Tame Collaboration Complexity
There’s a tendency to overmanage complicated collaborations. But additional meetings and structure put additional stressors on productivity. There’s a better way.
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IN COLLABORATIVE ORGANIZATIONS, where teams are matrixed, workers are multi-allocated, and the work itself is often fluid, exploratory, or evolving, managers face a major challenge: Cooperation is often messy and opaque, and it rarely follows a linear path. Today’s joint work products and multiproject environments don’t have the simple measurability of, say, a 1930s Tayloristic assembly line.
Managers nonetheless feel the need to manage and often revert to meetings and interruptions, which reduce productive time and stress schedules. Meetings and their resulting to-do lists increase the need for oversight — which leads to more meetings. A single 30-minute meeting might seem like a small tax on efficiency. But when meetings are multiplied across overlapping projects, they can result in hours of context-switching and time-wasting. What’s worse, most productivity metrics fail to capture this inefficiency. Time card hours look full, projects appear to be staffed, and everybody says they’re busy — but in reality, people are treading water.
At one large automotive client that my company consulted with, the customer relationship communications group — which served multiple brands, regions, and internal service organizations — had reached a point of “meeting wars.” Meetings were being proactively scheduled simply to secure people’s time, which dug into their productivity weeks in advance.
Managers need better strategies to manage collaboration. Gallup polling data supports this: According to the latest “State of the Global Workplace” report, employee engagement globally “fell by two percentage points in 2024, costing the world economy an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity.” The sharpest decline for engagement was among managers themselves, who “have been squeezed between new executive priorities and employee expectations” in recent years, the report notes. Only 27% of managers surveyed reported feeling engaged at work.
There’s a solution to the overmanagement of collaboration. Organizing workers into midsize, multiproject pods — collections of people who mix and match on projects as needed — enables a shift in what managers can and should focus on. Organizing with pods can help managers drop many productivity-sapping activities in favor of a deceptively simple focus: making sure people really understand what they’re working on, using a powerful set of noninvasive metrics to track these more-effective operations.
A Three-Part Approach to Boosting Collaboration
Adopting a better structure for collaborative teams and work is the key to enabling a better way of guiding performance while ensuring that the team’s talent is maximized. The following three practices tackle the challenges of managing multiproject teamwork at scale and the damaging tendency to allocate individuals across many different projects and teams.
Step 1: Organize employees into midsize pods.
A pod is a designated group of employees, often across disciplines, who work together exclusively. Creating pods for people to work within constrains the “noise” of the larger collaborative organization; pods are the organizational version of turning down the sound so that people can hear themselves think. And it’s easier to assign projects to pods and manage participants in the aggregate than to assign individual employees to project after project and then manage them in isolation.
Haier and Bayer are well known for organizing employees into a range of pod sizes depending on function. By far the most common pod size used in these and other companies seems to be the same as that of the Amazon “two-pizza” team: a group of five to seven people that could be well fed by two pizzas. Agile software development teams are often of this size as well, or sometimes as large as 10 to 12 people, as at USAA.
Creating pods for people to work within constrains the “noise” of the large collaborative organization.
What my team and I have found is that faster and deeper collaboration often happens in even larger pods of 25 to 40 people. This is especially true for larger initiatives and multiproject efforts. In our experience, small pods can struggle with meaningful cross-discipline integration and the ability to get a lot of work done, and they may lack stakeholder and business depth.
While the structure of these pods can be quite complex, a few design principles are essential for making them effective:
- Size is your friend. A single large pod that can tackle multiple projects is easier to oversee than the equivalent number of people in smaller project pods.
- Everyone has a home pod. The pod serves as both a home and a resource manager. Rather than assigning individuals to multiple different pods, work comes to their pod. The pod will then optimize and allocate its members accordingly. Assigning someone to multiple pods is counterproductive.
- Departments grow people but don’t own them. Departments live outside the pods and exist for developing people’s skills, sharing best practices, and ensuring that the right talent is available for pods.
- If you say “pods,” mean it. The pod approach works only when the pod boundary means something. One client I worked with was trying to use pods within a 250-person setting, but everyone ignored the pod boundaries, scheduling meetings and pulling people into other pods and nonpod projects. The CEO nodded in agreement when I noted, “And that’s probably worse than not having pods at all, right?” Pods offer the promise of enabling people to focus better and get work done. Keep that promise.
