Learning Effective Collaboration
Effective collaboration about complex topics requires (1) reading, (2) writing, (3) talking, (4) listening, and (5) thinking, over time.
Collaboration is not an event: it is a process. It is not a group in a room talking: that is only part of an effective collaborative process.
People are neurodiverse: they process information differently. Some people communicate well by speaking. But how do they learn well?—by listening, or by reading? And other people communicate best by writing their thoughts down, but again, how do they learn well?
Some people are more assertive than others. The traditional Agile community is sanguine about unstructured real time collaborative events such as Lean Coffees and Open Spaces. But such events act as a filter, empowering people who talk well and who also learn well by listening. These kinds of events disempower people express themselves better in writing, and who learn best by reading.
We need to be inclusive. Collaboration approaches need to informed by cognitive science—not by someone’s ideological views on how they prefer to work.
People in leadership roles in an organization are well positioned to influence collaborative activities. They can—they should—act as organizers and orchestrators, observing how collaboration is proceeding, and making adjustments to ensure that everyone who needs to be included is actually taking part in a way that is effective for them. And leaders also need to observe when collaboration is not happening, but needs to be happening.
A Learning Program for Collaboration
Agile 2 Academy’s Agile 2 Foundations course goes deep into the ways to achieve effective collaboration among a diverse group of people. It covers,
The activities that must occur in the course of effective collaboration about complex issues.
Ways to ensure that everyone is able to participate.
Ways to make people more self-aware with regard to how they are expecting others to behave when collaborating.
The importance of ensuring that everyone has the ability to focus and think deeply, and ways to do that.