Fostering Collaboration in Work Sessions

by Alistair Cockburn, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

As a practitioner of agile software development, I've had to participate in and lead collaborative work sessions. People remark on the strong feeling of collaboration during those meetings and the speed at which we get results. Other skilled facilitators manage the same. People ask my colleagues and me how we achieve these effects and whether it can be learned.

To unravel the mechanisms involved, I asked a dozen people to write down their recollections of what happened in various meeting settings and how they felt at the time. I then mined these descriptions for references to specific actions that someone else might copy, actions that seem to lead to an improved atmosphere for collaboration. I ended up with over 200 action phrases from the notes.

I asked several friends and colleagues to join me in digging to see why some of these (occasionally unusual) actions might increase people's inclination to contribute, and we also inverted them to see if doing the opposite would hamper collaboration. I started watching meetings more closely to see whether the actions in the catalog did indeed occur and whether the mood changed in the room.

In the end, three dominant categories of actions appeared. They are:

1. Lift others

2. Increase safety

3. Make progress

Another minor category also showed up:

4. Add energy

Sometimes a particular action applies to several of these categories at the same time; certainly there are more actions and more categories to capture. However, these four -- and particularly the first two -- are things that anyone in the room can do to help and that anyone should be able to learn.

Collaboration is a dance of contribution, and it requires that people alternately step forward to contribute and step back to let others contribute. This dance acquires a sort of rhythm.

At the start, people don't know the rhythm, nor are they likely to know what contributions are allowed. They are likely to be afraid of being put down or laughed at.

To get the rhythm going, someone in the room (and certainly the leader) needs to make some contribution, illustrate what can be safely said, support others in saying something, and make progress.

For more on these categories of actions, see my article in the Cutter IT Journal ("Being in the Room: Lessons Learned in Collaboration," Vol. 20, No. 8, available from Cutter Consortium). I welcome your comments on this issue of the Cutter Edge and encourage you to send your insights on the market in general to me at acockburn@cutter.com.

-- Alistair Cockburn, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium