Chief Change Officer - #318 Edward & Tricia: Collaborate to Compete—The Human Advantage

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

In the second half of their conversation, Edward J. van Luinen, Ed.D. and Tricia Cerrone reveal the system behind their decade-long collaboration—and the framework that became their book, Collaborate to Compete.But this isn’t just theory. It’s a Gen X playbook for how to lead, design, and scale collaboration that actually sticks. Grounded in five core behaviors—generosity, resourcefulness, co-creation, action, and gratitude—and powered by a noble purpose, their method flips the script on outdated workplace thinking. For Gen Xers who’ve quietly led with trust and integrity, this episode validates everything you’ve practiced—and gives you the language to teach it forward.>>Start With Self, Scale With Systems“Collaboration isn’t a team sport—it’s an individual practice.”They explain why collaboration isn’t about tech or tools, but behaviors—and why it must be designed into people first, not platforms.>>Five Behaviors, One Noble Purpose“Generosity. Resourcefulness. Co-creation. Action. Gratitude.”Edward and Tricia walk through the five behavioral anchors of collaboration—and why the ‘how’ must come before the ‘what.’>>Why the Old Workplace Models Are Failing“We’re still running on 1900s bonus structures—and wondering why collaboration breaks down.”They unpack how outdated incentive systems kill trust and team performance—and how leaders can redesign for shared wins.>>The Disney Story That Brought It Home“I watched a father put his arm around his son—and almost cried.”Tricia shares the moment that reminded her why collaboration must be human-centered—because when it’s done right, it doesn’t just produce results. It heals.>>From High Concept to DIY“Take the five behaviors and run a self-check. Which ones are you already living?”They offer tangible steps for leaders, founders, and managers to assess and apply collaborative behaviors today—without waiting for a reorg._____________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guests: Tricia Cerrone and Edward J. Van Luinen  --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.14 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Oshul is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Don't burn bridges. Keep up with business connections

and personal relationships. Because you never know when that connection or person could become your collaborator, business partner, or referral to a great opportunity. That's how I landed five job offers within three months after leaving a role that led to mental depression years ago. Today, though, it's so easy to burn and build bridges. You can add a friend in quotation in one second and just as easily delete them. This use of friendly in quotation, UI

UX experience has seeped into our modern mindset, making it effortless to kick people out of our own circles or lives. But without sustainable connections, how can we collaborate, build stronger teams, and create outcomes that benefit everyone? In today's episode, I sit down with two guests, Edward Van Doeden and Trishir Sriram to talk about connection and collaboration. Yesterday, Edward and Trishir reflected on their own collaborative journey, which started ten years ago at Disney. They turned a positive work relationship into a sustainable personal friendship

that has now grown into a business partnership and a co-authoring collaboration on a book about collaboration. Today, Part 2 will dive into the vision and framework for collaboration, centered on a noble purpose and five key behaviors. What are these behaviors? How can we practice them? And why is collaboration so challenging today? I assure you, the method isn't just another software solution. It's far more human-centered than what we're used to seeing.

Let's start collaborating. Before we dive into the five principles in your book and the noble purpose behind it, I want to ask, why does this book matter? On the flip side, what is the problem you're trying to solve with the book? From what you've shared with me so far, you believe collaboration is the solution to many of the biggest workplace challenges. So if collaboration is the key, that means there are a lot of issues in the workplace today. What are those problems? As you see them, we see collaboration as two or more people working toward a common goal,

where they are using all of their knowledge, skills, resources, and potential to achieve it. And that's important because they have to feel like they're also uniquely contributing. Like you were Vince in that job, or you were so excited to get out of bed. So it's important that they feel that. to get out of bed. So it's important that they feel that. I think also then the problem when people say collaborate, I'll back up. In 2014, there were a couple different studies that said collaboration was the cause for 86% of workplace failures and that was Salesforce. And there was another study done that they were looking at Australia, and if they could just solve the problem of collaboration, they would make another 46 billion a year. And Australia is a fairly small economy compared to some other countries, and that's a significant amount of money.

