The One Right Answer

Understanding the nature of collaboration is like looking for a black cat in a dark room.

Creating the definitive principles of collaboration and collaborative events is like looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat.

Finding the one perfect design for a particular collaborative event between human beings is like looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat and someone yells out, "I've got it!"

I don't know where I first heard that parable. I do know that it didn't refer specifically to collaborative design like I've written it, but the format is pretty flexible and any number of topics could be substituted.

Maybe some day we'll understand the complexity between human interaction to such a degree that for a given situation there will be only one best approach or design for helping people work together to create something outstanding. In the meantime, I've got my money on two things:

1) The compexity of any situation surrounding a collaborative event and the number of unknowns prohibits us from finding foolproof tools for helping people work together;

2) The adaptability of human beings favors successful experimentation with a wide variety of approaches to desiging and facilitating collaboration, implying an evolutionary pathway.

In other words, there doesn't have to be a right answer for designing and supporting any given collaboration between people. Furthermore, I'm implying that a dogmatic approach to designing collaboration may actually lead to sub-standard results over time. There isn't any magic to this conclusion: it only means that I believe we are learning more and more about how and why people work together and that this learning is folded into experiences that help us to learn more.

These experiences don't necessarily help us to test hypotheses about collaboration because that implies that there is a one right answer that won't be challenged over time. Hypotheses are just fine if you're dealing with systems that might be susceptible to immutable laws. Then there's something to be proven and a null case to be tested. Understanding collaboration is different than finding principles in mathematics or relationships in Newtonian physics or solving for the balance in chemical equations.

If you're a practitioner who designs collaborative events and facilitates them and your techniques haven't changed over the past five years, it may be time to take a broader look at the field and see if there isn't something new that you should be playing with. Chances are that you can continue in your comfort zone and provide good results to your clients.

But chances are that if this is a learning field and an adaptive, evolutionary one as well, your approach could use a radical shake-up. It may be time to loosen up the belief systems a bit.