Why collaboration?
The major challenges facing our society (whether at the local, national or global level) can only be overcome if we take a systemic approach. Linear approaches by individual actors can be successful in a few, very narrowly defined problem areas. But for everything else - issues like social inequality, refugee flows, disinformation, climate change, or privacy - we need to keep a variety of dynamics in mind and develop cross-sectoral approaches.
To address complex challenges, we need to incorporate countless different and even conflicting interests and perspectives. This can only succeed if we proceed in a decentralized and self-organized manner; if the most diverse actors pursue their particular goals against the backdrop of a common intention - to fight inequality, to stop global warming, etc. In principle, the lively diversity of civil society organizations is wonderfully suited to this. However, because they are not coordinated with each other at a higher level and do not align their intentions, goals, impact logics, information, etc., they risk failure.
As a result, the voice of civil society is silenced in the triad of citizens, politics and business, and countless good solutions end up in a niche or are largely ineffective.
Good reasons, then, to take collaboration very seriously.
The betterplace co:lab program
That's why we at betterplace lab have set up the betterplace co:lab Program. Within the framework of this program, we pursue two goals: first, we want to initiate effective mergers of civil society organizations and support them with coaching and process support over a period of six months. Our second goal is more meta: that's where we want to explore the principles of successful collaboration per se.
In the context of individual blog posts, as well as a podcast, we will share our experiences and insights with you in a timely manner and alongside the project.
Even the beginning is difficult
Collaboration often fails before it has even begun because the partners have (good) reasons for not coming together.
The betterplace co:lab program therefore supports eight thematic clusters for six to nine months each with process coaching of at least 20 hours. The thematic clusters consist of at least four organizations (two people per organization) and work on a future social issue with a concrete, realistic objective. The offer is free of charge. In return, the group must be willing to invest time and its own resources in the joint process. In addition, they take part in the beginners' workshops 1-5.
In putting together the first clusters of topics, we saw that many civil society organizations found our offer appealing in theory, but in practice expressed reservations about working so closely with like-minded people. They cited a number of reasons - some openly, others behind closed doors.
Often it was a fear of competition. After all, the other organizations in the cluster could not only tap into their own knowledge and thus dilute their identity, but also steal their funding - foundations, crowdfunders, ministries, companies.
Often, the initial collaboration also fails because no one has capacity for yet another shovel of extra work. Since most funding agencies allocate project-linked funds to one institution, NGO staff hardly have time to deal with collaborations or the larger context of their project mission beyond that. Collaborative approaches, in turn, are beyond the logic of the vast majority of funders. The little time that is left to the cash-strapped employees usually has to be spent on further fundraising, securing follow-up funding or acquiring a new project. As a result, even organizations that actually prefer a collaborative approach in terms of their impact logic are unable to pursue it for very practical reasons.
For-profit boards can prevent systemic collaboration
There is also another systemic factor. I know operational teams that would very much like to collaborate with complementary or like-minded partners. For example, some time ago I participated in a discussion between NGOs in which the participating CEOs concluded that "actually" they needed to join forces in one area - IT development - in order to achieve economies of scale and be independent of for-profit vendors. But at the same moment they rowed back: they would never get such an extensive collaboration approved in their supervisory bodies. I encountered this pattern again and again over the next few years:
Bodies superior to the operational NGO teams - the shareholder group, a board of trustees or supervisory board - see no benefit in collaboration and prevent it. One of the reasons for this is that many NGOs in recent years have started to staff these bodies with representatives of the business community. They transfer their for-profit competitive thinking to NGOs in order to make them (supposedly) more dynamic and successful. But the competitive mindset, along the lines of "the NGO I'm involved with needs to develop its USP more and meet the KPIs we set," is often diametrically opposed to collaboration aimed at a higher systemic goal.
Transactional versus co:creative
This is where an important aspect comes to light that we will elaborate on in more detail in later blog posts. We distinguish between different forms of collaboration. Most of the time, we are used to working together in a transactional way. For example: I give you reach and you give me reputation in return. This trade, tit for tat, we are all used to and know its rules and prices.
Beyond that, but even more unfamiliar and less explored, are co-creative collaborations. By this we mean an approach that follows the principle of emergence: from a loose combination of parts, or from the interaction of diverse perspectives, something radically new emerges. In the case of collaborations, this means that companies break away from their own narrow goal of success and, together with potential partners, ask themselves: what is the highest potential that we can achieve together? They assume that more can emerge between them than the sum of their parts. By engaging on a shared horizon, they can develop more groundbreaking and effective innovations than they ever could have on their own.
We are not starting from scratch. Because over the last six years, we've learned a lot about self-organization and effective innovation in the betterplace lab. These insights have been incorporated into the design of the program and will serve us in the future as working hypotheses that we want to validate, differentiate, or refute in the real lab of the clusters.
Foto: Sam Moqadam | Unsplash