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and web-driven collaboration and networking tools, with colleagues, customers, and business partners around the globe.

The Challenge: For most, the pressure is on to make 2+2 = 5 in the collaboration equation. Ideally, collaboration translates into best use of resources, higher quality solutions, increased value, inspiration and energy. Often though, it is merely time-consuming, frustrating, and produces compromised solutions. In some collaborative work groups, the sum of 2+2 becomes 3. Some common reasons: poor communication, lack of effective tools and processes, time pressures, lack of trust, lack of shared purpose or commitment…

• In successful collaborative efforts, what happens to allow or inspire the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts?
• How can we access the best from collaboration partners?
• What can business and organization leaders learn about successful collaboration from other fields?

Great collaborators don’t necessarily have the same working style. Successful musical team Ira and George Gershwin worked very differently. According to biographers, Ira would cross out his lyrics over and over again until the words revealed themselves, while George would write the music the first time through.

Which comes first – the words or the music? Listen to Oscar Hammerstein talk to Humphrey Burton about his collaboration with Richard Rodgers in a 1958 BBC interview. Show Souvenirs
5 October 1958 Light Programme

Recommended Reading for Collaborators

• How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions, David Straus, Thomas C. Layton
• Creative Collaboration: Vera John-Steiner
• Organizing Genius: Secrets of Creative Collaboration: Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman
• How Great Decisions Are Made: 10 Easy Steps for Reaching Agreement on Even the Toughest Issues: Don Maruska
• Six Thinking Hats, Edward de Bono
• The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts and Cultures: Frans Johansson
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Socieities and Nations, James Surowiecki
• Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration, Robert Hargrove

food for thought

• Expert Thoughts Relating To Collaboration
  Click here to read this listing of thought provoking quotes.

articles

• 10 Quick Tips for Effective Collaboration
  Click here to read 10 Quick Tips For Effective Collaboration.
  
  
• Jane Moyer on Collaborative Leadership: Lessons from the Choir Loft
  Click here to read this article on a group of people act together in unity and harmony.
  
  
• Success in a New Era
  Click here to read this article about the interesting times we are living in.

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