Most of us recognize the critical importance of collaboration in our everyday lives, whether with family, friends, colleagues, or community. Sadly, most of us also have had more bad experiences working with others than good, much less great. Why is this? How can we shift it? What’s the “secret” to high-performance collaboration?
The answer is simple, but not easy: Practice. We can look at other high-performance collaborative fields — from sports to music — to understand how best to structure and support practice that will lead to better collaboration.
These slides are from a keynote I gave at The Collaboratory 5 on March 22, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia.
11. 82 games x 48 minutes / game = 65.6 total hours
Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct
11 hours /
month of
performance.
The rest (93%) is practice.
NBA Regular Season
14. How might we create
structures that
encourage effective
practice?
15. Ecosystem of Practice (Fitness)
Cost
Supply
Books, articles,
videos, websites
Personal
trainers
Bootcamps, gyms,
club sports, classes
What it is right now
Coverage across the
spectrum, with more lower cost
options + practice-centric paradigm
16. Ecosystem of Practice (Collaboration)
Cost
Supply
Books, articles,
videos, websites Consultants
Business
schools
One-off
trainings
What it is right now
Gap in options
+ guru-centric
paradigm
17. Ecosystem of Practice (Collaboration)
Cost
Supply
Books, articles,
videos, websites Consultants
Business
schools
One-off
trainings
What it should be
Bootcamps, gyms,
jam sessions
Shift to practice-centric paradigm
18. How might we improve
the ecosystem for
supporting
collaborative practice?
19. Pausing
Asking generative
questions
Listening actively
Navigating power
Acting strategically
Group information
hygiene
Working inclusively
Working iteratively
Synthesizing /
validating
Facilitating alignment
Thinking systemically
Self-awareness
Asking for help
Giving / receiving feedback
Challenging conversations
Weaving
High-Performance Collaboration Muscles
21. Ecosystem of Practice (Collaboration)
Cost
Supply
Books, articles,
videos, websites
Consultants
Business
schools
One-off
trainings
What it should be
Bootcamps, gyms,
jam sessions
Shift to practice-centric paradigm
25. Thank you! We’ll do a
workout together next.
In the meantime, any
questions?
26. For More Information
Thanks to Anya Kandel, H. Jessica Kim, and Amy Wu for their
feedback on this talk. Amy also drew the delightful doodles.
Photo credits:
• “Lots of wild bow action.” Juhan Sonin. CC BY.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/juhansonin/4446978255/
Eugene Eric Kim
eekim@fasterthan20.com
@eekim on Twitter
http://fasterthan20.com/
Hinweis der Redaktion
Harmonizing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
We all have an intuition about what great collaboration feels like, even if we have low expectations about getting to experience it
My mission over the past 15 years has been to create this world where everyone’s baseline experience is at least as good as that little girl’s was with the harmony
How do you create this world?
Scale is the goal. If only certain people can be good at collaboration, then high-performance collaboration is not scaleable, and this vision is not achievable. Convinced this isn’t true.
Think about what it takes to do something very hard. Solution: Time and lots of practice.
Hollow success, like a ringer playing basketball
Wanted success to stick, so needed to rethink how I was doing the work
You either put in the time or you don’t
If you don’t, your experiences will be bad
Jives with my 15 years of working with groups — for myself personally and for others I’ve seen
When you’re performing, results count. Higher cost of failure than when practicing.
Don’t know what the right ratio is, but know that our current ratios are wrong
Predominant paradigm: Being good requires special knowledge or talent
All of our learning mechanisms are oriented this way
None of that works well. Shift paradigm so focus is on practice — how we practice, improving our practice-to-performance ratios
If we had better structures that supported practice, people would practice more
The more people practice, the better people would get at collaboration
Culture paradigm would start to shift, which would encourage people to create more structures for supporting practice
Collaboration is aggregation of several skills, some of which are context-dependent
You can read more about http://fasterthan20.com/collaboration-muscles-and-mindsets/
Workouts start to become clear. Aggregated and public domain at http://fasterthan20.com/workout/
Repetition, repetition, repetition
Can start developing programs that support these workouts
Lead to the ecosystem shift we want
Hope you’ll walk away from this talk thinking about how you can integrate practice more in your own work and lives
Hope you’ll try to convince others to do this as well
Learning Korean at the same time Benjamin was learning English
We’re going to trip and fall and suck for probably a long time, but we can still celebrate the little victories along the way. Given enough time, we will eventually get so good at it that we won’t even think about it.
Imagine that. What would our world look like if we all became that fluent at collaboration?