Whatever methods and structures you come up with for partnerships and involvement with other interests, it's always down to the people concerned to make it work - or not. So who do you need? A new study, reported by Dave Pollard, explores what it take to create The Ideal Collaborative Team.
The conclusion is that most people experienced in collaboration would rather have inexperienced people with a positive attitude than highly experienced people who lack enthusiasm, candor or commitment. Dave reports from his work with Mitch Ditkoff, Tim Moore and Carolyn Allen:
Two criteria, enthusiasm for the subject of the collaboration, and open-mindedness and curiosity, are rated as the most important criteria by virtually all segments of respondents. More than half of all respondents rated these qualities as indispensable in a collaboration partner. By contrast, five experience-related criteria (proven trustworthiness, collaboration experience, previous familiarity with other members of the team, reputation in the field of the collaboration, and business experience), rate at or near the bottom of the 39 criteria assessed by participants.
Candor, courage and timeliness of follow-through are also rated very important qualities in a collaborator, along with strong listening, feedback and self-management skills and diversity of ideas.
These findings, most of which are based on responses from experienced collaborators, seem to suggest that just about any group of appropriately motivated people can be effective collaborators, and that good collaboration is more art, and perhaps chemistry, than science.
Dave and his collaborators also struck up a conversation among themselves to reflect, from their experience, on the essentials of collaboration. They developed it on a wiki. This and the full report offers insights relevant to all forms of relationships, working and personal. If you've wonder what's the difference between coordination, cooperation and collaboration, there's a table to explain and this summary:
Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively.
In order to turn the survey findings into practice, Dave suggests - and I summarise - that you need to establish clear objectives for the collaboration and the commitments required of team members; decide on the appropriate collaborator selection process; review the composition of the team against the objectives, commitments and criteria; and allow the members of the team to get familiar with each other.
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has a new Program on Networked Governance since this fall. It might be interesting to look into this.
www.ksg.harvard.edu/netgov/
or the blog
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/
Posted by: Alexander | December 02, 2005 at 11:19 PM