The Team Collaboration Canvas

Use a canvas to organise your collaboration.

Most teams discuss their goals, and the work they want to do to achieve those goals. Fewer teams discuss how they will organise their collaboration. About half of the work a team does is not discussed as much as it could be. This means team are missing out on opportunities to improve their work by improving how they do their collaboration.

A team collaboration canvas makes the issues visible. It ties each space to one of the team collaboration rules. It creates a space for discussion. Without the canvas the team relies upon unspoken assumptions about how to organise the work. This leads to misunderstanding, and delay.

The team collaboration canvas creates space for discussion

The canvas has two halves. These left covers how the team organises their collaboration. The right covers how the team does the work together. These are mirrors of each other. For example, ‘shorten feedback loops’ maps to ‘deployable slices’ as what you do in one impacts on the other.

Under each section the team can discuss how they might do the collaboration, or do the work. They should start in the middle with ‘meet regularly’ and ‘how you will learn from the work’ and work outwards. These are the key areas, in my opinion, and everything else ties back to these two item. This is why they are in the middle of the canvas, and have the most space.

The canvas is not a one-shot and done tool. It should be a living document, like a team charter. This is why the date should be filled in, so that the team can experiment and try different options. If one practice doesn’t work as well as expected, then the team can review it, and either modify it, or swap it for something else. Everything should fit together with practices in one area supporting practices in the matching one.

Try it with your team

Print out the PDF and try it with your team. Clarify your assumptions about how and why you do the work the way you do. Also discussion your assumptions about how you organise the work within the team to do the collaboration. Each item is a team collaboration rule. Use the links below to find options to try in each area.

1. Always be collaborating, instead of working on your own – it’s needed all through life.
2. Aim for diversity to improve your work – diversity adds a superpower.
3. Work in the open so the team can see your work sooner – you know what progress is being made.
4. Be humble and ask for help and feedback – being in a team means people can help you when they help the team
5. Meet regularly with a suitable cadence for your context – the cadence depends on the delivery.
6. Accept that it’s all guesswork and start small to learn more – just start so that you can learn.
7. Build deployable small vertical slices to learn more quickly – thin deployable slices are a win for everyone.
8. Keep doing the next riskiest item in order to reduce risks quickly – reducing risks reduces unknown factors.
9. Shorten your feedback loops, so that you learn faster – freshest is finest
10. Always be pausing to review your collaboration – pauses help improve how you do the work.

Have fun teaching this to your people. Help them apply some ideas to start, and remind them to try more as they gain confidence in their collaboration. There are lots of ideas here to help your team collaboration canvas make issues visible.

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