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Tag: Facilitation

Performance, Attention and Focus

The way you and your teams pay attention and focus is crucial to achieving sustained optimal performance.

A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention.”[1] Daniel Goleman

Optimal performance is sustainably achieving goals efficiently and effectively, to your best ability within current conditions.  To perform, individuals, teams, and organizations manage and apply situation specific technical and administrative skills, project, program, and process management, supported by relationship capabilities like communications, conflict management, decision making, and expectations management.

These capabilities rely on attention and a realistic perspective informed by positive values like objectivity and servant leadership. A realistic perspective realizes that change is inevitable and that there is uncertainty because we live and work in a complex system (our environment, organization, etc.) [2]

While attention, perspective, and values are equally important, this article focuses on attention. Let’s look at what we mean by attention, its importance, and what you can do to cultivate it.

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Attention

According to Amisha Jha, a neuroscientist, there are three kinds of attention:

  • Focused attention – directed to a specific object. It is concentration like shining a flashlight on an object, for example, a person in a conversation or work on a task. On an organizational level, focused attention directs resources to a specific project or process.
  • Open attention – seeing or being objectively aware of what is occurring in a broad expanse, mindful awareness. Open attention enables a stepping back from focus to be in touch with what is occurring in and around the object of focus.
  • Executive attention – deciding what within the field of open attention to attend to and what to do about it, regulating responses with awareness and discernment.

Objects of Attention

Objects of attention may be anything – a project, an organization, a task, presentation, thought, sound, physical sensation, or any observable phenomena.

According to Daniel Goleman focused attention has three modes: awareness of self, others, and the wider world. [3]

With self-focus, the primary objects are thoughts, physical sensations, and feelings. With other-focus, the principal objects are other people and things and their behavior.  Focus outward is diffuse open awareness without focusing on any particular object. It is seeing the big picture and disengaging from routine attentiveness to allow for creativity and exploration.

Projects are Objects

A project is an object. It focuses an organization’s attention by dedicating human effort and other resources to create or change a product, putt on an event or make a change of any kind. Effective project stakeholders are aware of the impact their actions have on their environment and the way the environment impacts the project. Executives govern to manage a portfolio of projects, avoid distractions, and choose the most effective places to focus attention.

Projects, tasks, or activities, whether performed by teams or individuals, are objects of attention. A project team focuses on the project. Teams and individuals focus on performing, attentive to the way they perform and interact, aware of what impact they are having on their environment and how their environment is affecting them, their tasks, and projects.

Why Focus Matters

Lose focus and performance suffers. Fail to be attentive to what’s going on in and around you and performance suffers.

Concentration and skillful attention elicit a Flow experience, being in the Zone, a state of optimal performance and deep relaxation.

Consider what happens when sponsors or clients lose interest in a project, they once considered important. Other “interesting” things crop up to grab their attention. Resources start getting pulled away. The project manager is less able to influence some stakeholders to fulfill commitments. Performance suffers. The same kind of thing happens when you as an individual are distracted. Performance suffers.

The more undistracted the focus the greater the quality of performance. According to Cal Newport:

“Decades of research from both psychology and neuroscience underscore that undistracted concentration is required to learn complicated information efficiently.”

“Focus also produces better results. Recent research on the attention residue effect,  for example, reveals that when you switch your attention from one target to another, there’s a residue left behind from the first target that reduces your cognitive performance for a while before fading. In other words, if you quickly check your phone or e-mail inbox, your brain will operate more slowly for the next 15 to 30 minutes.” [4]

Fatigue and Distractions Get in the Way

Attention is a natural capacity that varies in strength depending on one’s energy level and powers of concentration.

The tired mind easily slips away from objects of focus and lacks the strength to bring focus back to the object. Open attention and executive function suffer because the mind is too easily drawn to the many distractions that call to it and it is too weak to return to awareness.

It may seem relaxing to just go with the mental stream of thoughts, feelings, and external distractions. However, when you regularly allow yourself to flit from one thing to another as they randomly appear, you weaken your concentrative powers.

Improve Your Attention

Three things enhance all the aspects of attention – focus, open awareness, and executive function:

  1. Strong concentration, mindfulness, and objectivity aided by minimizing distractions and managing the ones that cannot be avoided
  2. A process and systems view that recognizes the realities of interdependence, cause and effect relationships, and continuous change
  3. Values upon which to base skillful decision making.

