Me

Self‐awareness is essential for effective collaborations. There are two parts to this self‐awareness. The first part has to do with what we bring intellectually and personally to the collaboration and how we prepare ourselves for it. We will discuss that here. The second part has to do with monitoring ourselves during collaborations, as we just discussed. We address specific skills associated with that in the “Us” section below.

In the Intellectual dimension, we have knowledge, ideas, opinions, and intellectual biases related to a given topic of collaboration. In the Personal dimension, we have personal goals and agendas, beliefs and attitudes, and personal positions regarding the topic of collaboration. First and foremost, it is important to know where we stand in these areas. This is especially true with regard to our Personal attributes, which have significant emotional origins. Although it may be convenient to ignore them, doing so is likely to backfire in a collaboration. Ignored Personal attributes tend to come out sideways in collaborations, often at the most unfortunate times. So the first skill in the Me department is self‐awareness.

The second skill has to do with preparing for the collaboration. This has to do with our intent regarding the collaboration, as governed by our Directional dimension. Understanding our Intellectual and Personal attributes is a start, but then we must ask ourselves some fundamental questions.

• Will my Intellectual and Personal attributes, if brought to the collaboration, support what I understand to be our common goal?
• If not (i.e., I have Intellectual and Personal attributes that will work against our common goal), what am I willing to do about them going into the collaboration?

Regarding this question, there are a variety of things to consider in addition to adopting a genuine willingness to collaborate. For example, in the Intellectual dimension, if you know your ideas and opinions about the work or problem are significantly different from the other person's, you could decide to adopt the other person's ideas, try to find a middle ground, or come up with a brand‐new idea that may work for both of you. In the Personal dimension, depending on where your “issues” are, you could change your goals, agendas, beliefs, attitudes, or personal positions regarding the work. Although such changes should be considered, they are not always appropriate, and often we are not willing to make them.

Fortunately, however, there is another option. If, going into a collaboration, we are unwilling to change attributes that may tend to work against finding common ground and achieving the common goal, then we can at least choose to hold them lightly. That means that while we have chosen not to change the attributes going in, we have decided to keep an open mind regarding those attributes during the collaboration. I may go into a collaboration thinking my idea is better than the other person's, but I can at least be willing to hear them out and consider their ideas. And should I see merit in their ideas as I achieve a better understanding of them, I reserve the option of adopting all or part of the ideas. If, for example, I go into a collaboration with a personal agenda that a certain line cannot be crossed or it will threaten my budget, I can at least work with the other person to see if we can find a way to cross that line while adequately protecting my budget.

The point is that we are each responsible for doing all we can ahead of the collaboration to enable a successful outcome. That doesn't mean we should just roll over. It means we should do what we are willing to do and, at the minimum, hold our potentially conflicting attributes lightly. If we allow collaboration to happen, the creative process just might help forge a path to a mutually agreeable outcome. So, the underlying skill in the Me category is to have the ability, willingness, and courage to allow for a successful collaboration.

You

The other side of the coin in our collaborations is knowing the people we are interacting with (e.g., clients, stakeholders, teammates, coworkers, etc.), so we can optimize our interaction strategy with them. In the business world, knowing a person is focused on two primary categories: their business needs and their personal characteristics. Business needs spring from the person's position and role in the business, the person's associated business goals and concerns, and the circumstances surrounding the person in the context of the matter to be discussed. These things are associated primarily with the Intellectual dimension. People appreciate it when you know something about their business, circumstances, and history. If you are meeting someone for the first time, you can find a lot of information online (e.g., company website, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). You can also talk with people who know the person. However you do it, try to put yourself in the other person's shoes.

Personal characteristics include the elements of what we call PLOT: their Personality, Language (both verbal and body language), Opinion and frame of reference about the work and you, and Task approach (how they like to work and communicate). These things are primarily associated with the Personal dimension, especially opinion and frame of reference.

You can use PLOT as a tool to read people and formulate an interaction strategy. For example, you are about to meet with an executive you met once before to discuss the agenda for his executive offsite meeting. He is Type A and quite serious (Personality). He talks fast and waves his arms a lot (Language). He prides himself on how much work he can get done and thinks of himself as superior to most people, including you (Opinion/Frame of Reference). He is a big‐picture guy who doesn't think details are something he should get into and he likes to delegate (Task approach).

Given his PLOT, what is the best interaction strategy? He is certainly not the kind of guy who wants to spend all day brainstorming about possible agenda topics and activities. You are going into a collaboration with someone who probably doesn't like to collaborate, yet you have to find a way. You decide to meet him where he is. The meeting will be short, fast paced, and formal. He is not interested in building a relationship with you; he wants to get the meeting done and move on. You will talk fast and get to your points quickly. Instead of walking in with a blank sheet of paper, you will take a stab at framing out an agenda with options for topics and activities. That will put him in the role of evaluating and making quick decisions, things he is quite comfortable doing that reinforce his self‐image. The day of the meeting comes and your strategy works like a charm. You are in and out in ten minutes, he appreciated your preparation, and you have your agenda.

This example underscores the importance of reading and knowing the person with whom you will be collaborating. What would have happened if you had walked into the meeting without a strategy to optimize the collaboration? Sometimes, in fact, we find ourselves in that circumstance. We may learn about a last‐minute meeting with someone we have never met where there is no opportunity for preparation. In those cases you can apply PLOT in the moment when you meet and ask questions to find out about the person's business. That brings us to Us.

Us

As important as the Me and You skill sets are, the Us skills are probably the most important in collaboration. This is where the navigation really begins. At the heart of this skill set is the ability to sense, process, and respond in the moment during interactions to build shared space and alignment toward a common goal. As mentioned earlier, what is being aligned are the Intellectual and Personal dimensions of energy between you and the other person. We will address sensing, processing, and responding one at a time and then come back to how they all work together in collaborations.

Sensing has to do with monitoring the other person, ourselves, and the deeper messages of the interaction. It is the stuff of the Observer. What we are ultimately monitoring are the Intellectual and Personal dimensions of energy in ourselves and the other person. That means there is an intellectual component of the conversation and a personal component with an emotional genesis. To monitor these energies in others, we must monitor their indicators. These indicators include:

• Words. While it is certainly true that much of our communication happens in nonverbal ways, words remain a central form of communication. In particular, words—possibly augmented by visuals—are how you will learn about the other person's intellectual contributions to the collaboration. When people are being forthright, they may also express personal beliefs, attitudes, and positions through their words.
• Body language. Body language can tell us a lot about the other person's Personal dimension and reveal intellectual preferences as well. For example, if we inadvertently challenge someone's personal position about the work, we may see them push back or cross their arms. Most people read body language naturally, so we won't spend time here describing how to do it. Suffice it to say that we need to make sure we are paying attention to body language if we can actually see the other person.
• Tone. Even when we can't see the other person (e.g., during a teleconference), we can learn a lot about the Personal dimension and its associated emotions through a person's tone of voice and volume.
• Generosity. People can be generous in conversations or they can withhold information and contribute little. How generous people are to the collaboration with their engagement, willingness to listen, thoughtful ideas, and appropriate feedback can speak volumes about their intent.

