Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?

Posted on March 25, 2005 by Dave Pollard

The Idea: Three Words: Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration, are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.

Recently I specified the requirements for collaboration:

Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively

but I didn’t define the term. The term is being cheapened (“collaboration tools”, “collaborative environments”) to the point where in many people’s minds it’s indistinguishable from cooperation and coordination, which are less elaborate and less ambitious collective undertakings. How can we differentiate between these terms in a meaningful way? Here are a few ways that I think they differ:

Coordination Cooperation Collaboration
Preconditions for Success (“Must-Haves”) Shared objectives; Need for more than one person to be involved; Understanding of who needs to do what by when Shared objectives; Need for more than one person to be involved; Mutual trust and respect; Acknowledgment of mutual benefit of working together Shared objectives; Sense of urgency and commitment; Dynamic process; Sense of belonging; Open communication; Mutual trust and respect; Complementary, diverse skills and knowledge; Intellectual agility
Enablers (Additional “Nice to Haves”) Appropriate tools (see below); Problem resolution mechanism Frequent consultation and knowledge-sharing between participants; Clear role definitions; Appropriate tools (see below) Right mix of people; Collaboration skills and practice collaborating; Good facilitator(s); Collaborative ‘Four Practices’ mindset and other appropriate tools (see below)
Purpose of Using This Approach Avoid gaps & overlap in individuals’ assigned work Obtain mutual benefit by sharing or partitioning work Achieve collective results that the participants would be incapable of accomplishing working alone
Desired Outcome Efficiently-achieved results meeting objectives Same as for Coordination, plus savings in time and cost Same as for Cooperation, plus innovative, extraordinary, breakthrough results, and collective ‘we did that!‘ accomplishment
Optimal Application Harmonizing tasks, roles and schedules in simple environments and systems Solving problems in complicated environments and systems Enabling the emergence of understanding and realization of shared visions in complex environments and systems
Examples Project to implement off-the-shelf IT application; Traffic flow regulation Marriage; Operating a local community-owned utility or grain elevator; Coping with an epidemic or catastrophe Brainstorming to discover a dramatically better way to do something; Jazz or theatrical improvisation; Co-creation
Appropriate Tools Project management tools with schedules, roles, critical path (CPM), PERT and GANTT  charts; “who will do what by when” action lists Systems thinking; Analytical tools (root cause analysis etc.) Appreciative inquiry; Open Space meeting protocols; Four Practices; Conversations; Stories
Degree of interdependence in designing the effort’s work-products (and need for physical co-location of participants) Minimal Considerable Substantial
Degree of individual latitude in carrying out the agreed-upon design Minimal Considerable Substantial

Where do teams, partnerships, think-tanks, open-source and joint ventures fit in this schema? The general definition of a team is an interdependent group, which suggests that collaborative groups are teams, coordinated groups are not, and cooperative groups may or may not be. Partnerships and joint ventures are both, I would argue, primarily cooperative undertakings, whose objectives evolve over time. Open-source developments can run the gamut among all three types of undertaking. So theoretically can think-tanks, though in reality most think-tank work is solitary and not really collaborative. Even the work of scientists on major international projects is, I am told, substantially individual, with a lot more coordination and cooperation than true collaboration.

The last two rows of the above chart may seem somewhat paradoxical. It is relatively easy to coordinate the activities of a ‘virtual’ group that must work remotely and asynchronously, and much harder (but not impossible) to achieve virtual collaboration, especially if the collaborators already know each other. But once the ‘design’ of the collective work-product is done, the implementation work of a coordinated group is usually very explicit, while the implementation work of collaborators is necessarily more improvisational.

So what? Well, in many cases, collective work may be dysfunctional because it is organized as one of these types of undertaking when what is needed is another type. Or, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the collective effort, the wrong resources and tools are provided, or the preconditions for success are not met. And collaboration is not always a better approach than coordination or cooperation. In situations where the Wisdom of Crowds is valuable (prediction, optimization and coordination problems), independence of ‘crowd’ members is essential, and cooperative or collaborative processes can lead to ‘groupthink’ and actually detract from the crowd’s ‘wisdom’. There is nothing more frustrating than being invited into a supposedly empowered, collaborative team and then being charged with a task that needs nothing more than a good project coordinator.

