GPR Road to collaboration

We are creating this model to help people get a realistic assessment of where they are. Then they can see what is possible and what they could do to get there. The model is only useful if it helps individual teams take specific actions to improve the way they work.

Our precision is not academic. It is for clarity. We find less-precise discussions of collaboration leave teams without a clear idea of what they want to achieve or their next step to get there. This model is designed to help you find that next step.

Collaboration is one of those words, like team, that everyone wishes to apply to their company or set of co-workers. This has resulted in a dilution of the term to mean any way that people work together. The correct term for this general concept is interaction, where collaboration is one specific mode of interaction.

Many "collaborative teams" are actually well-coordinated work groups. This may well be sufficient for their needs. But by muddying the terms and claiming themselves to be at the peak those teams lose the ability to see what advances would be possible. There is a scale of levels of interaction.

Each person finds themselves in multiple different contexts, and interactions will be at different levels in different contexts.

Setting the right goal

The most important level is your fluency, not your aspiration. Collaboration comes from trust. Trust comes from trustworthiness. And trustworthiness is driven by how you perform on your worst days, not on your best days. So if you want to attain a particular outcome, you need to be fluent at that level.

Higher levels of interaction have higher costs. The more people who are involved in each context, the higher the cost for each level. With large contexts, often collaboration is not necessary or not possible. Simply aligning goals and then coordinating may be sufficient—especially if each team is internally collaborative.

For example, if you can align each small team to an end-user value stream, then you eliminate many dependencies between them. Customer scenarios can be shipped from a single team. This reduces the required level of interaction between teams and gives you a better product at a lower cost.

This is not always possible. Some experiences will be large enough that hundreds of people need to be involved. But it is always worth looking, first, to see if you could simply focus a small team tightly around the precise business value and deliver that, then conglomerate that with other teams doing the same.

Improving your situation

This differs somewhat based on which interaction scope you are trying to improve. Each scope-specific document gives scope-specific details. However, there are also some commonalities between scopes.

Collaboration requires strong connections between every part. Maintaining each connection carries a time and communication overhead. The benefits of collaboration are big - but as the number of parts grows, the overhead quickly grows bigger and close collaboration might not be worth the extra cost.

This is why it is generally easier to get collaboration in a small team, and why a larger group of 10+ people will rarely have collaboration between the whole team, but instead tends to break into collaborative teams.

Therefore your first step will probably be to create a cross-functional real team of 6-12 individuals (8 being optimal from a team dynamics perspective). Everyone should know who is in the team and who is not. The team should have all skills that are needed in order to deliver value to the customer.

Think of it like a startup: if these 8ish people were the only employees, would they provide value that customers would buy?

You don't need to progress through all of the stages. It is possible to bypass several in the middle. That said, blockers at any level will prevent attaining that level or any above it. Therefore you will have to eliminate all blockers at all levels if you want to attain full collaboration.

The fastest path to any given level is to assess your current state, agree with the whole team on your destination, and start acting as if you were at the target level. As a team, identify all blockers that apply to you for all levels between your current and goal levels. Then resolve them all at once. Many of the blockers can be resolved by simple team agreement + a history of everyone working in alignment with the team's agreement. This is why working as if you were at the target level works so well: it builds that history of success and that builds real trust.