Chapter 1
Collaboration in Principle
Connecting the Genius of Your Teams
If you're lucky, you've experienced what it feels like to be on a team. Clear on the mission and confident in each other's abilities, you lock arms with your fellow teammates and feel like you could conquer the world. Spirits are high, even when the challenges mount. Failures become moments that teach the team a new lesson. Members support each other when someone needs to take a break, and everyone celebrates together when milestones are reached.
Too often, that kind of peak experi‐ence at work is rare. It's more likely you feel lost in an organization, unclear on the “big picture,” and unable to make a dent in the prevailing culture—a culture of disconnection that surrounds you.
Beyond Meeting Hygiene
Consider Sharon, a product designer in a large enterprise. Recently, a new, high‐profile project brought her together with other smart and talented individuals from all over the company. Even before they met for the first time, the team shared a sense of enthusiasm. A casual glance at the roster showed many familiar names, all with reputations for innovation and knock‐out successes. This was going to be fun, maybe even an opportunity to do something extraordinary!
Leadership wasted no time in sharing their sense of urgency with the team, as well as making it crystal clear just how high their expectations were. While sobering, the news bolstered Sharon's confidence. Just look at this team. Each person had done such great work in the past—what could go wrong?
The first two meetings were cordial, even though it didn't seem that very much was accomplished. But less than five minutes into the third meeting, all politeness evaporated. Certain voices became louder, while others grew steely or silent. Some quibbled about procedures, while others talked over each other. As the meeting drew to an uncomfortable close, Sharon's heart sank. They were not one step closer to their goals.
Someone suggested shifting technologies. They tried Zoom, Slack, and everything in between. But it wasn't helping. In fact, it seemed like the more ways the team had to interact with each other, the less value‐creating collaboration happened.
There were so many brilliant individuals here—why was their productivity as a team so low?
We have all experienced this frustration. Discussions become circular. Colleagues jockey for attention as ego takes over. People disengage. Ideas are lost. There is no alignment, only frustration. Deadlines draw closer with little or no progress to report.
Between meetings, we might try a desperate search for “how to have better meetings” and come prepared with ideas like “Have an agenda! Polish those presentations! Capture everyones’ action items!” But it's not enough. Though basic meeting hygiene is important, it's no substitute for thoughtful planning, leadership, and culture. No matter how talented a group of individuals might be, it takes intention and know‐how—right from the beginning—to forge a highly collaborative team.
Sharon saw that the odds were low that this team was going to blow doors off any project. So she got to work putting together an approach that was thoughtful, intentional, and designed to remove luck from the collaboration equation.
She thought through a sequence of activities designed to build trust and bring out the full potential of everyone in the group. This approach would take the limited time a meeting affords into account. She'd select proven ways to guide interactions of the team, drawing out participation, removing ego from the equation, and focusing attention on the work.
Leaning gently into the camaraderie this new pattern‐breaking experience would introduce, Sharon would pivot the group into a series of designed experiences or methods built to pull observations and insights from each person. Like running plays in a game, each tailored to overcome specific obstacles and move a team down the field, the methods Sharon chose were crafted to activate and amplify the capacity of the team.
The plan worked! A few discussions ran longer than expected and everyone agreed that some additional work was required, but instead of leaving the experience tired and uninspired, the team left full of energy, clarity, and focus. These talented individuals were starting to function like a team.
Sharon's inbox began to fill up with messages and even an email thanking her at length for “creating a space where everyone gets heard.” A sense of relief washed over her. Reviewing the visual artifact of the groups efforts on her screen, the results were undeniable.
Focused discussions turned into a preliminary road map and shared priorities for the week ahead. The team co‐created a visual that cemented its alignment and progress. Sharon's team went from two months of indecision and frustration to a plan of action that everyone agreed upon in under a week, a nearly tenfold increase in velocity.
Sharon's manager, Abby, noticed this success too. Abby wasn't surprised that her best employee had pulled out a win when faced with a tough situation. In fact, she'd come to count on it. What Abby didn't expect, though, was that she'd now have to fill her brilliant employee's shoes. Sharon was moving on to an organization where her skills would bring more value and fulfillment. In her exit interview, Sharon expressed that while she appreciated the success of her team, she was frustrated by the pervasive dysfunction she'd experienced across teams.
Collaborate Smarter
It's not enough to bring your brightest people together and wing it. And while tools and technology may keep us in touch, they are not enough to keep us connected. As research by Google1 has shown, how a team collaborates is more critical to innovation and generating outcomes than who is on the team. Whether you're in product, design, engineering, IT, consulting, innovation—or leading a company in the C‐suite—when your organization fails to collaborate effectively, your best people not only can't do their best work, but they leave in search of better experiences.
The cost to your organization is real. It's also worse than you think. Some estimates show that businesses lose as much as $542 billion to pointless meetings.2 Others show as much as 85% of employee time is wasted on inefficient collaboration3. And these costs are only the beginning. Because what's hard to measure is the value of a high‐performing culture of collaboration. Organizations with teams that know how to collaborate effectively ship faster, innovate more often, and have happier customers.
