How thinking styles impact team collaboration

Tower Bridge in a fog.Cynthina Heinsohn, my business partner, and I have logged more than 20 years in our business and social relationship.  Yet for all those miles traveled together, we’ve sometimes fail to communicate effectively and our connection became like a bridge in the fog…we knew the connection was there but we needed to let the fog blow away to find it.

The fog didn’t derive from a deficiency in either of our abilities or from a lack of our willingness to collaborate.  Rather, sometimes mishaps occurred because we forgot about the reality of several of differing attributes.

Since we became business partners with Intellicore Design Consulting and now conduct the majority of our joint business via phone, some of our attribute differences are more pronounced, impacting our interpersonal art of collaboration with each other, and we’ve required new collaboration tools to help us ensure we keep our bridge unhampered by fog.

Today, one of the differences I want to discuss are the differences in thinking styles and how these can impact collaboration and communication.  Variations in thinking styles impact everyone so businesses need to pay attention to this attribute to be successful collaborators.

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The art of collaboration

Cynthina Heinsohn, my business partner, and I have known each other for more than 20 years as both business associates and close personal friends.  We’ve worked together in two companies and on a variety of projects -- and we work well together too because our strengths compliment each other.

Cynthina and I teamed up together in Intellicore Design Consulting because we wanted to work together and are both passionate about collaboration.  It’s what’s made our partnership strong over the years.

For all of that, though, we still sometimes stumble in our communications and drive each other bonzo.  It’s funny too, because for a small business, we have collaboration tools up the wazoo…because, hey, one of our raison d'être.

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Why folks will flip for GroupSwim’s version 6

GroupSwim, one of Intellicore Design Consulting’s partners, just released version 6 of their social software. This release offers a lot of features geared towards site owners and managers.

These features will help companies continue to gain all the GroupSwim community benefits and they will allow companies to fully showcase their own corporate brand while minimizing that of GroupSwim.

Here’s what’s got us flipping for version 6.

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Why Squarespace is a super blogging platform

A common question that pops up on LinkedIn’s Q&A forum surrounds are requests for recommendations for blogging platforms. The most common answers swirl around WordPress and Typepad. I tend to be the contrarian because I don’t like either platform.  Instead I like, recommend, and use Squarespace.com.

It’s what I used for this site (both in the main site and blog) and for Community Network, the Intellicore Design Consulting blog.

Let me tell you why.

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