Collaboration Compass

In today’s fast-moving, interdependent environments, leadership depends on the capacity of people to make sense together, act with intention, and build trust across boundaries.

This makes effective collaboration a critical leadership capability. Organisations that fail to collaborate well risk fragmentation, misalignment, and missed opportunities. Those that succeed are able to navigate complexity with greater clarity, cohesion, and resilience.

The challenge is that most tools for leadership and culture still rely on linear models, failing to reflect the dynamic, evolving nature of real organisational life.

The Collaboration Compass is a practical, adaptive framework designed to support leadership and working together in complexity. It strengthens how individuals and groups think, act, relate, and show up in the everyday tensions of collaborative work. It has become a central element in how we support clients to develop more effective leadership, healthier cultures, and more resilient ways of working.

Why It Matters

Organisations today face multiple pressures: rapid change, cultural fragmentation, burnout, competing priorities. Traditional interventions often fall short because they focus on surface behaviours or one-off fixes.

Working with the Collaboration Compass enables people to:

• Make better decisions together – especially when answers aren’t clear

• Work across silos and difference – with more trust and less friction

• Reflect in action – rather than defaulting to old habits under pressure

• See patterns – in relationships, processes, and assumptions that shape their work

• Develop leadership from every seat – not just the top

It gives people a way to locate themselves within the system, understand what’s going on beneath the surface, and respond with more awareness and intent.

What It Is

The Collaboration Compass is built around four interdependent domains of practice:

• Thinking – Making sense of complexity, surfacing assumptions, and staying open to different perspectives

• Relating – Working with group dynamics, trust, conflict, and difference

• Doing – Taking intentional, iterative action with clarity and accountability

• Being – Cultivating presence, resilience, and awareness of our inner state and impact

At the heart of the Compass are three powerful concepts:

• The Me–We dynamic: better understanding our constant influence on – and being influenced by – others

• The purpose we are coming together for. What is it we are trying to do together?

• The web of complexity we are always acting within. Making sure we take complexity seriously.

We see working with the compass as a way of noticing, practising, and shifting how collaboration happens in real time.

Strategic Value for Leaders

For senior leaders, the Compass:

• Serves as a common language for leadership and culture change
• Supports distributed leadership and capability across the system
• Anchors long-term development programmes in real, relational practice
• Builds adaptive capacity, not just technical skill
• Helps teams and networks move from shallow collaboration to real shared responsibility

In essence: the Collaboration Compass builds the individual and collective muscle to work and lead in complexity well.

Use Cases

For senior leaders, the Compass:

• Leadership and team development programmes
• Culture and systems change initiatives
• Cross-functional collaboration work
• OD and people strategy alignment
• Coaching, circles, and reflective practice
  

What Happens Without It?

Without this type of intentional approach to capability building organisations risk:

Fragmented decision-making, reduced performance, shallow collaboration, leadership burnout, and persistent blind spots in trust and connection – all of which make it harder to adapt and deliver on strategy.

What’s Next?

We work with organisations to introduce the Collaboration Compass through: 

• Workshops and immersive sessions
• Leadership development pathways
• Integration into team and change programmes
• Executive and peer coaching
• Train-the-trainer capacity building

Curious about the Collaboration Compass?

Whether you're looking to explore how the Compass could support your organisation, or want to understand more about how it works in practice, we’d be happy to talk. Fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch soon.