What We Mistake for Collaboration

Collaboration has become one of those words organizations use so frequently that we rarely stop to consider what it actually means.

We collaborate across functions. We build collaborative teams. We invest in collaborative technology and design workplaces to encourage collaboration. When a project brings together people from different parts of an organization, we tend to assume collaboration is happening.

But working together and collaborating are not necessarily the same thing.

People can divide a project into pieces, complete their respective parts, and assemble the result. Teams can coordinate dependencies, exchange information, attend meetings, share documents, and reach decisions together. All of that may be necessary to get work done. But it doesn't necessarily mean the interaction between people has made the work—or the people doing it—better.

Effective collaboration does something more. It changes what becomes possible because people worked together.

The Value of the Interaction

Think about what happens when collaboration is working well. Someone asks a question that changes how the group understands the problem. A perspective from one part of the organization causes another to reconsider an assumption. An unfinished idea becomes stronger because someone else sees something in it. A disagreement reveals an option nobody had considered.

The result isn't simply the combination of everyone's individual contributions. The interaction itself has created value.

This idea has been central to our work for more than two decades. The Medici Effect explored what happens when ideas, disciplines, cultures, and perspectives intersect. The premise wasn't simply that bringing different fields together was valuable. Proximity alone accomplishes very little. The potential came from what happened at the intersection—when an idea from one field influenced another and created possibilities that neither contained on its own.

The same is true of people. Putting different expertise, functions, experiences, or perspectives around a table creates the potential for collaboration. Whether that potential is realized depends on the quality of the interaction between them.

When Interaction Changes the Outcome

This distinction matters because organizations have become very good at creating the structures of collaboration. Cross-functional teams are commonplace. Technology has made it easier than ever to connect people across departments, geographies, and time zones. Most knowledge workers probably spend more time interacting with colleagues than ever before.

More interaction, however, does not necessarily mean better interaction.

Imagine two teams brought together to improve an important part of the business. The right expertise is represented. Everyone understands the objective. Ideas are being exchanged. By most conventional measures, the teams are collaborating.

But listen to the interaction. One or two voices dominate the discussion. Several people say very little. When an unconventional idea surfaces, the conversation immediately turns to why it won't work.

Now change two things.

Before the discussion begins, give everyone an opportunity to voice their perspective. The people in the room haven't changed, but the group now has access to more of what they know before one or two views establish the direction of the conversation.

Then, when an idea seems impractical, resist the instinct to dismiss it. Ask instead what's valuable about it and how that value might be strengthened or made possible. An idea that might have disappeared in seconds now has the opportunity to influence what comes next.

These are examples of what we call MOVES: simple, practical actions that help people interrupt familiar patterns and approach the work differently. In this case, small changes can alter the quality of the interaction—and what the group is able to draw from the people in the room.

The same people, with the same expertise, working on the same problem can produce a very different interaction—and potentially a very different outcome.

From Individual to Collective Capability

The quality of collaboration depends in part on what people bring to the interaction. Curiosity makes it possible to explore a perspective before evaluating it. Listening allows someone else's thinking to influence our own. Adaptability helps us change course when new information emerges. Judgment helps us know when to challenge, when to build, and when to let an idea develop further.

These skills don't simply make someone a better colleague. They help determine whether interaction merely coordinates individual capability or expands it.

Organizations contain enormous amounts of individual capability. The harder challenge is turning more of it into collective capability. That doesn't happen automatically when people are assigned to the same team. It happens when what one person brings changes what another person can see, understand, decide, or create.

This is also why collaboration can be difficult to measure. The visible signs are easy to count: meetings held, functions represented, documents shared, people involved. The more meaningful evidence is found in what happened because those people interacted. Did the thinking evolve? Were assumptions challenged? Did different expertise genuinely intersect? Did the group arrive somewhere its members were unlikely to reach independently?

Those questions set a higher bar for collaboration. They also make its relationship to performance much clearer.

Organizations will always need people to coordinate, communicate, share information, and work across boundaries. Those activities matter. But calling all of them collaboration can obscure the thing that makes collaboration valuable in the first place.

The test isn't simply whether people worked together. It's whether something became possible because they did.