Collide To Win

Collisions spark creativity, the collision of ideas and perspectives fosters the emergence of unconventional collaboration and new solutions to tough problems. Team members must learn to collide to work differently and explore unconventional ways of collaboration. This article contains a simple explanation on how to introduce collision inside your team.

Collision – Cohesion Balance.

With cohesion, team members feel safe to ask for help to their colleagues. However, if you have too much of it you incur in the risk of killing the tension, the debate, your team may end in a fake consensus paralysis, losing the chance to create new ideas or study new points of view.

Collision will allow your team to value perspective-taking decisions, study new solutions or working areas. Nevertheless, an excess of it may lead to power dynamics between some members, misaligned decisions or ever people lost due to confidence problems.

The key point consist on obtaining a balance that allows you to introduce some collisions in your team to solve a cohesion overload without breaking it.

Foundational Principles.

1. An ultimate mission: to have a common direction that brings guidance to the collision is crucial to obtain success.
2. Sense/quality of belonging: each member of your team must grant each colleague with positive and unconditional regard, even when he disagrees with the others’ opinion.
3. Self-awareness and radical accountability: each member of your team must be aware of his or her trigger points, biases and conditioned tendencies, as well as understand subtle cues. In this way, he can self-regulate in action.

4. Spaciousness: it is very important to provide your team space to observe, reflect, learn and think. You have to create pause moments, time outs and grounding practices.
5. Diversity: maximizing diversity is critical for creativity, this is not about gender or culture, but to have a team with diverse points of view and thinking paths to foster perspective-taking on the issue being discussed.

References: Lavoie, J., & Arias, M. (2018, October 08). Collide with your team for the best results. Retrieved November 20, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/collide-with-your-team-for-the-best-results

PABLO BROX ORTEGA