Second, the report briefly describes alliances in four states, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Missouri, and Utah, that bring together complementary and diverse resources to address complex problems. These states for the first time tried to create alliances among diverse organizations and to implement these collaborations in pilot or demonstration areas or, in the case of Utah, nearly statewide. In doing so, they had to facilitate the creation of and work with local collaborations. All the state alliances are continuing, so the summaries are summaries of work in progress. Because these states undertook for the first time alliances, their experiences, understandably, reflect successes as well as mistakes. Alliances may be necessary, but they are not easy to form and to implement. Each state had to learn, reflect, and adapt, and they are still adapting--a necessary pattern in all collaborations--as they continue their alliances.
I also want to express thanks to three long-time colleagues whose insights and sharing are always so valuable to me: Linda Wolf, James Forsberg, and Langley Keyes. While we may not always see things the same way, we always test and learn from one another.
Finally, I thank Debbie Jakubowski for her excellent work in preparing the camera-ready report.
Any mistakes or errors in the report are solely those of the author as are the opinions and judgements, expressed or implied.
Collaboration is not easy, but the capacity to collaborate must become a core competency of housing and community development-related organizations. Alliance partners should see collaboration as a way to solve past failures and as a new way of organizing, making decisions, and allocating resources that better matches our complex problems and rapidly changing environment than do complex vertical bureaucracies; they should see collaboration as a tool for actively creating and discovering the future, for learning, and for strategic thinking.
This report uses the experiences of four states who have engaged in collaborative housing and community development--Oklahoma, North Carolina, Missouri, and Utah--to illustrate significant concepts and lessons in forming and managing housing and community development alliances. The difficulty but also the power of collaborations range from those in which the primary output is the adjustment in each partner's output that occurs as a result of inter-independent action, to those in which the output is the synchronization of each partner's output in a way that only collaboration makes possible, to those in which the output is the inter-dependent fusion of each of the partner's outputs--creating truly new goods and services.
Alliances generally have two distinct stages, a forming or creation stage and an implementation stage. The forming stage usually consists of actions that generate enthusiasm for the collaboration and those that design the initial outline of the collaboration. Care must be taken in the forming stage to avoid or well address several potentially critical problems: overly high expectations for the collaboration, cultural dissonance, dominant logic conflict, and the spawning of lack of confidence or doubt. Similarly, the initial design decisions must be carefully made, especially in ensuring a clear, common purpose; identifying core partners, non-core partners, and the community of interest; striving to get the right balance of size and diversity; and laying out the alliance's approach to its work.
As the alliance transitions from its forming stage to its implementation stage, the alliance partners should recognize the opportunity provided by the alliance for knowledge generation and complex problem solving. If the partners ignore this opportunity and do not make knowledge generation a priority, the opportunity is rarely recaptured. Once the partners recognize the opportunity, they must see and use the collaboration as a shared knowledge generation space. Shared knowledge generation occurs when a group of diverse people create and shape new knowledge together.
Implementation is the most difficult stage of a collaboration and in this stage the partners will go through one or more sequences of learning and adapting. Collaborations that start with partners having a good degree of mutual trust will have a much easier and probably more effective launch than those where mutual trust may be low or absent. Trust is usually generated through experience, so positive prior working relationships provide a store of social capital that the collaboration can use in its early implementation work. If collaborations start with only a minimal level of trust, partners, individually and collectively, can help facilitate trust building.
In collaborations, all core partners should practice facilitative leadership, which includes managing across boundaries with no formal authority, developing a common vision, and using a consensus decision-making style. While a collaboration needs several facilitative leaders, important to managing relationships, it also requires a collaboration manager, important to managing the collaboration as a whole.
Once a collaboration starts, the partners must address several key operation and management issues. One issue concerns operational scope, which includes task definition, task integration, and skills melding. A collaboration also needs to build multiple bridges, connections between professional or technical personnel, mid-level managers, and senior managers. Effective communications are central to a collaboration, and handling this well involves knowing when to use what types of communication and ensuring that all participants are situationally aware of the collaboration. The cascading nature--the rolling out of the collaboration to other participants or vistas--presents another operation and management issue. Each cascade is in itself a miniature forming stage, and must be handled as such, with communications playing a critical role.