Monitoring our own Intellectual and Personal energies is part two of the self‐awareness equation. Intellectually, we generally go into collaborations with specific ideas and opinions about the work. As the collaboration unfolds and we are exposed to new information and ideas, our own ideas and opinions may well change. We must monitor the collaboration for things that may change us intellectually.

Monitoring our Personal energies is more difficult but essential for most good collaborations, as discussed. Remember unintentional conflict and the many things that trigger it? Well, this is the place where those triggers push our emotional buttons. At the sensing stage, we have not yet reacted and we still have a choice about how to react (i.e., do we engage in conflict or go a different way?). The important part of sensing is to be aware of when a trigger pushes one of our emotional buttons; typically this occurs when we perceive that our work survival, comfort, reputation, or level of importance are being threatened.

Not all Personal energies in ourselves and others are negative, however, and it is equally important to monitor the positive developments. For example, if the other person has a personal position about the work that was contrary to yours and decides to let that go, you will certainly want to be aware of that. If a person's level of generosity in the collaboration suddenly increases, it reflects a positive shift in the person's Personal dimension.

Processing is what we do after sensing. It is done by our Guide. Whereas sensing provides us with information, processing helps us understand what it means. Once again, there are two sides to the equation.

• What information means to the other person. Understanding what information means to the other person entails translating the information into how it is affecting their Intellectual and Personal dimensions and how it is affecting the creation or erosion of shared space. For example, if I throw out an idea and the other person reacts in a snippy way, I know that intellectually she didn't like the idea and personally probably felt threatened by it. Depending on the magnitude and implications of the idea and the personal attributes of the other person, it may have also eroded trust and shared space. Conversely, if the other person likes my idea and agrees to it, I have successfully moved him intellectually. Personally, he may feel a higher degree of trust. He may feel positive emotions like relief, satisfaction, or even joy. Shared space grows.
• What the information means to you. Once you have the information from the last exchange, and you have arrived at what it does or may mean about the other person, you evaluate what all the information means to you in anticipation of a response. These are often your defining moments in a collaboration. For example, let's say I am easily offended by people who reject my ideas. I am offended because I am unwilling to consider other suggestions (Intellectual rigidity) and I make the rejection of my idea into a rejection of me and a condemnation of my abilities (Personal beliefs). I decide to argue in favor of my idea and to do it with some anger and righteousness; this is a clear path toward conflict.

  In contrast, I may have prepared for the collaboration by holding my ideas and personal positions lightly, as we discussed earlier. I am not offended by the rejection as I can see that the snippy component of the other person's remark was born out of fear, and I am seeing the person's human condition. I am not condoning snippy behavior; I am simply understanding what it means—something about the other person, not me. I see this as an opportunity to ask the other person for ideas, to hear what he has to say and to model the kind of collaborative behavior I would like to see from him.

These examples show us that what we make things mean to us, based on our Intellectual and Personal attributes and energies, has a huge influence on our decisions and actions in a collaboration. What we make things mean to us can send us into battle, or it can turn a negative into a positive. It also shows us a defining moment when a trigger for conflict can be engaged or left alone. Given the magnitude of conflict in our businesses today and the huge prices we pay for it, we would be well advised to develop ourselves and our people with the skills and behaviors to see things for what they are and to choose not to take things personally. Doing so would help us avoid some of the conflict triggered by Environmental factors and interactions with people who are not as adept at managing their energies.

Responding is the second part of the Guide's job. It is essentially executing the plan and decision developed in the Processing step. However, there are many options for how you can respond. We look now at four things to consider in your responses.

1. Effective questioning. Most collaborations include portions where people are trying to get to the bottom of things (e.g., reach a mutual understanding of the causes of a problem). During those interactions, you will likely have to ask probing questions in a way that doesn't threaten people. For example, if I were to ask the captain of the Titanic (had he survived), “What the heck were you thinking as you steamed at top speed across the Atlantic in the Titanic when you knew there were icebergs in the area?,” he would have undoubtedly responded in a defensive manner. However, if I asked him, “What were the factors that night that compelled you to conclude that the risk of an iceberg collision was minimal?,” he would respond quite differently and would appreciate my approach. Another aspect of effective questioning is not to script your questions too tightly in advance. Instead, let the last response, and your processing of that response, guide you in framing your next question. You will achieve an understanding more quickly this way, and the other person will know you are listening.
2. Questions versus statements. There are times in collaborations when you need to make a point. But many a collaboration has gone awry because when people want to make a point, they often are more inclined to make a statement than ask a question. Avoid making statements based on your opinions only. Doing so can be risky. Instead, practice the art of making points with carefully worded questions. For example, if you are concerned that the manager you are talking with will not provide enough resources from her department to make a project successful, you may say something like “I'm concerned that the project could fail because you may not assign enough people from your department to support it.” That looks and feels like a direct confrontation, and it is guaranteed to close off any shared space you may have created. Alternatively, you might ask, “What is your strategy for identifying who in your department will support the project? How will you know when you have assigned enough people?” These questions are far more powerful and effective than making statements.
3. Adjusting your role. In our interactions we all have roles that we play, and those roles often change as the conversation progresses and evolves. For example, in the first part of a collaboration, you may be in the role of a Strategist as you brainstorm with the other person about how to approach accomplishing a goal. Once an approach has been identified, however, the other person may want help thinking through a sticky point in the implementation of the strategy where you have had significant experience. To bring the greatest value to the collaboration, you would switch into the role of a Coach. While a thorough discussion of the collaborative roles is beyond the scope of this book, suffice it to say that you will bring the greatest value to your collaborations when you can recognize in the moment the optimal role to play and then step into it. Collaborations are severely limited and more prone to conflict when people are unwilling or unable to step out of the comfort zone of their preferred roles. While changing roles may sound mechanical, it helps to create a dynamic, empathetic, and responsive dance in the interaction. This has a tremendous effect on building shared space.
4. Influencing others. We are all in business to get important work done, and it is essential that we are able to appropriately influence the positions, beliefs, and attitudes of others. How we influence others is the key. It is best to recognize that your influence during a collaboration is constant. Even your questions have influence. As you promote adjustments in the other person's Intellectual and Personal dimensions, you can see the results of your influence. Things to watch out for include coming on too strong, which can feel like bullying, and stating opinions without ensuring they are relevant and compelling to the other person. Communicating to the other person the relevancy of our ideas to their situation is far more powerful than simply blurting out an opinion. Because this type of communication is a very thoughtful way of aligning people with our ideas, people tend to appreciate the influence as opposed to feeling pushed. And, yes, this too builds shared space.