Though the state of collaboration may be dire, there is hope. Instead of relying on a wing and a prayer, collaboration can be deployed systematically throughout your organization. Having observed thousands of teams across dozens of industries at Mural, a provider of tools and methods that help teams do their best work together, we've formalized a way of working that drives business outcomes. We call it collaborative intelligence.
Collaborative intelligence is a holistic approach to the way people work together. It fosters connections across all of the individuals working together in your teams—as well as outside of them—and unlocks their collective genius. Productivity is streamlined, time to market decreases, and innovation quality is raised when teams collaborate more effectively. Dramatically improved collaboration doesn't just help organizations; it enables people to communicate and work together better.
And it opens up a well of imagination that can allow for real innovation to happen. It can change the world.
Principles of Collaboration
Principle 1: People Are Greater Together Than Apart
Collaboration is individuals working together to achieve what would have otherwise been hard, if not impossible, to accomplish working alone.
It's the highest order of working together on a scale that begins with simple communication:
- Communication doesn't even require a shared goal or a commitment to working together. In fact, communication is often one‐way, in the form of messages broadcast to others with no interaction or dialogue between the communicating parties.
- Coordination happens when there's a common goal, but it can happen without interaction between groups.
- Cooperation demands participants have not only a shared purpose, but also a commitment to each other's success. But groups can work in concert without understanding each other's point of view.
- Collaboration is teamwork between those with the same strong purpose and a dedication to each other as people. When individuals connect to each other in this way, they accept and learn from each other's perspectives and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
Collaboration is a mindset: an open willingness to come together to solve problems and engage in co‐creation. It goes beyond a transactional way of working to a generative way of building relationships, where the lines between individual people blur as ideas and information are shared, iterated upon, and improved by the team. Collaboration produces unique outcomes that couldn't be achieved by anyone working alone.
There is no Thomas Edison tucked away solving all the great problems (even Edison had a team of “muckers” working alongside him, brokering ideas and tinkering together). Whether it's in the lab, on the field, in a classroom, or in a Zoom, two (or more) heads are better than one. People are greater together than they are apart, and hard problems are best tackled by teams.
Duncan Watts, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, tested this theory. He and his research team conducted an experiment where both individuals and teams were instructed to complete tasks.4 The teams were ultimately quicker at getting the job done, even if they arrived at the same result as the individuals. “Interestingly, what we found is that where teams really shine is in terms of efficiency,” Watts said. “They were much faster, they generated more solutions, they generated faster solutions, and they explored the space of possibilities more broadly.”5
What makes teams so much more than the sum of their parts? Individuals are limited to their own experiences and thoughts. Teams are a synthesis of unique backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. One idea triggers another idea. One person's perspective challenges another's and opens a discussion. When that collective genius is activated, anything is possible.
Principle 2: Teams Can't Exist without Connection
A group of people isn't a “team” just because someone calls it that. Teams are something more.
When you're a part of a team, you feel it. That sense of camaraderie, mutual trust and accountability, and the strength of being a part of something greater—that's connection.
Teams crave connection — can't exist without it. Being free to fire off ideas, troubleshoot problems, express concerns, and activate opportunities. We talk to be heard. We listen to understand.
Ironically, more collaboration tools only compound the symptoms of disconnection. So why is it that today, when teams have channels galore and more ways than ever to communicate, we find it so very hard? Connection takes more than technology.
You have to take time and make space for connection—not just in yearly team‐building activities but as an ongoing practice. Trust and care cannot exist in a vacuum. They're human emotions that only exist in relation to others.
A focus on the personal, relational—human—aspects of collaboration must become part of the basic operating system of teamwork. Relational intelligence is the ability to build and navigate the productive interpersonal dynamics that exist any time a group of people come together.
Principle 3: Collaboration Should Not Be Left to Chance
Product design isn't left to chance. Industrial design isn't left to chance. You don't leave critical work to chance.
So, when it comes to collaboration, why is the default strategy to throw people together and hope for the best?
So many leaders hope for “water cooler moments” and hallway collisions. They turn to creative approaches for designing office spaces in order to maximize the odds of spontaneous, serendipitous collaboration. During the pandemic, these traditional ways of encouraging serendipity became impossible. Physical offices were replaced with digital spaces. The focus on where work happened was replaced by figuring out how to make it happen. Organizations adopted the latest tools and technology to support collaboration. Still it wasn't enough.
Why? Because for teams to collaborate, they need reference points, common spaces, and common ways of working. Digital makes it possible to collaborate from anywhere, but it doesn't automatically result in these commonalities. And as work continues to shift to digital territories, designing how—and not where—work happens is becoming the critical function.
Being intentional about collaboration and designing teamwork requires a new approach. It's a topic that's fundamental and wide‐ranging, serious enough to deserve its own discipline: collaboration design.
Collaboration designers bring purpose and intention to the collaboration process, inspiring teams to connect and innovate. The discipline of collaboration design takes direct aim at the isolation and disengagement many people feel. The craft supports the psychological needs of teams with relational intelligence. Using playful, provocative methods of visual thinking, collaboration design helps teams take ideas from imagination to activation.
