But because the concept of collaboration is treated as a soft skill, it can be hard to pin down exactly what is going wrong when collaboration is not happening effectively in an organization. Teams might schedule workshops to fix the problem without ever really understanding the problem, or conflate “more communication” with “better collaboration” and add a bunch of tools to their tech stack that don’t actually help them work better together.
On the flip side, when collaboration is going well, it can be easy to celebrate the end results—Successful product launches! Huge revenue increases!—without pausing to critically evaluate why your collaboration is working so you can replicate it, experiment, and problem-solve more efficiently during the rough patches.
So what can you do to strategically and systematically improve how well you collaborate?
To improve collaboration with rigor and intention, you need to focus on engaging in high-value collaboration.
What is high-value collaboration?
In short, high-value collaboration is a focus on activities that advance innovation, tangibly lift a business’ bottom line, or improves mission-critical processes. High-value collaboration is the antithesis of what we like to call “collaboration theater”—activities that seem useful at face value but actually just waste time and money without improving anything or creating value.
In a webinar with Lucid, 451 Research’s Chris Marsh proposed a way of thinking about high-value collaboration as the act of engaging in immersive productivity in shared interactive spaces (that is, really working together hands-on versus talking and coordinating only), using visuals to convey complex ideas, and documenting critical information to create a living blueprint of your business.
In other words: High-value collaboration requires active, consistent effort rather than a passive obligation to simply chat and check in on occasion with our colleagues.
It’s important to note that good communication is critical to good collaboration, but high-value collaboration requires a focus on the entire suite of skills, techniques, strategies, and tools necessary to increase your rate of innovation and improve your team’s impact on the bottom line—all of which extends beyond communication alone.
So, how can you improve your organization’s high-value collaboration skills?
Key tenets of high-value collaboration
Low-value collaboration is laden with communication for communication’s sake, bureaucracy, lack of direction, bad facilitation skills, conflict avoidance, and poorly fitting tools for your team.
Conversely, these key principles and strategies can help you increase alignment and innovation on your team by orienting you around high-value collaboration:
1. Focus on context and clarity over communication
High-value collaboration is not a numbers or volume game—you don’t get awards for the amount of chats you ping colleagues with or the number of meetings you schedule (or cancel).
To improve collaboration, you should view chat, email, meetings, and other functions of communication as a means to achieve clarity and share the necessary context you need as a team. Under various circumstances and team structures, projects may necessitate a lot of communication or a little.
The primary question you should be seeking to answer is “Do the right people have the right information at the right time?”
2. Build a foundation of rich visual documentation
Hosting team creative brainstorming and planning in shared visual collaboration spaces like Lucid allows for immersive productivity and deep, contextual understanding you don’t get from calls and text chat alone. Visuals allow you to break down contextual relationships and dependencies between systems and organizations in minutes instead of hours, flattening the learning curve for new employees.
By using visuals to eliminate walls to tribal knowledge and insider language, you’re able to get people on the same page faster and let each team member own their journey to becoming a well-informed, high-value contributing member of the team.
As you continue to engage in high-value collaboration activities in shared visual workspaces over months and years, you’ll also build an innovation repository of all your team’s best ideas, an incredibly valuable asynchronous resource you wouldn’t have if you’d relied solely on ephemeral audio and video for your collaboration.
When innovation is well-documented, innovation is celebrated—and when it’s celebrated, it happens more often.
