Throughout life, we all consciously and subconsciously engage in a variety of collaborations to achieve the desired output. Now some of these may be formal, perhaps informal and they may also carry less or more impact. By and large, you will find that it is not always the complexity of the task or project you are collaborating on, but more so the individual or group that you are collaborating with that have a direct influence on the outcome of the assignment in hand. For instance, I have always played football throughout my life and within those teams whereby I had better relationships and connections with my teammates both on and off the pitch, I felt that this significantly contributed to the result that we shared a desire toward. Of course, there are situations that work out even when we might not share those bonds that we trust and thrive off, albeit I would guess at them not occurring as often!
There is always the facility or platform for which you might choose to, or have to perform with…and let me not be the last to tell you, a poor football pitch can affect even the best performing collaborators in the game at any level! When depicting collaboration, team sport is everything for me. The rules of the games (be it football, rugby, netball or other forms that involve collaborating with another) might change over time, but how teams communicate to achieve the desired final result has changed very little.
So what do we need to do? We need people to communicate regularly. This does not always mean face to face or on the phone, it just means displaying a notion or sign to someone through which you receive a message and can respond or gain information. By disengaging your team with lacklustre facilities, tools and platforms for which to collaborate with one another you are continuously decreasing the confidence and stimulation to use said platforms to communicate, thus severely denting collaboration. We all know how great it feels to achieve something we have been tasked with or even set ourselves, but we also know that this would go wasted if we did not have anyone to share that achievement with. The more chances we provide each other to even get started on and engaged in collaboration, the more opportunity we provide for success.
“The less we work or communicate with someone, the less we produce. It’s easy.
