Working together can increase the quality of our lives and, indeed, our chances of survival as professionals. We don't like to work together unless there is some real payback for investing the energy required to collaborate. Meeting a need provides this incentive. If there isn't a payoff for everyone, collaboration won't happen. In general, the need to collaborate can simply be the necessity of dealing with uncertainty, or of having someone with whom to share our concerns, or of solving a very real, common problem.
Collaboration is a necessary technique to master the unknown.
3 In our experience, teams are often formed with only a vague idea that if their members work together, good things will happen. In the absence of a strongly felt common purpose and a real problem to solve, these efforts often fail, degenerating into a collection of individual efforts loosely held together only by unproductive meetings. Intimacy What is often not clear is that once the need is present, collaborators must develop a sense of intimacy . Good collaborators are able to speak openly about what they believe, feel, and think. Successful collaborative activity demands a feeling of safety to share information and a commitment to be completely honest about a particular area being discussed.