Mastering Collaboration (Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive)

Collaboration is a key skill for businesses in the 21st century, and yet many business people aren’t trained to teach collaboration skills. How do you evolve ideas in a collaborative fashion and communicate them widely to create a shared understanding? This practical book shows people in your company how to generate ideas with others and gain buy-in for ideas from all levels of your organization.

Many books talk about the value of practices such as Design Thinking, but few of them actually spell out how collaboration works, especially in complex decision-making environments. With this book, product managers, designers, marketers, technical leaders, and executives will understand how team members work together to make decisions. Through tangible exercises and techniques, you’ll discover how to turn promising ideas into products, services, and solutions that make a real difference in the market.

• Learn a framework for developing ideas into hypotheses to be tested and refined
• Understand how to avoid common pitfalls in the collaboration process
• Align communication approaches to ensure that collaboration is effective and inclusive
• Structure events or meetings for different types of collaboration depending on the people and tools involved
• Practice giving and getting critiques to allow inclusion while avoiding consensus-based decisions