It's rarely a way of getting things done faster that you would alone! If you are looking to collaboration to solve your speed problem, then you need to seek other solutions.
Fifth of six
This post is the fifth in a series of six, covering the six characteristic challenges of collaborative working.
Speculate to accumulate
Collaboration needs up-front investment in understanding the history, context and relationships between potential collaborators. And once that first phase is over and there's an eager collaborator willing to play, it takes time to explore possible win-wins and work through the details of how you'll work together. Let alone the time to agree on the action you will take together which moves you all towards the agreed outcomes.
The diagram of the loops of collaboration in this post is an attempt to put this into images.
One of my favourite aphorisms, supplied by the wonderful Elspeth Donovan, is that you have to go slow to go fast. Keep this in mind to reassure yourself and your colleagues when the pace of progress is making you twitchy.
What takes the time?
In collaboration, you can't skimp on the time it takes to
- build relationships
- understand the landscape of collaboration
- understand the culture of potential collaborators
- explore possible win-wins
- establish ways of working (formal and informal).
And there are two kinds of time taken up: the time budget (how many hours you have available to work on it) and the calendar time (how much time will elapse before the various milestone decisions or actions occur).
Speaking of the time budget, it takes real people's real time to convene, manage or even just play an active role in a collaboration. This time doesn't need to all come from the initiating organisation: in fact, it's a mistake if it does, because it leads to unhelpful assumptions about whose responsibility it is to keep the show on the road.
Leaders - you can help
If you lead a team who need to initiate and take an active part in collaboration, here are some tips, developed with facilitator extraordinaire Andrew Acland as part of our work with the Environment Agency :
Give staff time to explore the ‘landscape’ and understand the history
Be patient – don’t expect delivery, or even significant decisions, too soon.
Ensure internal reporting processes, deadlines, targets and KPIs are compatible with this reality. You may need to explain this to senior managers, defending the approach and the time it is taking. There is a great guide to evaluating collaboration (or 'collective impact' in the terminology of the Collective Impact Forum), which stresses the different things you may need to look for during the early stages (mostly process and proxies) than the delivery phase (deliverables, outputs, outcomes, impacts).
Communicate existing work and establish new ‘quick wins’ to maintain interest, support and momentum.
Be prepared to stay involved and actively engaged after decisions have been made or policies signed off. Don’t take up this way of working unless you see it as a long-term commitment.
Managers need to have detailed understanding of the organisational, legal and policy context of any collaborative work to be able to make sense of the reality of what their staff will need to do.
This might mean some ‘front loading’ of manager time in early stages, so they are sufficiently briefed to both lead and support staff. This resource needs to come from somewhere.
This way of working needs to be planned in, budgeted for and resourced, even if another organisation is ‘convening’ the partnership or collaborative planning process; most collaboration requires work between meetings.