One thing I like to do on every project is to set aside dedicated collaboration time as one of our standard rituals. If something is important, you need to be proactive about it. Let me tell you how this worked on a past project. One of the first things I put on our design team calendar was twice weekly “co-lab” (collaboration) times; 1.5 hours in a block, twice a week, reserved for the design team to do collaborative work.
I’ve tried this with some success in the past and was curious how it would work with a team new to me. The original response was…not exactly enthusiastic. The most common resistance was a desire to prioritize solo, heads-down time for work. “How am I going to get anything done if we are always meeting?” (Collaborative working sessions are NOT meetings; if it could have been an email, you are doing it wrong).
But we tried it. Sessions would include people sharing what they were working on and getting feedback, or the team doing a fully collaborative session around research synthesis, idea generation, some sort of user flow or system mapping…you know, all those things designers do.
At first, it was uncomfortable for all of us, myself included, to share work that was in really early stages, or to start new work together. Surprisingly, a lot of us designers are not experienced in sharing early, rough, barely formed work and even less experienced in what to do with early feedback.
We also weren’t quite sure how to collaborate directly on stuff. None of us had worked together before. And we were a distributed team, which added another level of complexity. And we often invited team members from other practice areas (sometimes even our client) which complicated things even more.
But we persisted, despite the discomfort. And something started to happen.
We started realizing that we were able to move FASTER despite the fact that we were working on a lot of things TOGETHER. We could push through creative blocks more quickly. We got better at presenting work to stakeholders and getting and incorporating valuable feedback.
And that feedback? Because we were sharing things very early in our process, the feedback came when it could provide the most value. We were less attached to the ideas or approaches, less invested–which made us more open to making changes or, in some cases, abandoning ideas altogether and heading in a different direction. This in turn gave the team more confidence to experiment with different solutions to the same problem without getting attached to any of them..
We also started getting better, and better, and better at every single thing we did, and here’s the key: our work improved because of these sessions both when we were working together or solo.
But the greatest value came in the trust and confidence it built on our team.
I have long believed and still believe that healthy collaboration is the salve for a lot of what ails us in our industry. But we somehow seem to assume that it should come naturally to everyone on a team. And when it doesn’t, we consider it a failure.
Like everything else, healthy collaboration takes intention, it takes practice, and it takes commitment. We expect every technical skill to take time to master. But this skill, this most foundational essential skill, we expect to be innate.
To improve collaborative skills, you can’t expect everyone (or anyone) to be good at it at first; be OK with things being weird and uncomfortable until you build trust and a cadence on your team. Schedule time. Commit to using it. Add structure where appropriate. Experiment with different ways of using your time together. Protect that time. Practice, practice, practice. Get better. Then celebrate.
(based on a Twitter thread)
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