As we look at these statistics of people measuring problems in the workplace, of not being engaged and quiet quitting and having stress, like the youngest generation coming into the workforce, 91% of them experienced at least one kind of stress, which is basically saying everyone is stressed. We do think collaboration is the solution because the way we have designed it, you can design it into yourself and into your team

and into your company. We're saying that you should design meaning and purpose, which is the noble purpose for the company and for the individuals. And we're saying you should always be leveling up yourself in these behaviors of generosity and resourcefulness and co-creation and action and gratitude. Because all five of those, we pick them for certain reasons, because they interact and support each other and build on each other.

because they interact and support each other and build on each other, and they actually impact our brain in different and similar ways that help us to think better, to be more resilient, to be more confident, to be happier, and all these other things. But we also have seen that people say, oh, go collaborate,

but they don't understand what that means. What we have discovered in our work, or what we believe from the work that we've done, is that people just simply don't understand what collaboration is, and they're spending billions of dollars on a problem they don't understand. Two issues with that, people think that the core unit of collaboration is teams or tools or technologies, but we're saying no. The core unit of collaboration is the individual. And so we all have to work on our individual skills first, or we won't be able to collaborate with anyone. There's this other piece of collaboration

is not one action, it's a collection of actions or behaviors. So you need, that's why we say these five behaviors. If you have these, you will be collaborative and your team will be collaborative. And so those misunderstandings, it's like people say, go collaborate when they like they say go ride a bike. You didn't learn how to ride a bike by doing one thing.

You had to learn how to pedal the wheels and balance and use the handlebars and there's all these other things. So it's actually a slightly more complex activity, but once you get it, we believe that you will become an incredibly high performer and develop a high-performance team. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more, Trish. I believe the problem that we solve with collaboration that we solve with collaboration is radically increasing innovation. Every CEO, every C-suite leader, every middle manager is trying to increase innovation. That's the problem that collaboration solves is we deliver innovation not only in leadership and building teams, but using the five behaviors,

as Tricia says, to be more efficient, to drive career growth, to drive better solutions, because they're collaborative decisions and solutions. In a virtual world, where running a business has never been more difficult. So the why is expanding innovation. And we reflect that in our book title, which is Collaborate to Compete. Let's not compete with our colleagues. Wasted effort, waste of time. We collaborate so we as a company can innovate and compete better with others outside the

company. So it's really the focus of what we want to do is collaborate and the why, Vince, with your excellent question, is to increase innovation exponentially. So that's why the name of the book is collaborate to compete collaborate internally to compete successfully eternally. Right. Yes. But don't become a competitor.

Use the same to your excellent earlier question, Vin and Trish Right? Yes. But don't become a competitor. Use the same to your excellent earlier question, Vint. And Trish, as we're all talking about, use the behaviors. Use the noble purpose outside as well. Don't turn into a different person once you're outside the company. You're a collaborative leader. You've built a collaborative team. Extend those behaviors and noble purpose and process and roadmap

that Trish was describing to your life. That's the true, we feel, innovation here. So tell me more about this noble purpose. How do you define it? Noble purpose is really a combination of vision and mission, but it's more than that. So you have your company vision and mission, but then you might have a team who is doing a project within a company. And so you want to take that noble purpose for the company. Let's say the noble purpose for the company is we make diapers and deliver them 24 hours a day to serve families at the messiest time in their life.

