Teams and Collaboration

Collaboration and Teams

A team is a living system in which task, relationship, history, power and technology continually influence one another. What is visible in meetings is always connected to what plays beneath the surface: who carries the tension, who waits, who rescues, who withdraws when it gets hard. Those patterns do not change through a team day; they change when the undercurrent becomes discussable and the structure makes the new behaviour possible.

What holds for teams also holds for collaboration between teams. Cross-boundary collaboration problems are rarely a matter of ill will; they are the result of structures and incentives that implicitly work against collaboration.

I guide teams from board level to operational level, and the collaboration between teams, in working on what is really at play. The aim is a team, and an organisation, that can correct itself.

Smart is not always smart collaboration. My management team is intelligent and committed. But we are not truly a team. We manage our own domains and then each go our own way.

Working hard to avoid the subject. There is tension in the team that everyone feels but no one names.

No shared task. We work in silos. As soon as the pressure rises, everyone falls back on their own interest.

"More ownership at every level. Less management attention needed, higher productivity, more enjoyment in the work." HR director, professional services

Psychodynamic. I work with the unconscious patterns every team has. Those patterns are not personal failings; they are system products that change when the system changes.

Systemic. I never take teams apart from their context. Sometimes the problem is not in the team itself, but in the place it holds within the organisation.

Human-AI. More and more team work is steered by dashboards, planning systems and AI tools. I help teams make explicit how technology shapes their collaboration.