Unpredictable cocktails or recurring recipes? Identifying the patterns that shape collaborative performance summits

Abstract

Advancing the performance of collaborations requires not only shared performance indicators, but also shared performance routines. Collaborative performance summits offer partners a routine for jointly explicating goals, exchanging performance information, examining progress, and exploring actions. However, summits can easily devolve into pointless talking shops or political warzones. Research has identified what ingredients shape a summit, but how exactly these ingredients interact and produce summit outcomes is less well understood. Through the systematic observation of eight summits, we identify and precisely describe 13 interaction patterns. These findings can be tested through future research and inform the design of summits.