Collegiality Versus Collaboration: Getting our Hands Dirty
December 20th, 2007
Merriam-Webster Online defines:
collegiality as, “the cooperative relationship of colleagues.”
collaboration as, “to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor.”
In the article, Norms of Collegiality and Experimentation: Workplace Conditions of School Success, Judith Warren Little places true collaboration at the end of a continuum of collegial relations.
Starting from weakest to strongest:
- Storytelling: Learning flows in one direction communicated as anecdotes not directly connected to the hearer’s experience.
- Help and assistance: Assistance provided only on when asked for. Again, learning flows in one direction. It’s applied to a relevant problem but tactical and limited.
- Sharing: Learning flows in two directions but is not applied and adapted into new learning. We simply express our own experiences with each other.
- Joint work: True collaboration in the form of teaming, planning, observation, action research, sustained peer coaching, mentoring, etc. A relationship that induces a sense of mutual obligation, exposes each participant’s thoughts and behavior to the scrutiny and evaluation of the other participant, and promotes an interdependence that previously was not part of the relationship.
Of these four, only joint work is “strong enough to contribute to a collaborative culture of enduring benefit.”
Joint work is the sharing of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is acquired through experience but difficult for the holder to express in words. It is core to craftsmanship and mastery.
Tacit knowledge is transfered when we work in collaboration with another person. In The New Product Development Game, Nonaka and Takeuchi call this “osmotic” learning and consider it the first phase in the organization knowledge creation process.
Nonaka and Takeuchi describe how attempts to design the first bread maker failed miserably until an engineer apprenticed herself to a baker, learning by doing the movements required to kneed great bread. She took that learning back to Matsushita, devising a paddle system that became an essential innovation in a wildly successful, new class of home appliance.
The relationship between product owner and team in most agile projects is certainly collegial. We communicate by story telling. Participants make themselves available to help each other. We share explicit knowledge across business and technical domains as best we can. However, all of this falls short of true collaboration.
The lesson I take away is if we want to foster creativity and innovation we need to get past the barriers of status and roles, go beyond talk, roll up our sleeves and labor together — joint investment, joint consequences, and joint work.
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