Collaboration isn’t merely a feel-good trend or a buzzword to slip into an organization’s values page or marketing material.
Innovation is a social process and effective collaboration is critical to thriving, inclusive organizations and teams that harness the power of diversity to better tackle intractable problems in today’s competitive and fast-paced landscape.
Many leaders rank collaboration as one of the most critical factors to innovation success, but many teams and organizations struggle to collaborate and settle for compromise instead.
The problem is that compromising and collaborating are not the same thing.
Enter Merriam Webster dictionary:
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Compromise: settlement of differences by arbitration or by consent reached by mutual concessions
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Collaboration: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor
In the finite game of compromising, everyone loses, at least a little.
In the infinite game of collaboration, everyone wins. Effective collaboration is inclusive, generative, and expansive.
Are you stuck in a game of compromise when you mean to be collaborating? If so, what would it look like to collaborate instead?
