2 APRIL 2025

Collaboration: How Can We Truly Collaborate and Mean It?

The three Cs serve as the foundation to the Alluvus approach to client engagement – curiosity, collaboration and creativity.

In a previous blog, we shared resources to examine and foster curiosity. Curiosity really is about openness, exploration and willingness. We like to say that curiosity doesn’t require any special skills, it just requires an open mind and a shared commitment to exploring every avenue.

And then there’s collaboration – an essential ingredient to our work; the backbone of any engagement with a client, agency partner or expert to ensure we tap into our collective curiosity and creativity. Collaboration at its core is about creating an environment where we can trust each other and have an honest conversation so we can achieve alignment.

In this blog, we are taking some time to talk about how Alluvus works to create an environment that ensures meaningful and mindful collaboration.

Listen, Learn and Create the Alluvus Planning Blueprint

Before we enter into any engagement, we always ask for time to conduct a “Listen and Learn” session. Simply put, we begin with a conversation. This offer is made without any expectations and is provided to demonstrate how we listen as the foundation of trust – the enabler of true collaboration.

We then process what we heard, conduct an in-depth situation analysis and use that to inform the Alluvus Planning Blueprint. This summary document (the Blueprint) communicates what we heard, our observations and opportunities for a path forward. The Alluvus Planning Blueprint is then provided to clients and partners in advance of a follow-up kick-off meeting where we ask participants to read the Blueprint and use it as a starting point for bringing their own perspectives to the table.

This is important as it demonstrates to the team that we’re not starting from scratch. We are committed to using their time to jump into the deep end of the pool. 

The Alluvus Planning Blueprint is an invitation to collaborate; it provides a disciplined starting point and helps us answer: what do you know and what are we missing? In doing so, we also ask participants to bring forward their own resources and sources of inspiration. And before the team may even be aware of it, a-ha, we’re already collaborating.

The SWOT Analysis: Examine if “We” are the “WEakness”

“The Knowing-Doing Gap” (information circa 1999) presents a great summary about the role of fear when it comes to collaboration: “Fear inhibits the ability to turn knowledge into action because people are so afraid…they do everything they can to avoid being the one delivering bad news about the company, even if they are not to blame… Fear… leads to falsification of information and the inability to learn, let alone apply the knowledge to improve [an] organization’s operations.” What we try to achieve with our clients is the psychological safety needed to overcome this fear-based mindset. 

While the Alluvus Planning Blueprint includes a SWOT analysis, the “weakness” box is really a device for examining if “we” are a weakness. Many of the organizations we have worked with have a tremendous sense of purpose, but how they deliver on that purpose can face internal roadblocks informed by fear.

As an October 2024 Harvard Business Review article notes, “Teams benefit when their members feel that offering up data, ideas, concerns and alternative views will be valued by their peers… Much has been written about how to build psychological safety in a team. But it’s especially critical to establish it in a team that seeks to use evidence to make business decisions – so that… fear or raising unpopular findings doesn’t cause members to miss critical data.”

In today’s data-driven marketing world, this is critical. The data usually is an easy piece of the puzzle to solve for, but how the data will be received by participants in a meeting, can be one of our biggest initial challenges. A current frame for understanding this dynamic is Chappell Roan’s Grammy speech where she asked, “We have your back, do you have ours?” It was a courageous statement informed by the artist’s struggle as she works to deliver what record companies want – hits! – but is informed by unspoken struggles that artists are often up against: meaningful healthcare benefits and a living wage.

Not to get off track, but the point is that the observation was there, and many in the room applauded, while record executives pushed back. But isn’t that what we want? If we can’t create an environment where individual observations are co-equal and heard, then… all the data in the world won’t solve for the biggest weaknesses.

Embrace the Value of Parallel Thinking

We understand that our role in an organization informs our perspectives. The book, “Unstuck” has a nice way of creating context for how to think about it. A shared commitment to collaboration should support both creative and constructive thinking. Our North Star is to create an environment where we can all examine opportunities and new possibilities rather than argue about two existing possibilities. The authors of “Unstuck” note that a simple way to think about this is to examine if participants are coming into a meeting in “Tuning Mode” or “Blue-Sky Mode.” Tuning Mode participants may be looking to answer the question, “Given the hand we have been dealt, how should we proceed?” While Blue-Sky Mode participants enter the discussion looking to examine, “Given a clean slate, what would we do to live out our purpose?”

Parallel thinking is useful because it creates space for both perspectives to exist and be put forward, but in doing so, the trick is to ensure that they are observed as such and also are acknowledged in a way that avoids argument and fosters constructive conversation (aka collaboration). Taking this approach ensures that everyone in the room feels that they have been listened to with the most important gain being that an adversarial approach is replaced by a collaborative approach.

And before you think that the approach to collaboration is binary… we invite you to consider Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats – a process for fostering parallel thinking. Six thinking hats goes farther when it comes to parallel thinking by delineating how mindsets operate when it comes to a collaborative discussion:

• Blue Hat – Manage the thinking process
• Black Hat – Caution ahead – watch out for the difficulties and problems
• White Hat – A little more information would be useful – what’s available and what’s needed?
• Yellow Hat – What are the benefits and how feasible are the ideas we are discussing?
• Red Hat – Intuition and feelings (aka, “I don’t like it.”)
• Green Hat – Alternatives and creative ideas (aka, “What’s not to like?”)

Six Hats is an interesting tool for acknowledging the mindset of each participant, that also ensures each individual is recognized with their respective perspectives honored and presented in parallel – the commitment is to collaborate not argue. Using Six Hats shines a light on a given mindset but does so without judgment, which fosters an empathetic approach. We often find this approach to collaboration can result in a “Black Hat” mindset finding appreciation for, “Why not?” – while those in “Blue-Sky Mode” acknowledge that while we may be flying high, somebody needs to think about how we come back down to earth (aka, the balance sheet).

The Most Valuable Asset We Have is Each Other

When we commit to an environment that results in deep and meaningful collaboration, we enter a world of opportunity. Roles are acknowledged and insights come to the forefront. And, more often than not, the team comes together; because no matter our respective mindset or set of responsibilities, we truly understand that we are all working together.

It really does take all-of-us and a disciplined approach to collaboration ensures that we meaningfully share and learn from each other.