Collaboration is one of those words thrown around all the time in the workplace, and there’s a common way to understand this word: working (well) together.
But I’ve been thinking about how we might re-imagine what collaboration means, because there’s some kind of magic that happens when we work together – sometimes – and it doesn’t necessarily happen every time any group works together.
So what is that special sauce?
Really dynamic collaboration seems to happen when high trust and high curiosity come together in a cocoon of creativity.
Most times when we “collaborate”, it’s after someone tells us to work with another person, share ideas, and develop something together. OK, sure. Good start.
What if you take that starting point (coming together with others to develop something) and infuse it with unusual ways of connecting – but also enshrouded with trust and curiosity?
Here’s an idea: in a given discussion, have the various folks in the room switch roles and participate in the discussion from the perspective of a different party. So, maybe you have a finance person, a marketing person, an HR person, and an operations person. Perhaps the finance person acts in the marketing person’s place, marketing in HR’s place, and so forth.
What considerations might a marketing person, with all their experience and expertise, bring to an HR perspective? What might an operations person see, when putting on their finance hat, that an all-finance-all-the-time person might look right past?
And if these people REALLY trust one another – meaning they can let someone “sit in their seat” without feeling fear or judgment – and can be curious about their new perspectives – and others’ – it makes for a wild experiment that just might be creative enough to develop something interesting.
I have clients all the time who talk about collaboration who really just mean “working with other people”. What might we be able to think up, dream up, or build up if we start to blow up our notion of what collaboration is and try a different way of being together?