When we put Me, You, and Us together, tremendous resolution, creativity, and innovation can happen. The acts of knowing ourselves and others, responsibly preparing for collaborations, and sensing, processing, and responding with a common goal in mind make us powerful collaborators. Looking at how all of this comes together, two overarching points about collaboration emerge. First, collaboration is best accomplished with a strong degree of independence from the Intellectual and Personal dimensions. You are observing and processing information and cues about yourself and the other person and making navigational decisions based on information. You need to be objective, especially about yourself. To do that you will want to observe and make decisions from a vantage point where you aren't taking things personally and you aren't easily insulted. This takes practice, but it can be done. Second, in your collaborations, you are ultimately reading and responding to energy. You sense these energies through the various cues we discussed. We call these cues the other conversation. The other conversation represents the bigger picture of energy. Let's look at an example.

Individual and Group Alignment

We know that alignment is important in collaborative group conversations, but exactly what is being aligned and how does alignment work? The answer is that both individuals and the group as a whole are being aligned. Individual alignment is finding common ground and direction between every individual and every other individual. This occurs, for example, when two people in the group express differing opinions and then work toward alignment through their interactions. Taken literally and to the extreme, aligning everyone with everyone would require far too many individual conversations. Fortunately, that is not the end goal, nor is that the way colloboration works in group conversations.

In group conversations, there is what I call a group track that has its own consciousness and energy. This group track is born out of alignment of the group as a whole. The greater the degree of alignment at any given moment, the more powerful the group track and the greater the shared space. While many collaborative group conversations begin with an emphasis on individual alignment, especially among the more vocal members, as effective collaborations proceed, the emphasis shifts toward alignment between each individual and the group track. This makes sense from the standpoint of building shared space. The greater the shared space across the group, the more powerful that energy becomes compared with the energy of individual opinions. That's good news if you can build group shared space quickly enough and bad news if you can't.

In general, group collaborations will spiral downward if they stay too long in the energy of individual opinions, and they will be successful if the group can make early and consistent progress in building the group track. That is why it is often a good idea to identify smaller, less divisive issues that a group can agree on early in a conversation.

The Other Conversation

Just as one‐on‐one collaborations have their “other conversations,” group collaborations have theirs. In both cases these other conversations are the real conversation. In group collaborations, the group track is born out of the other conversation, not the literal conversation that can be seen and heard. People who are adept at group collaborations intuitively listen to the other conversation and monitor the evolving group track.

I have marveled over the years at how differently those who have participated in the same collaboration describe what happened afterward. After one such collaboration, a less experienced participant said to me, “We discussed the issues, heard viewpoints from most people, especially Lori and Sergio, and decided that we needed to meet again to discuss it some more.” The second, more experienced person said, “Lori and Sergio were all about protecting their groups and preserving their statuses; they left no room for the creation of the new product group that intersects with both of their departmental functions.”

After hearing from both people, I realized they were both correct and that their stories were not inconsistent or incompatible. It's just that the first person focused on the literal conversation while the second focused on the other conversation. If we are to improve the level and quality of group collaborations in our businesses, we must recognize that many people have a lesser awareness and ability to track the other conversations and need help developing that capability.

Cognitive Creativity

Cognitive creativity is a phenomenon that exists in the Intellectual dimension of those around the table. We have all seen and experienced it. Someone throws out a question. Another person provides a partial answer. A third elaborates on aspects of the partial answer and adds a new perspective. Someone else sees the brilliance in that even beyond the initial elaboration. He puts it out for consideration and, almost like magic, a new innovative idea is born. The group loves it. The group created it together in a collaborative process. Every comment contributes something to the process, even if we don't recognize what it contributes at the time. When this “magic” happens, you can feel an energy spike. Shared space is abundant. These are the ah‐ha and Eureka! moments that get us going and give greater purpose to our working lives.

Innovation is often the child of group collaborations, which is another reason it is so important for us to collaborate well as people. Much of what is written in this book is about clearing the way and enabling this creativity to occur. We cannot overestimate or overlook the power and necessity of effective group collaborations, especially in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is amazing what can happen when people are free to create shared space.

Constructive Collaborators

We probably all know people who always seem to find ways to contribute to collaborative conversations. They tend to have strong interaction skills, a keen ability to monitor group dynamics through the other conversation, and a willingness to hold their personal agendas loosely whenever possible. They make a point to understand the ideas and opinions of others, to find the merit in them, and to help others see that merit. Others tend to see them as even‐handed and trustworthy. Constructive collaborators are the champions of the group track and seek creative and additive alignment in virtually everything they do. Needless to say, these people are models of great collaborative behavior and are usually fun and exciting to work with. We can all learn by watching constructive collaborators in action.

Collaboration Roles

When you watch or participate in a collaborative group discussion, you often see people taking on different roles in the interaction. Some are more active, and others are more passive. Some like to provide a moral compass, and others like to be great idea adventurers. Some like to share their extensive knowledge and remind the rest how smart they are, while others play the role of more thoughtful contributors considering the needs and ideas of others.

No matter what roles people choose to play, they are all still individuals in the group with their individual energies. Therefore, everyone has an influence through their individual energy, even if they sit quietly and simply react with body language to what others say. Like many things in collaborations, taking on specific roles can be helpful or harmful to the collaboration, and what is helpful in one conversation can be harmful in another.

For example, I once worked with someone who always played the devil's advocate role. She was very good at and comfortable with that role. On several occasions she helped identify holes in our ideas that we then addressed as a group. The result was stronger solutions. However, there were some conversations where we as a group were already facing issues and objections from people outside of our team. We needed some out‐of‐the‐box solutions, and her devil's advocate objections just felt like she was piling on. It certainly wasn't helpful to the group. What I learned from this situation is that the positives and negatives of taking on a role are situational, which is why none of us should get stuck in our favorite role.

That said, roles can be a powerful way to contribute, and when the players take on a synergistic set of roles, the results can be dramatic. We actually see this drama played out in many police/detective shows in television and films. It is essentially a formula. There is usually the wise head detective who leads the conversation and usually arrives at the big ah‐has first. Then there is the forensic specialist who brings science into the conversation. Next, the guy on the case is usually the one telling the crime story and offering insights as to the criminal's behavior. And then there is the quirky cop who the others make fun of but secretly respect because she is actually brilliant. In Hollywood, the collaborations go down at lightning speed because of program time constraints and because the writers don't want viewers to get bored. Nevertheless, you can see the creativity, sometimes playful and sometimes serious, as everyone plays their roles to make unique and timely contributions to solving the crime. You get the sense that if any one of the roles had been absent from the conversation, the crime would not have been solved. All the roles are essential.

Playing roles in business collaborations can be equally dramatic and rewarding. Granted, the pace is a bit slower, the roles are not engineered, and the words are not scripted. Nevertheless, I have seen powerful results in such circumstances more times than I can count. What is most amazing to me is that people in a high‐functioning group tend to find the role best suited to both themselves and to the group. They have advanced interaction skills and are extremely adept at collaborating. We need to adopt methods to teach these skills.

