The 4 Collaborative Conversations

At Third Floor Design, we work with groups in organizations, communities, and networks collaborating on making new impacts together. They could be working on any kind project or planning they care about and decide to work on. They are collaborative because they know they can go farther together.

We teach them a simple, powerful, adaptive model, The 4 Collaborative Conversations. The model applies to any kind of projects and planning. These are the Learning, Assumptions, Questions, and Actions conversations.

The model originated with seminal research on creativity and collaboration in the mid-90s and evolved into its current form through its evolution as Flawless Planning.

The model has several distinctive features:

• It can engage any number of people in any scope of work
• It is question rather than assumption-based
• It keeps people continuously aligned and productive
• It moves groups from uncertainty to new results
• It replaces discussion with action and hope with learning

People work through iterations of the process, and each iteration produces new results, learning, assumptions, questions, and actions.

The model is an elegant solution to the problem of groups wrongly assuming they need different approaches to projects and planning.

The model is useful in organizational and civic projects and any kind of planning — including strategic, scenario, and master planning.

Projects and planning are prone to floundering or failing particularly when they are assumption-based. Working from assumptions keeps people divided and spinning their wheels. Working from questions, as we do in this model, keeps them united and unstoppable.

The model is easily learnable because it only takes one iteration through the process for groups to guide themselves through next iterations.

The model is also particularly adaptable because it works with any project and planning constraints including goals, metrics, key performance indicators, time and resource limitations, and the constant of uncertainty.

It excels at leveraging available assets and engaging varieties of group personalities. Because of the social architecture of the process, no one in groups dominates or disappears which increases the group’s collective intelligence, making them smarter together. It is also quite AI-friendly.

In these times of unprecedented uncertainty, we will continue solving puzzles that only new collaborations have the power to solve.

For more on the model, visit ThridFloorDesign.org