Pattern: Personalized Relationships for Co-Creation
Solutions to complex problems are best created collaboratively by teams with high levels of interpersonal connection
The team is working on the more creative part of the implementation and still is only partially knowledgeable about it. There are no immediate answers, and the future is not clear or predictable. Teams are based on personal expertise and have clear roles and responsibilities.
In This Context
In uncertain environments, what worked in the past may not work here, so you need to invent rather than attempt to reuse existing solutions.
- Creativity requires trust and volunteering information.
- By default people will use existing knowledge to solve a problem.
- People will not volunteer information to an expert.
- They will only volunteer when there is trust and a personalized connection.
- New solutions are best achieved in highly collaborative, small creative teams.
Therefore
In complex environments where there is no clear path forward, a strong team needs personalized relationships to collaborate on creative solutions. Creativity is not the goal—co-creation is the goal. Creativity is open-ended and may not lead to anything, but co-creation generates results.Cloud native is better suited to co-creative relationships where the team itself collaborates on the future solution with all team members participating. People are solving the problem together rather than relying on the expert advice of individual members.Co-creation teams are significantly more innovative and creative because people are thinking together and drawing from group understanding and experience. They workby building mutual trust, volunteering extra information, and being willing to take risks as a group.
- To create closer relationships, literally reduce the physical distance between team members. Teams should share the same workspace whenever possible.
- Run trust-building experiences, bringing people together to build personal relationships.
- Encourage collaboration and co-creation by working in groups.
Consequently
The team has established trust and a relationship that helps people share information effectively, which leads to co-creating new solutions.
- Each person on the team is helping to create solutions.
- The team as a whole is more creative than each individual.
- People have individual expertise, but they contribute it to the wider team objectives.
- Effort is required to bring people together for social events, extra activities, etc.Not just money and time, but also psychological safety and other organizational culture aspects that take investment.