Influence Patterns

Most people in collaborative conversations want to have influence, and some people want to have a lot of influence. However, when you look at how that plays out in the interaction, the influence (energetic output) of any given individual often waxes and wanes throughout the conversation. Part of this has to do with the fact that there are many people who need time to speak, which limits the influence opportunity for any given individual. Another part has to do with the natural flow of the conversation and when people feel they need to jump in and say something. Sometimes people take this fluctuation to the extreme by staying quiet until the conversation reaches a pivotal point and then releasing the energy of an elephant stampede in an effort to push the group track in the direction they prefer.

To that point, I was once in a meeting with representatives from a large healthcare company. We were discussing how to implement a common IT infrastructure across the whole company, which was historically fragmented into divisions that each had its own IT departments and made its own decisions. The purpose of the meeting was to get objections out on the table so they could be addressed. For those of us who were the champions of the common infrastructure, it was like playing Whack‐a‐Mole. Whenever someone brought up an objection, one of us addressed it and made a case for how the objection could be addressed with the common solution. Though our whacks were gentle and professional, there was one objection after another, and they began to feel like moles popping up in the arcade.

Just when we thought all of the objections had been expressed and dealt with, one manager who had been noticeably quiet blurted out that his division could not tolerate using networking equipment from vendors other than those his division was already using. This was clearly his big issue. He didn't seem to care much about the other issues, so he saved up his guns (energy) to influence this one battle. It almost worked too, based on the shock factor and massive amount of energy released. However, the group track had grown strong by then and the option of switching vendors was preserved.

Group influence comes in many patterns. Good collaborators are watchful of these patterns. They learn to flow with the patterns and figure out the best way to interact with individuals and the group as a whole.

Factions

In group conversations, factions sometimes develop, with two or more groups polarized around one or more issues. At other times factions are formed before the conversation begins, as people bring their group loyalties and biases to the table. Whatever the reason for the factions, they are forces to be reckoned with in the group dynamics. Sometimes they can help by focusing the conversation on the divergent energies that need to come into alignment. However, just as often they can cause the collaboration to end in a stalemate with nothing resolved.

I was once in a meeting with several members of a client company. Some people had been in the company a long time, while others had recently come into the company via a small acquisition. The company that was acquired had a product my client company wanted to add to its product line. I discovered, however, that little had been done to integrate the people from the company. In the meeting, the factions quickly developed along (former) company lines. The acquired people were holding on tightly to their former company culture and methods, and the old‐timers were holding on just as tightly to their culture and methods. The only thing that was certain about that conversation was that everyone “knew” they were right. Needless to say, the conversation went nowhere. I subsequently went to company executives with recommendations for immediate integration activities. These factions had overpowering energies that had to be dealt with at the enterprise level. Where factions are not so overpowering, they are best dealt with by looking for common ground and building the power of the group track.

Bombshells and Disruptive Energy

One interesting dynamic in collaborative group conversations is the tendency of some people to drop bombshells. Bombshells and disruptive energy are similar to the IT story discussed earlier in the “Influence Patterns” section. However, they differ in one fundamental way. The IT story is an example of someone trying to influence the agreed‐on outcome of a collaboration. In this case, the manager wanted to continue using his preferred vendors. Bombshells and disruptive energy are more about sidetracking or blowing up the meeting so the conversation just goes away. I have seen this happen both early and late in the conversation. All of a sudden, out of the blue, someone drops a bombshell. Boom! Bombshells come in many forms. For example: “What we are talking about doing here is unethical!” or “I happen to know the superintendent doesn't like this approach,” or “We will bankrupt our company if we do this.”

In general, bombshells are meant to disrupt. For example, if the conversation (group track) isn't going in a direction that someone likes, the person may see a major disruption as a way of killing the conversation, at least in its current form and forum. Generally speaking, this is very damaging to the collaboration unless others in the group can expose the bombshell as opinion versus fact or somehow counter it with other evidence and arguments. Doing this preserves the group track and puts down the attempted coup. If this can't be done, it is sometimes best to put the conversation on hold while the bombshell is investigated to see if it has merit or if it was just a tactical smokescreen.

The bottom line: Learn to recognize bombshells for what they are. If they are negative efforts to disrupt, protect the group track and expose the bombshell for what it is.

Personal Agendas

As discussed earlier, one of the most important things that happens in a good collaborative conversation is adequate alignment between the personal agendas of those involved and the stated goal of the group. It is also necessary to achieve adequate alignment between the personal agendas and the group track that develops. In both cases, adequate alignment is strongly influenced by how closely and tightly the individuals hold personal agendas that run counter to the group energy. If they hold them lightly and consider alternate ideas and opinions, they may allow themselves to become a greater part of the group track, which grows the energy of the group track. If, however, they hold their agendas tightly, the only ideas they will consider are those that support their personal agendas.

Many collaborations die on the vine because of this problem. People always think they have good reasons for their personal agendas, and sometimes they do. However, when their energy and attention are focused on improving their own lot or keeping themselves safe, they leave little or no room for the larger goal or the creation of shared space. What is worse is that these people often blend righteousness and arrogance around their fixed behaviors with an attitude that they are doing the rest of the group a favor. The energy of that is bullying, but people get away with it every day because we don't look at it through the lens of energy and call them out on it. Personal agendas are a given, but they should be exposed for what they are.

The Nod and Turn

Whereas the bombshell is shocking and disruptive, the nod and turn is quiet and corrosive. It happens when someone nods in agreement with the group track and then leaves the room only to do just the opposite of that which was supposedly agreed upon. In psychology, we call this behavior passive aggressive. It gets its hideous potency because it is not only as potentially disruptive as a bombshell, it is hidden from sight, which makes it difficult to detect. It causes damage that people are not even aware of to the agreed‐upon common good. Eventually, things inconsistent with the supposed agreement start to occur, but they can be difficult to trace back to the perpetrator. Some would call such covert activity a brilliant political move. Perhaps it is. But when you look at the damage and waste the nod and turn causes, it is absolutely unacceptable.

I have seen the nod and turn most often at the executive level during large change initiatives where not everybody is on board. When we level the playing field by aligning control and responsibility, those executives who believe they will lose control often resist the change. When they realize that their personal agendas for power aren't good arguments for blocking the change, they go underground with their resistance. They nod in agreement at executive meetings and then turn around and rally their people to resist the change in subversive ways. This passive‐aggressive behavior is, from an energy perspective, simply aggressive. It is no less aggressive than overt aggression, and it is often more damaging. For the sake of one person's personal need for power, the entire business suffers. Business leaders need to watch for the nod and turn and deal with it decisively when detected.