Collaboration partners capture value primarily through the inter-organizational learning that occurs via the collaboration. This learning, which must be a conscious intent of each partner, especially senior managers, expresses itself through the transfer or diffusion of knowledge and the integration or application of knowledge gained via the collaborative process. The absorptive capacity of the individuals active in the collaboration and each partner's skills and experience in intra-organizational learning significantly determines the extent to which inter-organizational learning occurs.
Given the nature of the specific collaborations described in this report, the state-local nexus is both important and potentially complex. The nexus requires state partners to share their knowledge with a local collaboration or end users and tailor their outputs or resources to the specific locality as appropriate. State partners should envision the state-local collaboration design as a relatively open-ended and longer-term process involving on-going dialogue and negotiation through which the collaboration creates new policy and delivery structures.
As implied in the state-local nexus discussion, collaborative housing and community development places a stress on most local or community institutions because it forces them to stretch their competencies and increase their tolerance for risk and ambiguity, and often starts a process of internal change. As states initiate and facilitate collaborations, they must think about collaboration capacity building and in doing so will need to reinterpret capacity building. States should integrate from the start a capacity building strategy with their collaboration.
Each of the four states took divergent paths, although Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Utah focused on the welfare-to-work connection. Oklahoma's collaboration had two co-managers, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Human Services, within a fairly large number collaboration partners. Oklahoma's collaboration centered on selecting four communities (three rural counties and one metropolitan county) for comprehensive welfare-to-work planning within the context of decentralizing state administration of TANF. The collaboration transitioned to a commitment for integrated funding from several state agencies and programs, to be managed by one state agency with the intent to award competitively funds to communities for implementing comprehensive welfare-to-work strategies.
North Carolina started its collaboration with five state agencies, with the Department of Commerce as the collaboration manager. The state collaboration adopted an investment or outcomes funding approach, using it in three contiguous rural counties. The state collaboration facilitated and then engaged local collaborations within each of the three counties and across all three counties. The state-local collaborations effected funding for HOME and CDBG applications, with county departments of social services being the primary players within a broad local coalition. The CDBG funds will be used for welfare-to-work outcomes.
Missouri began with a broad state coalition managed by the Department of Economic Development that focused on the poor southeastern portion of the state. But when this initiative stalled, the collaboration manager and a small set of core partners re-directed the collaboration to a statewide focus centering on the state-funded, services-based Caring Communities partnerships. But the core partners then again altered the direction to focus solely on federal and state agencies. The final result is a large state and federal agency collaboration designed to produce coherent and streamlined community strategic planning requirements for all state and federal agencies, producing a common needs assessment format as part of the streamlining.
Utah's collaboration included 16 local public housing authorities, several state agencies and nonprofit organizations. While the collaboration manager was the Department of Community and Economic Development, the Department of Workforce Services and several local housing authorities sustained central action for the collaboration, which focused on using welfare reform processes and resources to increase the self-sufficiency of public housing tenants to enable them to exit public housing and obtain less highly subsidized housing or even market-rate housing--which also increases the velocity of use of public housing, giving more very low income families access to this relatively scarce housing resource.
As the four states concluded two or so years of alliance work, three topics stand out as important in all four states. The technical assistance and capacity building issue may be the most challenging issue, one that continues to confront the state alliances. A second key issue is the recognized need for frank and candid dialogue and discussion, especially early in the collaboration, based on trust among all the partners, and on identifying and appropriately communicating with each alliance's community of interest. Third is the bedeviling nature of programs: all states struggled with the delivery of different funding streams with their specific constraints and different timing cycles.
Finally, a more subjective statement: Individual and organizational learning must become a more conscious, explicit objective of alliances. Organizations must adopt structures and processes that facilitate learning. In the long run, housing and community development alliances are about complex problem solving and learning.
Although the private, for-profit sector has experienced for 15 or more years collaborations--or strategic alliances, networked organizations, joint ventures, or even virtual organizations--the public sector and the nonprofit community have only recently seen the emergence of collaborative ventures. This report addresses housing and community development collaboration in the public sector by using, in part, the two-year experiences of four states, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah. These states are participating in a collaboration project initiated in 1996 by the Council of State Community Development Agencies.
Using the experiences of these four states does not imply they are the only states engaging in collaborative community development or are the most successful states. However, these four states have tried to create and implement collaborations that involve organizations that focus on physical development, such as community development and housing agencies, and organizations that focus on human services, such as TANF and employment training agencies. Additionally, these states have engaged local or community organizations in their collaborations, especially as they try to implement collaborations at the local level.
