The method · The three levels
One method, from the boardroom to a team’s actual Tuesday.
Structured Collaboration uses the same logic at every level of an organisation. At each level you make roles explicit instead of assumed, fix rhythms instead of improvising them, and design handoffs instead of leaving them to chance, wherever that design earns its keep. People learn it once and use it everywhere.
01 · Senior teams · Concurrent Management
One forum, not five committees.
Most organisations govern process, technology, data and AI through separate forums: a strategy committee, an architecture board, a steering group, an AI committee. Each is reasonable on its own. Together they produce conflicting priorities, duplicated effort and technology roadmaps that quietly become the business roadmap.
The familiar symptom is “the system doesn’t support that”. It’s rarely true. The real problem is that no one owns the question of whether it should.
The Enterprise Execution Forum is Concurrent Management put into practice: a single forum that governs process, technology, data and AI as one portfolio, so the people responsible for connected parts of the business make connected decisions together.
The Enterprise Execution Forum
What the Forum does
- Owns the map of end-to-end processes, so there are no ownership gaps.
- Appoints and supports process owners.
- Sets shared standards, so a term like “cycle time” means the same thing everywhere.
- Decides what gets done first, what waits and what stops.
- Resolves conflict between functions.
- Asks, before any major technology investment, whether the process has been simplified first.
- Measures performance across the whole flow, not department by department.
- Keeps continuous improvement running.
Usually eight to fifteen people, chaired by the COO, meeting monthly as a governance forum, not a project status meeting.
02 · Across teams and functions · Designed interfaces
Agree the handoff once, then rely on it.
Most friction between teams isn’t disagreement. It’s two teams quietly assuming different things about the same handoff.
Operations asks Finance for “a business forecast”. Finance delivers a revenue forecast that’s accurate, on time and useless for planning headcount. Both sides believe the job is done.
The Structured Collaboration Canvas® makes each dependency explicit: who depends on us, what they need and to what standard, what we do to provide it, what we need in return, and from whom. Every team is both a supplier and a customer.
Operational definitions finish the job. Words like “complete”, “approved” and “on time” feel clear until two teams discover they meant different things. A good definition passes one test: could two reasonable people apply it independently and reach the same conclusion?
Every end-to-end process has two kinds of owner. The Process Owner is accountable for how it performs and where it’s going; the Process Manager runs it day to day. Across a wider flow, such as lead-to-cash, the flow becomes a chain of agreed handoffs, one canvas per handoff.
A worked example
One relationship, six stages
- Communication: Sales tells Finance a deal is done.
- Contribution: Sales supplies the data Finance needs to invoice.
- Coordination: they’ve agreed who provides what, and when.
- Cooperation: they work within shared rules for roles, systems and exceptions.
- Collaboration: they redesign order-to-invoice together when it stops working.
- Constructed Collaboration: that arrangement becomes a managed capability that survives changes in who does the work.
03 · The whole business · A shared picture
A strategy that lives in a slide deck never gets deployed.
It gets agreed, then quietly reinterpreted by every team that has to act on it.
The Agile Business Execution Canvas® and the Business User Manual give everyone a common view of how the organisation creates value and how its parts fit. The strategy cascade then carries direction all the way down to a named person’s next quarter.
- Strategy Deployment Canvas. One page, from vision and objectives to a named leader and a dated activity.
- Team OKRs. One row of that canvas becomes a quarter’s measurable work, inheriting the objective rather than inventing a new one.
- Structured Collaboration Canvas®. Where the team works out who it needs and what it owes.
- Forum Decision Canvas. What the Forum decided, who owns it and when they report back, so decisions aren’t argued over again.
“A strategic objective set in the boardroom and an issue raised by a team travel the same road, in opposite directions.”
Direction flows down through the canvas to the team. Issues a team can’t resolve flow back up to the Forum. That’s how collaboration stops depending on heroics.
Where it becomes real · The team
Everything above exists to point teams at the right work.
Manufacturing spent a century building the discipline of demand and capacity management at team level. Most service and knowledge-work organisations never built the equivalent, and it’s a big reason they underperform. Structured Collaboration gives teams five milestones.
- Know the team: what it does, for whom, and what it depends on.
- Make the model real: volumes, trends and standard work for the tasks that matter.
- Allocate the work: named owners and a daily allocation, not assignment in the moment.
- Run the rhythm: KPIs, a scoreboard, a daily stand-up and standard work for the team leader.
- Connect upward: an improvement list, with cross-team issues handed to the Process Owner.
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