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How do you foster cooperation when collaboration slows things down?

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Gwenola Michaud
Community Champion
Project Manager & Advisor| Geosciences & Monitoring Consulting Milano, Italy

We often say: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together.”

Yet in reality, cooperation across teams can be difficult. It may slow down decision-making, require compromises, and challenge existing plans or ways of working.

At the same time, strong collaboration brings clear benefits: broader perspectives, shared experience, better solutions—and often a more engaging team dynamic.

As a project manager or team member, what concrete practices have you found effective to foster cooperation without losing momentum?
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Anton Oosthuizen Senior Business Analyst / Project Manager| Self Employed Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa
Some of the things I normally do are:

Keep the stakeholder group small. 'Small' would depend on your project and the type of decisions that must be made. Generally, 5-7 is ideal; 10 or more becomes an issue.

I try to break it down into smaller stakeholder groups, on a functional level for operational aspects and a management level for strategic decisions.

Make sure that I know the stakeholders by doing stakeholder analysis. This allows me to a) make sure I have the right people in the right sessions and b) focus on the right stakeholder at the right time.

Something I've learned a long, long time ago - make sure they know what is at stake and what is in it for them. People are more inclined to do anything if there is something in it for them

Foolproof? Nope, nothing ever is, but it does allow me to manage stakeholders with some sense of structure. I know where and who to go to when things stall.
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Syed Ashir Riaz
Community Champion
AI-Powered Social Media Strategist
In my experience, cooperation slows things down only when it is unstructured. The key is to design collaboration, not add it on top of work.

Practices that help include: clear decision rights (who decides what), time-boxed discussions rather than open-ended meetings, and defined escalation paths. Also, aligning teams early on shared goals reduces the need for repeated alignment later. This way, collaboration improves quality without blocking delivery speed.
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Imran Afzal Cary, NC, United States
I like both of these perspectives—especially the idea that collaboration only slows things down when it’s unstructured.

Where I’ve seen this break down is when we treat collaboration as a default behavior instead of a designed mechanism.

Not every decision needs collaboration.

And not every collaboration needs the same level of participation.

In practice, what helps is being very explicit about where collaboration actually adds value:

  • Discovery → broad input improves the solution
  • Trade-off decisions → limited, accountable group
  • Execution → minimal collaboration, clear ownership
Most slowdowns happen when those modes get blurred—

everything becomes a group discussion, even when it doesn’t need to be.

One thing that’s worked well is making this visible upfront:

  • What decisions are collaborative vs owner-driven
  • Who is contributing vs who is deciding
  • When alignment is required vs when it’s already been achieved
That clarity tends to remove a lot of friction.

Because the issue usually isn’t collaboration itself—

it’s ambiguity about how collaboration is supposed to work.

Curious how others define that boundary—

where collaboration meaningfully improves outcomes vs where it starts to dilute accountability.
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Lissette Indhira Pimentel Sosa
Community Champion
Program Manager| HARPER SRL Santo Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Collaboration adds value, but I don’t think the problem is that it slows things down, it’s how it’s used.
I’ve seen teams default to collaboration for everything, and that’s where momentum gets lost. Not every decision needs group input.
What helps is being clear on when collaboration is needed and when ownership should drive the decision. Without that, things tend to stall.

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