The Problem with DIY-ing Complex Collaboration

What can we learn about effective collaboration from a DIY home repair gone wrong? Story time…

A friend bought her home from this guy Chuck.  

Chuck thought he was really good at home repairs. He installed new windows on his own. He updated the electrical on his own. He rerouted a bit of plumbing on his own.

But there was a problem.

You see, even though Chuck thought he was good at home repairs, he wasn’t.

When my friend opened the walls to make her own updates, she discovered a multitude of messes:

• missing supports and braces

• improperly housed electrical work

• improvised plumbing joints

  
  

To name just a few!

Many of these “chuck ups” presented serious risks to the property, not to mention risks to the family that lived inside – fire hazards, water damage hazards, and the like.

By purchasing this home, my friend had unwittingly adopted a host of problems, all born of Chuck’s blissful ignorance about what he knew and didn’t know. Every time she’d take on a project of her own, new problems were revealed. Over the years, she incurred loads of expense and headaches as she remedied these problems.

There’s a lesson here about the pit of despair that DIY can bring about if you're not fully equipped for the job: These “chuck ups” were avoidable, as were all the downstream consequences he inadvertently thrusted upon others, had he just had insight into the limits of his know-how.

The same is true of high-stakes collaboration in organizations:

• People believe it is easier than it is, intuiting that their big visions and best intentions will sustain the effort.

• They underestimate the resources needed to do it well.

• They fail to build the relationships and systems necessary to succeed over the long haul.

Quite simply, it’s easy to underestimate the complexity of collaboration. It’s easy to assume you can just DIY your way through it. Heck, we’ve all seen DIY work just fine for small, short-term projects.

But, when you’re dealing with multiple stakeholders, working in nuanced spaces, and investing loads of resources (i.e., time, money, people power), there are a lot of ways collaboration can go wrong. If you’ve been around the block a time or two, I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about – tense relationships, shattered timelines, lackluster outcomes, insignificant impact, etc.

Sure, sometimes DIY is the way to go. And, sometimes it isn’t. For the collaborations that matter most, it helps to bring in the pros to envision, construct, and facilitate the project.

Yes, your collaboration is complex. But, with dedicated expertise in intentional collaboration design, that complexity is absolutely navigable. You don’t have to suffer the avoidable pain of DIY.

If you could use hand navigating the tangled complexity of your next high-stakes collaboration, reply to this email with LET’S TALK.

(And, if you ARE going to DIY it, be sure to check out my many free resources over at www.debmashek.com.)