It is what it is

Sometimes it seems that the set point for most people and the organizations they create and inhabit is anything but collaborative. I often wonder why it is that people have so much difficulty in building bridges and or crossing the ones that are in front of them. My master's degree in theology offered some perspective, to be sure, but this question continues to haunt me.

I have a client who is fond of saying 'it is what it is,' and so with her wisdom, I move on. Sometimes I focus on making the bridge itself seem more inviting or try to bring people together in painting a compelling picture of the other side. That is fairly easy, as most of our projects bring people together around issues about which they care deeply: children and families, early care and education, children's mental health, aging services. I know how fortunate I am to be able to work with people who are not only doing good work but do good.

However, it can be easy to do good, it is by measure, much, much harder to do better. Sometimes collaboration is the key to unleashing what it takes.

Collaboration: It's nothing new

I have been facilitating collaboration, albeit without a label, since my days as a college newspaper editor, working to develop the most effective staff, and best paper possible. In those days all I knew about silos were from driving by farms in my home state of Minnesota. However, I knew the problem when I saw it:

• sports editors that, left to themselves, cared more about athletics than journalism and knew of the importance of athletic teams, but what teams had to do with getting a paper out.
• arts columnists who lived in the theatre arts and music buildings but did not see the connection between the roles individuals play in a choir or play and their role on the newspaper.
• production people who cared more learning about the new technology available to put the paper together than about the people who wrote the articles they needed to lay out.

The problem is that people living in silos only know their own silos and have a hard time envisioning what they have to do with the rest of the farm. What was amazing in retrospect was that rather than focus on working with each department to be better at what they did, my instinct was that for the paper to be better, people had to care about and learn about what others did and work together to make the best possible newspaper. In a career that has spanned decades and had many permutations, collaboration has been the constant, and has been the focus of my professional practice for over a dozen years.

Silos still exist and collaboration remains thought of as the unnatural act performed by unconsenting adults. However, the need has never been greater for collaboration, and so this blog is dedicated to helping people think about how we can all just work together - and create far better products for our efforts.