Exercise Your Mind

Let the practice of consciously managing distractions seep into day to day, moment to moment experience. When you notice that your focus has slipped away, make the effort to bring it back. The more you bring your mind back to a chosen object of focus, the more you strengthen your power of concentration.

There are many exercises to strengthen your power of concentration. One is to take a few minutes a day to sit quietly and count your out-breaths from one to ten. If you lose count (it is quite normal if you do), don’t beat yourself up for it. just start from one again. Don’t worry if your thoughts stream like a waterfall. Persist and the concentration will calm the mind.

Cultivate relaxed concentration. Distractions will come. Congratulate yourself for noticing and going back to the counting or whatever your object of focus is. No need to strain or over think it. Your open attention notices distraction and your executive function brings you back or lets the mind wander.

Mindfulness meditation is a highly effective means for honing your focused attention, open minded observation, and executive attention. See www.Self-AwareLiving,com for exercises and information on how to integrate meditation, and systems and process thinking into your life.

[1] https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-focused-leader

[2] For more on perspective see “Putting the Power of Process Thinking into Action[2]  and Vision And Systems View To Improve Performance[2].  For more on values and decision making see “Making Effective Decisions: What Is The Truth And How Important Is It?[2]

[3] https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-focused-leader

[4] {https://time.com/4166333/focus-is-the-new-iq/https://time.com/4166333/focus-is-the-new-iq/}

The Power of Not Forcing

If your goal is to perform optimally, as an individual, team, or organization, cultivate the power of not forcing.

A friend asked my view on Wu Wei or Flow. “In work and life, should one apply the notion of Flow in full?” My response was, “Yes, aspire to apply Wu Wei in work and the rest of life, being effortlessly present and aware, focused and active.”

Wu Wei – Flow

“The Taoists speak of wu wei, “non-doing,” and the paradox of wei wu wei, “doing without doing” or “action without effort.” In more modern terms, it is Flow – the quality of being totally immersed in action so that there is a loss of the sense of self and time and a natural application of skills, knowledge and awareness unencumbered by self-consciousness, worry, judging and other distractions.”

Wu Wei is not about being passive and accomplishing nothing – floating down the river on a raft and going with the current. It is about working smart. It is about not forcing.

Action without Effort

Life is a stream of thoughts, feelings, sensations, conversations, actions, decisions, intentions, plans and all the rest of the things we do. It occurs in a complex social and physical environment that is constantly changing.

It is as if you were in a fast-moving river. If you go against the current and try to force things, you use a lot of energy and risk getting nowhere. If you go with the current, navigating as best you can to achieve a goal, you use the energy of the stream’s current to your advantage. There may be times when struggling against the current is necessary, but for the most part it is a poor choice.

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The Master Butcher

There is the story of the master butcher who says the knife he has used for nineteen years needs no sharpening. He says it is because he goes at his work by spirit,
“Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So, I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.” His knife never touches bone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart … . Then I stand still and let the joy of the work sink in, … I wipe off the knife and put it away.” Chuang Tsu

Mastering Your Work

There are many stories like that. They point the way to optimal performance, to master your work and let go into it with confidence and mindful focused care. Then there is a joy in not only completing the job but in the process, in the work itself.

Managing people in projects and organizations is more complex than cutting up an Ox. Master managers work with communication and collaboration tools. They use them so skillfully that they cut through the conflicts, complexities and ambiguity to clarity and a way forward that optimally applies the team’s energy to achieve common goals.

The master manager works towards personal and team Flow.

Flow

In Flow, stress and its causes dissolve, time becomes irrelevant, doing happens effortlessly, perfectly in sync with the needs of the moment. The ego steps out of the way and lets intuition and knowledge do their things. Master managers let their mastery do the work.

Flow experiences are common in activities that fully engage the body and mind. Many people experience Flow while immersed in sports, writing, dancing, or doing whatever turns them on. Some experience it during threatening events that trigger fight, freeze, or flight responses.

The challenge is to make everything you do a Flow experience. Imagine being in Flow in a boring meeting (which becomes no longer boring), or during a crisis or conflict.

As I told my friend, aspire to be effortlessly present and aware, focused and active in everything you do, everywhere.

Presence and Aware Knowing

In Flow, in the Zone, you are entirely immersed in the activity at hand, while there is presence and knowing. The doing is unfolding. There is a felt sense of being fully engaged and aware of what is going on.

Note how it feels when undistractedly watching a good movie, identified with the characters and feeling their emotions as your own. Is there a heightened sense of awake awareness of the overall experience? You are not thinking about what is going on or critiquing the film. Your thoughts are not getting in the way of fully experiencing the movie. There is awareness.

