Collaboration vs the Cult of Busy

If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know these are written as a narrative of my life. They are rarely a fully researched and referenced article. They are my opinion on something I am experienced or have pondered as I drive from School A to School B. Don’t expect academic rigor. Just know these thoughts have been on my mind and to be articulated in some way.

It is my belief that truly collaborative workplaces are being killed by the ‘Cult of Busy’. We are all so obsessively busy, working on our own, ticking boxes, clicking on keyboards, attending disorganised and unfocussed meetings that we are actually stopping true collaboration from occurring. IN fact, we may be using the ‘Cult of Busy’ to stop avoid collaboration. I mean, if we were really being collaborative, then we wouldn’t need to cry busy as much as we do. We wouldn’t need to be working on our own until all hours, avoiding lunch, breathing time, laughing time, team time as much as we do. Would we?

The Cult of Busy

Photo by howling red on Unsplash

We’re all busy, so busy, too busy. We love being busy. We love telling people how busy we are. We love to share how tired we are. I am guilty of this at times, but I am trying to step back from this habit. Everyone is busy, I know that. But when we begin to use ‘busy’ as a badge of honour, an excuse to not try something new, a reason for stepping out of a meeting, a justification for not responding to an email, then we need to stop and ponder life for a minute.

I’m not insinuating that we should all be chilled, super present, uber relaxed, and oh so calm individuals, rather I am concerned that we use ‘the busy’ as an excuse not to try new things. I am concerned that we don’t prioritise things that spark us, that scare us, that inspire us, because we would rather be busy in our caves. Alone.

Collaboration

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Collaboration is a continuum. We talk about building soft skills in our students. We discuss ways to build collaboration into our learning activities. But do we ever talk about building our own collaboration skills? Do we acknowledge that we too have a collaboration continuum in our own work? Let’s dig in and take a collaboration continuum (from Microsoft’s 21st Century Learning Design Program) and applying it to our work as educators.

Level 1 — Informal Collaboration — We sit together in staff rooms. We answer each other’s questions, we ‘solutionise’ for each other, we make quick decisions to complete the tasks at hand. We share chocolate. We celebrate as a team, knowing that the workload is unequal and ineffective. And yet, we step deeper into ‘The Cult of Busy’.

Level 2 — Group Responsibilty — We are given tasks to do that require us work together, but in reality, we can just do these on our own like the ‘Midnight Keyboard Warriors’ that we are. There is no need to work together. Collaboration is tokenistic. What is most important is getting the task done, not the act of working together. A staffroom version of these ‘group tasks’ we used to do at uni. You know, the ones in which one member of the group ended up doing most the work.

Level 3 — Shared Decisions — Not only are you meeting and working together with a team on a specific task, but you are making hard decisions together. You have scaffolds and protocols to help guide and develop your ideation and workflows. You trust these protocols and you know they make a difference. Between meetings, you work just on the tasks decided and divvied up during your meeting. Your meetings are smooth, focussed and achieve a forward movement.

Level 4 — Interdependent work and achievements — In a truly collaborative group, no one can complete the work at hand without the knowledge of the rest of the team. The deliverable from the team is a result of everyone. Not one person can be seen to be the ‘driver’ and when credit is given, the whole team points to each other. In this team, protocols aren’t used so much anymore, because people intuitively use them in the work completed. Tasks are achievable within given timeframes, and the team is always moving forward. Meetings are focussed, as short as they need to be and people come with a sense of presence that gives their all to the task at hand. The word is left at the doorway, as there is no more important thing at this point in their time than that at hand.

So, what am I trying to say….

So, I guess I am sitting here thinking about how the ‘Cult of Busy’ people who sit on their sofas and at their desks working on endless lists and projects are actually just pushing back against collaboration. They are actually saying that their individual work is more important that that of the group. That they don’t want to work in a team because they are too busy being busy doing busy things. On their own. Late at night.

I guess that I am thinking that if we all began to work in a truly collaborative way that we would turn our backs to the cult, and be able to ‘give air’ to those projects we don’t have time to do. We would free up all those hours we busily work on our own, to move forward with more work that inspires us, in a way that empowers us to achieve more.

When we are truly collaborative, we work to share knowledge, to hand over control, and make decisions as a group, to work together to complete a task. When we work in a truly collaborative manner, we are actively working against the ‘Cult of Busy’. We are saying that together we can work smarter, together we can bring our knowledge together to make decisions and deliver our focus work, together we can stop the need to add more to our busy. We are saying that together the work at hand is important enough for us to step out of the fog and into a space where together we can.

When we are working, using our high-level collaboration skills, we are stepping away from being ‘busy’ we are acknowledging that together we can do better than the individual. If we learn from each other, and create together, that the process will be more efficient and effective than if we just ran with the project on our own.

I contest that if we embrace and engage in truly collaborative work practices, we will put The Cult of Busy back in its place. In the filing cabinet.

Done. Be collaborative. Like, really collaborative. Don’t drink the ‘Cult of Busy’ coolaid. It won’t help.