Despite our best intentions, working together is hard! It’s often harder than working on your own, but the results will be better if you figure out how to take advantage of everyone’s ideas.
Pitfall #1. Nobody’s in charge.
We’re used to organizing around a leader. It can feel sorta directionless when nobody is in charge. Sometimes nobody is and that’s ok. However, this arrangement should be intentional. Figure out how your group will resolve conflict and make decisions, before your faced with either. Will it be through discussion? Voting? Majority rules? Consensus? Write it down in a team charter. A team charter can make or break a group that prefers shared accountability.
Pitfall #2. Everyone thinks they are in charge.
Self-organized groups are often made up of strong, passionate, bright people. If nobody actually is the leader (and you like it this way) see point one. Otherwise, identify and agree on roles and responsibilities in advance so everyone comes to the group with the same understanding of who’s doing what.
Pitfall #3. Everyone wants to be in charge, but they don’t necessarily want to do any work.
Another messy one. One that can be prevented by clarifying the skills and work that each person brings to the project. Make that part of your on-boarding process for including new members.
Pitfall #4. The lifespan of the group outlives it’s usefulness.
It was while reading the numerous insights Clay Shirky has published that I first started thinking of organizations as porous. Always changing. Ephemeral. A good group knows when it’s time to close shop. Finish with grace. Lots of good things come to an end. It’s not a failure. Get some closure. It’s ok to move on.
Pitfall #5. The group folds before it finishes what it set out to do.
This is also not a failure. Maybe the time has not come for this idea; or maybe it’s an idea who’s time has not yet come. Document what you can and put it in a place where other people can find it. Like in the Policy Seed Bank on GCPEDIA.
Unless you actively try to avoid these pitfalls; you may fall into one of them. If anyone has advice for avoiding or handling them, please comment!
There is a policy seed garden on GCPEDIA? Awesomness!
I personally think that there is one missing, #6 Not having a shared vision on the project’s intended goal. We always assume that everyone is on the same page when it comes to a group’s expectations of the outcomes. But sadly, until these assumptions are made aware to all that take part, the common objective cannot be achieved. Your answer to pitfall #1 touches a bit on the subject of establishing a team charter, but doesn’t deal with the assumptions explicitly.
The other point that I might add would be #7 Not having a plan. This usually associated with pitfall #3, where there is a shared vision of success, but no idea how to get there. Furthermore, team members tend to rely & reinforce their inherent powerlaw (the usual 90-9-1) of contribution rates, but acting as default lurkers, waiting for a lead contributor to come in and establish governance over the project. To reverse this trend, some of the solution from pitfall #1 and #2 could help alleviate this by also breaking down monumental task into sizable and workable chunks over a period of time. Like a heartb…work schedule, complete with benchmarks and time for meetings.
But that’s just my 2 cents.
And I would add 8. No working agreements. In agile development, it’s common to create working agreements which are promises of what everyone will do and how they will work together. They serve to establish what each person will contribute and some guardrails (read: norms) to guide their decision-making and interactions with the group while contributing to the task. The concept can be applied to just about any collaborative circumstance.
There’s a good example of how working agreements are used in scrums here: http://www.gettingagile.com/2008/05/02/creating-a-team-working-agreement/
It’s silly question Monday!
So, how are we defining collaboration? What assumptions are embedded in these proposed pitfalls, etc? Trying to nerd on this post, but am currently stuck on the silly questions…
So, what is collaboration? Well, wikipedia defines it as “working together to achieve a goal” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration). Spydergrrl pushes this further by adding inclusiveness as a defining value of collaboration (http://www.spydergrrl.com/2012/01/rant-are-you-using-social-media-to-co.html).
Off the top of my head, I see collaboration as an act of working together, with fluid and limitless boundaries, to achieve something that one cannot achieve alone (effectively and efficiently, anyway).
The world is complex and collaboration, as part of our world, is no different. Therefore, a potential pitfall of collaboration is not recognizing (nor leveraging) the power of this complexity.
Think this just turned into rambling Monday
@Thom – it might be called policy seed bank, but yes…there is.
@Blaise Good adds! Totally agree.
@rebecca_blake I’d agree with @spydergrrl that collaboration is when you’re working with people to arrive at a better solution than anyone could arrive at on their own. Oh boy, is the world ever complex. That’s one of the reasons I started blogging. Have you read “Getting to Maybe” yet? It describes many projects I’d consider a success because the people most affected are the ones working together to come up with the solutions.
@spydergrrl thanks for the agile link. We’ve been doing daily stand-ups for the past few months in my office. We could definitely benefit from a Working Agreement. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Speaking of complexity and collaboration… I’m reading about how at a certain point knowledge is so networked that one person might find it impossible to work alone (Weinberger 2012). Better brush up on how to avoid these pitfalls…don’t want to be the one left out :0
And that’s it in a nutshell isn’t it? The world of work has become too complex and inter-twingled (Morville’s word) to work on our own. Collaboration is a must.