Agile Development Blog

I love talking about Agile Organizations with Ryan Martens. When we thought about our Top 10 characteristics of an Agile organization, we recognized the pivotal importance of collaboration. (Having written a book entitled Collaboration Explained may have prejudiced me slightly :- )

When I talk with teams, organizations, and  CxOs about adopting a collaborative culture, I can be met with some resistance. Some of it is very direct; often it is passive-aggressive. The rub lies in deep assumptions and old wounds:

• Collaboration means dumbed-down
• Collaboration means group-think
• Collaboration means bringing decision-making to a halt

When Ryan and I say “collaboration” this is the opposite of what we mean. We have a very different picture in mind. Here is a quick view of what WE believe:

Not only can collaborative and smart go together —
they must!

1. Command-and-control actually makes people stupider—we hire smart people. Don’t we want them to stay as smart and actually get smarter? Command-and-control has the effect of lowering people’s IQ. Collaborative environments improve people’s cognitive skills. They raise people’s IQ’s. Which statement would you like to go home and tell your family: “Hey! I lower people’s IQ’s as a living!” or, “Wow, I actually make people smarter!”
2. Whether you read “The Wisdom of Teams” or “The Wisdom of Crowds” the evidence is in: we make better decisions when we invite more insights. This aligns with the Lean principle about gathering as many insights as possible before making a decision. Think about set-based, concurrent design and concurrent engineering.
3. People who believe collaboration means group-think (or dumbing down of decisions) haven’t experienced the power of Storming. That means inviting open and safe conflict around decision-making in a high performance, high trust environment. A prejudice against collaboration is usually based on old wounds. Trust was low. Safety was low. People’s IQ’s had been lowered. In these contexts, an individual team member may only have one tool in their toolbox: a hammer of heroics. Taking that hammer away can look disempowering. In this context, collaboration has to prove that they have something to gain. That is, they are ADDING to their toolbox.
4. Finally, to make sure that collaboration isn’t a drag on an organization, we rely on extremely effective facilitation. (Collaboration Explained is a good guide!) We rely on effective processes to gather the insights, to seek conflict and dialogue, and to guide teams to take insights and turn them into consensus. This form of collaboration is NOT compromise or capitulation. It manages and then eliminates swirling down energy-draining ratholes. It ensures discussion around useful dialogue versus interesting debate. And, it prevents Loudest Voice Driven Decisions (LVDD) :- )

See our previous coverage of #10 Work/Life Balance, #9 Being a Servant and Leader, #8  Sustainable and Successful and #7 Contributing to the Community and the Company. Stay tuned for #5 in our series, Top-Down and Bottom-Up Decisionmaking.