Distracted Doing

When not in Flow your mind is in a monolog of judging, commenting on, and monitoring what you are doing. Distracting thoughts take you out of Flow. You think-about instead of experiencing.

It is like a football player thinking about just where and when he or she is going to kick the ball with what part of their foot, worrying about it, as opposed to letting his or her training and natural capacity kick the ball.

Distracted doing is far less efficient. Thinking about the action creates stress and takes the focus away from the doing. It gets in the way of optimal performance, the kind of performance that happens when you are in Flow.

Being in Flow is sailing as opposed to rowing. The sailor works the natural movement of wind and water, steering the boat and adjusting the sails as the wind shifts. The master sailor is in Flow. Distracted doing is more like rowing against the current, much more effort, less effect.

Transition to Doing without Doing

It takes training to go from distracted doing to “doing without doing.”

Learn the skills required to do your work. Become an expert user of your tools and fully know your process. Learn from each experience. Shoot for but do not expect perfection.

On a deeper level, cultivate the mindfulness and concentration required to avoid the distractions that take your focus away from your performance. Cultivate the trust in your capability to perform so you can let go of the reins and let yourself go into the flow.

Be self-aware enough to know when you are reacting rather than responding.

Learn to let things happen, confident in your abilities, as opposed to forcing them to happen.

References

[1] Pitagorsky, George Breakthrough Nov 2017 Three Pillars for Optimal living 

[1] http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/chuang-tzu.htm

Be Straight with Yourself to Get What You Want and Want What You Get

Being straight with yourself puts you on solid ground for getting what you want. And who doesn’t like to get what they want?

Can you own up to your motivations and limitations, your values, and your intentions? Are you self-aware enough to acknowledge your capacity and capability and to own up to your strengths and weaknesses? Can you manage your emotions to be responsive rather than reactive? Are you clear about your values and intentions and how they motivate you?

What Do You Want?

Here is a little story about owning up to what you really want.

A person came to the Guru to get instruction on how to deal with an exploitive partner (it could be an abusive, uncooperative, or incompetent boss, subordinate, or peer).

Guru asks, “So you want to change your partner.”

“No, I want to change myself” the person answered.

Guru (who is a bit of a mind reader) says, “No. You only say that because you think wanting to change the other is not “spiritual,” not giving and allowing; that it is manipulative.  You might have read somewhere that the only thing you can do is to change yourself and your perception, that you need to accept things as they are.”

Influencing

“Admit it.” the Guru says. “You are unhappy with the relationship, and you want change. You want to change the other or to have them change themselves into someone you’d like them to be, doing (or not doing) the things you want them to do.”

Guru continues, “You want to change the situation and you think the only thing you can do is to change yourself because you can’t change your partner. You are correct, you can’t change others.  But you can change your perception. When you do, behavior changes. When your behavior changes, you influence others, so they are likely to change their behavior. Though the change may or may not be to your liking.

You can’t change others, but you can influence their behavior.”

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Are You Being Straight?

The Guru concluded, “Are you being straight with yourself? Are you acknowledging your true feelings, thoughts, wants, and needs? Do you have an accurate sense of the situation? If not, you won’t get the change you want.

“Once you acknowledge the situation and your part in it, you can look in on it. You can be both a part of it and an objective observer, a witness. Stepping back to objectively observe you can better know the situation and it’s causes. Then you can apply the courage to work to change it or learn to settle into it.”

A Self-serving Boss

Take the example of a self-serving, manipulative manager. She exploits and verbally abuses team members. She takes credit for successes and blames others for failures; expresses no gratitude.  You are frustrated, depressed, and angry.

You’ve read a self-help book or listened to a podcast that says you can only change yourself and you begin to deny that you want to change her. So, you learn some techniques to manage your anger. You apply them and the frustration seems relieved; you’ve accepted the situation. Or have you?

The frustration doesn’t go away, instead, it gets buried or turned inward. You become frustrated with yourself and your inability to accept the situation as it is. You feel powerless. Your anger turns to resignation and depression.

A Solid Foundation

When you acknowledge your desire to change the situation and accept that you can change yourself and influence others, you courageously do it or you learn to settle into it, truly accepting what you can’t change.

If it’s neither change nor settles, then you complain (to yourself or out loud) and everyone suffers. When you are straight with yourself you can decide and do.

