Thinking About Collaboration

Most of my work these days revolves around designing tools for collaboration. Or so I thought. Only recently did I discover the field of cybernetics, which led me to some interesting concepts that have helped me frame my work in the collaboration space differently. I’d like to summarize some of those concepts here partly to help them solidify in my own brain, but also to share with others.

Collaboration is conversation, with the purpose of reaching a shared understanding

All collaboration can be framed as conversation. A conversation unfolds between the “self” and various possible kinds of “other.” “Other” is necessarily vague to capture the idea that your conversation partner doesn’t necessarily have to be another person. It can be an object, and it can even be yourself.

The participants of a conversation are usually attempting to arrive at some kind of shared understanding, and the way they do that is interesting to me. Conversation is a constructive act, which means that meanings are not transferred between participants as commodities—they are created by the participants together through the conversation itself. Each participant must construct their own interpretation of what their conversational partner really meant.

The way you reach shared understanding through conversation is:

1. I present some idea.
2. That idea is not transferred directly to you. You build your own understanding of what it is that I meant, and then you present that understanding back to me.
3. I interpret your understanding.
4. I compare my interpretation of your understanding to what I originally meant to communicate, check how close we are, and circle back to step one if necessary.

It’s a loop that stops when all the participants in the conversation feel they have reached a shared understanding, or when everyone agrees to disagree.

This “shared understanding” model of collaboration helped me generalize an overwhelming amount of possible collaboration use cases. Instead of thinking about fifty ways our customers could collaborate, I could generalize towards the idea that in all fifty of those situations the common denominator is people trying to reach a shared understanding.

Good conversation requires listening

It’s so simple, but if any participant in a conversation is not listening, it’s not actually a conversation. A crucial requirement of conversation is that you (the “self”) have to create space for the other to speak back. You need to listen and be willing to accommodate the unexpected, so that the self can affect the other, and the other can affect the self. That is the essential dynamic that makes it a conversation.

Diverging is just as valid as converging

I unearthed a harmful assumption pretty late in the game, which was thinking that the point of collaboration is always to drive towards some kind of tangible output, or a decision. I failed to look at my own experiences as a designer and realize that I am not always collaborating with the purpose of arriving at a choice. Sometimes we collaborate to create choices, and that’s every bit as valid as collaborating to make choices. If I create a collaboration situation that is optimized for making choices, I have to realize that I might be doing so at the expense of encouraging people to be creative and to embrace a more open-ended collaborative process.

The need to think beyond the tool

Something like a collaborative document (think Google docs) cannot only be viewed in isolation, or strictly from a feature perspective. A collaborative document is only meaningful when understood as part of a human environment—as grounds for collaboration. The document is one piece of a larger system that includes human components. As a product designer I need to be mainly focused on designing these larger human systems, and not just the features or tools by themselves.

A tool is a conversation partner

A Google doc is a participant in a conversation, the same way a sketchpad can be a conversation partner for a designer. If you record something to the document, then listen to it and allow it to spark a new thought, you are conversing.