Mastering Collaboration

Introduction

What Is Collaboration, and What Gets in the Way

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

—Unknown

The 21st century has brought our society great new capabilities, such as landing on Mars and editing genes to treat disease, but it has also brought us complicated, intractable problems like climate change. We need to get better at coming together to solve these problems, because no one person is going to make a dent on their own. But many people find collaboration difficult and exhausting compared to working in simple teams of like-minded individuals with clear lines of authority. In my own work, I have experienced the temptation to take a narrower, more isolated path. But even when it’s difficult, the experience of working closely with someone who is very different is ultimately rewarding, and generates better answers. While not everyone is a natural collaborator, we can all adopt different behaviors and approaches to make working together better.

What’s Collaboration? And What Isn’t?

In researching this book, I’ve heard many people say that collaboration is simply “the air we breathe” and covers almost every aspect of our work. Kate Rutter, principal at Intelleto and author of Build Better Products (Rosenfeld Media), has a useful model for defining teamwork at several levels, which I have adopted (Figure P-1). She lays out the difference between cooperation, collaboration, and co-creation. At the most general level, Rutter says, is ...