Collaborative Work in Organizations
When it happens and why it matters

Strategy Work, Design Work, Operations Work
The more complex the organization, the more important collaboration becomes. The three focal points for collaborative work in an organization are strategy, design and operations.

• In Strategy Work, teams position the company on the competitive and customer landscapes. Strategy Work also outlines the products and services required to thrive on this landscape.
• In Design Work, teams craft these product and service ideas into working models ready for the market. These models undergo extensive analysis and testing. Design Work teams also envision the internal structures and processes required for sustained and sustainable implementation.
• In Operations Work, the marketing, sales, manufacturing, delivery, service, and support groups work together to improve the existing product or service, shorten cycle times, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Responsive, Flexible, Nimble
These three types of work are conducted in parallel with one another throughout the life of the company.

• Responsiveness measures a company's reflexes on the competitive landscape. A company can become more responsive if it can shrink the elapsed time between conceiving a strategy and achieving operational viability for the strategy.

• Flexibility measures the number of genuine options a company can take at any time. If the company can feasibly contemplate and occupy an increasing breadth of strategic positions, the company becomes more flexible.

• Nimbleness measures the degree of cross-departmental coordination that a company possesses. As the information exchange between strategy, design and operations grows stronger, the company becomes more nimble. The long term objective of collaboration is to increase the company's responsiveness, flexibility, and nimbleness.

Collaboration Ability, Timeliness, Communication
Throughout all of this work, from strategy formation through successful execution, the ability of people to collaborate, the timeliness of their collaborative efforts, and the communication of the ideas, models and results between groups plays a major role in the company's success. People must be able to work together-not just to get along with one another, but to bring the various perspectives to each challenge that are required to overcome the challenge. The collaborative response must be timely-it can't drag on for months and years. The collaborative response must also be shared. If good ideas never leave the proximity of the individual teams or departments, they cannot be acted upon in concert.