Reprinted with permission as a two part series for the Galley, this article originally appeared as a single article in the October, 2002, issue of the CIDM Best Practices newsletter (105). Part II will appear in our September issue.

Collaboration: The New New Thing and This Decade’s Hottest Skill (Part I)

By Jean Richardson

Some technical communication gurus would have it that the profession’s history goes back as far as Leonardo da Vinci’s descriptions of his inventions; some would go back even further, perhaps to the brief technical specifications for the ark in Genesis. Be that as it may, most of us can agree that collaborative writing processes are becoming more important in technical communication and this trend has emerged fairly recently. Cross-functional teams are still a new idea in some environments. Cooperative writing—the practice of distributing chapters in a single book among multiple writers—is something many teams attempt but few do well. And now we have single sourcing staring us straight in our collective faces, upping the ante on collaboration in some teams to a point where the process of writing is more complex than even the most technical content.

The demand for collaborative writing is not likely to go away any time soon. Expert collaboration skills, that is to say human communication skills, will increase in significance for technical communicators. But just what are those collaboration skills? What can developing stronger collaboration skills do for you and your team? And how can you tell when you’re collaborating—or not?

True collaboration is co-creation of a shared work product. True collaborators can create a better quality product because decisions are reached in an egalitarian manner using the best the entire team has to offer. Collaboration is fostered by a dialogic mindset (see sidebar, right) and is supported by a set of facilitative interpersonal skills. That is to say, good collaborators have many of the same skills as good mediators and facilitators.

You may have had the experience of joining a team that is supposedly collaborating, and you sensed something didn’t fit or didn’t make sense when the team’s methods and modes of interacting were measured against your understanding of collaboration. So it makes sense at this time to say what collaboration is not. Collaboration is not:

• Networking: people with common interests informally exchanging information
• Coordination: people with a common mission and formal relationships working independently to meet a common goal
• Cooperation: people working together toward a common goal without any clearly defined mission, structure, or planning effort
• Competition: people acting as rivals, competing simultaneously for the same set of limited resources

Perhaps you see some of your collaborative work experiences defined in the terms above.

FOUNDATIONAL UNDERSTANDINGS

Kikuyu Saying: When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

Collaborators can identify and respond appropriately to their team members’ communication, learning, and conflict styles. Good collaborators know their own styles and can flex those styles appropriately for the benefit of the collaborative process.

Communication Styles

Communication style is not something many of us identify objectively. It can be very subtle, and we can perceive it primarily as “clicking” with another person—or not. Communication style may be best described by a range of continua, including

• Direct versus indirect
• Boundary differences regarding private versus public information
• Boundary differences regarding the amount and type of touch
• Use of pauses during verbal exchanges
• Intensity and use of body language
• Use of physical space
• Tone of voice

Many of these style differences are cultural, but all tend to be learned in childhood. And while communication style can be elevated to the level of a conscious skill—image consultants do this for public figures all the time—modifying your individual communication style takes time and attention. For many people, their communication style is so much a part of who they are that even considering modifying their style seems like an abnegation of their essential self. However, the ability to flex your style to assure that your message is received as you intended is extremely powerful.

Learning Styles

To collaborate well over the course of a career and sometimes over the course of a project, stepping into another team member’s dominant style is helpful to communicate new information effectively to that team member. The instructional design and educational psychology communities have developed an array of models to help us understand learning styles. One model includes the following styles:

• Active learners, who learn best by doing
• Sequential learners, who learn best by stepwise inquiry
• Sensing learners, who like to learn disparate facts and established methods
• Visual learners, who learn best by looking
• Reflective learners, who need time to think through or process new information
• Intuitive learners, who prefer to learn through exploration and discovery
• Verbal learners, who need to talk through new information and understandings
• Global learners, who seem to learn by leaping to conclusions, which is typical of gifted learners

In this model, learners are evaluated as having a combination and range of styles, from most to least dominant or preferred.

The Learning Style Inventory and Interpretation self-scoring workbook developed by David Kolb (McBer & Company 1985) encourages participants to focus on pairing themselves with learners who are diagonally opposed to their own style. This strategy stretches the individual’s learning style comfort zone and helps each become a more expert learner. There’s wisdom in this strategy for would-be expert collaborators.

Conflict Styles

As with learning styles, there are a number of conflict styles available. One basic set that seems to work well for conflict managers includes the following styles:

• Competing, in which a win/ lose paradigm is operative
• Accommodating, which dictates letting the other person win to end the confrontation
• Avoiding, in which the conflict is not acknowledged
• Compromising, in which you exchange concessions to end a crisis
• Collaborating, in which you engage in a dialogue to develop greater understanding and a long-lasting resolution.

Identifying your own and your team members’ dominant conflict styles can help minimize needless escalation of a conflict. Some styles work better under some circumstances. Identifying conflict styles also helps the two (or more) of you identify what kind of conflict style may be best applied in the current situation.

End – Part I

References

Kolb, David. The Learning Style Inventory and Interpretation self-scoring workbook. 1985. Boston, MA. McBer & Company.

Senge, Peter, ed. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. 1994. New York, NY. Currency/Doubleday. ISBN: 0385472560.

Jean Richardson is a communication consultant in private practice. She focuses on hardware, software, and Web development. She is past president of the Willamette Valley Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication in Portland, Oregon, as well as a Better Business Bureau Arbitrator, and a Multnomah County Court Mediator. With various associates, she trains other technical professionals on conflict management and collaboration skills. Jean can be reached through her company, BJR Communications, Inc., at jean@bjrcom.com.