I help you collaborate by helping you build collaboration models, as:
- an advisor on a fixed term project
- a part time / fractal leader for ongoing embedded work
- a long term coach or advisor to ongoing teams
- a non-executive board director
First we define – or often refine – your objective for the collaboration.
Objective
Your objective is why you are collaborating, so it must be:
- sufficiently clear that you and everyone else involved understands it
- sufficiently accurate that it describes a realistically achievable thing
- sufficiently precise that all remaining ambiguities are small and unproblematic
It can change as you learn more – often it should change as you learn more – but change is only possible when it is made between two well defined knowns. Otherwise it's just wandering.
so for example, your objective might initially be:
- to explore a new idea or proposition - conducting research, creating new products, assessing new activities etc.
- to expand an existing project - finding new customers, accessing new territories, expanding within new domains etc.
- to transform something that is broken, or no longer fit for purpose - deploying new technology, introducing new working practices, managing new owners etc.
but as you learn more it might evolve to be:
- to start a new area of research prompted by your first
- to create an alternative project that has better characteristics for success in the new area
- to deprecate the thing that is broken in a way that causes least additional harm and makes way for a better idea
Your objective can be either tactical and local to your team, or fundamental and strategic for your whole organisation.
Either way it must be valuable enough that you can and will mobilise the stakeholders and resources, both internal and external to you and your team, that are needed to be successful. Mobilisation takes sustained effort and is the first thing that will leave a collaboration cold.
Principles & Boundaries
Having set your objective I review your key documents and interview your key people to understand how you will execute your collaboration.
From this I write down:
1. your principles, which confirm what you will ALWAYS do within the context of this collaboration (for example: "we always build products, not services", and "we always maintain ownership of code, but can work on third party data"),
and
2. your boundaries, which define where your collaboration will NOT go (for example: "this collaboration is to build a tool for X, but will not stray into Y").
These need to be explicitly and repeatedly stated by your team internally and with your collaborators, because principles define everyone's expectations and boundaries define the collaboration's scope.
When these things are clear, you are setting the foundations for successful collaboration. Their absence leaves much room for contradiction, misunderstanding, and ultimately failure down the line.
Barriers and Stakeholders
Collaborations remove barriers and open opportunities between stakeholders.
Your objective likely faces many barriers to its achievement, and involves stakeholders with whom you must work to remove or bypass them. Identifying them both is vital.
When you know the barriers you face and whose help you need to resolve them you can build coherent engagement strategies to incentivise those parties to remove them, or to join with you in removing them.
Not all barriers may be visible without further action, but structural issues and current problems need to be captured.
Key stakeholders may be few or many in number, they may be suppliers, customers or bystanders, and you may or may not need to build new relationships with them.
Review and Internal Sign-off
Collaboration involves new combinations of resources, new questions to answer and new decisions to make.
It is therefore vital that your decision makers understand and approve the collaboration and are prepared to resource it.
To ensure this you review, adjust, discuss and approve my analysis accordingly.
My initial review happens over an appropriate agreed timetable, maybe a week or up to 6 months, depending on the complexity and scope of your organisation and your objective.
Further reviews continue throughout the life of project to confirm progress, adjust direction and report outcomes.
Consistent stakeholder engagement makes collaboration work and this starts internally within your organisation.
We form the narrative through-line connecting every internal stakeholder to the mission set by your objective.
Your makers, sellers, administrators and leaders adopt this narrative to align their people, data and processes to effective collaboration.
Execution and your Collaboration Map
Planning, review and sign-off brings together a clear description of your objective, your principles and boundaries in achieving it, the barriers you face and the stakeholders who control them.
I draw this up as a Collaboration Map for you to use in communication and planning at each stage of the collaboration, either directly or as an aide memoir.
From here each barrier is understood in relation to the stakeholder(s) who control or influence it and you can begin execution.
This means creating or adjust the relationships you need to remove those barriers, implementing the structures, incentives and controls that move you from present state to desired state.
Your principles provide each stakeholder with a consistent expectation about your motives and intentions and build trust in you objective.
Your boundaries provide certainty for the limits of the collaboration and build commitment to this effort.
I am available to advise and lead on stakeholder relationships as necessary, with your given resource.