The report uses the experiences of these four states not so much to describe their experiences or promote their accomplishments but to illustrate key points and significant issues in collaborative community development. Consequently, it only briefly summarizes the four-state experiences in part 2. In using the states' experiences illustratively the report tries to identify and explain characteristics or factors crucial to the success of collaborations. This endeavor requires exploring theories or concepts that can help explain what must be addressed and how these must be addressed to create and manage effective collaborations. In other words, what do we already know that may help us create and implement collaborations even if we have little or no experience in using collaborations? As the report notes throughout, much experience and even concept-building is occurring with private sector alliances and collaborations, which is often largely relevant to the public sector.
Why use collaborations? And what is a collaboration, anyway? In answering these and related questions, the report uses several overlapping themes or topics, such as trust, facilitative leadership, organizational structure, communication, knowledge generation, inter-organizational learning, high performance teams, and capacity building. These themes tend to overlap because it is difficult, for example, to discuss trust without discussing communication, or inter-organizational learning without discussing facilitative leadership, or communication without discussing organizational structure.
Collaborations are essential to housing and community development and perhaps to all organizations trying to solve difficult problems or address complex issues. Further, the capacity to collaborate should now be seen a necessary core competency of nearly all public and community organizations. In the words of Gary Hamel, on the road to the future organizations that have learned how to collaborate effectively will be the windshield and those that have not will be the bug.
Collaborations are essential for three reinforcing reasons. The skills and resources essential to an organization's effectiveness are increasingly located outside an organization's boundaries and are not subject to management's direct control. Second, if we are to solve well and for the long term the housing and community development-related problems we face we will need to blend or meld resources and skills that no single organization possesses. We need to use our complementary strengths in a collaborative way. Finally, our uncertain and rapidly changing environment requires us to accelerate our learning by combining our insight and understanding so that we can strengthen our foresight and strategic thinking.
Saying that collaborations are essential to community development does not mean they are always absolutely necessary. Some problems can be well addressed through one-time, rifle-shot use of resources. Nonetheless, we are realizing that our more significant and difficult problems are inter-connected and that solving one problem may alleviate one or more symptoms in the short run, but often does little to improve significantly conditions in the long term. The policy and practice of community development is beginning to recognize the applicability of Ashby's law of requisite variety, which states that to control a situation the variety of response actions must at least match the variety of disturbances that are causing the problem or situation being addressed.
Community development-related organizations--organizations dealing with housing, community facilities, and infrastructure--have led, indeed, usually have been the sole actors, in community development or neighborhood revitalization since the late 1940s. Further, housing, usually housing rehabilitation, has usually spearheaded and dominated community development. In the mid-1980s things began to change, especially as housing organizations increasingly recognized the need for support services. On the other hand, beginning in the 1980s human services organizations began to recognize the need to go beyond treating individuals, or cases, and began focusing on families. The expanding focus of human services continued in the 1990s by putting families in the context of communities. Thus, development organizations began to recognize the importance of services while service organizations began to recognize the importance of community. Additionally, the increased blending of development and services is now being overlayed by the policy and political importance attached to employment and self-sufficiency.
Employment-centered community development provides not only an overlay to the development-services and services-community trends but also helps bridge the two trends. Development has usually had some involvement in employment, using funds for job creation or maintenance through fixed-asset financing or site and infrastructure development. Services have also usually had a connection to employment through employment training and related initiatives such as adult literacy.
Unfortunately, this conceptual or intellectual acknowledgment and understanding, slight as it may be, of the fusion of development, services, and employment has grown much faster than our ability to put the understanding into practice. In other words, a disconnect exists between what we know we have to do and how we have to approach it and the tools and practices we have to implement what we know.
Two factors, perhaps among several others, stand out as causing this disconnect. One is that the financial resources we have at our disposal are usually contained in programs, and these programs almost invariably have a relatively narrow focus--in the activities they can fund, and/or in the clients or constituents they must serve, and/or in the objectives or goals they must be pursue, and/or in the organizations that have access to them. This is like trying to walk through a complex maze with 12-foot walls and not being able to use, for example, a helicopter to provide a map of how best to walk through the maze.
