The Collaboration Canvas. A beginner’s canvas for making…
By: Jaya Ramchandani
Tags: Toolkit, Partnerships, Canvas, Learning, Collaboration

Everyone is familiar with hierarchies. The pros are decision making is fast and everyone knows how to work in a hierarchy. But hierarchies are not what collaborative structures look like as they are not egalitarian and many views tend to be ignored.

No structure is great at the start of a collaboration. Choose it to be free from too many rules. No structure works well for short-range tasks among equal functions. For larger group sizes, no clear structure tends to be chaotic, and you’ll soon see a few people start to dominate the decision making, which may frustrate others.

Majority rules is a quick way to make decisions in collaborating groups, and like hierarchies, everyone is familiar with the process. The disadvantage is that it could split the group into winners and losers and great insights could go unheard.

Unanimity is great when it occurs but almost impossible with more than two people, and if your group reaches a unanimous opinion quickly, there is probably a problem in speaking out or a lack of diversity in the group.

My favourite decision structure for collaborative working is building consensus. Through discussion and dialogue, many ideas can be synthesized, conflicts are brought to the open, decisions are thoroughly thought through, and group members have a high buy-in. Consensus building is time-consuming and is contingent on good facilitation and listening skills.

Governance structures like sociocracy and holocracy have been designed to optimize collaboration within organizations. They adopt consent-based decision making for policy decisions that affect the whole group, while keeping different operational structures for execution tasks. Consent-based decision making works with a consensus of ‘good enough for now, safe enough to try’ and adopts a feedback-based iterative approach to decisions.

#3 Build capacity for shared understanding

Capacity building starts with the questions, “who lacks what to make this collaboration effective?” and “who is missing from the table?” Skills may need to be built across various domains. Perhaps someone has a lot of technical know-how but has never worked in teams — they need the skill of teamwork. In the case of artists and scientists collaborating, an artist needs to spend a significant amount of time learning the language of science, and vice-versa, for effective communication to even start. Skills and knowledge exchange forums, safe spaces for discussion and feedback, technical vocabulary bridges, and programming common experiences for the group are all ways to build capacity for shared understanding.

#4 Agree on how to communicate

Depending on whether you are communicating across time, space, or organizational boundaries, it is important to choose tools of communication that work for all entities. If you are communicating across languages, investing in bilingual team members or interpreters can make your efforts more fruitful. A host of tools are available for online collaboration (Google Drive, Slack, Zoom, and RealtimeBoard work for me). If you are collaborating across very different cultures or socioeconomic classes, it also helps to learn about each other’s hidden rules of communication. If you are an academic working with a non-academic, you need to ensure that your language is jargon-free and everyone is on the same page.

#5 Plan and facilitate meetings

I highly recommend planned and facilitated meetings when collaborating. If your group does not yet have any skilled facilitators, it is definitely a capacity that should be built on priority. The task of facilitation should also be rotated to avoid power concentration. Good meetings have an agenda that everyone contributes to, a relaxed atmosphere, respects time, and is a space for listening and contributing without personal attacks. Facilitators are trained in encouraging good listening practices, keeping things on focus, discouraging personal attacks, motivating the group to share opinions, providing the necessary information to make decisions, and identifying and dealing with concerns and conflicts.

#6 Set feedback mechanisms and conflict resolution protocols

When working in new collaborations, it becomes very important to invite your peers into a feedback session where they provide both appreciations and actionable improvement suggestions. I prefer to have such sessions in groups unless the topic of feedback is something very specific. When receiving feedback, a trick I’ve learnt along the way to distinguish the information from the emotions or feelings that arise in me when hearing the information.

Remember, feedback is a gift.

The better your group’s feedback mechanisms are, the less conflicts there will be. But don’t start the collaboration under the assumption that there will never be any conflicts. Instead, prepare yourself with tools on how to resolve disagreements when they occur. Conflicts are easiest to resolve when everyone involved is concerned with resolving the situation for themselves AND for the other.