And so that's an important thing. Like you're literally saving some mother's sanity and some little baby from diaper rash. That's the big emotional noble purpose of it. So there's like what you are physically doing and the customer, the value and the change and the impact that you're having on their lives. Now that can get lost when you're just a little person on a team, maybe developing a new app for the company. You're the person programming and you can lose sight of the noble app for the company. You're the person programming,

and you can lose sight of the noble purpose for the company. And so we always ask the leaders that you have to take that noble purpose and explain it to your team, the importance of this app for your end customer, right? Not just for the company ROI, this app is gonna now be accessible to the mother or father for them to access

and order diapers to be delivered within eight hours. Then with that like programmer, you also wanted let them know, look, this app wouldn't happen without your unique skills. And our team wouldn't even function that if you didn't have that sense of levity in your work and the outgoing curiosity that you have. So a leader wants to bring that noble purpose to the individual in a very specific and unique way

so that person feels seen and valued for everything that they're bringing to the job and to the company and to the people they are serving in the bigger world. We don't spend enough time, first of all, articulating what the noble purpose is and the why. So link that, Vince, to your earlier question about you being motivated to want to go to work at one of your past workplaces. What happens? We are in back to back meetings for 10 hours a day. We're just trying to get tasks done, but we need to spend time as Trish says, sharing, what is the noble purpose with the team and with each individual to ensure they

understand the why and tie it back to Vince, what you said, so that I do feel like I want to get my head off the pillow and go to work, which I did at Disney because the noble purpose is incredibly motivating at Disney to create things every day. So tie the noble purpose, explaining the why, making sure it resonates and is real for the team member so that they want to get their head off the pillow and want to go to work. And also at the end of the day, have a dinner conversation. That's exciting. Oh, this happened at work today. Oh,

this team member did this. Our leader shared this information with me. Those are the deeply human metrics that drive collaboration, and I think we were able to do that. Edward and I were both at Walt Disney Imagineering, so we were working to design the theme parks and experiences around the world. And one of my very first attractions that I did was in Epcot, and it was a small little attraction where you design a robot and then you race on a dance pan. You have these different winners. Opening week, there was this family that came in to play. It was a father and mother, a very, like, annoyed,

cynical- looking teenage boy and a little girl. They start playing the game. They're looking and then they start getting a little competitive with each other. Then they race and when they left the attraction, they were literally like walking off the dance pads and the son and the father like high-fived each other and the son's face was so transformed like he had had fun and laughter and their engagement while they were

playing it created a different space for them to engage. How they looked at each other was different and how they experienced each other was different. The dad put his arm around his son as they were walking out and I literally almost started crying. I might have been crying because that's the noble purpose for Imagineers. Yes, we're building these beautiful spaces and these rides that are fun, but what continues to drive you when you're working 24-7, trying to install an attraction or something, is the memory of, I'm doing this for that family

that has no other place where they can connect and see each other in the most important way. Fulfilling that desire that a parent has to connect with their kid and have a memory, express love in a way they can't express it. That's what noble purpose, when you can explain it to your team members, it's powerful, and it gives us all kind of meaning in our lives. As I'm listening to you, I'm visualizing this noble purpose as being at the top, and

then these five principles you mentioned serve as the pillars supporting and driving that purpose. If I'm understanding correctly, these principles are the foundation for everything. I love to learn more about each of these fundamental behaviors. Could you walk me through them? I would offer that the five behaviors of generosity, co-creation, action,

resourcefulness, and gratitude are first in collaborate to compete. Why are they first? Because the root about how we work is much more important than what we're doing. You need the what, but in most performance management systems that we've all been in, we've created, we've designed, we've led, and we've had to communicate to our team members, put what first, what are your goals? Oh, okay, you did your goals wonderfully.

Okay, you were a nice person at the same time, but oh, sometimes you weren't a nice person, but that's okay because you accomplished your goals. In a way, the five behaviors are radically human and they have to be put in the first position because the how you work is based on it being more important than what you're doing. Now the noble purpose, as we've just been talking about, is vital and has to happen as well, but it happens next.

That makes sure that we're all aligned. But first we focus on, as Trish said, the unit of collaboration is not the tool or whatnot, it's the human, it's the team member. And that's why that focus on the behaviors, first and foremost, and consistently demonstrating are really important. And then we add the noble purpose.

When it comes to these five behaviors, generosity, resourcefulness, co-creation, action, and gratitude. I know each one could probably have an entire episode of his own, with so much depth behind them, but I still love to get an overview of what they mean in the context of your methodology. How do these behaviors show up? How can we nurture and manifest them? Not just for our own benefit, but also for the benefit of the team. I can add to what Edward said.