Further, the managers of these public programs/funds deal with mechanisms that ensure accountability, which means that "program" and "accountability" often become synominous. Consequently, many program managers strongly adhere to traditional notions of accountability and are disinclined to blend funds and programs to address complex issues. Our usual accountability requirements limit our ability to inter-connect and adjust programs and make it very difficult to match the rapid changes in policy contexts we face.
Inherent in learning is the need to transcend specific tasks, which is difficult for professionals who tend to focus on tools, and traditional accountability requirements reinforce this tool focus. Traditional accountability procedures sometimes produce an excessive emphasis on monitoring, which can also be problematic because monitoring favors forecasts or improvisions (doing what you promised to do is more important than making adjustments that result in more effective outcomes) and constraints over opportunity (not doing something you said you were going to do to do something more cost-effective is wrong). A pre-occupation with monitoring reinforces a program focus and drastically reduces time horizons (you need to do what made sense yesterday, when you signed the contract, and not what makes tomorrow as you spend the money).
The other factor is the nature of our delivery organizations, the organizations that control and manage most of the resources that can be used for holistic community development. One might say that the nature of our community development problems are boundaryless and changing while the organizations we use to address these problems are segmented and inflexible. The segmentation can be programmatic (an organization has a small share of the resources needed to address well a problem) and/or geographic (an organization territorially serves or focuses on a small part of problem). The inflexibility can be bureaucratic (an organization is weighed down by multiple hierarchical layers, substantial division into functions, and extensive task specialization) and/or ideological (members of the organization strongly believe that there is one best way to solve a problem or that there is one priority problem that needs to be addressed). This is like trying to walk through a complex maze while encased in utter darkness.
The real bad news, however, is that these two factors tend to exist in a vicious, self-reinforcing circle. "Good" public policy tends to be policy that provides your organization with the resources to solve problems; "bad" public policy tends to be policy that prevents your organization from accessing resources or provides resources that your organization cannot access. Similarly, "good" public policy is policy that gives priority to the issue that your organization addresses and thinks is most important; "bad" public policy is policy that ignores or does not well finance the issue your organization addresses and believes is most important. Consequently, organizations and interests work the legislature (local, state, or national) to create very specific programs, and policy entrepreneurs in legislatures or foundations create programs that fit their definition of what is needed. Further, old programs are rarely eliminated as new programs are added.
These actions may not necessarily be nefarious or manipulative; they sometimes proceed from the best of intentions. But they result in an enormous hodge-podge of narrow-scoped programs. The accretion of niche-building results in a rabbit warren of structures and organizations each of which increasingly deals with a smaller portion of the puzzle as the number of pieces in the puzzle grows.
Two sets of circumstances, each of which is a different side of the same coin, drive the need for collaboration. One side of this coin is the complexity of the problem--complex problems are inter-domain (inter-disciplinary, inter-program) problems that have a significant impact on society and the solutions to which are very difficult to find because they cross many areas of expertise and for which there is always incomplete information. This complexity requires drawing from the diverse knowledge, experiences, capabilities, and processes of different organizations and people. Complex problems and cross-cutting issues increase the need to integrate and not merely coordinate resources. Collaborations are necessary for complex problem solving.
The other side of the coin is the fragmentation and resultant complexity of the problem environment. Collaboration is necessary to prevent not only working at cross-purposes but to accomplish working at reinforcing purposes. Organizations and people working together can accomplish things that they individually cannot accomplish. In other words, who we are together is always different than who we are alone and new relationships create new capacities.
What is collaboration? Collaboration has become an overused word, and its definition now is probably in the eye of the beholder. As used in this report, community development collaboration involves the extended collective interaction among three or more organizations representing diverse, complementary resources that focuses on a common complex topic or outcome. This definition implies several characteristics.
One is that the resources include both development-related and services-related resources. Thus, a collaboration is not simply a partnership among similar organizations; diversity is central to the notion of collaboration. Second, a collaboration lasts for an extended period of time. An extended period of time need not mean years. It means that the relationship exists long enough to address well a problem or attain an objective (even on a pilot or demonstration basis) and that the partners have the time to adapt to one another--a collaboration changes over time. Finally, a collaboration is not project-based or single task-based. It involves a series of projects and/or multiple activities.
