The Ten Commandements of Cross Group Collaboration

Today I held a workshop with a group from Microsoft Sweden on the topic Cross Group Collaboration. It was a very good group of people and I was impressed with their involvement and inight into issues of cross group collaboration as well as diversity. In preparation for this workshop I created Ten Commandments for Cross Group Collaboration that might be of interest to others. Some of these may need some explaination and I will try to get around to developing them more later.

The Ten Commandments of Cross Group Collaboration

1. Remember that rules are made to help us. When they don’t help us we are allowed to break them.

2. Break down the communication hierarchy.

3. Remember that good ideas can come from anywhere, and often do!

4. Show respect but don’t avoid conflict.

5. Adapt your processes to your customers needs, not the other way around.

6. Adapt you decisions to each new situation

7. Avoid compromise

8. Celebrate Failure

9. Be resillient

10. Keep an open mind!

Substance vs. Structure

Someone asked me an interesting question. "How do our cognitive abilities get any structure without adhering to some sort of ideology?" My answer: Structure and substance are too different things. A book can give you a structure, we read from left to right, from top to bottom etc. What I am concerned with is what we write on the pages not how we read. The common structure of a book can hold the ideologies Marx, Christianity, Islam or Communism and Capitalism. Anyone can write anything on a page, the reader must read with discernment.

Beware of Ideologies!

Ideologies scare me. Good people can kill or be killed for ideologies. Ideologies put power in the hands of the few to steer the minds of the many. Life can be complicated and confusing at times and ideologies make things easier. Too easy!

It is better to struggle with life’s choices and fail occasionally than to swallow easy answers and comfortable truths served up by political parties, religions or Dr. Phil. We have to learn to adapt our decisions and actions to each new situation. If you find yourself trusting rules of thumb on important issues think again! If people around you state opinions as if they were universal truths be wary.

Experiments

When the democrats try to create a healthcare system that provides quality even for the poor it is deemed (at best) as a liberal experiment by republicans. I guess an example of a conservative experiment would be when our previous president took us to war to prevent the use of nuclear weapons by a nation that had no nuclear weapons. Risk is implicit when experimenting. I think I would rather stick with liberal experimentation that conservative.