Is it possible to systematize collaboration?

That's what Rafael Caceres, Celso Martins, Marcelo Walter and Ramon Tramontini did when they brought together the practices that gave rise to Unified Flow. They created environments where collaboration is systemic.

May/15/2024 - 11 minutes reading

Let's say I work in a company with more than 1,000 employees. If I have an idea and decide not to share it, no one will use it and the company will not grow using my idea, it will not benefit from it. If I share it with an obligation to follow exactly how I think and do not accept complements of ideas to make adaptations or improvements to my idea, it will also make it difficult to use my idea. It is likely that people will not agree with something, with some part, so again the idea will not be used and people will not believe that it works.

Now, if I share and accept adaptations, accept improvements, after some time the idea will evolve a lot with the collaboration of several people, it will be easier to use the ideas and the benefits for the company will be greater, so will the idea still be mine? Or has the idea become a collaborative idea?

This is what happens with physics, for example. Physics does not belong only to Isaac Newton; it has the collaboration of Einstein, Galileo, Oppenheimer, Hawking and many, many others. As do the methods, models and ideas that we use to manage our work.

Our projects and products may have a person in charge, who will make the difficult decisions and who will be an important point of communication. But the project/product will have contributions from many people and therefore it is a collaborative work.

So, the suggestion here is to use collaboration and sharing techniques that make our work even greater, that make our work grow with each contribution and thus our organizations will benefit greatly.

This is what Unified Flow does. It systematically creates opportunities for collaboration between people who have expertise that can help. Allowing one person to help with an activity that they are familiar with.

But how do we know that a person can help? Do we have to map out all of everyone's knowledge? Do we have to explain everything to everyone?

It's simpler than that, you don't need to go from an environment with no collaboration to an environment that spreads everything to everyone. I believe both are bad.

The Unified Flow proposes that people share a work input flow. In other words, when a person is available to work, they can see the options at that moment and choose to work on one of the existing activities. These activities can be shared between a small group or a large group of people. It can be for a specific type of work. You will evolve the use of the Unified Flow according to the capabilities of the people and the organization.

You can start with a group of up to 30 people sharing the work and then you can evolve. We have examples and cases with 20 to 30 people and we also have examples and cases of more than 100 people successfully sharing a flow. There are also other examples of several unified flows that add up to more than 400 people collaborating in some way.

But some techniques are important to make this happen. The flow must be organized and work in progress limits must be managed, because the problem is not sharing but overloading people. Within Unified Flow we use techniques that manage this overload.

Standardization of work and quality are also important. But it doesn't have to be just one standard. The more standards are created, the more different ways of doing work there are. If we have perceptible work standards, we will have more productivity gains from the standard. This also increases quality, because with standards, errors decrease and quality increases.

In Unified Flow, we use automation techniques and work cadences to standardize and increase quality. Process automations serve any area of activity, but we also value automations in specific areas such as the use of marketing activity scheduling tools or in software development the use of automated tests and devops techniques.

I think it has generated some insight into the potential gains that Unified Flow can bring and some techniques to make that happen. But where is the collaboration? Is it just a shared flow?

The basis of the Unified Flow is to share the flow, but when the flow is shared, other questions arise, such as how to do an activity that you are not yet familiar with or how to learn while doing the work, since no one arrives already knowing how to work on everything that appears in the flow. One solution would be to work in pairs, where one already knows and works together with another who is learning. Another thing is to move people between projects/products to learn new challenges, but this movement should be done with enough frequency to generate synergy and good productivity. These techniques make the unification of the flow more efficient over time.

In other words, we are increasingly deepening the use of techniques that provide success in sharing the flow and with this we achieve effective collaboration.

The environment becomes more conducive to collaboration and people begin to think it is normal for creation to be collective. The results grow and everyone benefits..

This collaborative thinking even happened when defining the name of the Unified Flow. Imagine if the people who had the first ideas refused to use the same name and each created a name for their method, for their way of working.

If, when Einstein was writing his papers, he had refused to use the term "Physics" and had used only the name "Relativity" for his studies and contributions, would Oppenheimer have asked his opinion on the studies of nuclear fission? Would so many discoveries have been made? Physics is great because it brought together the collaboration of many people.

When Marcelo Walter and Ramon Tramontini improved the way Objective worked by using more collaboration techniques from 2010 to 2014, they had not yet met Rafael Cáceres and Celso Martins from Taller. They talked and exchanged knowledge, sharing their ideas on how to share work, this happened between 2015 and 2016. Rafael and Celso had ideas, as did Marcelo and Ramon, everyone benefited from sharing ideas. After that, Rafael and Celso defined the name Unified Flow and formalized the method, shared a lot of information and more people got involved. Later, they decided to share the authorship of Unified Flow.

So more people collaborate on the Unified Flow, more companies apply the concepts and the idea of collaboration becomes increasingly normal.

Learn about Unified Flow, increase collaboration in your environment and contribute to more and more collaboration techniques being incorporated into Unified Flow and serving more and more people.

Let's systematize collaboration using Unified Flow techniques.