Jiri’s Notepad

[UPDATE: This is a fifth and the last post in the series on architects collaboration.]

“Complexity science implies that managers must give up control – or, rather, the illusion of control – when they are trying to lead their organisation towards some goal” -Roger Lewin & Regine Birute: The Soul At Work: Unleashing the Power of Complexity Science for Business Success

Collaboration, is pretty much what complexity theorists call an ‘emergent behaviour’. What this means? The excellent book by Lewin & Birute that I am currently reading, described that as follows:

“When agents interact and mutually affect each other in a system, this is the source of emergence. In business, this translates to the important and much denied need to attend to relationships characterised by mutuality among people, among teams and among companies.

Agents’ behaviours in a system are governed by a few simple rules. The practices that guide organisations are shared values, and small in number.

Emergence is certain, but there is no certainty as to what it will be. Create conditions for creative constructive emergence rather than trying to plan a strategic goal in detail. This includes nurturing the formation of teams and creativity within the teams, and in evolving solutions not designing them.�

Considering collaboration needs to be based on broad and frequent personal interactions between all people involved in the team effort, what can managers and architects do to facilitate it? There are few things:

• allow and promote unbridled interaction between people;
• work on building trust between parties involved that they will not misuse the open communication;
• select people who are likely to subscribe to the same shared values;
• have communication and social skills allowing them to involve in the interactions;
• take collaboration and cultural aspects into account when selecting suppliers.

One thing that they cannot do is to mandate; collaboration is one of those things that cannot be designed but that needs to be evolved. Recently I have seen twice a metaphor superbly describes this type of effort: (Once by James McGovern and then by Glen Allemann). Using Glen’s words:

“Gardeners produce products that pretty much produce themselves. The role of the gardener is to ‘keep the weeds out, put the right amount of water on the planets, and kill any pests that attack the plants.

Whereas gardeners need to understand the subtleties of plants and what kind of environment they need. Architects and project managers need to be aware of social dynamics of the programme team. This requires emotional intelligence, but some understanding of social
psychology does not do any harm. One of the tools they can certainly use is Tuckman’s development model that provides a useful model for the social dynamics of teams. This model is most applicable to small groups – that’s what it was developed on - but I think it can be applied in a cross-team settings. Bigger groups are almost certainly split up into smaller teams, which are going to have internal and external interactions. Social dynamics will evolve in two cycles running on different speed – one within teams and one at cross- team level.
Enlightened programme and architecture managers can use their understanding of the evolution of the social dynamics by seeking specific opportunities to accelerate the Tuckman’s norming-storming-performing cycle. This is typically done by identification of activities that have a common tangible goal that requires various teams to collaboration on sever timescales. Depending on the stage in the programme lifecycle, such task can take a form of a development of the programme physical architecture, delivery roadmap or implementation of a trial system.

Stretch objectives of the activity create an environment full of pressure but also creative tension that results in a strong emotional experience and personal bonding, helping programme teams to move from being a collection of teams to being a high performing programme team with a strong collaborative ethos.

There is no guarantee that on its own this activity will make teams to collaborate. But as long as the people do have shared values, competency, willingness, and as long they develop mutual trust, there is a good chance, this is something that can be achieved. That’s why growing a collaborative culture comes much closer to gardening, than to, let’s say, building railway stations.