Let's just start with generosity. Generosity is basically giving to others. So it's about how you give to others. And it's always about assuming positive intent. When you are engaging with generosity and learning how to just be better at it and be more generous, you end up creating a safe environment for people to grow and contribute, to speak up and to share crazy ideas like ones that might be really innovative. And so safety is really important for people to feel like they belong and to speak up and

contribute. The next one, resourcefulness. It's a very practical thing that you can grow, but it's all about growing your tools, your information and your network. Not just having them, but seeing different ways of using them and connecting them so that you can always find the answers that you need, which kind of leads into then co-creation. You can't always figure it out yourself, so having another person there is really helpful. And co-creation is an area of, as a leader, there's a lot of skills in there that

you really do need to develop ongoing that are going to help you with brainstorming, with coming up with new ideas. But at the foundational level, co-creation requires that you listen very well, listen very well and that you ask open-ended questions, more expansive questions, so that you're gaining information versus judging or being a naysayer up front. So co-creation is going to help you come up with new solutions for problems or those innovations or if something went terribly wrong and you pull your C-suite together and you need, you're the CEO and need a bunch of ideas, you have the smartest people in the company there. So you don't want to screw it up and say, we've tried that before.

You want to really ask open questions to get the best of everyone in the room in a way that's positive and playful because that's when they do their best. Then you're the leader you have to take action and a lot of people think they have to wait until they have all the information to act and we're very much against that. You will never have all the information you need to act but if you take an action even if it fails you're going to learn and get more information and be able to make progress toward your goal or pivot. The last one is gratitude. You think about a high-performance team, even athletes, they need to rest after

delivering something or doing a lot of work and gratitude is the thing that helps people breathe even if it's for a moment or have that recovery and so gratitude is how you respond to generosity and to work. We always say don't just make it a feeling like oh I feel grateful show it how are you showing thank you? And Edward would do this great thing of sending a little thank you card with a coffee card inside for one of our teammates who did a good job, which is just thoughtful. It's not just the handwritten note. It's, oh, go get a coffee and brainstorm with a friend. Or we would have special lunches to celebrate a big milestone and use those lunches to celebrate a big milestone

and use those lunches to thank every person individually in front of the entire team and make a note of some unique contribution that they made. Sometimes it's like the big celebration of the end of the project. Gratitude is really important for teams to have recovery and rest and then rebuild that excitement to go get it again. Not just feelings that are ambiguous. Trish and I made a commitment to each other with senior leadership when we had to update

them over the three-year lifespan of our project, is we did it together. And I think that was important so that we were hearing the same thing. It also showed that we were truly collaborative. We were showing up collaboratively. The visual is sometimes very important. So that the collaboration looks like in big actions, small actions, every action are collaborative.

It's a practical example of how we did that. We also depended on partnering with our leaders in this three-year knowledge transfer project that we led. So we were very grateful and generous at the same time in providing feedback to the leaders in specific thank you written form for the contribution that they made to our project. And that not had happened that often.

So they remarked to us that they really liked that. Finally, the other leaders of the people that were on our team noticed, hey, what are you guys doing over there? People love going to your meetings. They wanna be on your collaboration team. Would you please come and speak to my leadership team about what you're doing over there in collaboration?

So I feel that that was co-creation, we were helping them out, but we were also generous with sharing our time. And when people are generous in sharing your time in the organization, that's another example of a collaborative behavior. That's another example of a collaborative behavior. Tricia, you've quoted some important statistics about the scale of these problems. And we've gone deep into the method and solutions.