Collaboration design codifies proven ways of working from design thinking, Agile methodologies, and other pioneers in facilitation.
Rather than design office spaces, it's time to design collaborative experiences—and empower teams to do their best work together.
Principle 4: Collaborative Spaces Power Connected Teams
Decades of research show that you must enable the right conditions for successful collaboration. So what are the right conditions for true collaboration?
Common Space. A common space may be physical or digital. It's often both at the same time.
Most importantly, true, purpose‐built collaboration spaces offer teams a place for exceptional teamwork because they are accessible and inclusive. These spaces amplify the strengths of team members—they don't average them out. When an environment excludes any member of a team, the team can't realize its full potential. Collaboration spaces reduce bias, promote risk‐taking, make it easy to play with ideas, reward imagination, and support the courage to contribute.
Common spaces make it possible for a team to have shared reference points. Teams working in a common space can go from simply using communication channels to co‐creating a shared reality.
Dynamic Communication. Despite countless channels available for communication, modern teams still struggle to communicate effectively. Phone, email, chat, video calls, documents, and more all impose uniquely stringent, often unintended limits to communication. Just as often, the pressure to use any particular form of communication—or, at other times, all of them—muddies messages.
People need to be free to communicate dynamically: to be able to share ideas and insights thoughtfully and meaningfully in whatever form is most appropriate to the content—and the person. “Dynamic communication” can take the form of individual words and concepts jotted out on sticky notes. It can also look like diagrams or visual metaphors. It can and often is both and more. What's crucial is that dynamic communication adapts to the needs of the team when it must convey never‐before‐expressed ideas, allowing information to be shared in a way that it can be questioned, adjusted, and ultimately, understood.
Time to Team. Collaboration takes time. Because collaboration necessarily means two or more people working together, time spent working together can be costly. It's also a finite, valuable resource that not every team member can access equally. Differences in modalities—synchronous, asynchronous, in‐person, remote, hybrid—time zones, workloads, and other needs means that time spent working together must be managed with intention. It's too important to misuse.
More productive and inclusive collaborative experiences become possible when teams unbundle time into synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. But to make the best use of dynamic working time requires a particular set of skills.
“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.”
– William Whyte
Principle 5: Measuring Collaboration Is Possible—and Essential
How much does your company invest in meetings today? Let's say you have 10,000 employees who spend 50% of their time in meetings. If the average salary is $100,000 per year, that's an annual investment of $500 million . . . in meetings. With so much at stake, measuring that investment is no longer a nice‐to‐have: it's a must‐have.
And in order to shape the way our teams and organizations collaborate, we have to be able to measure it, observe and analyze trends, and learn from what's working. Because collaboration is happening more and more in digital spaces, data about collaboration effectiveness is prevalent. But it's underused. Collaboration insights turn raw data about how teams are working together into actionable intelligence, responsibly and with respect for privacy.
There are different levels of insights we can get from measuring collaboration:
Individual. Collaboration insights help individuals better understand and assess their own collaboration performance and evaluate concrete actions they can take to improve.
Team. For teams of 10 members or more, anonymized and aggregated collaboration insights help assess and improve collaboration within their group. For example, after a workshop or meeting, teams could learn how engaged people were or how well methods were employed.
Organization. At the company level, see how teams connect and interact. For example, anonymized views of collaboration insights can provide input into the general effectiveness of collaboration and can even show which teams are most likely to come up with good ideas.
Ecosystem. Finally, collaboration insights also help spot global trends in collaboration design, providing insight into how changes in the way work is done impact collaboration as well as how to collaborate better externally.
Welcome to the Renaissance of Teamwork
We recognize that researchers and practitioners alike have been striving for better collaboration for decades and decades. And after combing through dozens of the key resources about collaboration from the past 40 years, we've also conducted our own primary research with dozens of workers and thought leaders in the field. From all of these inputs, patterns have emerged.
Collaboration doesn't have to look like an endless slog through meaningless meetings and pointless presentations. Real collaboration is not the result of chance. And collaboration is not an end point, it's a means to an end. Innovation, a job well done, a product launch, or whatever the desired outcome, you must be able to know enough about the way your business collaborates if you want to grow it.
This will require change. To achieve a more innovative organization, leaders must get smarter about how they help teams work. People will have to learn new ways of working. Executives will have to acquire new ways of understanding so they can effectively manage how teams collaborate. Everyone must start paying attention to what kind of collaboration leads to innovation.
The way we collaborate has changed. To keep up, teamwork needs to become more productive, faster, and smarter. Collaborative intelligence imagines a better future for work.
Notes
- 1 Charles Duhigg. “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times (Feb 2016). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html
- 2 Doodle. State of Meetings 2019 Report (2019)
- 3 Rob Cross et al. “Collaboration Overload Is Sinking Productivity,” Harvard Business Review (Sep 2021).
- 4 Abdullah Almaatouq et al. “Task complexity moderates group synergy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Sep 2021).
- 5 Knowledge@Wharton. “Are Teams Better Than Individuals at Getting Work Done?” [Audio podcast episode] (Oct 2021).