It all comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. The ‘Purpose of Using This Approach” row of this chart is therefore perhaps the most important. A hammer, a wrench and a screwdriver are not interchangeable tools, and none is best for all situations.

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5 Responses to Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?

  1. ginny says:
    May 19, 2006 at 08:57

    Please can you help me – both you and Wikipedia mention ‘four practices’ of collaboration in your web page. What are these?

  2. ginny says:
    May 19, 2006 at 12:03

    Please can you help me – both you and Wikipedia mention ‘four practices’ of collaboration in your web page. What are these?

  3. Lillian says:
    March 26, 2007 at 01:29

    Hello！In China，there is a pattern in middle school and elementary school。Teachers，who teaches the same subject and the same grade，prepare their classes tegether。Please tell me，which word is the best？

  4. LeaNder says:
    February 26, 2009 at 12:18

    I wonder, what you think of the extensive use of collaboration in the following context: Musical Show of Unity Upsets Many in IsraelMs. Nini asked if she could bring along her current artistic collaborator, an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad. Ms. Awad said as she and Ms. Nini, and their artistic collaborator, the guitarist Gil Dor, took a break from rehearsal to discuss the controversy.The two women have been collaborating for nearly eight years.Both singers and their collaborator, Mr. Dor, say that they spend many hours arguing …I love words that have a precise and unambiguous meaning. Maybe since they are rare. But I always love it when I find one of the rare gems in the work of an author.If I look at your article, the answer is probably: no problem, the author intuitively understood the difference. But–leaving apart the misguided action of the left, I basically prefer communication to easy judgments, my overall impression after reading the article is that the word is used so prominently without ever using an alternative term to drive this basic message home:

    Neither Ms. Nini, 39, nor Ms. Awad, 33, has been deterred. But since they consider themselves peace advocates, they are a bit surprised. The antiwar movement, they say, seems to have turned into a Hamas apology force. That, together with the political turn rightward in Israel, means that while the two are being sent to represent this mixed and complex society, they also feel a bit orphaned by it.

    It feels the above bold sentence is the center of the argument, and the extensive use of collaboration ultimately leads us there to some kind of mental collaboration that surely isnot supported by your wonderful analysis, but that is ultimately at the core of the misguided (in context) left in Israel.

  5. LeaNder says:
    February 26, 2009 at 12:20

    I wonder, what you think of the extensive use of collaboration in the following context: Musical Show of Unity Upsets Many in IsraelMs. Nini asked if she could bring along her current artistic collaborator, an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad. Ms. Awad said as she and Ms. Nini, and their artistic collaborator, the guitarist Gil Dor, took a break from rehearsal to discuss the controversy.The two women have been collaborating for nearly eight years.Both singers and their collaborator, Mr. Dor, say that they spend many hours arguing …I love words that have a precise and unambiguous meaning. Maybe since they are rare. But I always love it when I find one of the rare gems in the work of an author.If I look at your article, the answer is probably: no problem, the author intuitively understood the difference. But–leaving apart the misguided action of the left, I basically prefer communication to easy judgments, my overall impression after reading the article is that the word is used so prominently without ever using an alternative term to drive this basic message home:

    Neither Ms. Nini, 39, nor Ms. Awad, 33, has been deterred. But since they consider themselves peace advocates, they are a bit surprised. The antiwar movement, they say, seems to have turned into a Hamas apology force. That, together with the political turn rightward in Israel, means that while the two are being sent to represent this mixed and complex society, they also feel a bit orphaned by it.

    It feels the above bold sentence is the center of the argument, and the extensive use of collaboration ultimately leads us there to some kind of mental collaboration that surely is not supported by your wonderful analysis, but that is ultimately at the core of the misguided (in context) left in Israel.

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