Facilitating Collaborative Group Conversations

This section has illustrated many of the good, the bad, and the ugly dynamics that occur in collaborative group discussions. The bad and ugly dynamics can immobilize groups to the point where they simply cannot achieve alignment around important topics. In these cases, the only hope of achieving alignment is to bring in a neutral facilitator.

The traditional view of a good facilitator is someone who will keep the conversation fair and moving in a constructive direction toward some kind of agreement. This is all good but it is essentially an insufficient view. Looking more deeply, our energetic view of collaborative group conversations suggests that the goals and methods of a facilitator must be refined. First and foremost, facilitators need to function as champions of creativity and positive energy and guardians against negative energy whenever possible. That means they have to monitor the group track (i.e., the other conversation and how it builds and erodes shared space) as well as the energies of the involved individuals with laser beam attention. Second, they need to facilitate by encouraging constructive collaboration while calling out those who attempt the kinds of negative tactics just discussed.

Facilitation is not the work of wimps. When we call out those who are used to getting away with negative tactics, we often receive angry responses designed to intimidate. Facilitators must put down these power plays and show the group how this navigation and push‐back is done.

This section is by no means an exhaustive treatment of collaborative group conversations. That could literally be a separate book. But the most important point here is to demonstrate through examples and insights how to approach these conversations as energy exchanges and, it is hoped, a co‐creation of shared space with a positive business outcome. In my rowing story, I spoke of swing and the bubbles under the hull. I was recalling an exhilarating experience. As you may well know, collaborative conversations can be equally exhilarating as a group of individuals merge to create something new, innovative, and even surprising.

Having addressed collaborative group conversations, we now turn to longer‐term collaborations that span many conversations and can last weeks, months, and even years.

Environmental Alignment

In the Environmental dimension, our desired alignment is between the project and the business itself, including customers and stakeholders, and the business environment that surrounds the collaborative team. Key objectives include:

• Align with customers and stakeholders. All projects have customers and stakeholders, whether they are internal, external, or both. We consider these to be a part of the business environment. A key goal of any collaboration is that its customers and stakeholders are satisfied with the business outcomes. But in a world where our collaborations are increasingly focused on complex solutions, this alignment can't wait until the end of the project. We must build and maintain alignment along the way to help ensure that we have alignment (satisfaction) at the end of the project. That means clearly identifying who our clients and stakeholders are and interviewing them early in the project to find out their needs, preferences, and concerns and to start building a relationship of trust with them.

  For internal stakeholders, and often for external clients as well, doing this means involving them in reviews of major work products produced as the project unfolds. And, since most projects are funded by clients and stakeholders, doing this means managing the project's scope and resources to ensure that when it's over, clients and stakeholders feel they have received adequate value for their investment. In successful projects, the team, customers, and stakeholders are all pointed in essentially the same direction, allowing the energy and shared space to flow into a successful business outcome.

  Project scope management is a good example of a key alignment activity, one that many of our clients at Advance Consulting ask us to help their people with. We often hear statements like “When my project managers get requests from clients to add more work to the project scope, they tend to answer with either yes or no. Unfortunately, when they just say yes to a request for something additional on the project, they take on the work for no additional budget. And when they say no because it's not in the project scope, the client feels rejected and angry.”

  We teach project managers and others that having a conversation and building alignment is the way through this. Making sure that they—and clients—truly understand the need by engaging in interactive dialogue is usually the best way to start. Promising to price out the additional work quickly is a good place to end the conversation, which is a path toward alignment. In contrast, the “no” response is an energetic block with no alignment possible, and the “yes” response is but a temporary alignment that will lead ultimately to problems with project performance and client satisfaction. Overall, the more trust you have with a client, the easier and more effective these conversations will be.

• Align with end users. Many projects have end users who are not necessarily considered primary clients or stakeholders but are nonetheless an important force in the business environment. For example, users of a new system or process (internal) and consumers who will ultimately buy a new product (external) are considered end users. Ultimately, building alignment with end users can be the difference between success and failure of a project. Therefore, it is important to talk with them early in the process to understand their needs, ideas, preferences, and concerns. One‐on‐one interviews may not be practical when there are many end users involved, so communication forums such as focus groups can be quite effective. In addition, it is important to maintain communication with end users along the way so they are on board at the end. Like customers and stakeholders, you want them essentially pointed in the same direction as your team throughout the project.
• Work within established boundaries. The enterprise elements collectively define a set of boundaries that define the rules of the road for working in a business. For example, organizational structures define reporting relationships; policies and processes define how things should be done; roles define and confine the work of individuals; and systems guide people with automation. We have talked a lot in this book about how enterprise elements are often broken or dysfunctional, necessitating that people work around them to get things done. However, in general, people and teams should follow these established boundaries. For teams, following the applicable boundaries is one important way of aligning with the organization. For example, if there is a policy that any increase in the budget of an internal initiative must be approved by the chief financial officer, and a project team circumvents that policy, they are putting the project at risk because the bookkeeping will probably expose their circumvention. In summary, the energy of not working within established boundaries is conflict, which will ultimately waste project energy. Circumvent the boundaries only when they themselves are dysfunctional and stand in the way of project success.
• Utilize available resources. Utilizing all available resources may seem like a no‐brainer, but it is interesting how often project teams complain about resource shortfalls when they haven't tapped the available resources in the business. This is a sure way to lose team credibility and raise the anger of the higher‐ups receiving the complaints. For example, if there is a provision for bringing in contractors to perform specific tasks and augment teams when they are overloaded (surge capacity), a team should tap those resources if appropriate. Or, if someone in the business has been identified who can help projects that run into regulatory issues, that resource should be utilized if such issues arise rather than churning and wasting time and money. A team should not expect the business to present available resources on a silver platter. Team members should take the initiative to know them and find them. In other words, we must be careful not to ignore positive potential energy sources available to the project.
• Overcome or accommodate limitations. Let's face it, most projects don't have access to every resource they need when they need it. I have never seen a business that is perfect at resource management. Although major resource shortfalls are an issue at the enterprise level, project teams need to overcome or accommodate more minor and occasional limitations.

  For example, I once worked on a large system development project where various people needed access to the mainframe for different purposes. The rub was that, given the development environment, the mainframe couldn't do two things at once. Consequently, there simply weren't enough hours in a regular shift for everyone to have time with the computer. I pulled the short straw and was assigned to set up a 24/7 calendar where people came in around the clock to have their time with the computer. To my surprise, the team accepted this quickly, knowing there was no other realistic choice. Eventually, things calmed down and the team went back to regular workdays. The main point is that teams need to take control of issues where possible (positive energy) rather than sit back and be victims of environmental circumstances (negative energy). Teams are capable of vast creativity, and overcoming limitations is one place to apply it.

