by Morten T. Hansen

Harvard Business Press, 2009

“good collaboration amplifies strength, but poor collaboration is worse than no collaboration at all.” (page iv)

Collaboration Traps: How Smart People Get it Wrong (pages 11-14)

1. Collaborating in hostile territory – where competition and independence are the culture.
2. Over-collaborating — thinking more is always better.
3. Over-shooting the potential value – thinking it will produce more than it will.
4. Underestimating the costs – how difficult it is to change cultures.
5. Misdiagnosing the problem – falsely looking only at surface issues.
6. Implementing the wrong solution – caused by #5.

Disciplined Collaboration (pages 14-15)

Defined:  Getting people to work together across departments, programs or functions.

Disciplined Collaboration: Three Steps (pages 15-18, 50-63)

Step 1: Evaluate opportunities for collaboration – “Will we gain a great upside by collaborating?”. Collaboration is a means to an end, not the end.

Step 2: Spot barriers to collaboration – “What are the barriers blocking people from collaborating well?”

1)   The not-invented-here barrier (people are unwilling to reach out to others)

• Insular culture – Communication mainly inside a group
• Status gap – Don’t want to cross status lines
• Self-reliance – Should fix your own problems
• Fear – Do not want to reveal problems

2)   The hoarding barrier (people are unwilling to provide help)

• Competition – Competition with colleagues and units
• Narrow incentives – rewards for own goals
• Too busy – No time to help others
• Fear – Loss of power if sharing knowledge

3)   The search barrier (people are not able to find what they are looking for)

• Company size – Big companies face search problems
• Physical distance – Distance makes search difficult
• Information overload – Too much information worsens the search
• Poverty of networks – Lack of links undermines search

4)   The transfer barrier (people are not able to work with people they don’t know well)

• Tacit knowledge – Difficult knowledge to transfer
• No common frame – Don’t know how to work together
• Weak ties – No strong relations to ease transfer

All four barriers need to be low before effective collaboration can really take place. Each one is enough to stop people from collaborating well.

Step 3: Tailor solutions to tear down barriers.

Three strategies to tear down barriers:

1)   Unification strategy – craft compelling common goals, articulate a strong value of cross-company teamwork, and talk the talk of collaboration to send strong signals that lift people’s sights beyond narrow interests and toward a common goal.

2)   People strategy – get the right people to collaborate on the right projects. People who simultaneously focus on the performance of their unit and across boundaries.

3)   Network strategy – collaboration runs more through interpersonal networks and less through formal hierarchies.

The best of Two Worlds – Decentralized and Collaboration (page 19)

Barrier Assessment (Page 64)

Solutions to achieving collaboration

1. Unify People – Create a Unifying Goal (pages 74-82)

Criterion 1: The goal must create a common fate

Criterion 2: The goal must be simple and concrete

How President Kennedy went from the main objective of demonstrating U.S. world leadership to landing a man on the moon.

Criterion 3: The Goal must stir passion

Criterion 4: The goal must put competition on the outside

2. Cultivate two-dimensional leaders (Leaders who deliver results in their own job and deliver results by collaborating across the organization (Pages 95-114)

3. Build Nimble Networks (Pages 117-123)

Collaborative organizations run on networks, those informal working relationships among people that cut across formal lines of reporting.

Six Network Rules (pages 123-136)

Network Rule #1: Build outward, Not inward.

Network Rule #2: Build Diversity, Not size

Network Rule #3: Build weak ties, Not strong ones

Network Rule #4: Use bridges, Not familiar faces

Network Rule #5: Swarm the target, Do Not go it alone

Network Rule #6: Switch to strong ties, Do Not rely on weak ones