What You Can Do

When faced with a challenging other, do a reality check.  Are they behaving in an abusive, exploitive manner or are you overly sensitive or expecting too much? Or is it a combination? Are you being open and empathetic? Are they? What are the risks of being straight with them?

Answering these questions will put you in a position to more effectively manage the situation to get what you want and be more likely to like what you get.

Depending on the situation, voice your wants and needs. You can confront your partner gently but firmly and tell them what you are feeling and how their behavior affects you. You can ask them to change their behavior.  If you don’t say what you want, the likelihood of getting it is small.

At the same time, you can change your perception and become less vulnerable to their abusive behavior. Here we are on a slippery slope. You don’t want to become a doormat or accept the unacceptable. You need to know your limits  In negotiation it is knowing your best and final offer and having the resolve to walk away.

Changing your perspective to unconditionally accept what is, is wise. However, accepting what is does not mean that you can’t do something to influence the future. Remember, you can’t change the past or the present moment, but your thoughts, speech, and actions create a ripple that changes the future.

Knowing what you want and don’t want, influences your behavior. You establish goals and objectives, and these motivate you to do what you can.

Values, Intentions, Implications

What are you willing to do to get what you want? Does getting what you want to harm others?  What are the immediate, medium, and long-term implications?

Being straight with yourself includes knowing your values and intentions. The values may be saving time and making money, health and happiness for yourself and others, environmental health, ethical and non-harming behavior, safety, and security. Your intention might be to win at the expense of everyone or to find win-win solutions. Your highest intention may be to become a great servant leader or the richest and most powerful.

Getting What You Want

Opening to self-knowledge, being straight with yourself, may sound easy, though for many people it is not. It requires the courage to confront your beliefs and acknowledge realities that you do not like. It requires stepping back to objectively observe and accept things you don’t like.

When you own up to your motivations and limitations; your values and intentions, and acknowledge your expectations, capacity and capability, strengths, and weaknesses you can get what you want and be more likely to like what you get.

Cultivate self-awareness and be straight with yourself.

The Key to Performance Improvement: Candid Performance Assessment

Performance assessment is a critical part of optimal performance. When done well it brings intelligence, effective processes, mindfulness, and self-awareness to bear to sustain and continuously improve performance. Unfortunately, performance assessment is often not done well.

Recent discussions about performance reviews make me ask:

  • Why do people have such a tough time admitting that they screwed up?
  • Where does the tendency to hide mistakes come from?
  • What benefit does it provide? What does it cost?
  • Wouldn’t mindfully saying something like
    “The situation is terrible, we misread the conditions, we could have acted differently. We’ll learn from this and do better next time. Meanwhile we will do our best to manage the current situation.” be better?

Candor – Open and Honest
Candor is being open and honest. It implies that bad news not be filtered out.

This article is about the need to value candor to better enable performance assessment and the improvement it can bring. How do we overcome the habits of blaming, perfectionism, unrealistic expectations, and fear of rejection and punishment that get in the way of owning up to performance shortfalls?

Costs and Benefits
In project management, it is ultimately damaging to hide the reality of a troubled project that is behind schedule and likely to go over budget.

The truth will come out at some point and the failure to own up to the problem in the first place will make the reaction to the truth that much more intense. Further, ignoring the bad news will make it less likely that effective action will be taken to remediate the situation.

On a broader level – across multiple projects, in organizations, and in the political realm – leaders lose confidence in followers and followers lose confidence in leaders when they have the sense that the people they rely on are not able to see and unwilling to say what is happening and how it happened.

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Case Study: Performance Assessment Avoidance
Matt is the knowledgeable and competent manager of a team responsible for a program at one of his firm’s clients. The program has a multi-million-dollar annual budget with a mix of capital projects, smaller projects, and operational activities. As program manager Matt reports to the client’s leadership team. He is responsible for supervising and coordinating with members of the client organization, as well as contractors and vendors providing services to the client. The client and Matt’s firm consider themselves as business partners rather than client and contractor, though in the end there is a client/vendor relationship.

Matt is volatile and highly defensive when he perceives that he or his work is being criticized. He reacts with anger and is often rude to members of the leadership team.

The leadership team and Matt are focused on concrete current issues and have not addressed processes such as performance assessment, project and operational administration, and communication and relationship management.

The board is generally satisfied with Matt’s performance and his firm’s services, particularly regarding management of large capital projects and vendor/contractor relations. They have no interest in replacing Matt or the firm.