• Adapt to environmental changes. Major changes sometimes occur in businesses during the course of a project. For example, a change in executive leadership, a reorganization, or an acquisition can have significant potential impacts on a project. Such a change disrupts the field of play, which requires an adaptation on the part of the project team. If, for example, a new leader just became the project sponsor, the project manager and possibly other leads on the project should meet with the sponsor as they would meet with any sponsor at the start of a project to find out about the person's needs, preferences, sensitivities, and the like. Based on this information, the team should be prepared to do a reset on the project plan and approach to accommodate alignment with the new sponsor. While it is not always possible to adapt to environmental changes, it is important to try. Otherwise, we must live with the consequences of a misalignment, which can threaten the future of the project and/or drain its energy.

Intellectual Alignment

Aligning intellectually within a team is something that people naturally associate with projects. However, one of the very common problems we see with teams is that they focus this alignment on the “what” topics (what we will do) and give far less attention to the “how” topics (how we will do it as a team). Both are equally important, and, to help ensure a high‐functioning team, both must be addressed and the resulting agreements should be documented and distributed among the team members. When teams aren't working well, it is often because they didn't align around how they would work together. That generates misunderstandings and unintentional conflict, which can literally destroy teamwork. Here are some common objectives to achieve adequate alignment within the Intellectual dimension.

• Align around the “what” topics. The “what” topics of a typical project address standard project management elements. Initial alignment around these topics should be achieved up front during the project planning process. In addition, as the project unfolds and evolves, changes to these elements must be clearly communicated to maintain alignment throughout the project. The “what” topics include:
  • Background of the project or engagement. Team members need to have a common understanding of the background of the situation in order to be successful in their roles.
  • Business goals. The expected final business results of the effort need to be understood by all who will contribute to its completion. Goals and expected outcomes need to be updated and communicated if they change or evolve during the project.
  • Scope. People need to have a clear understanding of the scope and complexity of the project. Although project managers are responsible overall for the management of scope, they cannot do that well if those doing the work are not clear on what is in and out of scope. Performing out‐of‐scope work, which is typically not compensated, can be a huge energy drain on a project. Thus, creating ongoing alignment around scope is critical.
  • Deliverables/specifications. Different parties may be responsible for different deliverables, and there may be dependencies between deliverables. All parties need to understand clearly what they are responsible for delivering as well as the specifications and interdependencies associated with those deliverables.
  • Success criteria. Success criteria are how key stakeholders will define and measure project success. These criteria need to be clearly understood by all contributors at the outset of the project, so all know how project performance will be gauged at the project's conclusion. Individual team members may have their own success criteria, depending on the function they perform. It is critical, however, to ensure that individual success criteria roll up to achieve the overall project success criteria that key stakeholders hold as the ultimate indicator of success.
  • Schedule. A schedule is a powerful tool for aligning project activities and energies. The team needs to have a clear understanding of the timetable and sequence of project deliverables, major milestones, and work. The degree of detail needed in a project schedule depends on the size and complexity of the project. To achieve a high degree of clarity and alignment, the schedule will identify the project tasks and, for each one, will specify who will perform it and how many labor hours are budgeted for work completion (resource loading). Ambiguities or lack of sufficient specificity in a project schedule will almost certainly lead to delays and cost issues as well as team conflict.
  • Resources required. The team needs to consider all the human, material, and facility resources needed to meet project expectations. Human resources include project staff controlled by the team as well as outside resources that may not be under the team's control. Having dependencies on outside resources who do not have a significant stake in the outcome of the project is a risk to the project, so building alignment with those people is especially critical. In addition to the human resources, teams should identify and communicate planned material acquisitions, facilities needed, and any other resources needed to get the job done.
  • Budget. In addition to knowing the overall budget for the project, team members should know and agree to the budget for their portion of the project work. Furthermore, should unexpected work impacts occur, team members must be prepared to communicate them and their potential effect on the project budget.
  • Risks and red flags. The team should identify project risks and agree on plans to either avoid them or mitigate them should they actually occur. A realized risk that wasn't planned for can blow the lid off of a project's energy reserve, so it is essential to be proactive when dealing with risks.
• Align around the “how” topics. The “how” topics of a typical project relate to how the team works together. These topics include:
  • Processes used to perform the work. These are the processes used to do the primary work (e.g., agile development processes, HR business processes, etc.). These processes often need a level of customization for a particular project, so the team should be aligned around the customized process.
  • Roles and responsibilities. Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined for all team members so that all know what they are assigned to do, the roles and responsibilities others have, and what is expected from each team member.
  • Communication/status reporting. It should be determined how internal communication and project status reporting will take place to meet the needs and expectations of the team. The team will need to consider frequency, style, method, and content of communication and status reporting.
  • Client communication and management process. This process typically is used by a project manager to communicate status, discuss issues, and manage project scope with the client. This process is often based largely on the client's preferences and working style. The objective is an ongoing alignment with the client as the project proceeds and evolves.
  • Decision‐making process. Teams often must make decisions on a variety of important matters, such as a task approach, response to an issue, a workaround, approval of deliverables, and others. To avoid arguments and conflicts downstream, the team should agree in advance on who needs to be involved in what types of decisions, the timing of the decisions, and how the decision‐making processes will be facilitated when multiple people are involved. Where appropriate, team members should be empowered to make decisions relevant to their particular work if their decisions do not impact others' work. Team members should also establish in advance how they will work out disagreements, should they arise.
  • Operating assumptions. The team should identify and agree on underlying assumptions regarding the work process, resource availability, constraints, and client responsiveness (e.g., in reviewing deliverables). A good rule of thumb is that whenever a project is dependent on an outside resource or action, the project manager and team should formulate an assumption about how and when that support will be provided. All assumptions should be clearly communicated to the team members, the client, and the outside resources.
  • Common expectations and commitments. Teams often have problems when expectations and level of commitment are not clarified up front. For example, if some team members are working overtime to help salvage a project that is behind schedule and others are not, resentment will naturally grow. It is much better to establish expectations and commitments up front than it is to resolve misalignments after the fact.
  • Preferred work style. Team members may have different preferences for how they like to work, they may be in different time zones, or they may work in different shifts. The preferred work styles of each team member should be communicated up front so that the team may identify the favored common denominators for the style of teamwork to be utilized on the project.
• Achieve a common understanding of problems and needs. Teams are often handed big problems to solve. In order to solve them, teams first must achieve an accurate understanding of what the problem truly is. Quite often, the presenting problem does not turn out to be the root cause issue. Systematic data gathering and analysis can reveal that the problem is deeper than it first appeared and that there are multiple contributors. All team members must have a common understanding of the root causes and contributors before moving to the solution phase. Without that alignment, different team members will be trying to solve different problems, making solution alignment all but impossible.
• Align around solutions and work outcomes. Based on a common understanding of the problem and needs, teams must then figure out the best way to solve the problems and fulfill the needs. Doing this can be a very spirited process as ideas are presented, challenged, processed, and filtered. This process can also be one of the most intellectually exciting aspects of a project. In the end, teams must align around the preferred solution or at least around solution options for the client to consider. Doing so helps establish a clear path for the team to develop and implement the solution.

