Innovating Collaboration: Making Thinking Visible
in Business
Author Name: Linda Yaven
Contact Email Address: elle@lindayaven.com
Introduction

It was on a plane coming home from a visit to the Reggio Emilia,
Italy schools for young children that I was taken by the
possibilities of what might happen if the model of documentation
I had just witnessed fell into the hands of design students.

This came to pass as I developed a curriculum, The Teaching and
Documentation Project at California College of the Arts (CCA),
San Francisco. Simply put my students documented their design
and teaching of an art/design project at a site in the
neighborhood.

Recently I have adapted this material from higher ed for those
keen on innovating communication flow within business.
Documentation is a mind-set and a method balancing strategic
thinking with execution and reflects an emerging business
environment valuing collaborative teamwork at the intersection
of creativity/logic, right/left brain and visual methods/text.
Recognizing this link CCA is launching the first MBA in Design
Strategy offered in the States September 2008.

Business Applications for Making Thinking Visible

1. Communication at the Front End Impacts Customer Experience:
Testing products & services before budget is spent on
development, getting data early while approaches can be changed;
peer to peer assessment enables innovative marketing experiences
to surface
2. Cohesive Teams Innovate: Introduces design thinking aligned
to execution; supports the unique cultures of diverse teams;
deepens transparency in cross functional teams; boosts morale by
building and rebuilding trust up
3. More Immediate Customer Feedback: Sessions designed for
customer participation
4. Higher Caliber Client and Customer Relations Creating process
framed case studies demonstrates control over internal process
reassuring clients and customers

History

Several snowy winters ago I received a grant to visit Reggio
Emilia in Italy which Newsweek named one of the top 10 learning
systems in the world. Their students are 3 months to 6 years old
while my clients are grown-up so I was a little concerned about
how much sense it would make. But it was Italy - there was no
resisting.

The relevancy knocked my socks off and I returned with a burning
question about the implication for adults. How could this
collaborative model that provides equivalency to images in
conjunction with the spoken word - whether or not we are
visually versed or even if our professional context is word/text
dominated - impact adult inquiry in business practice?

We reward talking in education - and pretty much everywhere
else. Yet children do not have recourse to speech like adults do.
In Italy I saw systemically how communication flows when the
"tyranny" of the spoken word is balanced with other ways of
knowing. The Italians call documentation "the second skin" of
their schools.

The children's reflections about their work were visible
everywhere. The Italians say that children speak 100 languages
yet adults listen to just one: the spoken word. Again, adapting
this material for business, a variant on their question: What
are the 100 languages of adulthood?

Teachers have taught in Reggio for decades without burn out.
What was going on? A colleague returning to the States said the
hardest part was becoming a solo practitioner again while in a
school full of teachers. Communications systems were missing.

Returning I began to embed documentation into my curriculum and
felt an instant relief: the shared visual medium provided a
powerful way to communicate alongside speaking, the dominant
communication mode of teachers - and managers. In making visible
the diverse ideas and experiences as well as the shared goals of
the student group reduced stress and personality clashes were
quieted or given a fresh (visual) inroad to address them. I
looked forward to coming to class.

Introducing this improved discovery session into organizations
echoes this: shared visual mediums lift morale by provide a
framework to recognize differences, air them, unravel knots and
implement more effective strategy design. This method replicates
the ecology of a design lab generating, testing, organizing,
clarifying, baking and rising ideas before implementation.

What is Documentation?

We ordinarily think of documentation as something conclusive
occurring at the completion of a project. An emerging definition
from higher ed, spearheaded in the States by the Harvard
Graduate School of Education, holds documentation as a powerful
tool for making learning visible. Here documentation is not
something moribund but alive and responsive to a social context
of learners. It furthers group thinking by making it visible.

Documentation is the footprint of an inquiry allowing someone
who was not there to follow a thinking process through "reading"
the images presented and to revisit learning, cull insights,
connect dots and design next steps with increased clarity.

In the student example the first day of the semester we
brainstormed "documentation" on the blackboard. The students
came up with: research, evidence of progress, non-empirical
evidence, meant to be read, understandable by whoever reads it,
transference of knowledge without teacher present.

It's important to highlight this last distinction when coaching
teams on the approach. Documentation is full of rapid decisions
based on the knowledge of participants of the inner workings and
rhythms of their culture since no one knows this better. The
goal is for teams to ultimately craft this method as their own so
it is sustainable going forth.

