busy people whose typical focus is on the products and services they create, but without taking time to come together as a group and establish shared understanding and priorities, their day-to-day efforts would have been affected.

For example, a vendor you rely on for key technology needs a seat at the table, but success for them may be selling you more product versus your end product being successful.

Getting diversity means including people with a variety of: Experiences in industry and skills Cultural backgrounds

Burn a cycle

When problems have many intertwined causes, or solutions require novel skills and materials, it’s critical to be able to bring a diverse group of people together to be productive.

He says that “trying to prove the contribution that healthy collaboration makes to an outcome is impossible, because we have no control group to compare it to. We don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t worked together.”

Much has been written about how to do co-creation — from Sprint (Simon & Schuster) by Jake Knapp to “Pair Design”, which I wrote with Chris Noessel for O’Reilly

growth opportunities for more junior team members or people looking to expand their skills.

Rather than just following metrics, teams need clear objectives to steer their efforts.