For our theme of “Doing, not talking”, we’re providing practical methods and tools for supporting collaboration.
In an earlier post, we gave some insight into our process for building a top creative team. But before you start your search for talent, one of the most important things you can do is to produce an effective brief. This will help you to identify the actual skills and expertise you need to look for.
This month, we’re looking at “Doing, not talking” and providing some practical tools that can be used to help teams work better together.
Since collaboration starts with the individual, for our first post we’re trying out the personal audit – a tool to be used by team members to review their own position before the collaboration starts. We aim for it to be useful for team members that are approaching a project from separate businesses (or different departments within an organisation) to help the team find common ground.
Throughout May and June, the theme for our Bracket Mondays posts is: Doing, not talking.
Last month, we were at the Business Design Summit in Berlin. The two-day event brought together 11 leading authors and business experts, plus practitioners, to share their latest tools for strategy and innovation. And it demonstrated that the best way, by far, to encourage people to work better together is to do things that help them work better together.
From the event website:
“Whether building new businesses or re-inventing existing ones, all leaders need practical strategies to navigate today’s ruthless business environment. You need tools, not talk.”
As a Collaboration Catalyst, you’ll often find yourself responsible for mobilising teams at the start of a project. There are different ways that these teams might have formed – an existing team might have a new challenge presented to them, or a conversation between new connections may identify an opportunity that they can address together. But sometimes you might also need to bring various specialists and experts together around a problem to be solved.
In their book “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing”, Bronson & Merryman state that ninety-percent of a team’s success is determined before they even start work (h/t Eric Barker). At Bracket, we’ve been continuously improving the way that we get the right mix for our bespoke teams – mainly made up of creative freelancers that may not have previously met. Of course, you can never tell how people will work together until they actually start, but perhaps there are a few things we can do to start off in the right direction.
This month, we held our first Bracket Salon of the year. Bracket Salons are monthly events where we hand-pick a team of freelancers from our network, bring them together and facilitate a fast-paced, 2-hour session to debate and generate ideas, and explore how the team can work together.
We brought together freelancers from disciplines across film, interaction design, multiplatform production and branding to explore the hot topics in their sector, and of particular relevance to consumer brands. In their discussion, the team covered the concepts of community, online interaction and identity, the tension between digital and analogue, and user experiences.
Have a look at what we covered below, and if you’d like to hire this team to work on a project or develop ideas for you, get in touch.
The initial stages of a project can make all the difference to its overall success, so the kick-off meeting needs proper planning and consideration.
It might be your role to bring the team together, or you see a need to run your project kick-offs more effectively. Either way, it’s pretty hard to find comprehensive and/or up-to-date guides for how to run them. Much of the material is loaded with traditional project management terms (Collaboration Catalysts are often not formally trained as project managers), not tailored for a creative environment and do not place emphasis on how interactive they should be.
In January 2013, Bracket began a new project for professional services firm Oury Clark. With their collaborative way of working – across accountancy, legal advice, recruitment, financial advice and consultancy – Oury Clark is the perfect client for Bracket. They were keen to cement their position as a forward-thinking organisation and although they had great concept and an amazing service, they needed some live materials to communicate this in an engaging way. We knew we could bring together a brilliant team to create some effective content which would really put them on the map.
Bracket Salons are monthly events where we hand-pick a team of freelancers from our network, bring them together and facilitate a fast-paced, 2-hour session to debate and generate ideas, and explore how the team can work together. Each month there is a new team and theme, and we’ll publish the results here.
Collaboration and business can seem to be at odds with each other – the former about sharing and mutual gain, the latter often associated with individualism and competition. But when entrepreneurs choose to work on a project with others it can be extremely beneficial – they gain exposure to new ideas, share resources and learn new skills.
As a Collaboration Catalyst (our theme for April), you might see great opportunities to bring entrepreneurs to work together on specific projects. So what can you do to increase the chances of success?
Welcome to the first of our regular Bracket Monday posts, where we’ll be giving you a weekly dose of information and knowledge sharing.
Our theme throughout April is: The Collaboration Catalyst
We see a new role that’s instrumental in creativity and innovation, and we call it the “Collaboration Catalyst”.
As we’re seeing more of a need to drive creativity and handle chaos in order to innovate, it takes an individual with a certain set of skills to make this happen. Often, the focus is on those that come up with the ideas, but the Collaboration Catalyst is just as important – they focus on how to make those ideas happen, connecting the dots and bringing projects to a solution.