Several layers of documentation took place. My students
documented their students at their respective sites in the
community, I documented my students and they documented each
other. In some cases my students' students were documenting. We
all documented the objects and artifacts generated. The
documentation took many forms: photographs, video, drawing,
charts, interviews, paper and pencil, audio.

Digital recording technologies let us review process immediately
while the project still had flex. We could also revisit a
subject later on when data can overwhelm to remind us of earlier
insights. In our case the subject of documentation was the
students' teaching projects: papier mache mask making, a "blind"
coke taste test and one about favorite buildings in the
neighborhood.

Collaborative Intelligence

Although each of us acts within a social sphere this is not an
area in which we are necessarily trained. Yet business
environments require we become agile collaborating in cross
functional teams. My documentation curriculum was shaped by a
sustaining question: How to educate the "introvert" who creates
and "extrovert" tasked with collaborating, managing, leading and
teaching teams?

Making Thinking Visible facilitates group interaction and can
have as its subject group interaction. The 14 students in the
seminar worked individually and were teamed. Like a jazz
ensemble it provided something rare: a rhythm of independence and
interdependence - the opposite of the usual 'reporting out"
passing as group work. Our project was not only about increasing
knowledge but about transforming our understanding of
collaboration. It's a method to accelerate individual learning
while providing avenues to work across silos.

Assessment

Making Thinking Visible is based in reflective conversation
among stakeholders (the subjects of the documentation, the makers
of the documentation, observers of the process and those who did
not take part in of any of these - peers, managers, clients and
customers) at various touch points to interpret the collection
of shared visual mediums.

While assessment is part of any inquiry documentation makes this
explicit. Its deliberate visibility invites scrutiny, comparison
and lively debate. As co-constructors of the knowledge base
being built participants more organically bridge disciplines and
diversity of view. A manager who knew her team quite well told
me afterwards she was "amazed to see the variety of solutions"
they came up with. Engaging the "head, heart and guts" as author
Peter Cairo suggests naturally builds buy-in and is a
competitive advantage today.

Shared visual mediums melt resistance so people move through
habitual (stuck) assessment quagmires more swiftly. As a
participant said "It naturally encourages engaged listening".
People get to know one another in an unforced way so there is
more trust for those outside our discipline and within habitual
ways of thinking and doing.

Making Thinking Visible has an unedited, in-house aspect and an
edited, public side. In a safe context it deliberately reveals
the back story of an inquiry - the gaffs, mistakes, "let's not
go there again" moments - moving beyond cosmetics to learning
experiences with substantial meaning. Sounds simple yet few
structures for mistake making as a generative act actually
exist.  The idea is to fail fast, often and with others who are
doing same around a topic of inquiry. The team jells and best
practices surface. We become acclimatized to beginning again
swiftly without making a fuss. Skateboarders excel at this.

Of the 5 senses vision provides the most distance - a cool lens
to revisit moments we wished had never happened, paths abandoned
or "redo's" with lightness and even humor to glean the learning.
This activates flexibility of assessment.

Future History

On a plane coming home from documenting the first Making
Learning Visible Institute at Harvard I thought of something I
heard while there. One of the participants said how teachers
here in the States care as much about their students as teachers
in Reggio Emilia do. Education is a daunting issue everywhere in
the world. I am most familiar with what makes our context so -
no matter the age or context of the learner.

Documentation is a method and mind-set for innovation. While
originally designed to address the question of who a child
growing into a grown-up may become the implication is profound
for adults in professional business practice as well.

(c) 2008, Linda Yaven.  All rights reserved.  Want to use this
article in your e-zine or website? Sure, provided all links are
live and include the copyright and by-line below.

Linda Yaven is a Professional Speaker and Design Thinking Coach
who has presented at Harvard University, The Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum, The Creative Problem Solving Institute,
Innovation Immersion for Fortune 500 and The Home Schooling
Network among others.  She is an Associate Professor teaching
Effective Communication and Experience Design in the MBA Design
Strategy Program at California College of the Arts, San
Francisco. Her consultancy provides programs on Innovation and
Making Thinking Visible and Meaningful Assessment.  You can
reach her at http://www.lindayaven.com, elle@lindayaven.com or
510-594-3602.