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1.0.2- Sustainable Collaboration and the Law of Agreement
by NT Community Manager.
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Sustainable Collaboration
and the Law of Agreement
One of the key reasons collaborations fall apart is that people working together do not spend enough time at the beginning of their collaboration creating a joint vision: defining what they want to accomplish and how they will accomplish it together. I call this creating “Agreements for Results.”
The key premise on which “Agreements for Results” are based is The Law of Agreement[1] which says that
· All productivity and satisfaction in professional and personal relationships happens because we collaborate with others, and,
· All collaborations are embodied by an explicit or implicit agreement about what we are doing together.
Sustainable Collaboration is the ability to maintain productive working relationship for as long as people want to because the collaboration is held within the container of a clear “Agreement for Results.” This container includes a process to quickly get back to collaboration when people are not effectively collaborating.
Collaboration typically breaks down because either all those involved have reached no agreement, or the agreement is ineffective. Invariably the solution for an unproductive collaboration is to put in place an Agreement for Results. Collaboration essentially is a function of an effective relationship. As we know, building effective relationships is very subjective.
Example:
In the early 1980s, I was working for the old AT&T. The company was gearing up to move
from a world where everyone waited for their marching orders from corporate headquarters into a new era, the post-divestiture world in which competition and entrepreneurship would reign supreme. I had a progressive manager at the time who was open to letting us push the edges of our new environment and evolving culture.
By collaborating with our manager and a volunteer team, we were able to develop an
innovative work style that resulted in the design of a new telecommunications application. Without waiting for corporate headquarters to tell us what to sell and how to sell it, the collateral to use and what to charge, we plunged ahead, creating both our process and our results as we moved forward. The team’s members were empowered by each other and the excitement that our collaboration generated. We called ourselves “The Mod Squad,” after the popular TV show of that era, because our work style embodied this modern philosophy of collaboration and self-regulation.
We were so successful that senior management asked us to travel around the country and teach others what we were doing and how. As I think back, I remember the joy of collaborating, how productive we were, and how much fun it was to forge new territory.
Collaborating effectively is a holistic activity, especially on high-performance teams. It is personal, and sometimes intimate, requiring exquisite attention to the nuances of another’s presence and personality and the ability to pick up subtle verbal and physical cues. It is not unlike dancing. In collaboration, one must pay attention to the whole of the project and the whole of the team. Anything less is mechanical, a going through of the motions of a process someone else set up, check-listing a set of activities asynchronously rather than creating cohesively in the moment.
Because collaborations are so personal, it requires dedicated participation in a continuous feedback loop. Without this, true collaboration does not take place. Yes, you might be adding value to a desired outcome, but it is not one forged of an interdependent set of activities, reliant and affected by the actions of others. When everyone is fully responsible for the result, and innovation is required, the process must account for the whole.
