Recently I had the privilege of working with a group of UK charity and third sector CEOs, who had begun collaborating as a matter of urgency at the start of the pandemic.
A blog post on their #NeverMoreNeeded website says:
Give your collaboration some backbone!
All collaborations need a strong, flexible backbone, holding it all together, channelling communication and letting the interesting bits get on with what they’re really good at. I first came across the term ‘backbone organisation’ in the work of US organisation FSG, writing about what they call collective impact, but the need for a central team of some sort has been obvious throughout my work on collaboration. What is the ‘backbone’, and what does it do?