Zooming out on collaboration

In my previous post, I zoomed in on what it takes to ‘bring the system into a room,’ to achieve fruitful collaboration between multiple stakeholders with different perspectives and different incentives.

In this article, I am going to take a giant step back to take a bird’s eye view of what a collaborative effort could look like.

Imagine that you have brought together a group of people from different teams and/or different organisations to tackle a complex challenge. You have included people directly impacted by the challenge, sponsors, decision makers, experts, and people with a variety of skills that are pertinent to the problem at hand.

Let’s sketch out their possible interactions.

For simplicity, I am going to represent interactions between the different participants with lines, but I am not going to qualify the interactions. For example, an interaction can be an exchange of information, co-creation, coordination, or other ways of working together.

1. Fragmented group

Before the project starts, the participants are likely to be somewhat scattered. They don’t habitually work together, although some people may know, and interact with each other. Clusters may form among people from the same team, but the group as a whole is fragmented.