Three things I've learned about commitment to collaborate
I was recently at a wedding and as always enjoyed that critical moment when the bride and groom say “I do”, each making a public commitment to their lifelong partnership.
And of course, this reminded me of the commitment required to collaborate authentically
Commitment to collaborate is one of the five elements of our Power of Co collaborative pathway. In the original version of the Power of Co it is step number one.
In our later iteration, Commitment to Collaborate lies at the centre of the cycle.
However we want to illustrate it, there is no doubt that the commitment to work together, much like the commitment to a marriage, is a critical success factor of any authentic collaboration. I’ve been thinking about it a bit lately and want to share a couple of things I’ve learned about commitment to collaborate.
Who needs to commit to collaborate?
In the ideal universe, everyone is up for this collaboration thing. But of course we can’t click our fingers and make people commit. In reality there is only one person whose commitment we have control over, and that is ourselves. So this is a great place to start. Who needs to be committed to this collaboration? We do. If we believe in this and really want to bring people in to help us make decisions, we stand a good chance of success. With our collaborative mindset we are likely to act collaboratively, and it’s hard to go wrong from there. Furthermore, our authentic collaboration will help others to make their own commitment.
Bottom line? Are you committed to collaboration and how is this driving your collaborative actions?
How much commitment is enough?
I used to believe that successful collaboration required everyone to be fully committed from the get-go but over time I’ve come to see it differently. In my experience it’s unrealistic to think that all parties, whether external or internal stakeholders and decision-makers, will simply sign up to this new way of working together. I’ve learned that commitment isn’t all or nothing and that it grows over time. In practice this means I now worry less about getting strong commitment from everyone at the outset. Instead I seek to get into doing collaboration as quickly and usefully as I can, confident in the knowledge that success breeds success. The experience of good collaboration builds everyone’s confidence in the process and each other and our collective commitment grows.
Bottom line? Build commitment by doing collaboration, rather than expecting everyone to be enthusiastic supporters at the outset.
When should we be focussed on commitment to collaborate?
The answer to this lies in our evolution of the Power of Co, from a linear framework with commitment at the start to a more cyclic framework with commitment at the heart. The difference reflects our realisation that we should always be seeking to build everyone’s investment in and commitment to working together. In other words, at every step in our journey it is useful to ask ourselves “how can we do this in a way that strengthens our collective commitment to this process”.
Bottom line?: Keep asking the question – how do we strengthen our commitment to this process today?”
Embarking on a collaborative process is not like getting married, but it does require a commitment to work together. And like a marriage, it helps to re-commit every day. How committed are you?
How I survived my angriest public meeting
So there I was, in front of the stage, microphone in hand in a village community hall, attempting to manage the angriest public meeting I’ve ever been involved in. Everyone knew it would be angry, including the local media who were there with TV cameras to capture every juicy moment.
But being a clever facilitator I had planned ahead and had my strategies in place for managing just such a situation. The first one was to give everyone an opportunity to express what was on their mind. So…
“On your seats you found post it notes and a pen. To get us started you might like to write down your key issues and post them on the wall here, to capture your concerns…”
The reactions ranged from unpleasant to unprintable and it was very clear that they were going to do no such thing.
Smiling nervously at the camera in my face I soldiered on. Not to worry. Plan B then.
“Let’s go straight to the presentation then, to show you what works are being planned for the local road…..”
More abuse and invitations to stick things in uncomfortable places.
Camera man leaps up again. He’s loving it. Pans across angry crowd. Swivels and tightens on my increasingly sweaty visage. “What’s this bloke gonna do now” he’s thinking…. As was I. In that moment, I had no Plan C.
So I went rogue.
“Ok, so what would you like to do? What feels most useful to you?”
It turns out that their local community committee had their own presentation to give and nothing was going to happen until it had been shared with the room. Up they came with USB stick and the meeting was theirs for the next 30 minutes.
And after that my client was able to share their presentation and we got into Q&As and discussion. And so on.
