The Best Tips for Collaborative Problem Solving

Newsletter #1 for Strategic Saturdays

Lewis Harrison

Dec 10, 2022

—————————————————

“This subscription newsletter serves a demographic of highly intelligent readers, deep thinkers, life hackers, preppers, entrepreneurs, and survivalists. I especially focus on those with a passion for ideas, critical thinking, self-awareness, healing, the arts, personal development, and a desire to understand the world around them.

Readers of my posts are usually tired of being patronized elsewhere by fact-less, opinionated know-nothings, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news.

—————————————————

“Knowledge is power, wisdom brings meaning, contentment, and happiness!”

—————————————————

This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, and bonuses, and to become part of my Inner Circle please become a paid subscriber. (Sign up at the end of this newsletter)

—————————————————

On a personal note: Please excuse grammatical errors, typos, repetition, and any general nonsense, and such in this post. I am getting a bit older now, and I have about 20,000 pages of information that must get published before I leave the mortal coil. I simply write and publish more than my humble editors are able to correct. If you find enough errors you are welcome to contact me about being an editor of my work.

Thanks for sharing this newsletter with your friends and associates.

———————————————————

Before you read todays article on strategic thinking you may wish to read the Introduction to this series. Click below…

The Life Strategies Playbook & Mentoring Program

An Introduction to Strategic Thinking

“Strategic thinking is a mental or thinking process applied by an individual in the context of achieving a goal or set of goals. As a cognitive activity, it produces a tyoe of thought designed specifically for problem solving. What are the principles of strategic thinking, and what are the 5 key elements of strategic thinking?” Read on to learn more…

2 years ago · Lewis Harrison

A 3-Minute Read

I The best strategists are also collaborators. I don’t say the word “collaboration” superficially. At the highest level there is a concept called collaborative intelligence. Collaborative intelligence characterizes multi-person (or computer), distributed systems (a system whose components are located in different locations), which communicate and coordinate their actions with the purpose of solving a specific problem. This type of “collaboration” is different than brain storming where people in a room share ideas. With collaborative intelligence each agent (human or machine), is autonomously and independantly contributing to a problem-solving network.

If you Google Strategic thinking, these are the question that are most frequently asked…

What is a collaboration wiki?
What collaboration really means?
What are the 3 types of collaboration?
How is wiki used in business for collaboration?
So, what are the 3 types of collaboration?

Many of the concepts applied in collaborative intelligence processes are drawn from the study of natural ecosystems in evolutionary biology. Here the collaborative autonomy of organism in their ecosystems makes evolution possible. Natural ecosystems, where each organism's unique signature is derived from its genetics, circumstances, behavior and position in its ecosystem, offer principles for design of next generation social networks to support collaborative intelligence, crowdsourcing individual expertise, preferences, and unique contributions in a problem solving process.

There are actually 8 types of collaboration. These include:

Team Collaboration. This is one of the most common types of business collaboration in the workplace. ...

Community Collaboration. ...
Network Collaboration. ...
Cloud Collaboration. ...
Video Collaboration. ...
Internal Collaboration. ...
External Collaboration. ...
Strategic Alliance.

You can research each of these if you wish. In this newsletter I am going to focus on Team and Community Collaboration.

How does collaborative intelligence work in practical practical application in a Team or Community?

In any collaborative problem-solving group there will be many voices. Each team member has their own voice and each of these must ultimately become one voice once a strategy is put into place. In some scenarios the chief strategist or leader can choose who they wish to have on their team.

One of my mentors, a master strategist, has created a system for choosing her team members, based on a 2015 study, by Malgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl, a psychologist at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. Malgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl asked students to describe the different kinds of inner voices they conversed with and came up with a list of four common internal interlocutors: the faithful friend; the ambivalent parent; the proud rival; and the helpless child. Each voice might pop up in different situations – an ambivalent parent-type might offer caring criticism, but a proud rival-type is more likely to be focussed on success rather than offering support. We might adopt these different roles to help ourselves get through situations like a tough test or sports game.

Using the above model, I now collaborate by creating a combination of,

a faithful friend – A team member would support and even effectively argue for whatever strategy the team leader decided upon.
the ambivalent parent – A dominant team member that all the other members respect, who seems to know what the best strategy might be but does not share that information. In the end they are willing to accept whatever strategy the other team members chose, if it sees plausible.
the proud rival – A team member, who in many other scenarios might be chosen to be the team leader. This individual will usually play “devil’s advocate” asking question after question, and using predictive analytics when possible, to show that any strategy chosen by the team leader is likely flawed.
the helpless child – This individual, though highly skilled in a specific area, and a great and effective follower has nothing to offer concerning any particular strategy that may be chosen.

Final Thoughts on this Approach

When dealing with collaborators who are committed to solving a problem, each voice might pop up in different situations – an ambivalent parent-type might offer caring criticism, but a proud rival-type is more likely to be focused on success rather than offering support. We might adopt these different roles to help ourselves get through situations like a tough test or sports game.

I have used this approach to collaborative intelligence in my work as a mentor and transformative coach, and the positive result have been astounding.

——————————————————————————

Author: Hey there. My name is Lewis Harrison, and I created this newsletter. I am a transformational coach, teacher, and professional problem solver. I am a proponent of entrepreneurism and also a writer and seminar leader. The author of over twenty books, and numerous self-improvement, business success, and personal development courses, I am the former host of a talk show on NPR Affiliated WIOX91.3 FM.