However, there are some unaddressed complaints. The complaints are voiced among the members of the board but have not been directly communicated to Matt, largely because every time an issue comes up there is an explosion of defensiveness. Matt addresses each issue, but they repeat. There is neither effective job tracking nor performance assessment. Leadership team members are not comfortable confronting Matt.

The Root Causes
On a personal level, the habits of blaming, perfectionism, unrealistic expectations, and fear of rejection are causes of the tendency to hide performance that does not meet expectations. These are rooted in psychological and cultural conditioning. On an organizational level, blaming, punishing, lack of sensitivity, and poor performance management processes combine to reinforce the personal issues.

Taken together these causes create a culture that hinders candid performance assessment, and as a result will be hard-pressed to perform optimally.

Sensitivity
Because root causes are clearly tied to personal psychology, many work environments are less likely to address them directly. Where mindfulness practices and awareness of emotional intelligence are part of an organization’s culture, the likelihood of effective assessment is higher.

Though, there is always a great need for sensitivity; to be gentle but not so gentle that you get no results.

Dimensions of Assessment

  • There are three dimensions when it comes to candid performance assessment
  • Working to overcome personal resistance
  • Team and organizational maturity
  • Tools and techniques.

Working on oneself begins with the recognition and acceptance that there is resistance and that its cause is internal and personal. With that recognition and acceptance there can be investigation and remediation.

To achieve recognition requires gentle but firm confrontation. Ideally, one recognizes their own resistance and confronts it. If that doesn’t happen and the team’s performance is being affected, then the team or management must confront the issue.

Raising or confronting the issue may or may not result in the desired personal self-awareness. Without the individual’s recognition and acceptance there is unlikely to be remediation. In fact, confrontation can lead to greater outbursts and active and passive resistance.

Culture
The team and organizational culture play significant roles. Cultural maturity sets the stage for effective handling of the performance appraisal issue.

Where the culture is immature, as in the case study, confrontation is difficult and more likely to face pushback from team members.

A mature culture doesn’t necessarily have formal processes and procedures, it recognizes and acts upon the power of appraisal and has a clear commitment to continuous improvement and optimal performance. A mature culture recognizes the way emotional intelligence, mindful awareness, and relationships intersect with more concrete measurable aspects of performance such as schedule and budget compliance.

Procedures, Tools, and Techniques
Formal procedures are a means to maturity, not a sign of it. When the procedures are followed naturally as an integral part of everyday life, then there is maturity. There are many immature cultures with assessment procedures that guide managers and staff through relatively useless annual reviews and project retrospectives.

Tools and techniques support processes and procedures. For example, a tool like Perflo enables frequent micro assessments. Frequent assessments enable early warning of performance issues and remind everyone that assessment is a regular and natural part of life.

Action
Awareness training and facilitation are needed to initiate and reinforce awareness and cultural change. In your scope of control, which my include only you, make the effort to value and promote candor. Cultivate an attitude of continuous improvement. Stop the blaming. Reframe failures and errors as learning experiences. Learn from them so you don’t repeat them.

Improve Performance by Tapping into the Power of Collaborative Intelligence

Decisions drive performance. When making important decisions, take the time to consider multiple perspectives, facts, opinions, and feelings.

“If you rely only on your own knowledge and experience when tasked with deciding, you are missing an opportunity to get to an optimal outcome.  As smart as you may be, you can only gain by getting information, opinions, and experience from multiple sources with meaningful diverse perspectives.”[1]

Important decisions have both short-term and long-term impacts on your ability to meet objectives. The more important the decision, the more you want to combine analysis and intuition to come to the right one.

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats approach is an example of a technique for looking at a subject from multiple perspectives, considering data and feelings with optimism, caution, and creativity, while managing the process.

Taking multiple perspectives on your own is powerful. Getting input from others increases the power. If you have access to knowledgeable people willing and able to give you the benefit of their intelligence, you augment your own intelligence.  You are still the decision-maker.

Collaborative and Collective Intelligence

Collaborative and collective intelligence are areas of study about sharing the intelligence of multiple people, machines, etc. to enhance the power of individual intelligence, with particular emphasis on decision making.  While there are differences, we will use the terms collective and collaborative interchangeably, with the focus being collaboration.

“Collective intelligence is the body of knowledge that grows out of a group. When groups of people work together, they create intelligence that cannot exist on an individual level. Making decisions as a group, forming a consensus, getting ideas from different sources, and motivating people through competition are all components of collective intelligence.”[2]

To make the power of collective intelligence a reality requires awareness, intention, sponsorship, and techniques to facilitate the sharing.