Personal Alignment

As we have discussed, people bring their Personal ingredients to the table when they work. This is certainly the case with group collaborative conversations as discussed earlier. Within the Personal dimension, the difference between collaborative group conversations and project‐based group collaboration is that with projects, the need for alignment spans a long period of time rather than just a single conversation. Because of this length of time, the intent of each person on the team (i.e., their goals and agendas, personal beliefs and attitudes, and personal positions regarding the work) must remain sufficiently aligned to the team and the work. This can be challenging since, as we discussed, Environmental factors can have a profound ongoing influence on the Personal dimensions of those on a team.

The story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team, as portrayed in the movie Miracle, is a great example of how divisive factors, which stemmed from the environment around the team, were ultimately overcome. When Herb Brooks, the Olympic team coach, first selected the group of amateur players as candidates for the final team, their identities and attitudes were clearly with the college teams for which they played during the regular hockey season. Old rivalries played out on the ice as what was supposed to be a team looked more like so many college factions with little interest in the larger cause (the U.S. team). Few people thought the team had much of a chance of winning anything at the Olympic Games.

Undaunted, Herb Brooks, a master motivator, purposely exposed the personal agendas for what they were, ridiculing the old college rivalries and working the team harder when they were clearly favoring their personal agendas over the larger cause. Herb knew he had to shift the team members' identification from their individual colleges to the U.S. Olympic Team. As one of his tactics, he would randomly ask players during practice, “What is your name and who do you play for?” Their answers always included the names of their colleges, until one night. Herb was working the team to exhaustion following a very lackluster, inattentive performance at an exhibition game. He was breaking down members' personal agendas and attitudes so they would realize how petty this old intent was compared with the honor and responsibility of representing their country.

Finally Mike Eruzione, who would later become team captain, got it. He stopped in the middle of the ice and shouted out with what little breath he had left, “My name is Mike Eruzione, and I play for the United States of America!” Herb Brooks, seeing that a leader among the players had turned the tide, promptly dismissed the exhausted but more enlightened and aligned team. From that point on the team came together, ultimately beat the favored Soviet Union, and won the gold medal at the Olympics. The so‐called Miracle on Ice is now the stuff of legend.

You can see from this story the power of the Personal dimension on the members of a team. Misalignment in this dimension can tear a team apart, while alignment can form a bond that leads the team to unimaginable accomplishments. In the story, the team factions sprang from the college hockey environment, which encouraged the individual players to identify more with their college teams (where they came from) than with the new U.S. team. In business, functional departments and factions in the business are the equivalents of college teams. As cross‐functional teams become more necessary in business, this identification problem becomes more noticeable and serious. People are drafted from their departments (where they come from) to work on cross‐functional teams. They often bring the same kind of personal agendas and allegiance to where they came from that the hockey players brought to the ice. That situation, of course, leaves little room to collaborate and work as a team.

The way through this is twofold. First, the business needs to set up the Environmental factors in a way that encourages identification with the teams, not just the departments. We provided an example of this in our Alchemy Instruments story. Second, regardless of the state of the Environmental dimension, team members must be willing to put aside and hold lightly their personal attitudes and agendas in favor of the larger team agenda and goals. Project managers can help make this happen, but, in the end, it is up to each team member to favor the larger purpose over personal agendas, beliefs, and attitudes. Each person is responsible for sustained attention to, and engagement in, the team work, and for putting forth a level of effort needed to make the project successful.

Directional Alignment

As mentioned earlier, project teams must achieve adequate alignment within and among the dimensions of energy over a period of time to be successful. That means the alignment must be sustained, or at least renewable. The first three dimensions of energy—Environmental, Intellectual, and Personal—each contain a number of areas where alignment is needed. Establishing and maintaining adequate alignment in these areas constitutes a set of ongoing project objectives. Achieving these objectives is where our skills and behaviors in navigating work and developing working relationships (i.e., the Directional dimension) come in. How we navigate, and the energy we bring to it, will largely determine how successful we are in establishing and maintaining alignment in the first three dimensions.

For example, if you and your teammates are skilled at one‐on‐one collaboration, you will tend to be successful in building alignment with others in your one‐on‐one interactions. Similarly, if you and your teammates are skilled at collaborative group conversations, you will tend to build alignment and shared space in your meetings and group work. Thus, if alignment is built, maintained, and renewed in all or most of the interactions related to your project, the powerful collective energy (shared space) among you, your teammates, and the project's stakeholders will essentially be pointed in the same direction, and the project will almost certainly be successful, perhaps fantastically successful.

In contrast, a team less skilled in collaboration will be more challenged in building and maintaining alignment around the key topics. There will be less positive energy and more negative energy present. There may still be enough positive energy to overcome the negative, but success will come with a higher price (lower efficiency due to the energy drain) and may be compromised in terms of final business outcomes. Worse yet, the negative energy may overtake the positive energy and start a downward spiral that leads to failure. So the importance of collaborative skills and behaviors is immense. Building these skills and behaviors will likely become a major focus area of business in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Although the Directional dimension is something we bring to literally everything we do on a project, there are some specific actions that we can build into project operations to help organize Directional energy and promote alignment. These key actions include:

• Establish alignment up front. Alignment around the topics just discussed should be established as soon as possible after project start‐up. That means working with team members, clients, stakeholders, and, if applicable, end users, partners, and subcontractors. Delays in establishing alignment can easily lead to negative attitudes, the development of opposing forces, and energy drains at a time when the project needs to build momentum and positive energy.

  Many years ago I managed a mission‐critical project for a large healthcare company. Although we put a great deal of effort into identifying and meeting with stakeholders from various parts of the business, we missed one—the head of finance for a major part of the company. He was quite upset about it and felt left out. I felt horrible about our oversight and was worried the man would react by somehow sabotaging the project or undermining our reputations. He was capable of both. I immediately scheduled a meeting with him, myself, and one of my teammates at his office, which required us to jump on a plane. Our immediate efforts to get there gave us an opening with him. By the end of our frank, open, and constructive meeting, we had established a good mutual understanding of his desired role as a project stakeholder and alignment around how decisions that affected the business would be made.

  Similarly, I have seen many projects that failed to align early around the team‐based topics. These projects often are the ones where things just aren't working, arguments are frequent, and people seem to be going in different directions. The choice is a simple one: Either put in the effort to align quickly up front, or pay the price in obstacles and energy drains along the way.

