Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive

We Start with Unclear Objectives and Structures

The company sees so much value in breaking down silos that they’re not as concerned about duplicating efforts and optimizing the creation of new ideas.

To handle leaders, Borek suggests giving them an important task — the keyword being important. These folks should be asked to lead a discussion about key decision criteria, or to make critical decisions.

It also may be necessary to acknowledge that their other priorities are more important. You may need to wait until they have the time and space to devote to your effort.

run through a cycle of exploration to move quickly from the fuzzy frontend questions and assumptions to asserting a hypothesis about the solution or creating a prototype. This answer need not be (and probably won’t be) the right one, so beware of investing a lot of time or making it very high-fidelity. What you might find is that once you assert a

She suggests using specific language, like “Help me understand your point” in place of “I disagree with that,” to depersonalize and invite intellectual discussion among those who might otherwise give in.

author of Agile for Everybody (O’Reilly),

To help teams crack problems with unknown unknowns, we need to focus on framing the problem, stating objectives that describe outcomes (not outputs), and watching for leading indicators of longer-term success. Providing just enough structure and guardrails to help a team feel safe and have room to maneuver helps keep people focused.

Part I. Creating the Right Environment

When we have a real interest in an effort, we can’t help but want to contribute, and if we aren’t given a chance, it can bring up an emotional response that is hard to corral productively. By engaging “everyone” in approaching a problem, you increase their commitment to the end product and reduce the drag on momentum.