Unpacking the value of Collaboration
ARTD Consultant Fergus Bailey continues his blog series unpacking ARTD’s values. In this instalment, he focuses on how our team were able to focus on improving our collaboration skills during our recent staff retreat.
Maybe I’m hard to please, but I have never been fully satisfied by a definition of collaboration. It’s entirely possible I permanently broke my brain studying philosophy, but each time I hear a definition or try to put it into words myself I feel like I’m sinking slowly into word soup. Collaboration is…working as a team toward a common goal? Working as a team or sets of teams on a shared project? All true, but still missing the feeling, the experience of collaboration that separates it from merely “working together”.
Like many amorphous concepts, collaboration is fairly easy to identify when it is genuinely occurring. For me, this has usually been an embodied experience. In a state of collaboration, I become less aware of how I’m holding myself or the temperature in the room, and it’s as if my colleagues are voicing ideas I’m thinking faster than I can get them out. We’re in tune, and we understand each other. This means that even if we disagree, we’re disagreeing on actual matters of substance, rather than confusing misunderstandings of meaning for disagreement. In short, when we’re collaborating, we’re speaking the same language.
Here’s where I need to commit the most tiresome social crime a philosophy major can: bringing up what someone from the canon said about something. Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed that language operates as a game, in which the meaning of words and sentences result from the “rules” (explicit or implicit) the speakers are playing by – as well as some interpreting, negotiating and creating. It is within this game, Wittgenstein said, that the meaning and shared understanding of a language emerges. This requires time spent together, to learn (or create) the rules, explicit or implicit: to speak, hear, and be heard. It takes time to build the relationships required to talk to each other and not past each other.
However, consultancy is fast paced by nature. When you combine that with a company full of hard-working people hungry to understand as much as they can about the world, the empty time evaporates. Opportunities to sit together without a ticking clock are treasured.
Recently, we spent time at a company retreat to pause, breathe and strengthen our relationships. We undertook a variety of exercises to explore how we work as individuals and how we can collaborate more effectively as a team (pictured below). We also did some trivia, dancing, and even a little karaoke. Thankfully, all footage has been lost.
Spending two days where every person in the company, from the most junior to the most senior, was empowered and enabled to just be, gave us the pause we needed. We learnt or relearnt each other’s language both through explicit exercises and over games of pool. The retreat allowed us to embed that rich, deep understanding that lets insight emerge weeks later without explicit structure, direction or instruction. And it’s a pleasure to feel that connection with someone else, to feel your world shared with theirs.
Importantly, these bonds last. Though they sometimes need rewiring or reaffirming, the pathways remain. This is indispensable when we’re busy, working on complex problems to a deadline, and we need to be speaking the same language, and anticipating each other’s needs. We can bring our collaborative mindset and relational skills to our work with clients too, spending time at the beginning of each project to build our relationship ensure we’re speaking the same language. The work benefits, the people benefit, and the attuned connection creates an irreplaceable instinctual understanding.
