What Is Collaborative Awareness?

Collaborative Awareness—the discovery and design of who we are together.

Collaborative Awareness is the discovery and design of who we are together.

We have grown up in a world that is often focused on learning who we are and how we fit in. The journey of self-awareness begins as and infant and continues into adulthood, with many books and podcasts devoted to understanding the self. Where as self-awareness is about knowing the landscape within our own mind and body, Collaborative Awareness invites us to discover and design the field between us. It’s about seeing the space of relationship—not as fixed, but as something alive and full of creative potential. 

In any relationship there are a minimum of three voices: You, Me and a third voice of We. Collaborative Awareness contains the individual self-awareness of You and Me, but goes beyond to look at who we are together through a similar lens. When we pay attention to who we are as a group or an ecosystem—whether a couple, community, organization or planet—we understand that every group has its own heartbeat, personality, and ways of being, much like every individual.

We coined the term Collaborative Awareness after working with groups where those involved were brilliant and self-aware, and yet the group could not find their flow. Self-awareness is vital, but on its own, you leave out an important entity in the relationship. Group dynamics don’t have to happen by chance, they can be mindfully designed by people learning to become collaboratively aware.

In our pursuit of Collaborative Awareness, we use the simple structure of the Blueprint of We Collaboration Document to guide how we discover and design who we are—together. It is a simple, elegant co-written design document that groups of any size, coming together for any reason, can mindfully design who they are and how they get things done. As we build our Blueprint of We, we share the “files” of who we are and how we work best, and together the group gives voice to the We entity. It is an iterative design document that grows and changes as the people and what brought them together evolves over time.

This process isn’t just about logistics—it’s relational. We begin by asking questions. We get curious about one another, and in that curiosity, we start to see how each person shows up in relationship—with themselves, with others, with the whole.

With each question asked and answered, there’s an upward spiral of learning. Awareness expands—for self, for other, and for what’s possible between us. From there, we shape our “We.” We give voice to what this relationship can be—not by default, but by design. In this ongoing dance of discovery and design, we grow something new: Collaborative Awareness.

Collaborative Awareness is a relational space, one where the intelligence of the “we” becomes visible, nameable, and designable. In practice, Collaborative Awareness means tuning into:

• How our individual and group patterns affect the collective dynamic

• What stress in a group reveals about what deeply matters and designing from there

• How we can design our interactions, agreements, and communication to support the best in each other and the whole—not by chance, but by choice. It’s a mindset, a skill set, and a design discipline

Collaborative Awareness honors that we don’t just grow as individuals, we evolve through the spaces we co-create. It’s about making those spaces visible, meaningful, and tailored specifically to everyone involved and what we want to do together.