Cultivating a Shared Sense of Purpose
By Dr Graham Norris.
Just as Inuit languages have numerous ways to describe snow, so do organisations to describe the silos, turf wars, and office politics that sabotage collaboration. According to Roland Berger, nearly 80% of respondents from 100 global companies reported “strongly pronounced” silos that negatively impacted their companies1.
The survey supports what I have discovered as a keynote speaker and trainer on teamwork. During a talk at this year's CIPD Festival of Work, for example, I asked 200 human resources professionals to rate their organisations out of 10 in terms of collaboration. Around 60% gave ratings of "could be better" (1-6) and about 40 percent as OK (7-8). Just one hand went up for the top rating of 9-10.
Combatting silos has often been seen as a challenge of organisational design or leadership. However, a simpler technique is emerging that could put an end to turf wars for good: collaborative imagination.
Adjusting Our Focus
Silos emerge from attempts to group people into collaborative units so they can be managed. Even now, a lot of effort goes into team building – $4.7 billion worth of effort in the United States alone2. Yet successful team building risks playing into counterproductive social identity dynamics, especially the creation of in-groups and out-groups. While in-group favouritism may have benefits in terms of evolutionary psychology3, it's disastrous for a modern organisation in terms of innovation, culture and profitability.
Fortunately, psychology's ability to explain how silos form also leads us to a possible solution.
For example, when two people who could be cooperating in an organisation refuse to, it's usually because they are focused on what I call the ultra-short term: "I'm in this group, and you're in that group."
The key, therefore, is to transport them to the future, where anything is possible. In the future, one of them may have swapped teams, or the teams may have merged, or disappeared. We are limited by our current thinking, whereas we can be liberated by future thinking. So it's important to help people escape the constraints of the present so they can experience the possibilities of the future. This is the heart of collaborative imagination, and it produces remarkable outcomes.
Evidence for Future-Focused Collaborative Imagination
In an experiment4, pairs of participants were asked to imagine future events together, such as a picnic. Other groups were asked to imagine future events on their own, or work in pairs on non-future activities such as playing games. The results showed that those who imagined the future together felt more connected to each other than those in the other groups. Building the vision also built the relationship.
Not only that, but the participants were more connected to the visions they created together than those they created on their own. In other words – they were more bought in to co-created visions than even their own visions.
How to Apply Collaborative Imagination In the Workplace
The important thing to understand is that this isn't simply goal setting, because we can set goals without engaging our imaginations. The key is to get people to imagine what life is like in the future, in detail, so they can really experience it.
One technique, borrowed from improvisational theatre, is "yes, and," where one person describes the future, and the second person follows by saying "yes, and" before adding their own ideas. A game I play during training sessions using this technique is to get people to imagine organising the next Christmas party together. It’s a fun and engaging way for them to practice imagining a future with someone else – not something we often do, especially at work.
Tap Into the Magic
Collaborative imagination has the potential to be a powerful destroyer of silos. By drawing people out of the present to focus on the potential of the future, they are required to listen to each other, think about the bigger picture and find ways to make their relationships work better. Hopefully we can then reduce the negative influence of silos and tap the collaborative magic of our organisations.
About the Author
Dr. Graham Norris is a teamwork keynote speaker and Organisational Psychologist who helps companies going through change think more clearly about the future so they can realise their collaborative potential. He has helped some of the biggest companies in the world – including Pfizer, Microsoft, Intel, Lenovo and Volkswagen – communicate their strategic visions more effectively. His TEDx talk Be More Futurist has inspired over 50,000 viewers, and through his newsletter, The DIY Futurist, he shows leaders how to develop foresight as a competitive advantage.
References
- Conquering silo mentality https://www.rolandberger.com/en/Insights/Publications/Breaking-bad-silos-starts-with-executive-and-employee-buy-in.html
- https://high5test.com/team-building-statistics/
- L. Cosmides; J. Tooby; R. Kurzban (April 1, 2003). "Perceptions of race". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 7 (4): 173–179.
- Z. Fowler, D.J. Palombo, C.R. Madan, & B.B. O’Connor, Collaborative imagination synchronizes representations of the future and fosters social connection in the present, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (25) e2318292121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2318292121 (2024).