Originally developed at the National Cancer Institute and National Science Foundation by synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary research on teams (Hall et al. 2019), Collaboration Planning (CP) is an evidence-based approach that helps teams develop strong team processes from their inception. By surfacing how team members will work together, this 90-minute facilitated workshop helps teams to proactively plan for the future by discussing potentially contentious issues before they erupt in conflict, such as authorship, communications, and project management. Over the past five years, CP has been operationalized, implemented, and evaluated in over 50 translational science teams by the Team Science Core at UW’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) (Rolland et. al, 2020). Our multi-year evaluation results from over 250 participants are positive and encouraging: 97% would recommend Collaboration Planning to a colleague and 99% found the CP facilitators to be effective.

The success from these initial sessions has inspired us to experiment and adopt an even more expansive approach to cultivating a culture of Collaboration Planning at ICTR and across UW more broadly. In this oral presentation, Drs. Patrick Kelly and Whitney Sweeney from the UW-ICTR Team Science Core will share a few of the innovations their team has developed in the delivery and evaluation of CP. This includes increased touch points with teams following their initial session in the form of CP “tune-ups,” an enriched evaluation model that assesses changes in a team’s collaborative processes both immediately after a CP intervention and in subsequent years as part of a longitudinal study, and a new multi-team model for introducing CP to groups of teams and larger collaborative projects (e.g., multi-site projects and P grants). In particular, the multi-team model allowed us to share the principles of CP to ten teams in a two-hour period, which offers a promising avenue for how CTSAs might implement a more expansive culture of Collaboration Planning at their local institutions. We will also discuss how this new focus on cultivating a culture of Collaboration Planning will help us develop more tailored “just-in-time” interventions and trainings that address the specific needs of translational science teams, at the right moment in their particular stage of team development.