Those moments are the teaching moments aren’t they. As I drove home, a shaken shadow of my former self, I was able to reflect on what had happened and how I had managed to survive and get a discussion going. Three things I learned in that baptism of fire:
- Letting go of control, sharing how things should proceed. It feels terrifying but was in reality the thing that allowed us to make progress together.
- The more I tried to manage out the anger I was expecting and seeing, the more I exacerbated it. I was the problem.
- Being vulnerable, unsure and uncertain of how to proceed was not the end of the world. In fact, it allowed the meeting to take its own more useful direction.
I learned these lessons in the context of facilitating a public meeting. But have applied them in all collaborative situations since.
Collaboration often involves or evokes high emotions and it’s human nature to try to manage them out. But by sharing control, acknowledging how people are feeling and accepting vulnerability we are much more likely to connect and collaborate as humans.
That’s what I’d say to the camera should it ever be pointed in my face again.
Three simple steps to better collaboration across silos
“I’ll be blunt, the biggest barrier to Australia having the convenience of seamless government services is what I refer to as a plague of fiefdoms. The siloed thinking across departments and agencies has to stop.”
Said Minister Bill Shorten in a recent address at the National Press Club.
And he is not the only one to point out the downside of silos and what he called “turf protection”. We see it in all large organisations and between any organisation and their stakeholders.
Of course, some organisational structure is essential. Silos are useful. But silos often become those fiefdoms the Minister was decrying, getting in the way of effective delivery.
I’ve done a lot of work this year with teams from State Government finding it difficult to make their silos disappear so they can work as a single team and learn from each other.
Here are some things I’ve learned about how to make your silos work a little better.
Get together as often as you can
There is no substitute for getting into the room together – physically where possible, virtually where you must. Get together across your silos. Sit beside ‘them’ and talk to them. Look at the issues together.
Walk in each other’s shoes
Share your perspectives, your dilemmas, your aspirations. Talk to each other. Most importantly, listen to each other.
Just try stuff
Agree on few small steps you can take together to bridge the gaps between you. Experiment with your processes. Learn your way beyond the silos together as you do the work.
Sounds simple. Is simple. Takes commitment. By coming together, walking in each other’s shoes and experimenting with new ways to do things, you can work together better, whatever the state of your silos.
A new bout of solution-itis strikes home
A small group of residents in my home village are talking about forming a group and working towards a more clean energy future for our community. Everyone is excited about the possibilities, but it’s occurred to me that we may be suffering a collective bout of solutionitis.
Much of our talk is around building something shiny like a ‘community battery’; a visible, tangible solution to our collective climate change anxieties. It’s an exciting thing to imagine and the enthusiasm is growing.
But having done some more research and talked to like-minded groups from other communities, it seems that we may have fallen into the collaborators trap of leaping to a solution before understanding what the problem is. A classic case of solutionitis! While a big battery is a nice idea it may not be the ‘solution’ for what is a complex set of interrelated technical and behavioural dilemmas. Single answers rarely are.
It seems much more likely that the journey to a renewable community is less certain, comprising multiple ideas and actions. Walking this journey together is going to require a whole lot of collaboration through complexity. This means:
- Co-defining our clean energy dilemma together – what’s the problem we are trying to solve here?
- Co-defining our collective light on the hill – what does success look like for this set of dilemmas?
- Co-designing our processes – who are we as a group, what’s our governance, how do we do our work together and where do we get started?
- Co-creating potential ideas, projects, things to try.
- Testing the way forward, trying things, taking small steps together as we build clarity and confidence and find ways to move towards our light on the hill.
- Iterate, learn, fail, learn some more and do it all again.
Creating a more sustainable village is a complex problem and there is no single solution. Instead we are going to need to do the difficult work of working together over a period of years. We are going to need our collaborative mindsets and our commitment to working together. Do this and we can declare our current bout of solutionitis cured.
Wish us luck!
(The photo is a shot of our garden on a clear autumn morning this year)
Curiosity saved the project
I have my doubts that curiosity killed the cat, but I’m certain of its role in being wiser together (curiosity that is, not the cat). We can’t get different outcomes if we don’t bring different thinking to bear. And we can’t bring different thinking if we aren’t learning. And we learn best when we are at our most curious.
