4 Q's: The Collaboration Trap

Get your week Unstuck! 4 Q’s of agile inspiration.

Author

Unstuck Agile
June 15, 2023

Thanks for taking the time to read our weekly newsletter to help you get Unstuck! Check us out every week for your dose of agile inspiration. We’re striving to keep the content in our 4 Q’s brief and powerful so you can get a lot of impact from a little reading!

The Collaboration Trap

Quintessential Thought

Collaboration is a tricky word. Some people mean it as, “I’m going to tell you my ideas and then you’re going to agree.” Others mean it as, “I don’t have the answers so let’s discover them together.” Better conversations happen with the latter perspective.

There are four ingredients for effective collaborative conversations:

  1. An outcome we are pursuing

  2. Psychological safety to promote openness and sharing of ideas

  3. Facilitation of the process (context, divergence, convergence, action)

  4. Commitment to proceed

Quotes

Politeness is the poison of collaboration.

Edwin Land

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

Golda Meir

Working with others is, in my mind, the future of business. You have a larger audience, more ideas, shared risk, shared workload and you will be getting a portion of something greater than had you done it alone.

Seth Nichol

Quick Step

Of the four ingredients for collaborative conversations, choose one that is hindering your team and address it.

Question

What does collaboration mean to you? To your team?

Want to improve collaboration within your organization? Join us in this interactive workshop to remove the taboo from conflict as we enable collaboration.

Want to chat? Reach out to [email protected] so we can help you get Unstuck!

Also, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on Twitter, or connect with us on LinkedIn, where we’re posting content that goes beyond the ~200ish words we have in this newsletter.