Order this sturdy poker-style deck of Collaboration Cards for your organization. The excellent quality makes team play easy, and the key concepts of the Collaboration Cards gets results.

The deck includes 27 cards and comes in a handy clear plastic storage case. Instructions on how to use the card are included with the deck, or you can read the instructions online here.

Cost: $12.95 + shipping

As a practitioner of agile software development, I’ve had to be part of and lead collaborative work sessions. People remark on the strong feeling of collaboration during those meetings, and the speed at which we get results. Other skilled facilitators manage the same. People ask us how we achieve these effects and whether it can be learned. With this article, I hope to show how we achieve these results, and that they can be learned.

To unravel the mechanisms involved, I asked a dozen people to write down their recollections of what they saw happen in various meeting settings, and how they felt. These descriptions I mined for references to specific actions that someone else might copy, actions that seem to lead to an improved atmosphere for collaboration. I ended up with over 200 action phrases from the notes.

In discussion with friends and colleagues, we dug to see if we could see why some of these (occasionally unusual) actions might improve people’s inclination to contribute, and also inverted them to see if doing the opposite would hamper collaboration. I started watching meetings more closely to see whether the actions in the catalog did indeed occur, and whether the mood changed in the room.

In the end, there were dominant categories of actions that appeared. Collaboration Cards are broken down into those categories to help people become aware and practice ways in which they can work in a collaborative manner.

Read the full article here: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Collaboration%3a+the+dance+of+contribution