• Monitor alignment and reset as needed. Once alignment is achieved on a project, it must be maintained. Why? Because various forces at work in your business, the client organization, and your team will often tend to erode alignment. Whether it is a client who changes his mind about a requirement, a teammate who decides to favor his personal agenda, or delays in meeting a deliverable date, the alignment you thought was secure is suddenly challenged. This situation tends to happen more in businesses with dysfunctional Environmental dimensions that spill into the Personal dimensions of the people involved in a project. Attention, effort, and energy are required to address problems and maintain alignment. And because misalignment invites additional misalignment, it is best to nip these problems in the bud as soon as they are detected. The reward for maintaining alignment throughout the project is success.
• Manage communications. Within the context of group collaboration, communication is the vehicle for monitoring and building alignment. Communications are an exchange of information. Much of what we learn through communications indicates underlying energy. Communications are essential for navigating work. They give us a way to (1) discover things relevant to the work (e.g., problems, issues, positive feedback), (2) understand the status of the work (progress against schedule and degree of alignment across the key areas), and (3) execute navigational actions that steer the work toward successful outcomes (e.g., project activities, collaborative conversations, organizational announcements).

  The “how” topics discussed in the Intellectual dimension provide structure and agreement on how we communicate within a project. In the Directional dimension, we’re executing those protocols (hopefully) and navigating the dynamic situation as the project unfolds. The question becomes this: How, as a practical matter, do we manage all of those communications? How do we best manage for success? Should we do it like Captain Kirk and his team did it on the Starship Enterprise? Should we manage and communicate like the FBI when it's on a case? These are exciting possibilities, but there is no one answer for the best way to manage project communications. Nevertheless, however you and your team do it, there are three kinds of communications you need to address: periodic, ad hoc, and external.

• 1. Periodic communications. Teams benefit greatly from regularly scheduled opportunities to communicate around important project topics. Often these opportunities are team meetings scheduled weekly or even daily. They can be held in person or virtually. Topics generally include project status, problems, resolutions, risk management, and decisions regarding both strategy and tactics. Ideally, each of these topics is addressed in a collaborative fashion with the achievement of alignment marking the conclusion of each discussion topic.

     Team meetings should be approached as collaborative opportunities rather than mandatory meetings driven by a checklist of topics. Well‐done team meetings usually are facilitated by the project manager, who must keep the discussion on track, leverage the individual strengths of team members, champion creativity and alignment, lead the decision‐making process, and delegate assignments. This complex array of activities requires a significant skill set that is not always present in project managers.

     In my work building project and program management groups (e.g., in professional service groups), I have observed project/program managers who approached team meetings as if they were painting by the numbers. When this happened, the rest of the team invariably approached their parts in the meeting with the same rote method and attitude. An apathetic energy was generated where creativity was stifled and alignment became unimportant. Left unaddressed, this rote approach would have probably caused the team to hit a wall. Fortunately, once these problems were addressed, the teams came alive with enthusiasm and renewed energy.

  2. Ad hoc communications. Ad hoc communications come in several forms, including brainstorming sessions, email, social media, texting, and phone calls. They are the day‐to‐day team communications that happen in between periodic team meetings. They are less formal than team meetings, more focused by nature, and they provide the daily glue that holds the team together. While I have seen teams that omitted periodic communications in favor of total ad hoc communications, I have never seen a team resist ad hoc communications. People tend to communicate this way naturally, so the issue is not whether to do it, but how to do it.

     Ad hoc communications should not be overly controlled, but they can get out of hand without some structure and protocol. Collaboratively deciding on how these structures and protocols will work, which is best accomplished at the beginning of projects, was discussed earlier in this section. Now, in the Directional dimension, it is up to the team to implement the chosen structure and protocols.

     For example, one communication guideline could be that ad hoc communications on any given topic are delivered only to those on the team who need them. This method avoids wasting team members' time with extraneous information. Another guideline might be that when information turns into a discussion, the discussion must be had in an appropriate forum. A violation of those protocols could occur when a team member sends an email to the entire team about a specific issue affecting only himself and one other teammate. The teammate hits Reply All and responds, which pulls others into the conversation. This unmanaged conversation has little chance of achieving alignment and wastes inordinate amounts of time. In this case, it is better to move the conversation into a more structured forum, like a meeting, involving only those affected by the issue.

     Teams should be self‐managing in terms of their ad hoc communications, with everyone watching for departures from the agreed‐on communication structure and protocols and helping to bring things in line as needed. More important, we must remember that ad hoc communications, no less than periodic communications, are about building and maintaining alignment among team members. This is the responsibility of every team member.

     When I see a team that isn't working well, problems with ad hoc communications are either a symptom or a cause, but they are always present. Either way, the problem boils down to a lack of alignment among the team members, which usually coexists with a lot of conflict and emotion. There is no single correct way to manage ad hoc communications. However, if you decide as a team how they will work and then self‐manage toward those protocols, your efforts will be rewarded with greater team alignment and cohesion.

  3. External communications. External communications are with people outside of the project team, including clients, stakeholders, and end users. They are a hybrid between periodic communications (e.g., client status meetings) and ad hoc communications (e.g., informal conversations and emails). Without specific agreement about how these communications will work, teams can face significant risks.

     For example, I once took over management across a group of external client‐facing projects. These projects were composed of cross‐functional teams with our people interacting daily with client peers. The whole thing was way out of control because there had been no discussion and agreement about how external communications would work. Commitments to take on extra scope without adjusting the budget were being made by virtually everyone during casual conversations with client peers. Disagreements among our team members were aired to client staff, who became inappropriately involved in the debates. The situation essentially invited clients to pit our team members against each other to get what they wanted. A great deal of damage was being done, and a lot of energy was being drained from the projects.

     The interesting thing is that this problem was not that difficult to fix. We agreed on the external communication protocols and then held to them. Project managers were the only ones who could commit the projects to additional scope, which usually came with commensurate budget. Disagreements among team members were worked out in internal meetings, and the aligned decisions were then communicated with client staff. Although some clients no longer got everything they wanted without paying for it, our overall alignment with them was dramatically improved.

• Review and reflect at project completion. One final Directional activity that can add significant value to the growth and maturation of a business is to review and reflect at project completion. Project teams learn and innovate a lot during projects, and that information can benefit future projects and the enterprise as a whole. For example, the information can result in changes to process and policy, can spawn system modifications, and can seed new product development initiatives. Reviewing and reflecting can take different forms. Perhaps the simplest form is the after‐action review. Developed initially by the army to debrief soldiers coming off the battlefield, after‐action reviews ask four questions: What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? What did you learn from that? What will you do differently next time?

  This simple yet powerful process can be done on a whiteboard with teams at the completion of a project, ideally while the information is still fresh. Teams should have a way to submit the results to the broader organization for consideration and possible action. This final form of alignment works across projects and throughout the enterprise to build customer focus and foster business excellence.

As we have discussed, project‐based group collaboration requires that we build alignment on our projects up front and then maintain alignment throughout the project's life. As with individual work and one‐on‐one collaborations, alignment on projects involves all four dimensions of energy: Environmental, Intellectual, Personal, and Directional. Understanding this model (and reality) gives us a strategy and set of concrete objectives for achieving success on any project. Now that we have the clarity that comes from understanding the hidden energy of projects, we can better utilize the unique talents of people to accomplish amazing things as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.