Effective collaboration

Organisations often come to the conclusion that their groups and teams should collaborate more effectively. No competitive rat race but collaboratively achieving results. No hidden agendas and politics but connectedness and trust. However, the question is how to accomplish this. Collaboration is seldom part of a curriculum. It is a skill that people are expected to have, it is considered as a given talent, a personal characteristic, or a general competence. But collaboration, the skill of effective collaboration, can be learned. This book describes how to enhance collaboration, not just by setting goals and allocating tasks but by activating, empowering and continuously engaging the group, and the expertise and knowledge within. Just like lighting and fuelling a fire, we need to enhance and facilitate collaboration to support groups and teams in effective collaboration using modern tools and techniques based on three decades of research and practical experience. This book offers rigorous but practical methods to enhance and facilitate effective group collaboration.

Gwendolyn Kolfschoten is an expert on collaboration, facilitation and group processes. As a researcher at Delft University of Technology, department of Technology Policy and Management, she studied collaboration processes for a decade. She was also a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Engineering Systems department. She has published many academic articles on collaboration, facilitation and on tools and techniques to support group work. Currently, Gwendolyn is the founder of 'Beter Samenwerken' (which means 'improving collaboration'), a company dedicated to supporting workshops, training and teaching about collaboration and facilitation, and to advise organisations on effective collaboration.