Editorial
Several years ago I talked with Sharon, a senior product designer for a large software company. She was excited about a new project, but disappointment set in after attending the weekly team meetings.
“We were trying to set priorities for the next release, and they just talked and talked, and went down ratholes—all with zero decisions at the end,” Sharon recounted. After several frustrating meetings, she told the project lead that the lack of progress had to end. “We need focus. Can we try something different?” she inquired.
Given a chance to direct the conversation Sharon used lightweight activities, personas and journey maps to find opportunities and prioritize them on grids before visualizing everything on a roadmap.
Then something happened: they stopped spinning their wheels. The team was better aligned and could literally see how one workstream flowed into another. They went from over two months of indecision to a focused plan in under a week.
All it took was a little bit of attention and intention. Being deliberate about how they collaborated made all the difference. Whether she knew it or not, Sharon was practicing Collaboration Design, simply by raising her hand to steer conversations in a healthier way.
Collaboration Design makes explicit what Sharon did intuitively. It’s based on the belief that collaboration can be a teachable and repeatable practice. In the modern workplace, with flexible, dynamic teams working in a distributed manner, teamwork is too important to be left to chance.
Who Can Practice Collaboration Design?
Spoiler alert: anyone.
Anyone can raise their hand to guide teamwork in the right direction. A simple nudge is sometimes all it takes. Doing a warm-up, ensuring equal turn-taking and providing a solid follow-up can change the dynamics of the entire team and drive results.
Collaboration design is a new field of practice that seeks to democratize better ways of working. But don’t be daunted: it doesn’t have to be complex to learn or get certified in. It’s just about paying attention to collaboration as it happens.
From this perspective, many of you are already designing collaboration, just like Sharon, but don’t know it.
While Collaboration Design borrows from existing fields such as organizational design, psychology and employee experience, it’s distinct from these and other fields like facilitation in several important ways:
- Collaboration Design can be formal or informal. Collaboration Design is both a general skill set and a formalized role.
- Collaboration Design is an embedded function. Champions will emerge to guide teams from their own ranks.
- Collaboration Design leverages asynchronous communication. Collaboration design goes beyond real-time facilitation to include asynchronous habits.
- Collaboration Design considers long-term team development. Collaboration Design is all about building the relationships between team members over time.
With this in mind, we can also imagine a team of people sharing the duty of guiding teamwork. It’s not just up to one leader or facilitator, but rather a skill set that a group of people can draw on before, during and after team interactions to move forward efficiently and effectively.
Objectives of Collaboration Design
Collaboration design establishes a flow for teamwork across remote, in-person, synchronous and asynchronous modes. Whether choreographing an extended high-stakes session for executive leaders or holding an informal weekly team meeting, the fundamental objectives of Collaboration Design are the same:
- Build connections: Creating time and space for people to connect helps at a time when 56% of people feel disconnected from their colleagues because of remote work.
- Create a safe place: Research shows that creating psychological safety correlates to high performing teams.
- Foster diversity and inclusion: Everyone should feel welcomed, included and supported in collaborations, and diverse teams tend to perform better.
- Provide structure and clarity: To focus a team’s energy, there has to be clear roles, goals, and purpose.
- Guide problem-solving: Collaboration design leverages methods and rituals that help them solve problems and innovate together.
- Make time to reflect: Regular reflection and introspection as a group build healthy teams.
- Keep the momentum going: Collaboration design isn’t about making one meeting great, it’s about creating a forward motion for the team over time.
Related Article: Design Better Hybrid Workplace Experiences With Empathy
How to Get Started With Collaboration Design
Liberating Structures can be considered part of Collaboration Design. Developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, Liberating Structures are a set of techniques and rituals that shape the way we work.
For example, one of the most popular methods is called “1-2-4-All.” It’s simple to use, and fits many different situations. Consider Collaboration Design as a broader practice that anyone can participate in. Bringing in simple techniques to guide teamwork is all it takes.
Here are some simple starting points:
1. Implement an asynchronous daily check-in via a group chat, such as Slack or Teams. Have everyone on the team respond to the same three prompts each more, such as how they are feeling today and what they have planned. Use emojis and gifs to make it fun and playful.
2. Start meetings with quick icebreakers and warm-ups. Taking two minutes before each meeting to become more present with one another goes a long way in team building.
3. Try a technique from the Liberating Structures toolbox. The 1-2-4-all approach is very simple and effective. There are many more to consider. Find the activities that suit you and your team best and make them a habit.
4. Use techniques from Design Thinking to guide the team interaction. For instance, when brainstorming new ideas, start the challenge with the phrase “how might we…” These three simple words are open and inviting to participation: “how” indicates you’re looking for solutions, “might” signals that you don’t know the right path to follow yet, and “we” clear indicates it’s a group effort.
5. Build in time for reflections. Take a minute at the end of sessions together to get feedback from the group. A simple scale or poll can indicate if it’s an overall thumbs up or thumbs down. This gives you input to improve things next time.
The best time to start being more intentional about collaboration is right now.
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Related Article: Want Your Organization to Collaborate More? Social Psychology Can Help
Collaboration Design for the Win
One report estimates that businesses lose as much $542 billion to pointless meetings. Others show as much as 85% of employee time is wasted on inefficient collaboration.
As workplaces become less hierarchical and more reliant on team creativity to innovate, designing productive collaboration becomes a skill everyone needs to have. Equipping everyone in an organization with the ability to improve team interactions will lead to more innovation faster.
Fixing teamwork is no small challenge, but the rewards of paying attention to deliberate collaboration are potentially great. Team productivity is enhanced when the common pitfalls of collaboration are minimized, and more successful group interactions improve engagement and help employees feel better connected to one another. Last but not least, because they’re collaborating better, teams can find better solutions and serve customers better as well.
While Collaboration Design is still in its infancy, a movement around it is starting to grow. For one, it’s emerging as a job title on LinkedIn. More and more consultants describe their offerings as “Collaboration Design.” The LUT University in Finland is also offering a full-fledged course on “Collaboration Design.” Finally, communities of practice with “Collaboration Design” as a core theme are starting to emerge internally and externally.
More than just a nice-to-have soft skill, Collaboration Design is becoming a future skill that all leaders and teams will need to function in modern workplaces.
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