Questioning, inquiry, seeking to know are perhaps the fundamental tool of collaborators. Yet asking questions from a place of curiosity and learning can be very challenging, particularly when someone I strongly disagree with is trying to convince me of their argument. Defending comes easily. Seeking to understand more deeply takes self-awareness and effort.
For this reason we created designed specifically to encourage respectful inquiry across differences. Where people have expressed their position or made their opinion clear, this tool can help everyone explore more deeply and learn more authentically from each other.
If you have a group where opinions differ and where thinking wisely together is important, perhaps is worth a try.
Extending our thinking to be wiser together
“How are we going to implement this so that it works?” is a question that is often asked. All too often the default response is along the lines of “let’s do it the way we have always done it, but ‘more’, or ‘better’, or ‘with better enforcement’”. In other words, business as usual with the same results we’ve always seen.
If we are truly seeking to be wiser together when planning to implement a solution it pays to think creatively about how to do that, yet I know from my own experience that creativity doesn’t always come naturally. Sometimes things get in the way, such as:
- Organisational norms about what is acceptable or not,
- Unspoken assumptions about what is or isn’t possible or workable,
- Group think where we rapidly line up behind an idea,
- Unwillingness to say something out of the box lest it seem silly,
So far, so human. Yet, creativity and generative thinking are very human too, and with the right encouragement any team can be more creative.
Some teams can find a simple tool helpful, even if simply as a reminder to avoid the trap of BAU thinking. Our tool is appropriate for groups large or small and is designed to do just that. On its own it won’t save your project or the world, but as an action you can take in five minutes, it can help any group be wiser together.
and extend your thinking.
Why taking the risky action is the path to reducing risks
Are you circling the wagons or leaning in to manage angry stakeholders?
I once had a client at a council where the General Manager had taken a battering over the years from a small number of vocal and angry community groups. By the time I was involved, the GM had effectively pulled up the drawbridge and stopped talking to his stakeholders.
This response to community anger is very understandable and a natural self-defence mechanism. Other ways we respond include to:
- Get angry that they are outraged at us. “How dare they! Can’t they see I’m doing the right thing? Of course I can be trusted and it’s offensive of them to say otherwise!”
- Go into defensive project management mode: Plan every move out before doing anything; Line up your ducks in an attempt to minimise the chance of pushback; For every move, seek permission from those up the line; Manage out any opportunity for untoward anger; Get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Of course the irony is that these actions are likely to exacerbate the very stakeholder anger you are trying to avoid. By managing to reduce outrage, we often increase the outrage.
Vulnerability is the secret to success
What to do instead?
Lots of things, many of which boil down to being vulnerable in the face of potential bad experiences. For example:
- Do more engagement, not less.
- Stop talking and start listening.
- Be curious without defending (“Is that right? Tell me more about why you feel that way….”)
- Talk. Remember that conversations build relationships, which make the transactions possible.
- Embrace uncertainty and do stuff. Less planning to manage out risk and more engagement, even when unsure about outcomes.
- Ask for their help.
- Extend trust to them, so that they might return the favour.
Back at this council with the besieged GM, I encouraged my client to go and talk to some of these people. To his credit he did just that and came back with a new spring in his step. It turns out that he and the GM’s number one ‘public nemesis’ grew up in the same suburb in the same city, and my client’s father coached the other guy at football. Connections were made. Barriers began to crumble. Frosty relationships began to thaw.
Circling the wagons is a natural response to scary situations and ‘leaning in’ to those situations feels very uncomfortable. But if you want to reduce the anger out there, leaning in to that vulnerability is the lower risk move. Can you risk doing anything else!
Three Ways to Achieve More Learning in Meetings
One of the things that clients most appreciate is our suite of tools for collaborators. In creating this toolkit we sought to ‘bottle’ as much as possible of our collective experience, philosophy and style, so that clients could bring that to their own work without requiring us to be in the room.
