February 26th, 2026
Sometimes teams that are meant to be collaborative are really just teams that co-exist.
To collaborate means to co-labor. Picture a group of people leaning in together, sleeves rolled up, examining ideas and artifacts, creating something, building a new and better collective understanding.
This is different from people coming together and simply dividing up the tasks. Or people coming together and leaving with the same thinking they brought in, without having expanded their view by taking on others' perspectives.
When groups become truly collaborative, magical things can happen! New pathways come into view. New understandings emerge. Something that didn’t exist before has been created. The magic is possible because the expertise of every person has been revealed and harnessed to create something better.
That magic doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by intentional design. One of the most powerful things you can do to support a group to truly collaborate is to release ideas to the group. Have people share their thinking and publicly record it for everyone to see. Get the ideas visible and in front of the people.
Then, support the group to talk about the ideas - not the people. Separate people from their ideas. Make it safe enough for people to play with ideas and be creative to build something better.
A Next Step
Maybe you do this already! Maybe you haven’t tried this yet. Identify a meeting in the coming weeks. How might you even more intentionally design for collaboration?
