Collaboration Works Only When Decisions Stay Clear
A December 2010 debate examined why collaboration needs clear goals, roles, and decision-making rather than consensus for its own sake.
Collaboration should help people make clear, informed decisions. Cynthia Gibson argued in December 2010 that it failed when organizations treated it as the goal rather than as a way to reach an outcome.
Gibson published her argument on Deep Social Impact, The Philanthropic Initiative’s blog, on December 6, 2010.
Process and outcome
Gibson described a consultant’s experience at an organization that took pride in its collaborative culture. The consultant spent eight hours in a meeting where participants blurred the difference between working together and deciding what result to pursue.
That distinction mattered because a meeting could involve many people without producing a clear decision. Participation alone did not establish who could decide, what decision was needed, or what outcome the group sought.
Gibson’s concern was not that organizations should reject working together. Her point was that collaboration needed to remain a means to clear, informed decisions, rather than becoming an activity that justified itself.
Clarity about decisions
CommonGood Careers examined this issue in its study, Decision Making at Nonprofits, which drew on hundreds of nonprofit employees. The study found that employees reported confusion, disempowerment, and dissatisfaction when they were not involved in decisions or did not understand how decisions were made.
The study described a continuum between concentrated decision-making, associated with a traditional top-down approach, and distributed decision-making, where everyone was involved. It did not identify either end as correct or incorrect.
Instead, CommonGood Careers said organizations needed clarity about three things: how decisions would be made, who would make them, and when each approach applied. Gibson observed that this clarity was often absent in organizations that placed the greatest value on collaborative styles.
Clear rules did not require every decision to follow the same model. They established the context in which people could understand their role and the route from discussion to action.
Risks of broad agreement
Gibson also pointed to concerns about consensus and large-group input. Rebecca Thorman argued in her June 2009 post, Is Gen Y Teamwork Killing Creativity?, that excessive consensus could weaken creativity.
Crowdsourcing offered another example of the limits of participation without a defined decision process. A White House public vote on priorities placed legalizing marijuana first by number of votes.
Pete Peterson, writing on techPresident, suggested that government consider “smartsourcing” instead of crowdsourcing. The contrast focused attention on whether a process drew on useful judgment, rather than simply collecting the largest number of responses.
Thomas D. Seeley’s book Honeybee Democracy described honeybees selecting a new home through both the judgment of the swarm and the knowledge held by individual scout bees. The example joined collective input with distinct individual knowledge, rather than treating all input as interchangeable.
Kim’s definition
Eugene Eric Kim responded in December 2010 in Misconceptions about Collaboration on eekim.com. He shared her view that groups needed defined roles and decision methods, with collaboration directed toward a specific purpose.
Kim defined collaboration as two or more people working jointly toward a shared goal with a defined scope. Under that definition, collaboration did not automatically mean a non-hierarchical structure or consensus-based decision-making.
Kim wrote that hierarchy described organizational structure, while consensus described a way to make decisions. Neither, he argued, showed whether a group collaborated effectively.
His examples included the New England Patriots, which had 107 wins, 37 losses, and three Super Bowl titles from 2001 through the end of 2010. He also named The French Laundry under Thomas Keller and the Vienna Philharmonic as hierarchical organizations that performed well through effective collaboration.
In a response on Kim’s page, Gibson said she accepted that distinction. She said collaboration pursued as an end in itself was not collaboration, but ineffective management. A reader there cited Morten Hansen’s book Collaboration for a related conclusion: no collaboration was better than bad collaboration.