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Awareness

Being aware is the starting point. Often this awareness is so natural that there is no need to discuss it. Everyone thinks “Of course I will seek out information from others to better inform my decision making.”  People regularly and informally engage peers and subject matter experts.

Is knowledge management recognized as a critical success factor? And if it is, are leaders aware that collaborative intelligence must be considered when implementing knowledge management tools and procedures. For more on Knowledge management see the paper, Managing Project Management Knowledge[3]

Whether or not those around you aren’t regularly taking advantage of collective intelligence, some evangelizing, and a program to implement or better enable it may be needed to promote awareness of the power of collective intelligence and enable them to use it.

Obstacles: What gets in the way?

As intuitively sound it is for a person or team to seek out information from knowledgeable others when tasked with making a decision, it is often not done.

Several things get in the way. For example:

  • Know-it-all-ism: The belief that there is nothing to be learned from others; closed-mindedness.
  • The belief that asking for help is a sign of weakness
  • Lack of access to knowledgeable people who are willing and able to offer input in a constructive and well-facilitated way
  • Not enough time (and there may not be)
  • A sense that the decision isn’t important enough (and it might not be).

Creating a Sharing Environment

Collective intelligence thrives in an environment that values and enables, objectivity, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. In that kind of setting, obstacles are overcome or avoided.

The first two obstacles, Know-it-all-ism, and belief, operate on a personal level, often encouraged by cultural norms. Overcome these obstacles by candidly addressing them and changing any cultural norms that promote them. This implies that there is enough organizational maturity to engage stakeholders in meaningful conversations about behavioral change, mindful awareness, emotional and social intelligence, and the personal beliefs that influence performance.

To ensure access to the right people with the time to take part in collaborative knowledge sharing, create communities of practice, and use formal techniques, sponsored by senior leadership, and embraced by the staff. Assess the need for communication skills training and facilitation and inject them into your approach to promote useful and efficient sharing.

As with any improvement program, sponsorship and stakeholder buy-in are critical to success. While collaboration and collective intelligence can operate on a local level – like, within a project team – it is best when there is a wider organizational program. But don’t wait for the organization-wide program if you can work on the local level without it.

Techniques

Formal collaboration techniques provide structure to successfully address complex issues without being caught up in either-or thinking, competition over ideas, and common group communication issues such as going off-topic. Formal models include facilitation guidelines and standard agendas and questions.

For example, Wicked Questions can be used in planning sessions, retrospectives, and design sessions. It is used to address complex issues like conflicting design concepts, strategies, or “tension between espoused strategies and on-the-ground circumstance and to discover the valuable strategies that lie deeply hidden in paradoxical waters.”[4]

Mindful Life Mindful Work’s Co-development [5] brings people together in facilitated sessions to tap into the group’s collective intelligence. Groups may consist of members of an operational or functional team with a variety of roles, across different departments, and levels of experience. They might also be members of a practice group, for example, project managers or business analysts. The purpose is to enhance team members’ ability to address their issues, goals, or challenges. The group is not making the decision, which is the individual’s job. The group discussion informs the decision-maker.

o-development events might be part of a community of practice, or they may occur in the context of a business process, program, or project.

Managing Cultural Change

Managing the change in a collaborative environment can be a challenge. Particularly if there is a need to change cultural norms and values and cut through individual barriers.

If the environment is already collaborative, then collaboration can be supported and improved. For example, the skillful use of collaboration tools and methods better enables people to work together.

In any case, within your scope, promote knowledge sharing and collective or collaborative intelligence. Sponsorship and engagement at the working level are critical success factors in any change.

The next time you have an important decision to make, engage knowledgeable others to get the benefit of their perspectives and knowledge.

[1] https://www.mindfullifemindfulwork.com/2021/08/02/collaborative-intelligence-and-co-development-by-george-pitagorsky/
[2] https://www.organizationalpsychologydegrees.com/faq/what-is-collective-intelligence/
[3] Pitagorsky, G. (2008). Managing project management knowledge. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2008—North America, Denver, CO. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/managing-project-management-knowledge-6950
[4] https://www.liberatingstructures.com/4-wicked-questions/
[5] Mindful Life Mindful Work MLMW: CoDevelopmentGroups-HedyCaplan-9.25.19.mp4
Hedy Caplan MLMW  https://youtu.be/CPBr6hzvsV4