Change at this level requires a strong leadership commitment. Shifting a culture connected to your current structure and processes requires broad buy-in, but the benefits can be quite strong. For example, at one Florida-based ad agency, my team helped a 60-person group restructure into two 30-person pods. It didn’t cut staffing, tools, or projects, but clarity surged. Work sped up by more than 20%. Meetings dropped by almost 50%, and morale improved dramatically.
Step 2: Focus on building understanding and clarity about the work.
Collaborating is something that we, as humans, are naturally quite good at. I’ve found that the problem in business settings is that we don’t enable it well. The most significant impediment seems to be a lack of individual understanding and the subsequent misalignment of that understanding across the whole team.
If people don’t understand what they are working on and all of the context behind it (the “why”), then they struggle in the partnership. This can be seen in research on how ineffective collaboration can become when a narrow group of people becomes the primary source for the partnership and the search for insights: It is collaboration in name only. True cooperation is a team sport, and you can’t play the collaboration game unless you understand the topic well enough.
Alignment, the second precursor to collaborative activity, is when people start to understand each other’s understanding. It is when our brains get in sync.
Briefings and documents, which focus on a one-way transfer of information, fail teams more often than people would like to admit. I’ve had great success borrowing pages out of Japanese management playbooks (such as kanban for organizing work, and quality circles for problem-solving) and have begun to use the Ba method for surfacing collective knowledge. (Ba is a Japanese word meaning “place.”)
Despite being part of the knowledge-sharing models at IBM, Pixar, Google, and BP, the Ba method is not well known to many Western managers. The key idea behind it is that learning (and ownership) is something that cannot be thrust upon a group. Instead, the group must “unfold it” together.
True cooperation is a team sport, and you can’t play the collaboration game unless you understand the topic well enough.
The version of this approach that I teach managers is a simple process: Convene a group and let them know the general subject (for instance, a new product that will be launched). Then, instead of making a presentation, ask them what they want to know about it. Ask what questions they have. Encourage conversation, but do not lead it. Make the discussion a puzzle of sorts — a search for sensemaking. Using a whiteboard or canvas visible to all, gently facilitate the capturing of what people discover through conversation, or have them capture it. Include what’s not known or not answerable at the moment. Make sure everyone participates, takes turns, and can go at their own speed. Leave no one behind.
I’ve seen organizations that embrace this new way of managing understanding go on to experience sharp increases in employees’ sense of belonging, engagement, and problem ownership. Project success rates go up, and a more collaborative culture emerges. A Tampa, Florida-based digital strategy shop I worked with reported a 90% decrease in rework that corresponded to an additional 6% to 8% for its annual bottom line, just from getting people to ask good questions and get an understanding of the work before they dived in.
Step 3: Give managers the tools to eliminate friction.
When managers are focused within a pod and using the right metrics, they can begin the shift from overmanaging collaboration to unleashing it. I call this becoming a “friction detective.” The friction detective uses a pod metrics program to diagnose whether processes and information are all appropriately present.
At the core of this program are two deceptively simple survey questions that reveal more than any timesheet ever could: “How well did you and your teammates understand the work you were asked to do?” and “How much productive time did you have to actually do your work?” Ask both questions using a 10-point scale, where 10 represents the highest levels of understanding and productivity. Low scores don’t tell you why things are off — they signal where to start looking for the problem. The job of finding the “why” is where managers become detectives.
These questions work best when asked regularly — ideally, weekly or every two weeks — and accompanied by real conversations. Do it as a group, not in an app and not behind a dashboard. Ask the questions in person, or at least synchronously.
Over time, the answers and the ensuing discussions become a Ba-like rhythm of shared reflection that managers can lead obliquely with root-cause-style questions: “What made it hard to stay in flow this week?” “Where did understanding break down?” “What part of this work isn’t clear — or keeps changing?” This isn’t a reporting loop. It’s a mutual inquiry process that surfaces friction before it becomes failure, and it invites everyone to take ownership in improving the way they operate. It’s the team helping managers help the team.
Collaboration works better with the right structure and management mindset. Success creates better results but also unleashes significant productivity gains and boosts other core metrics such as team member satisfaction and quality. By measuring workers’ levels of understanding and productive time, leaders can begin to quantify the impact of these modifications on their teams.
Armed with these strategies and data, leaders can take steps to limit organizational sprawl, democratize understanding, and create a self-optimizing workplace in which improving productivity is truly everyone’s job.
