Positioning a Collaborative Design Group
Organizational Strategy for Adopting Collaborative Design
Bryan Coffman
Principal, InnovationLabs

Organizations that wish to create and deploy a capability for improving its collaboration and design capabilities sometimes create a group to steward the development of collaborative design processes and catalyze their dissemination throughout the organization. In all too many cases, these Collaborative Design Groups are poorly positioned in the organization. Without proper positioning they are doomed to failure. This paper outlines four principles for successful positioning and illustrates five archetypes that employ the principles.

The four principles are:

• Align with the Center of Value Creation
• Align with Political Power
• Align with Core Processes Vital to the Health of the Organization
• Align with a Portion of the Organization that Generates Profit

These principles can be expressed in a variety of ways. The paper outlines five archetypes that illustrate the principles in practice: the
Builder, the Innovator, the Teacher, the Convener, and the Decider.

The paper concludes with a set of pathologies that we have observed many times over the years and which are to be avoided.

Contents

1. The Collaborative Design Group
2. Why and Where?
3. Accelerate, Align, Solve
4. Align with the Center of Value Generation
5. Political Power
6. Core Processes
7. Profit Generation
8. Archetypes of Collaborative Design Groups
9. Pathologies