This definition excludes several kinds of interactions sometimes labeled collaborations. Community development is no stranger to partnerships. There are many initiatives that involve the leveraging of funds, various infrastructure projects, for example, in which the only common denominator is money--the roles of the partners are clearly defined ahead of time. There are many examples of diverse partners coming together to complete one specific project or task, such as building and staffing a community center or a complex for the frail elderly. There are housing initiatives that involve multiple partners. But these initiatives are almost invariably project-focused, time-limited (that is, there is good understanding at the start of how long the interaction will last), and usually involve similar resources (e.g., finance, development, construction, etc.--all related to housing).
The words "strategic" and "alliance" add to the notion of collaboration. These words suggest an involvement among diverse organizations that requires a degree of mutual and long-term alignment benefitting all partners. They imply an on-going sharing of goals and objectives and a set of relationships that are fluid, future-oriented, and long term. Strategic alliances for community development, finally and perhaps most importantly, imply far more than cooperation. In cooperation, partners can still remain autonomous and relatively unchanged. A strategic alliance fundamentally changes the partners in a collaboration; a mutuality of influence and learning enables the partners to become different, more capable, than what they were as autonomous actors.
What do collaborations produce that cannot be produced by partners otherwise acting alone? Collaborations can produce three kinds of outputs that cannot be produced by participants acting alone. One is output adjustment, which occurs when one or more collaboration partners inter-independently make adjustments in their outputs. The mutual learning or influence that occurs in a collaboration leads partners to innovate; they individually produce outputs that are different than the outputs they have previously produced. This adjustment may also include the partners' using their outputs to serve new, different customers or attain new, different objectives. In other words, the knowledge gained in the collaboration and the commitment of the partners to the collaborative venture as a whole makes or permits them to make innovations and adjustments in their individual outputs. Obviously, output adjustment occurs because these adjustments are deemed to server better the needs of the customers or clients or more effectively solve problems than the traditional outputs.
An example of output adjustment is a housing agency using for the first time tenant-based assistance, and using this assistance to promote self-sufficiency.
Another type is output synchronization. In this case, the collaboration partners synchronize their outputs in a way that is impossible without collaboration. Output synchronization is often part of the rhetoric of community development initiatives. Usually output synchronization is attempted through planning and/or through targeting. In planning, a group of people and organizations assess a community, develop goals and objectives, and identify a work program comprised of multiple tasks or steps (outputs) that over time will attain or move toward attaining the goals and objectives. However, the planners rarely have control over the resources, or at least many of the resources, that are needed to implement the plan and the actual outputs usually fall far short of coordination as they are delivered. Targeting attempts to get at output synchronization less directly by encouraging or in some cases mandating that resources be allocated to a relatively small geographical area. The hope is that as these diverse resources come into a relatively small geographical area they are used in a coordinated fashion.
However, both planning and targeting are more often aimed at providing a wide or comprehensive array of outputs than at output synchronization. In collaboration, the partners that control the resources attempt to use their resources, develop outputs, in a patterned, coordinated fashion so that the impact of these outputs is much greater than if they were uncoordinated. However, actually securing output synchronization is much more difficult than it seems: organizations whose outputs are being coordinated tend to see much more coordination than the clients or customers of the coordination. Output synchronization may seem seamless to the collaborating organizations but clients or customers rarely see or feel seamlessness.
An example of output synchronization is a development agency providing funds for local infrastructure repair and community facilities, while a housing agency provides funds for the rehabilitation of houses in the community being served by the infrastructure and community facility improvements and a human services agency provides substance abuse treatment and family preservation assistance to the households receiving housing rehabilitation assistance. Further, these outputs are timed or scheduled in such a way that their sequencing adds to the effectiveness of the individual outputs.
A third kind of collaborative production is output fusion. Output fusion is the melding or blending of the outputs of the partners. The collaboration partners produce outputs that clearly could not have been produced by the partners acting independently or even inter-independently. In this instance, the collaboration truly produces something new, a truly new product.
An example of output fusion is a housing agency providing funds for the construction of a special type of housing for several formerly homeless single parent teen mothers who are being provided services by one or more human services agencies and where the human services agencies are providing financing that the housing agency includes as part of its financing pro forma for the development. One can further the degree or intensity of fusion by indicating, for example, that one or more businesses have agreed to employ the teen mothers provided they meet certain qualifications, such as threshold levels of literacy and various standards of soft skills, and that employment training and adult education agencies have agreed to provide services to help the teen mothers meet those standards.
