What the #%&@ does collaboration mean anyway?

6 minute read

THE QUESTION

The three of us sat staring at the whiteboard. Covered floor to ceiling in barely legible red scribblings. The CEO, who wasn't present in this meeting, planned for his top 100 leaders to gather for their second annual leadership conference in four months time. Our job in this moment was to design the agenda and content of the conference. The brief wasn't clear. This planning wasn't going well.

The head of HR, let's call him Peter* (unless he outs himself in the comments of this article :-) gave me a look that was a bit "Sorry the brief is so vague that we are just flailing around in the dark here" and a bit "Shaun you better have some magic up your sleeve 'cause I got nothing!"

I looked back at him. I had nothing. 

The CEO couldn't decide on what the point of the conference was. "What are the objectives?" Yeah, can't help you there Shaun. "What would success look like? How will we know this conference has hit the mark?" Hmmm, good question.

He just knew that last year went really well. That was essentially the brief. Make the Conference Great Again! As vague as a Trump campaign slogan. 

We looked back up at the faded whiteboard scribblings (by the way, are there any whiteboard markers on the planet that aren't on the verge of running out of ink? Surely a business opportunity there?) 

Nothing much to go off there. 

So we buried our noses back in the Pulse engagement survey in front of us, hunting for clues as to an area to focus. 

"Collaboration. This keeps coming up. People are unhappy with collaboration." 

Peter and I (along with Colin* our collaborator in the meeting) saw the same theme, but couldn't penetrate further. 

Colin was a little perplexed. "But we do collaborate. We collaborate in teams, between teams, between offices. How much more collaboration can we do?" (that is a very rough paraphrase)

In exasperation Peter threw up his hands: "What the #%&@ does collaboration mean anyway?" (that is an exact quote) 

There was a pause.

Great question!

THE REAL ISSUE 

There are two ways to take this question. 

Option 1 is that this highly experienced, thoughtful and switched-on executive has somehow achieved the rare feat of rising through the ranks over the last 20 years without ever encountering the word 'collaboration' before. How miraculous! As rare as rocking horse manure. 

Option 2 is that he is hinting at something else (knowingly or unknowingly). 

I use the word collaboration all the time. All the time. After all, a large portion of my work is with intact executive and leadership teams at off-sites and in an ongoing group coaching capacity. You can bet collaboration is a regular theme. 

I am almost always sure that the person I am speaking with knows what I am talking about. 

Innovation is also a regular theme in my work. As is resilience. Customer centricity. Strategy. Influence. Leadership. Leaders are grappling with all of these and more. 

These words are not jargon. They are not clichés. They are legitimate labels for aspects of organisational reality. They also represent key priorities for companies. Improvement in these areas yield very real shifts in team or company performance. They are very real concerns leaders in organisations have. 

These are words we use safe in the knowledge we are talking about the same thing. 

What if though - god forbid - we aren't talking about the same thing? And what if that misalignment is at the heart of why it is so hard to make meaningful change happen in these areas? 

The challenge is that these themes are so multi-dimensional it can be hard to know where to start. And when we dig into them, it can be hard to know what they truly mean in practice.

UNCOMFORTABLE SPECIFICITY

This little reflection piece isn't about collaboration in particular. It is about how to be more effective in our attempts to change the culture of groups we lead (be they teams or organisations) so that we can achieve the lofty outcomes we set out for. 

It could equally be about the other themes I just listed like innovation or customer centricity. 

This is about the "uncomfortable specificity" that is required to make real behaviour change happen (to quote the work of Dan Ariely's Irrational Labs). It is about the need to dig below the surface of overarching concepts like the ones I listed. We use these concepts as a shorthand to communicate, but the shorthand can mask the fact we are often not talking about the same thing.

So what does it mean to be uncomfortably specific about a behaviour? Simple. In my view an uncomfortably specific behaviour takes one of the following forms.

Behaviour that needs to STOP:

When this happens … (behavioural cue)

People here tend to do this … (behavioural response)

Then this happens … (result).

Behaviour that needs to START:

When this happens … (behavioural cue)

People here could do this … (behavioural response)

Then this would happen … (result).

Here's a real example. A large tech client we work with was trying to create a more innovative culture. One key pattern of behaviour that we isolated as being key to being more innovative was empathy (think design thinking, IDEO, etc. etc.). More specifically, one of the types of empathising that yields useful insights, ideas and innovation are those observations about your customer/client which defy your expectations. Anything that surprises you. Most of the time we are looking for what reinforces our current beliefs, but when we look for what is surprising we are more likely to capture information that leads to innovation. 

Knowing this, here is how we framed the behaviour…  

Behavioural cue:

Every time a sales person walks out of a customer meeting

Behavioural response:

They immediately record (in a shared system) the one thing they learned about the customer's experience that most surprised them

Result:

Then the customer experience team will collate the data collected and eventually gather together a small group of colleagues to pore over the data to see if they can arrive at any non-obvious insights. 

Making this behaviour happen still isn't easy. But at least you have a shot. It's a lot better than hearing for the umpteenth time "we need to be more innovative!" at your next team meeting. Yawn.

BEHAVIOURAL ENGINEERING

This year I have been bandying about the term behavioural engineering with clients at every chance I get (or behavioral engineering for our American friends). I am obsessed with it. I coined the term to capture how our business People of Influence thinks about behaviour change and to evolve a systematic approach that will be more successful than what most organisations do now. Because let's face it: practically all attempts to create behaviour change across organisations fail. Miserably. From what I see anyway. It's frustrating. For everyone. And I've noticed our clients sometimes just want to throw up their hands and give up.

This project of elucidating what constitutes ‘behavioural engineering’ is an ongoing project of ours, but what we do know is that getting uncomfortably specific about the behaviour you want to change is a key component to success. 

WHAT NEXT? 

So next time you are having a conversation about how your team or organisation needs to be more collaborative or innovative or agile or resilient or customer centric or … (you get the idea) I would suggest you challenge each other to get more specific about what that means. If they get uncomfortable, you are probably on the right track! Even if you do nothing about it, at least you will be talking about the same thing. And no one will be tempted to ask 'what the #%&@ does (insert topic) mean anyway?!' 

Which reminds me of my last meeting with Peter and Colin. Another whiteboard, still not a lot of progress on the design of the conference. I said to Peter: "You know, this is not exactly on topic so forgive me, but from our last meeting what has most stayed with me is you saying 'What the #%&@ does collaboration mean anyway?' I've been thinking about it a lot. I think there is something in that."

His response? 

"It's a bullsh*t term!" 

I think that's going too far. After all, collaboration does have a meaning. But I took his point. We went back and forward on this. 

He concluded with "Well, at least you have the title for your next blog post." 

Peter, if you are reading this…challenge accepted!

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Shaun Kenny is director of leadership development consultancy People of Influence and one of Asia Pacific's most in-demand speakers and educators, having delivered 1,000+ sessions to 150,000+ people in the past decade with clients such as Microsoft, PwC, Visa, LinkedIn, Australia Post and Uber.

Shaun is an authority on helping leaders harness the science of influence and behaviour change to create world-class teams and organisations. An economist by training, Shaun translates the latest insights of behavioural economics and neuroeconomics into practical tools that professionals can use for immediate impact.

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