When Collaboration Makes Things Worse

 

New research helps us understand how to use collaboration better - and the findings do not mesh with what is currently fashionable.

The guidance we are hearing now promotes collaboration strongly. This story by NPR, for example, explains how workers are being tagged and tracked to determine how they use and move about the workspace. The objective is to design workspaces so that workers interact more efficiently. The article  mentions experimentation using different snacks to find which is better to get people to congregate more in the break room.

What you know now is probably a summary of what has been reported as successful in previous years:  co-locate workers, and if they are geographically separated, use technology to help them feel they are closely connected, and so on. Co-location is a value of the SCRUM methodology as well.

But wait, all this togetherness is not always the best way! Sometimes it is better to separate workers.

We know this from a timely study where researchers had different groups solve problems in different ways. You can read about the details, but the summary for our purposes here is that collaborating close together was better for researching and gathering useful information. There was less redundant work and more got done.

On the other hand, when information was applied to coming up with solutions, togetherness brought about groupthink - too much consistency and reduced creativity. The researchers concluded that the two activities, information-gathering and solutioning, required different methods of using workers. The former was best done with close collaboration. The later was got better results with much less collaboration.

There was a comment in the last part of the NPR story where a workspace designer recommended putting in secluded areas where workers can be alone to avoid group think. It was the study mentioned here that really clarified one activity that required seclusion.

What can you do with this information to help improve performance?

• Do support people collaborating generally. There really are benefits proven over many years.

• Look for work that has a component where options must be created and a solution determined. Examples are:

  • Design for new mobile web pages

  • Options for training the project workforce or for business user group that is affected by technology change brought by project

  • Finding vendors and technological solutions

  • Resolving complex project issues

• When "solution work" is found, try to structure the process into two phases, fact-finding followed by solutioning.

  • Organize participants in the first phase, if needed, to collaborate to divide and conquer the work. For example, they could list training topics needed by the business user group.

  •  For the solutioning phase, organize a small group to work as individuals to come up with the best solution for covering those topics. Continuing with the example, working separately, the project training lead and a couple of senior reps from the user group who are working to be supervisors create separate solutions. Perhaps these could be judged by the manager of the user group to be trained. The point is that the solution is more likely to be innovative and effective if determined in this way.

Try this tactic in a small way in your project. Maybe it will catch on and you will have been a change agent to create a more innovative culture in your organization. Sometimes the project manager role can be very powerful.