Collaboration creates alignment and innovation

- In our research, we have found that 84% of teams claim that they don't get collaborative value from their team. In other words, these individuals they do their collaboration, they do their innovation in their individual silos, in their individual teams, and then they come in and they do report outs. They plug their work into a team without getting real juice and innovation from the team itself. This is a huge missed opportunity. I want to introduce a simple practice called a CPS, a collaborative problem-solving. If you do CPS well and you're using it great in your teams, this is the opportunity to get more ideas into your decision-making process. The CPS is a very simple process. Come up with a clear compelling question that you want bold innovative inputs into. The person who owns the idea, the person who owns the question, thinks of a great question and brings it into the room. CPS could be things like, what are the greatest risks we are going to face addressing this particular problem? Or, in the next year, what are the greatest growth opportunities we might be missing. Step two, break into small groups where you get psychological safety and bolder, more innovative thinking in those small groups. I love to use just three people in a breakout room. If it's a much larger group of individuals and you have more time, you can certainly use four. I don't like going above four because the reason for the breakout room is we want everybody to have a voice in the discussion. Step three, make sure that you use a Google Doc or something to record the feedback in the small room. We definitely want to use some form to capture the information in the breakout room real-time, so that you don't lose anything in the report out. You can use a Google Doc, Google Form, or whatever form of data capture, information capture you have. Open the document, have everybody write their input when they're in the small room, so you get the full breadth of the information. And then when it comes back, you can even spend a shorter amount of time on the report out because whoever's receiving this information, remember, this is a gift to the person of ideation and bold new thinking, whoever's getting that information can have all the time they want after the meeting to go through the detail of the report out. Step four, which actually becomes the least important, do the report out back to the room. But I say it's the least important because all the bold input is actually captured in the Google Doc. Now let's take this to the next level. We have seen organizations that are doing something in a virtual they could have never done before. Meetings of hundreds and thousands of individuals crowdsourcing innovation and ideas around collaborative problem solving in the broadest scope. Imagine the CEO of a significant company giving a presentation around the future growth strategies for the next year. And then, the entire company goes into small breakout rooms answering the question, what are the risks to us achieving this? Or, what are the opportunities for growth that the plan did not address? All of these things can be captured. We used to have these town halls, one-way communication. Now we're able to crowdsource innovative ideas. We can bring customers into the dialogues. This is our ability to close the strategic distance to get alignment, and in the process of doing so have even bolder solutions.