On the theme of making difficult conversations safer and get more learning together, here are three tools designed to help people talk and learn across different views, experiences and opinions. Each comes from the section of our suite concerned with encouraging exploration of issues prior to making decisions. Use them in any meeting or workshop. Note that each tool is designed to help people release their strongly-help ‘positions’ – if only briefly – and to go deeper. For more about this see .
This process asks people to have a go at articulating the reasons and rationale behind the opinion that they don’t support. In other words it encourages me to put aside my ‘position’ and walk in the shoes of another, if only briefly. Use it when you want people to really consider other perspectives before making choices.
This process pairs people up and encourages each person to use generative questions to explore the thinking behind the issue at hand. What you are really doing here is making it a little more likely that different perspectives will be drawn out, heard and more deeply explored, prior to making decisions.
This process is a variation on Practice Curiosity, with a key difference being that each person in a pair is invited to first be curious about and then to advocate for the position that they don’t hold or the view they disagree with. Once again it encourages people to listen as loudly as they speak – an important part of any effective communication.
If you are facing conversations that you fear may be ‘difficult’ and if you are looking for some ways to make them both safer and more useful, why not give these processes a try. Let me know how it goes, and feel free to be in touch if you’d like me to talk you through it prior to your meeting.
ChatGPT's take on Collaboration
Chat GPT was asked to explain the value of authentic collaboration. Here is it's reply, in full and unedited:
Authentic collaboration refers to a process in which individuals or groups work together towards a common goal by sharing their ideas, knowledge, and skills. The value of authentic collaboration lies in its ability to generate innovative solutions and foster a sense of community among team members.
Here are some key benefits of authentic collaboration:
- Diverse perspectives: When people from different backgrounds and experiences collaborate, they bring different perspectives and ideas to the table. This can lead to more innovative solutions and creative problem-solving.
- Improved communication: Collaborating requires open and effective communication, which helps build trust and respect among team members. It can also reduce misunderstandings and conflicts, leading to a more productive and positive work environment.
- Increased efficiency: By sharing knowledge and skills, team members can accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. Collaborating can also help to streamline processes and eliminate redundant efforts.
- Personal and professional growth: Collaborating with others can provide opportunities for learning and development, as team members can learn from each other's strengths and weaknesses. It can also help individuals build new relationships and expand their networks.
Overall, authentic collaboration can lead to greater creativity, productivity, and job satisfaction. By working together towards a common goal, individuals and groups can achieve more than they could on their own.
What do you make of this summary? It seems hard to disagree with any of it, but at the same time, I know that there is much more to say in answer to this question. Meanwhile, are you living up to ChatGPT's expectations of your authentic collaboration?
Exhausting Lessons in Communicating Across Barriers
As my wife will attest, I’m not a French speaker, but I do have a (very) basic vocabulary. This means that communicating when in France can be quite challenging, sometimes embarrassing, often hilarious. It struck me that my struggles to communicate in a foreign language are a little like the struggle to communicate with those who think differently to us in everyday life.
For example, I have a client in the stakeholder engagement team of a large utility. Their communication struggle tends to be with the internal infrastructure team who design and build the pipes, who come from a different background and see things through a different lens. Sometimes the teams feel like they are speaking different languages.
So what can a month in France teach me about that challenge? Well, despite my limited French I did manage to communicate using:
- Multiple channels, sometimes writing things down, even using facial expression and hand gestures to get my meaning across.
- I listened as loudly as I spoke. I concentrated very hard on what was being said to me and invested a lot of energy in clarifying meaning.
- Most importantly perhaps, I was highly motivated to communicate, as only being stranded on a rail platform in a foreign land can motivate a person. I wanted to understand and to be understood. I cared deeply about what was being said to me.
For my client this means trying diverse channels to deliver and receive messages to and from the engineers. It means really listening. Asking rather than telling. Being curious and wanting to know how ‘they’ see it.
Communicating in a foreign language is an enjoyable challenge, but it can be completely exhausting, which probably indicates how much I was investing in trying to communicate. I know that working with collaborators can be exhausting too, but perhaps that’s an indication of your commitment to working authentically with others. Working across barriers is tiring, but worth it.
The photo is of Estaing, one of the many beautiful villages we walked through on the Way of Saint James.