Module 3 · Lesson 3.4
From belief to evidence
What separates C5 Collaboration from C6 Constructed Collaboration.
Key idea
At C5, good collaboration is a belief held by particular people. At C6 it is evidence the organisation keeps when they move on.
In this lesson
- Two stages that look alike
- Why belief is fragile: the Kraków go-live
- What evidence looks like
- From soft skill to system of management
Two stages that look alike
For an important, recurring interface, Collaboration (C5) and Constructed Collaboration (C6) can look the same from the outside. In both, teams work well together and produce integrated results.
What separates them is not how good the collaboration looks. It is whether there is evidence for it.
At C5, collaboration is a belief. People think they collaborate well, and often they are right. But the basis for that belief is experience and goodwill, not anything the organisation can point to and inspect.
At C6, the conditions for collaboration have been made explicit and deliberately designed. There is evidence for how the arrangement works: what each party requires from the other, and how it will be managed.
Why belief is fragile
A belief is carried by the specific people involved: their experience, their goodwill, and the relationships they have built up over time. When those people leave, the organisation’s capability at that interface leaves with them and has to be rebuilt from scratch.
Harbourline · Kraków, Service Transition and Pune
Harbourline has a live example. When the Kraków Salesforce practice takes a new client service live, the integration engineers know far more about how it works than anyone else. For the first weeks after go-live, Service Transition and the Pune Service Desk lean on them heavily, and it works well. Everyone would say the teams collaborate.
Then the project ends, and the Kraków engineers move to their next project. Their knowledge goes with them. Fiona Grant, the Service Transition Manager, raised this as an issue: integration knowledge leaves with the Kraków project team. It is serious enough that she escalated it to the Enterprise Execution Forum, Harbourline’s senior governance body.
The collaboration was real, but it was a belief held by particular people, not something the organisation could keep. The response being worked on is to make it evidence: Kraków integration engineers will stay with each new service for its first 30 days of early-life support, and what they know will be captured in the run-book and the service design before they leave.
Try it
C5 or C6: the Kraków go-live
The same go-live seen two ways. Switch between them.
| What it rests on | Experience and goodwill of the people involved. |
|---|---|
| Where the knowledge lives | In the heads of the Kraków integration engineers. |
| When the project ends | The engineers move on and the knowledge goes with them. Fiona Grant escalates it to the Enterprise Execution Forum. |
| A new Pune analyst | Has to find someone who remembers. |
Both look the same from the outside while the engineers are there. The difference shows when they leave.
What evidence looks like
Evidence doesn’t look like more process. It looks like less friction. A well-designed, mature interface shows signs like these:
Try it
How much evidence does your interface show?
Think of one important, recurring interface. Tick each sign that is true today.
The signature of a mature interface is not more meetings or more documents. It is less time spent chasing missing information and recovering from misunderstandings that could have been prevented.
From soft skill to system of management
That shift, from a belief the organisation holds to evidence it can point to, is what turns collaboration from a soft skill into a system of management. A soft skill is judged by impression: did that go well? A system of management produces evidence that can be inspected, measured and improved, whoever happens to be involved at the time.
That is worth doing for the interfaces important enough to justify it, and only for those. The rest of this course shows how.
Pause and think · your notes
Think of an interface where people would say the teams collaborate well.
How Alex would answer
Start with what would hurt most to lose. Capture it where the people who come next will find it, built with the people who do the work now.
What to take away
- C5 and C6 can look the same from outside; the difference is evidence.
- Belief leaves with the people who hold it. Evidence stays.
- Evidence looks like less friction, not more process, and is worth building only where the interface justifies it.
Your progress
Course contents · This is the open version of the course. Your notes, progress and check scores are saved on this device, and in your account when you are signed in.