Collaboration: Timing Is Everything

 

While many of my ProjectManagement.com co-contributors have focused on the benefits of collaboration, pitfalls of its absence, and tools or techniques that might help attain the former while avoiding the latter, I (predictably enough) want to take a slightly different tack. You want collaboration? It’s simple, really. Drawing from some pretty basic game theory, all you have to do is to time the payoff to as late as possible for each member of the project’s team. Did that last sound a little jargon-y? Let me put it this way: pay everybody else last.

Before I get into the longer explanation, let me stipulate this: if your organization’s approach to motivating employees is confined to threatening them with their jobs, forget about any honest collaboration. Any loyalty to your proffered technical or managerial approach is completely faked, period. The acid test here is this: if the PM were to suddenly be replaced, would there be any member of the project team who would assert that the previous PM’s technical approach be maintained, or would they reflexively embrace the new PM’s version? This approach to motivating the project team is typically confined to project teams where:

• Each member belongs to the same organization,
• Very little original thought is required of them, and
• They are rewarded (or not punished) the same, regardless of project outcome.

In other words, projects where collaboration would be largely superfluous.

Conversely, the benefits of collaboration among team members are maximized when:

• The members of the team are brought together for their expertise, not because they just happen to belong to the same organization,
• Much invention or original thinking is called for, and perhaps most importantly,
• …they receive their rewards only when (or if) the project is executed successfully.

Remember the iconic scene from The Mummy where protagonist Rick O’Connell confronts his one-time associate Beni about his plans to guide the Americans to the lost city of Hamunaptra? Beni admits that the preferred tactic of leading them into the desert to “let the rot” has been denied him because the Americans have paid him half of his fee, with the other half coming only after they have arrived in Hamunaptra.

Of course, not all attempts at project team collaboration are analogous to hiring a cunning opportunist to serve as tour guide to an ancient but treasure-laden city-of-the-dead. But many, if not most of them are. In typical, spontaneous acts of economic collaboration (also known as purchasing a product from a person or organization that has agreed to sell to us for a specific price), the consumer has selected the desired product off of a shelf where, again typically, there were options to the product selected, and approaches the check-out ready to pay. If you think about it, that’s really the optimal way of doing it. Under certain circumstances it might be better to pay first, and then be shown the product purchased; or to arrange payment well after having taken delivery, but in each of these instances one party is vulnerable to having the other not follow through on the terms of the collaboration, potentially rendering the whole exchange a bad idea.

On the other hand, by arranging to have the rewards of a successful collaboration delayed until after the benefits have been realized, the collaborating parties really don’t have to worry about the other’s level of commitment, or good character, or outward appearances of being trustworthy collaborators. All anybody really has to concern themselves with is preventing the other’s payoff from being realized too soon – hence the original admonition.

 It also doesn’t hurt if you can arrange to have those collaborators who double-cross you eaten by beetles.