But I want to shift from the macro view to a more micro view. We know these issues have economic implications. But why do we even have these problems in the first place. An other way to look at it is why is collaboration in organizations so difficult to embrace and practice isn't due to office politics, ego, inexperience, or something else, could you highlight some of the key hurdles you see when it comes to fostering real collaboration within a team? Yes, that's a really good point. There are barriers to collaboration. They sneak up on you and they can be barriers that are inside us that we don't maybe recognize

or inside someone else. And we don't know why we think we're there being a jerk, but really they have some barrier that speaks to a wound in their life in some way. But those barriers that we see most often are people who have a sense of superiority. So they don't think they have to do the work or it's beneath them, or they have a big ego and want all the attention, or I have to do everything myself.

They like to self-reliant and they think everyone else doesn't do it their way. And sometimes it's okay for people to do it a different way. And the one that is a little sneaky is insecurity, where a leader, they might have just been put in a position that they're not fully equipped for. So their insecurity can come out in a negative way. But if you recognize what's going on, you can help them gain the tool of incompetence that you need. And then the last one is really just about being ungrateful, like

having ingratitude to see that you actually have some great people working around you who want to help you that you have all these tools and these people. And so all these things are, again, they speak to the behaviors, there are these internal things when you get in, they speak to the behaviors. There are these internal things. When you get in a work situation to your question, the reason we all fail a lot is there hasn't been a lot of focus necessarily on developing what character looks like or what morality looks like in the workplace or doing the right thing or virtue even. It's like almost sounds old-fashioned. Once you get into the workplace, we see each other and we're working with each other and it's a very external thing. It's, oh I need this report,

so I'm going to do this report. Oh I need to serve this salad, so I'm making this salad. I need to build a construction project. It's all very external. We can get caught up in thinking that life is external. So much of what we experience is very internal. I think we've lost sight that leadership is an inside game and collaboration is an inside game. And nothing changes outside until we change inside.

We have to focus on ourselves. And going back to that Gandhi quote, be the change that you seek. And I feel that we have to focus first on ourselves and that's important in collaboration. And the external influences as you say, Trich, are very strong, but it really has to start with the internal. We also have the challenge of company structures and resources and rewards really being based on a 1900s industrial competitive productive model.

Yes. So not only are we needing, as Trish brilliantly says, start with ourselves, recognize how difficult it is to be collaborative. When we're competing for bonus dollars, we're competing for headcount. We're competing for promotions. It's very counter-incuitive. That's why, again, we call the book collaborate to compete because sometimes those

collaboration behaviors are rewarded or recognized or valued. As Trish says, the values are off. But we feel that our noble purpose is really important with collaboration and can make a vast difference as we've talked about in innovation, engagement, efficiency, career development, happiness, and many things. Being able to say, going back to our metric, I love my job. Yes, I just want to emphasize what Edward just said, because we're both designers, and so we're like, how do you design collaboration onto a team?

But what he just said is a truth that companies, their design, their structures are designed not necessarily to support collaboration or to reward teams, they reward individuals. And so there is a lot of external design that fights against us in a lot of ways. Do that. I had the privilege of getting a sneak peek at the framework of your book. You've interviewed a lot of experienced and interesting figures to gather stories and lessons. I can't wait to read it myself once it hits the market. For today's listeners,

whether they're managing a team, building a startup, or even a CEO of a larger firm, what are some actionable DIY do-it-yourself tips they can start implementing right after listening to this episode? Edward, you mentioned before that collaboration is a process. So what's something they can do now to kickstart that engine and move forward more collaborative outcomes? Any quick

practical advice for them? Thank you and great question Vince. I love the application because I thought we're all trying to do as leaders is be better every day. One of the things we recommend is with the five behaviors generosity, co-creation, action, resourcefulness, and gratitude, we ask leaders to take just a quick informal poll of yourselves. Which one of these collaborative behaviors am I good at that I understand and I show consistently at work on the team with my peers. So pick the one or two of these five collaborative behaviors

and recognize that you're good at this because we as leaders are not starting from scratch. When we launch a new leadership model or trying to be better, we're always building and improving and also leveraging what we've done in the past. So we feel that one, two, or possibly even three of these collaborative behaviors, leaders are already demonstrating now, but spend the time to understand them and keep demonstrating

and applying them on the job. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.