What? I hear you cry...surely the learning we do at the moment, be it 70:20:10 based or otherwise is always collaborative.

We collaborate with the tutor, the author, the fellow delegates, our coach, our work place colleagues. 

I grant you this may well be the case, but I'm specifically talking about how are we learning from other businesses, other organisations and industries.

I know from my experience the more enlightened professional may look to complete a bench marking exercise to rank their current status or situation against a comparible team or unit. 

But how often do we take the oppotunity to actually engage with that other organisation to discuss, debate, learn from and seek inspiration and creativity?

Not that often I'd wager.

In working with a variety of senior teams across organisations and continents it strikes me that I'm in a very unique position of seeing the familiar process of 'team development' work. One thing I note is that there are common issues and problems within these teams.

I understand the sensativity of corporate IP, and trading information so I'm not necessarily suggesting the collaboration is with your industry rival. However, there are a vast amount of companies and senior teams that are set up and deal with similiar operational, logisitical and strategic issues to perhaps your own.

So why not learn from others experience? Learn from their successes and mistakes..speed up your own teams development as a result.

One thing to consider though before you rush to the nearest comparible organisation asking for them to divulge their key to success....is what's in it for them?! The WIFFM factor.

Consider what can you trade with. What could they benefit from. What would they value in exchange for sharing their learning.

Worth a thought...to speed up the learning process at the very least!