Collaboration is an important element for creative construction, it is the exoskeleton of intelligence in action, where we build in a flow, making ourselves fully present to create something non-existent, facilitation helps us to leverage this creative process.

Our purpose is to build together, in a self-organized and improved way, for this we must accept and see in a natural way in others and in ourselves levels of achievement below the expected objective, so that we can recover quickly from it, reflecting individually and together (cognitive and affective domain) about the process that allowed us to reach that result, for this we must make ourselves 100% present, observe our inner dialogue, through our thoughts and our actions, in such a way that in our thoughts positivity and progress are found in doing, action verbs instead of procrastination verbs.

A warm-up exercise that can help us to do this is to put all the members of a team, in a parallel starting line, define a goal to be built among the whole team, each of the members must think of an action and express it out loud, action that will allow us to advance towards the objective, if this action is positive and builds, then the member or collaborator advances towards the objective and the team gains points, when the action is not positive and does not build, the member does not advance , passing the turn to the next collaborator and so on until the objective is achieved, the action verbs are those that are in the psychomotor domain, in order to build iteratively, a member of a team should then accept and confirm what their collaborator proposes, quickly think of an action that complements that proposal, with another verb in the psychomotor domain and express it out loud.

Teamwork, acceptance and rapid recovery from errors, through individual and joint reflection, disciplined, commitment to increase mastery, creation of safe spaces, impacting on the decrease in time learning skills, responsible assumption risk management and expanding resilience.

So, collaboration is a co-creative process to achieve a goal, it is based on communication and interaction with the people around me. The level of collaboration required is related to the scope of the objective we want to achieve, depending on the magnitude of this, we can find different levels of collaboration that range from: individual, team, program, company and extended company.

What we want to achieve through collaboration is to create a culture of high performance, where the level of achievement of the objective in each execution is higher than the initially proposed. To achieve this, we require a work environment, where agile values, psychological safety, alignment, autonomy and responsibility are lived. We must first be sure to answer these questions: 1. Why are we here? 2. Who are we? 3. What do we do? 4. How do we do it?

The level of collaboration that we seek in agile, is the business level, which implies a transversal collaboration, it is to create a flow of delivery of unique value to the client, flattening hierarchies and organizing teams around this delivery, these teams can be of various rates, synchronize their rate of delivery and value, to the established value stream. When we deliberately co-create a collaborative environment, it is necessary to think about maturity. Maturity is the state of a thing that has reached its full development, a mature collaborative environment is one that allows us to ensure a very high level of achievement, through constant inspection and adaptation of the execution, with a scope of the objective at the program or company level.

A framework is a collaborative tool, allowing us to answer the questions that create high performance in a practical way. It is made up of:

1. The values, which represent the qualities of being to focus on the achievement of a habit or behavior, which will allow me to achieve a set of objectives. Respond to: Why are we here and who are we?
2. The principles, which are the rules aligned with the values. Respond to: what do we do?
3. The practices, which are the systematic execution of actions that allow me to create habits and behaviors in the long run to achieve a goal. Answer: how do we do it?

A framework represents a quality and integrity assurance mechanism, in the chain I am, think, feel, say and do.

Values ​​are the most relevant element of a framework, they are related to the way of thinking or mindset, which is composed of the set held by one or more people.

Prosperity is the product of a belief system, a way of thinking or mindset.

Prosperity implies growth, development and sustainability, it is based on the ability to be and do what we have, in balance with the environment (time / space).

Let’s put all this into practice, when we need to grow and develop a company, we must do it at least twice the average of the sector in which we find ourselves, we require a prosperity mindset, which is achieved with the creation of capacities, to go from a state to another effectively.

If we represent it as a wave, where we have, peaks, plateaus and valleys. A ridge or plateau is defined as the objective state where we want to reach, between crest and crest are the valleys, which represent the series of obstacles to growth and development, which are solved with the appropriate mindset and previously built capacities.

As Einstein said: “No problem can be solved on the same level of consciousness in which it was created.” What helped us to achieve a goal, will not help us to achieve another of a higher level, we need to increase mastery, greater competencies (maturity) and level of thought to achieve each objective level, a higher level of consciousness and new learning will help us to achieve it.

The growth of an agile initiative in a company has parallels with business ventures, only that it has internal financing, it is an intrapreneurship.

We define scaling as the growth and development in a sustainable way that we do to an agile initiative to achieve a goal with a broad scope at the business level, thus we have at least 3 types of scaling, according to the goal to be achieved within the companies:

1. Vertical scaling, it is an agile intra-enterprise, focused on converting an internal initiative the closest thing to a business unit or an independent external company.
2. Horizontal scaling, focused on achieving an objective with a very large magnitude and / or scope, a collaboration at the level of several programs or companies of the same group, is based on the elimination of dependencies and continuous integration of the value of the participants.
3. Organic growth and development, creation of teams of teams in a self-organized and emergent way.

To be able to effectively scale Agile, we must ensure the achievement of the objective by building a mature and solid collaborative work ecosystem, prepared to solve the obstacles that will arise in this growth. This requires that from the beginning of the creation of the environment to be scaled, we focus on the creation and maturity of the minimum capacities required that will make it competent as a high-performance work ecosystem and the type of scaling required.

 

A useful practical tool is the quarterly realization of continuous and iterative diagnoses and reinforcement so that the level of maturity that we require emerges and we scale without debt, technical or cultural. Let us remember that failing to mature the collaborative agile environment creates an imbalance in the environment, which becomes a cultural or technical debt in the business domain that we are working on.

In our next article we will talk about how to manage an escalation environment.

Miguel A. Martínez H., August 2020.

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