Collaboration design

How we can help design collaboration?

First, we work with you to assess the current state of your business or organization and identify your most pressing challenges, through deep-dive conversations and analysis of your work structures, processes, and tools. Using the insights we get, we then help you design and facilitate inclusive and collaborative sessions where everyone is equally involved in the co-creation of a change roadmap to help you tackle your challenges and sustain your transformation.

Why is collaboration design important?

The way we work has changed and keeps changing rapidly and radically. Not keeping up with the constant change could cause various collaboration issues, ranging from a disconnect between leaders and team, teams that work in a silo, stalled projects with unclear goals and meetings that spin in circles and have no conclusive end. To protect your business or organization from any of these issues, you need collaboration design.

When do you need collaboration design?

Collaboration is needed at every stage of the lifecycle of any business or organization, right from the startup phase to the expansion phase. It is needed when a new team has just been formed, when planning a project or when projects are stalled. Basically speaking, whenever a group of people are required to do anything together, collaboration design is needed.

What is effective collaboration?

Collaboration design is effective when it promotes inclusivity by encouraging shared ownership of the collaboration process through individual participation. People want to feel valued, heard, and respected. Therefore, when their feelings are validated, they become more willing to collaborate by contributing their quota towards achieving the goals of the collaboration.

Who designs collaboration?

Most organisations today don’t have dedicated roles or departments for collaboration design. Collaboration between teams, and often within the team, is left to chance. People join a new workplace without any guidance on what are proper ways of communicating, discussing, sharing perspectives, making decisions.

However, there are people tasked with coordinating tasks, and rallying people into meetings to make decisions and get the work done, like team or project managers. There are people tasked with making technology work for the business and implementing best practices. There are people tasked with making sure goals are achieved, like business leaders and heads. But there is no one tasked with taking care of how people feel when collaborating, what process and methodologies they use.

This is often left to invisible forces and described as workplace culture. Too often leadership skills and lack of culture is blamed for inefficiencies. But culture is built through actions and behaviours, not through talk. Therefore there should be people who take care of collaboration design and propose and facilitate ways of working that are in sync with the needs of the people, technology, and business outcomes. That role can belong to anyone with the desire to improve their workplace and help people work better together.

How we can help design collaboration?

The world of work has changed. It is time to change with it. Drastic and rapid change is causing confusion. If you have people who don’t talk to each other, teams that work in silo, stalled projects with unclear goals or next steps, meetings where conversations spin in circles… you need collaboration design.

When designed, the experience of working together brings many benefits for people and business. Organisations that pay attention to collaboration design are twice as likely to outgrow their competitors, while their employees saw gains in efficiency, quality of work, innovation, and overall job satisfaction. Deloitte

When do you need collaboration design?

In many workplaces today collaboration is too often left to chance. Leaders hope that bringing the brightest minds together and relying on their professional capacity will improve productivity and business outcomes. But that is proven to not work. Brightest minds especially, need designed and facilitated experience to work effectively together.

Collaboration needs to be designed when a group of people is coming together to achieve something. This can be a desire to do things faster, improve something, learn or implement something new, or create something new from scratch. In real life work examples: when a business wants to grow, when a new team or project is starting, when projects are stalled, when a group of people needs to solve problems together.

What is effective collaboration?

Effective collaboration is all about people, therefore it is difficult and it takes a lot of effort. More people get involved, the more complex it becomes. And the more you want to get out of it, the more processes need to be in place. To achieve effective collaboraiton you need to balance people’s needs and right methods.

Effective collaboration is not just a process to achieve result, but first of all a philosophy of interaction with other people who need to create deep shared understanding about collaboration effort, and have clarity and provisions to make individual contributions.

People need to feel valued, heard, and respected and be ready, willing, and able to use the tools and methods to contribute.

Who designs collaboration?

Most organisations today don’t have dedicated roles or departments for collaboration design. Collaboration between teams, and often within the team, is left to chance. People join a new workplace without any guidance on what are proper ways of communicating, discussing, sharing perspectives, making decisions.

However, there are people tasked with coordinating tasks, and rallying people into meetings to make decisions and get the work done, like team or project managers. There are people tasked with making technology work for the business and implementing best practices. There are people tasked with making sure goals are achieved, like business leaders and heads. But there is no one tasked with taking care of how people feel when collaborating, what process they use and enable, and what role technology plays in the collaboration.

This is often left to invisible forces and described as workplace culture. Too often leadership skills and lack of culture is blamed for inefficiencies. But culture is built through actions and behaviours, not through talk. Therefore there should be people who take care of collaboration design and propose and facilitate ways of working that are in sync with the needs of the people, technology, and business outcomes. That role can belong to anyone with the desire to improve their workplace and help people work better together.

COLLABORATION

DESIGN