Individuals work in teams to create value. Individuals communicate in teams to create value. Individuals interact in teams to create value. Slice up the collaboration equation however you want…it always reduces to the same thing. We get together. We work together. We get things done.

And what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, is transforming information into product.

You have a plan. That’s information. You gather data. That’s information. You figure out what the client wants. That’s information. Then you make something out of all of it, it could be a sandwich, a Lamborghini, a skyscraper, a piece of software, a hospital. Work is literally the act of taking information and turning it into a thing somebody else wanted.

It is not the task list. It is not the plan. It is not the KPIs. Those are scaffolding. Work is the transformation.

And it always requires at least two people. There’s the person doing it and the person who needs it. Otherwise you’re just screwing around in your garage. Which is fine. But nobody’s paying you for it.

What a collaborative team actually needs

We want strong professionals inside collaborative teams delivering strong work. Easy to say. Here’s the part people skip:

Information doesn’t flow on its own.

Nobody wakes up thinking, you know what, today I’m going to withhold context from my teammates. They don’t share because we’ve built systems that make sharing hard. Status meetings instead of visible work. Dashboards instead of conversations. Slack threads that scroll into oblivion. Emails nobody reads.

Even Toni and I (who work together well) have had stretches this year where we got too busy and the information stopped moving between us. We felt its absence immediately. Then came the guilt, the frustration, the scramble to fix it. And by the time we looked up, we’d generated a pile of unnecessary work because we weren’t paying attention to what the team needed right now.

That’s the whole thing. Right now.

The four questions

If you want your team to actually function, you need to be answering four questions continuously and visibly:

1. What does the team need right now? What do you need to get your work done. What tools, information, contacts, time….Not what the plan says it needs. Not what last month’s retro said. Right now. This week. This hour.

2. Who are we? What are the people on this team actually capable of? What do they want to do? What does their job description say they’re supposed to do? What is the work currently demanding of them that sits completely outside that description? Those are four different answers and all of them matter.

3. Who are our stakeholders? Most teams I work with can’t answer this. Flat out. They don’t know who’s judging the work. They don’t know whose “yes” actually counts. So projects fail in this very specific, very predictable way: you do a ton of work to appease the one loud stakeholder who’s a pain in the butt, you ignore the three quiet ones, and at the end the quiet ones say this doesn’t give us any of what we needed and you feel like a schmuck.

Don’t feel like a schmuck. Find out who they are first.

4. What is happening right now? Not the Gantt chart. Not the roadmap. The actual state of the actual work. Where the blockers are. What’s moving. What’s stuck. Who’s waiting on whom.

Make it visual. Make it real-time. Make it shared.

It doesn’t matter where you put it. Miro. A kanban. An Obeya wall with sticky notes. A shared interface you built yourselves. What matters is that your team and your stakeholders agree that’s where the information lives and then you keep it current.

Because the moment that information stops being current is the moment everything starts falling apart.

If you’re underperforming, it’s usually because you’re under-informing.

And this one is a rule: if someone on your team says they don’t feel informed, they are right. Don’t argue with them. Don’t tell them you sent the email. Don’t explain that it was in the standup. If they feel under-informed, they are under-informed. That is independent of whether you feel you gave them enough. It’s not about you.

Quality of life, not work-life balance

I don’t particularly believe in work-life balance. I believe in quality of life. Work ebbs. Work flows. Satisfaction ebbs and flows with it. The job of a professional is to watch what you need and what the people around you need, and make sure the system is delivering it. That’s what a good team does. That’s what a good Obeya does. That’s what collaboration actually is when it’s working.

If you liked this, stick around. Like and subscribe is appreciated but what I really want is for you to go look at your team tomorrow morning and ask yourself: can everybody here see what’s happening right now?

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