I’ve spent much of my career working in large, multi-national organisations where there are amazing resources available to get things done. Marketing, comms, tech, PR, accounting, sales, support - there is a division, group or team somewhere to help out. But with any large org this capability comes at a price. It can be hard to work across disparate groups, to collaborate on a project, to solve a problem.

This had me thinking about how this situation might be improved—in organisations of all sizes (because even large orgs are made up of many smaller teams). The fact is we have many collaboration tools at our disposal but do they really work for us?

Say you want to get feedback from your team on a planning document, before close of business tomorrow. What do you do?

You could:

• Call a meeting
• Kick off a conference call
• Start an email thread
• Fire up a Yammer or Hangouts conversation
• Start a private Facebook group…

There's certainly no shortage of options.

So far so good, but how do you manage the conversation? And how do you work out where the consensus (or disagreement) lies and what action should result from the discussion? It becomes your task as the conversation leader to distill the feedback and work out the answers yourself. This might be fine with five people, but what if your team is 25, 250 or 2500 people?

What we need is a way to create, manage and drive outcomes through structured discussions.

This is what collaborative problem solving is all about assembling the right people, inviting their ideas and feedback, and letting them help evaluate feedback from across the whole group. The notion being that the contributions with merit will rise to the top. It's a simplified version of crowd sourcing and works well in a business setting, a community group, or even within a personal circle.

So if you’ve ever struggled working across teams of all sizes I’d encourage you to look at krunch which takes a super simplistic and intuitive approach to solving problems together.

Keep on collaborating!