Radical collaboration requires friction

Last year, just as we were winding down for our annual (and very much needed) winter break, I scheduled a handful of check-in calls with some of Siberia’s closest clients. I framed them as year-end retrospectives — a chance to reflect on what had gone well, what hadn’t, and how we could work together better in the coming year. Frankly, I expected polite conversation and mutual congratulations.

During one of those calls, one of my favorite clients, a Chief Design Officer who is razor sharp and possess minimal capacity for bullshit, hit me with an extremely inconvenient truth about a project that both myself and our leadership team was completely unaware of.

A significant portion of the work we’d delivered on our largest initiative of the year had been almost wholly scrapped, and quietly rebuilt, after delivery, to comply with their current-state design system. 

The failure of awareness hit me the hardest. We hadn’t been asked to help. We hadn’t even known it had happened.

This was one of our closest clients. During the project, we embedded our team with the client. Our designers were in the same Slack channels as the client. They attended the same standups, the same birthday rotations, and collaborated on the same roadshow decks. Plus, by almost every measure, the project looked healthy. Approval gates were cleared. Deliverables were accepted. Handoffs were completed. From the outside, everything suggested success.

Everybody felt like one team, but that actually became the problem. No one on either side of the partnership wanted to break up the good vibes. In other words, no one wanted to stress test the work. And everyone wanted to avoid friction.

There has always been a spectrum in our industry. On one end sits structured delivery: defined processes, formal communication, carefully managed boundaries. On the other sits radical collaboration: embedded teams, shared ownership, constant conversation, and blurred organizational lines. Agile vs waterfall. Embed vs full-service. 

When you fully integrate or embed external teams, the lines begin to fade. Truths are seen and spoken. Strengths are emphasized. Velocity can 10x. 

There is gold in them hills. But there is also a trap.

At Siberia, we’ve leaned into collaboration for fifteen years, and I’m still a believer. When it works, it’s transformational. We’ve sat in rooms with C-suites and rewritten mission statements in real time. We’ve walked into kickoffs where the client pulled back the curtain and handed us the keys, and we’ve walked out with mandates we couldn’t have earned through any number of polite proposals. But here’s the key: it’s not easy. Both teams have to be willing to lean into the friction.

Radical collaboration is not the absence of friction. Friction is not the problem. Radical collaboration is the careful removal of the wrong friction while preserving the friction that keeps everyone honest — moments to steps back, ask uncomfortable questions, and test whether the work is actually accomplishing what it set out to do.

What follows are 10 lessons we’ve learned from trying to get radical collaboration just right. Five things to make it work. Five that can blow it up.

1. DO: Get in the room where it happens

Earn the right to be in the meetings you weren’t invited to. Strong, consistent delivery and compelling in-room presence can translate into invitations to C-suite or board sessions that can shift direction, purpose, or even the entire nature of an engagement towards much bigger and more high-value problems that you may not be aware of from the project sidelines.  

2. DON’T: Confuse familiarity with alignment

Side DMs and Zoom reactions from the working team do not equate to organizational alignment. That holiday phone call revealed a hidden problem that could have surfaced much earlier by asking the tough questions, or perhaps engaging the most skeptical stakeholders and inviting pushback. Seek friction at the right moments. 

3. DO: Treat complex design like complex surgery

Surgery requires a team of specialists, and well trained supporting teams. The brief (the patient) needs prehab, a plan, and someone watching the monitors. Formal communication at every major step is paramount. 

4. DON’T: Let your team forget that they are consultants on a contract

Do not let your team get so comfortable that they forget about the outcomes, outputs, and scope that they are being paid to deliver. 

5. DO: Assign a formal client advocate (not just a team captain)

The radical collaboration model needs internal affairs. Someone watching the team, representing client interest internally, asking uncomfortable questions, and raising the flags when the work isn’t doing the job it needs to. 

6. DON’T: Assume transparency means showing everything

Full transparency doesn’t mean full disclosure of every exploration or anxiety. The art is knowing what each collaborator needs to see, and when. Protect people from noise that they don’t need to hear. 

7. DO: Co-create the things that matter most

Sometimes the best deliverable is a conversation. Let your clients collect references, sketch, prototype and write copy. Go lo-fi. We’ve rewritten corporate mission statements boardroom whiteboards. No presentation. Just collaboration, spirited debate, and alignment. 

8. DON’T: Let scope creep disguise itself as collaboration

Radical collaboration is not the absence of boundaries — it’s the presence of enough trust to enforce them. “We’re all one team” can become an excuse for a lack of a definition of done. When you hit a pivot, put it down on paper, pin it on the wall and continually remind the broader group about it. 

9. DO: Invest in understanding constraints

Radical collaboration also means going deep on the boring stuff: tech stacks, approval workflows, what the team got wrong the last time they attempted the redesign. You will be operating with looser briefs and less documentation, and you may have to self-manufacture some of that rigor. 

10. DON’T: Believe your own mythology

Radical collaboration does not guarantee successful work. The philosophy is just a starting point. As with everything in our business, the execution is everything.