The Difference Between Collaboration And Strategic Collaboration

Leaders and Managers often wonder what the difference is between collaboration and strategic collaboration. The short answer is strategic collaboration is one type of collaboration that groups of people do at work.

The definition of a collaboration is:
“The action of working with someone to produce or create something.”

There are three types of work collaboration conducted by business groups.

• Strategic collaboration,
• Operational collaboration, and,
• Tactical collaboration.

A Strategic Collaboration is a group of executives, managers, and staff creating strategies, solving problems, revising policies, chartering programs, capturing opportunities, optimizing mergers, identifying improvements, forming and growing business relationships, and dozens of other organizational topics. The starting point is a situation and a trigger. The group’s purpose is to identify the coordinated actions that need to take place. Minimum outputs are a set of agreements, goals, and actions to produce those goals.

A strategic collaboration’s outputs become operational collaboration’s inputs. Strategic collaboration software enables groups to develop the most valuable, viable and endorsed goals and plans.

An Operational Collaboration is members of a workgroup sequencing and scheduling tasks, communicating status, sharing files, messaging about their actions. The starting point is the goals and plans passed in from the strategic collaboration. The purpose is to ensure the actions are coordinated and conducted. The output is the assignment of the actions to owners to produce the strategic collaboration’s target objectives.

The field of operational collaboration software has grown dramatically in the last few years with platforms such as Trello, Slack and Asana joining Microsoft Project.

A Tactical Collaboration is two or more individuals in one, between two, or across multiple organizations, connecting virtually to interact, talk, and/or share screens in place of in-person interaction, or to perform one of the tasks with an interdependency being coordinated by the operational collaboration. This tactical collaboration is where the work gets done.

Tactical collaboration software has also grown, particularly with increased remote and hybrid working. Examples include Zoom, Teams and various digital whiteboards.

What is The Value of Knowing This?

Next time you bring a group together to discuss a business problem, create a strategy, or respond to a new need, or if you are a member of one of those groups, stand back from it and see it as one more example of a strategic collaboration.

Don’t just see it for the topic at hand.

When you realize your group is entering into a strategic collaboration, you can ask some important questions:

What is the shortest path from the first conversation to quality coordinated action?

What should the first conversation be, and the second, and the third?

What are those fewest steps, and how do we conduct them optimally?

Do we have the methods and skills to collaborate successfully?

Do we have the tools to collaborate efficiently and effectively, such as strategic collaboration software?

Fast flow rarely occurs naturally in strategy development, executive decision-making, and problem-solving groups. Through SchellingPoint’s study of over 330 strategic collaborations, there is now a single set of principles, frames, methods, and tools for each strategic collaboration situation.