Audit Your Collaborator Portfolio
What is true on a team level — that modulating diversity of perspectives leads to better success — is true at an individual level as well. Just as Ben Franklin stimulated fresh thinking by regular gatherings with folks outside his organization, we can all amplify our creative output if we consider in the diversity of perspectives that we invite to contribute to the problems we are finding, and the solutions we’re imagining.
Not only is it immensely helpful to vary individual and team working time, it’s also critical to assess the portfolio of collaborators we’re drawing into our thinking. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea of a calendar audit, but imposes a lens through which an innovator might evaluate the calendar: you should audit the breadth of collaborators in your portfolio of perspectives.
Here are three categories to consider when auditing your own personal portfolio of perspectives:
Complementarity: Just as Nobel Prize winners Bardeen and Brattain perfectly complimented one another at Bell Labs, there’s immense value in difference.
Experience level: Whether it’s the Chilean miner rescue mission, stealth bombers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Christie’s decision to sell Beeple’s NFT, or writing a new book for Harvard Business Press, a novice perspective provides invaluable insights that experts miss.
Outside the field: Similar to Franklin’s Junto, which gathered like-minded thinkers from outside his organization, Charles Darwin held an ongoing correspondence with an incredibly broad group of thinkers.
So when you perform your calendar audit, consider the collaboration layer:
Does my collaboration portfolio extend beyond my team, my organization and my industry?
Does my collaboration portfolio include folks without much “expert” baggage?
Does my collaboration portfolio include folks whose skills are radically different from my own?
Related: Dial In Diversity
Related: Alternate Solo and Team Work
Related: Perform An Innovation Audit
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.