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.