Agile and Collaborative Intelligence

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”

“Remember the story from childhood with the moral saying ‘unity is strength’? Where breaking a single stick of wood was so easy whereas cracking the bundle was near to impossible.”

Well much similar is with human’s intelligence. Professionals are commonly viewed as solo operators, but from an inside organizational view Interdisciplinary and even inter-organizational teams are necessary to solve the really hard problems that professionals face. Teams are formed when individuals with a common taste, preference, liking, and attitude come and work together for a common goal.

The most important aspect of a collaboration tool is that you have the ability to respond quickly. In Agile, collaboration is the act of working together within that process to achieve a shared goal. It is one of the foundations of Scrum and it helps lead a company in a direction to be agile. Its core dimensions of collaborative work are awareness, articulation, and appropriation.

Collaborative intelligence in Scrum refers to the Scrum Core Team working together and interfacing with the stakeholders to create and validate the deliverables of the project to meet the goals outlined in the Project Vision. Collaboration occurs when a team works together to play off each other’s inputs to produce something greater. Agile lets each team member contribute to the solution, and it requires that each member assumes personal responsibility for their work.

Why collaborative agile development delivers better software?

When you take the aggregate of agile principles, implement them in an agile framework, leverage collaboration tools, and adopt agile development practices, you usually get applications that are better quality and faster to develop. You also get better technical methods, aka hygiene.

Hence, agile team work is basically about Collaboration, which is the process through which a group of people constructively explore their ideas to search for a solution that extends one’s own limited vision. Intelligence work can be stated mostly about collaboration. Therefore Collaborative intelligence is considered as the approach which leads to the innovative solutions and results that any businesses needs to succeed.

Don’t think so?
Well I agree that the concept of ‘one man army’ is liked by many. People prefer getting the solo credit for their achievements, being in charge of their goals and making their own decisions. But it has its own limitations, for instance vision of solo being can be limited to a certain extent. Solution of every problem cannot be catered by solo being always, he/she needs assistance at many steps. On the other hand, Team efforts increases the work efficiency, improves communication, gives opportunity of sharing ideas & most important of all ‘Two heads are always better than one’.

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”

Not only real life heroes but also fiction needs team efforts to be a great hit! Take ‘The Avengers’, ‘The A Team’, ‘The Expendables’ and ‘X-Men’, do they have something in common? Yes! They are all stories of individuals combining their talents to achieve a common goal. No doubt Teamwork produces victory in the world of fiction and helps us do the same in business.

To Conclude, Collaborative intelligence provides a very effective vehicle, when you to need to work with others to develop a solution to a complex problem or to generate better and productive ideas. Properly used, teams can be very effective and the most effective work environment is one in which people know when to work alone and when to ask for help.