What We Can Learn About Collaboration by Studying the NSA
The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences is an eight-year-old partnership between the National Security Agency and North Carolina State University that says it aims to bring together people from business, academia, and government to help the intelligence community solve its “most pressing challenges related to national security and technology.” A collaboration in 2016, for example, used information from buses and trains to alert officials at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro to potential safety issues for athletes and spectators during protests.
A team of outside researchers studied the lab and has published a book about the multidisciplinary collaboration. “Our interest was, ‘How well does this actually work in the wild?’” says co-author Kathleen Vogel, deputy director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.
One of the biggest obstacles to collaboration, they found, is culture clashes among members of different professions. “At meetings, we would find the government people sitting around the edge of the room,” Vogel says. “The academics at the table didn’t understand what was happening—they were, like, ‘Do they not want to be involved?’ But the government people were used to working-level people sitting around the room, with only senior government officials sitting at the table.”
How do you make sure new collaborators mesh? Here are some of the researchers’ biggest takeaways:
Spell out the small stuff. People in different fields can have divergent understandings of the simplest tasks, from setting up a meeting to sending an email. “You have to be in constant communication about how things are or aren’t working, and be explicit about problems as they arise,” says Vogel. “We had to come up with protocols for how you would work with others.”
Don’t forget about long-term goals. Initiatives for pressing NSA missions often took priority over long-term projects. “This is not necessarily a bad thing,” the researchers wrote, but there’s a danger in becoming “increasingly drawn to produce tangible widgets that can be implemented quickly.” The risk is that short-term projects usurp the “longer-term research and innovation that can have significant future payoffs.”
Make it “mission critical.” “Mission criticality” is common in government projects such as bridge-building or first-responder training. It means that the work is essential: If it fails, damage or injury to others will occur. It’s motivating, especially in remote contexts in which social bonds among team members might be thin. “Criticality is really important when it’s virtual,” says Beverly Tyler, Vogel’s co-author and a professor at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management.
Focus on output. People with set schedules that conform to traditional working hours didn’t always appreciate peers whose schedules were less nine-to-five. As one lab worker put it to the researchers: “We had to kind of learn that professors can come and do what they want. It was kind of surprising to us.” This can create tension, so make it clear that what’s important is the outcome, not who was in the office when.
Be supportive. As obvious as it sounds, workers who are collaborating need to feel supported by their managers; if you’re managing remotely, you need to work extra-hard to make that support clear. Workers are “gonna lose interest,” says Tyler, if they’re not praised and promoted for their work.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-11/five-lessons-on-collaboration-from-the-national-security-agency