Andrew Dietz is Founder and President of Creative Growth Group, Inc., a business development firm that exclusively helps professional service organizations sharpen growth strategies, enhance client development capabilities, and implement marketing and business development initiatives.

A doodle is worth a thousand words. After Creative Growth Group‘s recent “Creating Collaborative Advantage” program with SilverEdge and Deltek, one of our attendees, Steve Bell of KeySo Global, said, “I think that the value for me was in the recognition of the breadth and diversity of the multiple component pieces that are required to make collaboration successful. The panel highlighted – via their own anecdotes – not only this diversity but also the subtlety that is required from a leadership perspective to encourage and nurture this essential capability.”  This doodle that Steve created as an aid to his thinking while listening to the panel illustrates the complexity of factors involved in successful collaboration.  The drawing reinforces the notion that managing collaboration will benefit from frameworks and can be guided in a positive way by leadership but may have too many moving parts to forcefully systematize and control.

This post is part of a series recapping the event, Creating Collaborative Advantage: How To Get Fiercely Independent Professionals To Collaborate For The Benefit Of Each Other, Their Firm and Their Clients hosted by SilverEdge, along with its partners Deltek and Creative Growth Group. Stay tuned for more advice from the event.