Collaboration Engineering for Group Decision and Negotiation

Collaborative work is essential to the success of modern organizations. Many organizations could benefit from the use of advanced collaboration technologies and collaboration professionals, such as facilitators. However, these technologies are often too complex for practitioners to use without professional support, and collaboration professionals are too expensive for many groups who could benefit from their help. To address this challenge, researchers developed and tested the collaboration engineering approach. Collaboration engineering is an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks and deploying those designs for practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from expert facilitators. Collaboration engineers design collaborative work practices using a facilitation pattern language consisting of “thinkLets.” ThinkLets are facilitation techniques that create predictable patterns of collaboration. Extensive research and practice demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach. This chapter summarizes the collaboration engineering approach in general and the thinkLet concept in detail using an illustrative case in a governmental organization.