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Collaboration Resources

Collaboration brings people together to work on a shared goal. One specific type of collaboration—creative collaboration—focuses on a diversity of perspectives and creativity to solve complex problems. Explore IDEO’s exercises, methods, and ideas around using collaboration to work more effectively with your team.

How to Set the Conditions for Collaboration

This video comes from our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration.


During the collaboration process, it’s important for teams to be open, curious, and vulnerable. These are essential collaborative behaviors that allow everyone to feel comfortable sharing their ideas and feedback. When you set the right conditions for collaboration, you’ll find that people are more willing to make mistakes, express what they think, not always know the answers, and hold unique perspectives.

To set the right conditions for collaboration, start by asking more questions, actively listening, assuming a curious mindset, and building on the ideas of others. As you begin to lead, it’s essential that you practice and model this behavior so that your team will feel comfortable using collaborative behaviors and mindsets as well. Encourage empathy and collaboration across your team by practicing these techniques:


Include a Diversity of Perspectives
Build a diverse team where people bring different perspectives, skill sets, backgrounds, and experiences to the table, and unite them under a collectively held goal.

Make Time to Build Trust
The key to collaboration is making sure each person feels able to bring their fullest self to work. Focus on establishing a culture of trust and belonging to enable those vulnerable moments.

Hold Space for Tension
Tensions naturally arise when opposing perspectives meet. While it might be uncomfortable at first, it’s not a bad thing when approached with the right mindset. Tension can provide the greatest opportunities to unearth impactful ideas.

Make Others Successful
Set the tone for collaboration instead of competition—you can inspire your team by demonstrating a desire to help others.

There are different challenges at each step of the collaboration process. Be aware of these potential roadblocks when working with your team.
  • Judgment
    When a team goes broad with ideas during divergence, judgment can slip in and prevent the team from exploring what could ultimately become some of the best directions. Push back and remind the group that all ideas are welcome and encouraged.
  • Attachment to Ideas
    As you begin to converge, people may be attached to their own ideas. Make sure not to include or combine concepts simply to appease everyone in the room—decisions shouldn’t be made based on personal attachment, bias, or ego.
  • Early Convergence
    If you converge too early, you might limit the ideas you have to work with. Give enough time for your team to diverge before homing in. It can be tempting to shift gears once you have a few good ideas, but let the process continue to allow even greater ideas to surface.
  • Remote Teams
    Working with remote teams can be a challenge, but it can become a benefit with the right planning. Use online collaboration tools, find times that work for everyone, and gather input on meeting preferences.

Designing Community Conversations to Foster Collaboration

During the collaboration process, established expectations and assumptions in an organization can prevent people from openly voicing their viewpoints. One exercise to encourage more meaningful dialogue is facilitating a community conversation. These kinds of discussions allow teams to gain a shared understanding, become more empathetic, and expand their perspectives.

Lauren Collins, Chief of Staff at IDEO, shares how to design community conversations to foster belonging and set a foundation for creative collaboration.
  • Build a Planning Team
    Have a team of two to four people help you with the logistics, content, facilitation, and communications of the community conversation.

  • Set Expectations
    Define a clear purpose for the talk, whether it’s increasing understanding and compassion or simply practicing listening. Reflect on your goals and desired outcomes, and create conversation agreements and boundaries for participation.

  • Establish Shared Context
    Focus the conversation by starting it with shared content, such as a guest speaker or a YouTube video clip, to ground people in the same experience and terminology.

  • Train Facilitators
    Facilitators can bring structure and guidance to conversations. Prepare them with the discussion questions, the conversation agreements, and their responsibilities ahead of time.

  • Model Vulnerability
    When organizers and facilitators speak based on their own experiences, it invites other participants to do the same. Vulnerable stories help people know they’re in a brave space, where you expect and embrace differences.

  • Evaluate and Iterate
    After each community conversation, it’s helpful to reflect and learn from what happened. End with a feedback survey for participants and facilitators, then adapt and improve for future sessions.

  • The Creative Process

    The Creative Process contains multiple cycles of iteration—with each phase, you move closer to a refined solution.
    • In Divergence—teams go wide to find insights and generate new ideas.
    • In Convergence—teams narrow their focus by refining ideas and synthesizing information.
    The design thinking creative process: diverge to create choices, converge to refine ideas and make decisions, and repeat.

  • Inspiration to Implementation

    Creative collaboration calls for different mindsets and modes of thinking at each stage of the process, from initial ideas to final prototype.
    • Could Be: What are all of the possible solutions to a problem?
    • Should Be: Which ideas would most effectively address it?
    • Will Be: Which ideas would be best to prototype?
    • Alpha Build: What might a prototype look like?
    The creative collaboration iterative process. Narrowing down the right idea takes multiple rounds of diverging and converging.

  • Essential Collaborative Behaviors

    Establishing the right conditions for collaboration allows teams to tap into their creativity and diversity.
    • Learning: Be open to exploration and experimentation.
    • Curiosity: Question what you know and explore what you don’t.
    • Vulnerability: Build trust by inviting others in.
    A Venn diagram showing the relationship between the essential behaviors or qualities you need to be a successful collaborator.

  • The Tension Spectrum

    Tension between ideas comes from having diverse perspectives on a team and provides an opportunity for innovation.
    • Avoiding tension: Teams focus on consensus and don’t push beyond what’s comfortable.
    • Embracing tension: Teams have tough conversations and use them to make ideas better.
    A chart showing the spectrum of avoiding and embracing tension as a team.
Develop your skills further with these collaboration resources.

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