THE AGILE CULTURE: LEADING THROUGH TRUST AND OWNERSHIP (2014)

Appendix C. Collaboration Process

From the book, Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, by Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little, and Kent McDonald.

What It Is

Collaboration is a powerful tool to find answers in your organization and foster the flow of ideas.

When to Use It

Use this tool to answer questions as a group that can help solve problems such as prioritizing projects and determining their purpose, increasing productivity and workflow, identifying and developing innovative products and services, and managing risk, uncertainty, and complexity.

How to Use It

Bring the right people together—those interested in the success of the issue and those impacted by the issue. Create an open environment based on trust. Use the collaboration process to stimulate the flow of ideas.

1. Agree to the goal, objective, or problem to be solved.

2. Using sticky notes and marking pens, everyone brainstorms their answers, one answer on one sticky note, as many notes as they need.

3. Have each person read their answers out loud to the group as they stick each note on the wall or whiteboard.

4. Ask the entire team to group the notes—in silence. Give them no other directions than that.

5. As a team, have them label the groups with a title they all agree to.

6. Add up the number of groups, divide by three, and round up. This is the number of votes each person has to vote for the most important or best solution.

7. Let each person vote next to the title. Make sure they understand that they can put more than one vote on a group if they feel it has great importance to them.

8. Tally the votes.

9. Break them into smaller teams and work on how you can implement the highest-voted groups, with each breakout team taking a different group and then reporting their results to the full team.

10. Work through all relevant groups.

11. Let people decide what tasks they want to do and by when. Stress that they should take on tasks they want to do. The remaining tasks that no one wants to do should be resolved by the full team.

In leading this collaboration effort, remember to use questions to keep the focus, stand back and let people work, trust first, avoid rescuing the team, practice influence not command and control, over communicate, and listen.