A collaboration need not produce all three kinds of outputs. In some contexts, only one output may be very appropriate. Output adjustment is usually the easiest collaboration product. Moving from output adjustment to output synchronization to output fusion moves along a collaboration output continuum that is marked on the output adjustment end by relatively low mutual interdependence and by relatively high mutual interdependence at the fusion end. It is probable, or at least arguable, that the continuum also moves from relatively low inter-organizational learning and/or minimal complex problem solving at the output adjustment end to relatively high inter-organizational learning and/or maximum complex problem solving at the fusion end. In other words, one might argue that the more complex the problem being addressed the more the collaboration outputs need to move toward the output fusion end, and perhaps needs to produce all three kinds of outputs. At the same time, moving from adjustment to fusion is more difficult because it requires more interdependence and more learning.
Collaborations are not easy to form or to manage, and this is no secret. Putting together a collaboration requires paying attention to important start-up issues that if not dealt with successfully can significantly reduce the efficacy of a collaboration, and perhaps even cause its early demise. Simply believing that an enrichment of resources brought together by a collaboration will result in more effective problem solving may help start a collaboration, but will ensure neither the collaboration's success nor the effective use of resources. Collaborations require flexibility, adaptability, but these attributes and processes are much different than simply stumbling along from one crisis to another, or from one conflict to another. Once formed, collaborations cannot be managed like organizations and programs are managed. Developing trust and ensuring communications among partners while trying to solve complex problems that require a combination of diverse resources is a monumental challenge. Collaborations are more likely to pay off if all parties understand the essential keys to success.
Before the alliance is actually created or before any collaboration activity begins, the supporters of the alliance often promote and market the benefits and advantages of an alliance to develop or reinforce support for the alliance by the partners and perhaps even by the partners' value chains--the entities that supply resources to the partners or receive the outputs of the partners. This enthusiasm-generating phase is sometimes needed to push the partners into the design and creation phase. Partners may be reluctant to move into the creation and design phase for several reasons. Collaboration is not easy, and there is usually some recognition of its difficulties, such as the amount of time a collaboration takes, and this time is an added burden because other responsibilities are usually not taken away as the collaboration activities start. Often, managers or leaders may be reluctant to engage in collaboration because it may reduce their autonomy or flexibility.
The importance of the enthusiasm-generating phase depends in part on the stimulus for the collaboration. Sometimes the stimulus is external to the organizational partners. For example, a governor or a legislature may mandate a collaboration. Or, external events can create opportunities for collaboration but these opportunities may result in a feeling of "It looks as if we should or have to collaborate, but I really would rather not." An external stimulus may make the collaboration partners feel they are being forced to collaborate. An enthusiasm-generating phase may be necessary to turn reluctance or pessimism into acceptance or optimism.
Expectations
However, the enthusiasm-generating phase can be counterproductive. Most collaborations are probably over-hyped at the beginning. That is, the benefits and advantages of a collaboration are not only exaggerated, but the time it will take to produce the benefits are underestimated. Collaborations that start in an environment of unrealistic expectations often succumb to that unrealism when they are immediately judged by these unrealistic expectations. In the forming stage the collaboration partners must work hard at being realistic. Partners must know and agree to the purpose and objective of the collaboration, and this purpose and objective needs to be recognized as sound. Involving people who are part of the enthusiasm-generating phase in design and creation phase can be very helpful. It provides a bridge between the collaboration partners and those involved in the enthusiasm-generating phase, a bridge that can help lower the over-hyped expectations as the partners try to become realistic about what the collaboration can accomplish.
An enthusiasm-generating phase may be less necessary if the core partners fully volunteer to collaborate. In the private, for-profit sector, most decisions to form a collaboration are made for strategic reasons: the partners believe that the collaboration will be mutually beneficial to their long-term bottom-line. In these instances, one or more partners usually spend much time researching and examining options to find the right partners. The better prepared a firm enters a collaboration-- examining skills, resources, competencies, strategy, and culture, for example, and creating transition processes--the more successful the collaboration is likely to be.
Sometimes the partners decide to form a collaboration but this decision is made in response to emergent opportunities. Here, the decision is collaborate is made relatively quickly to take advantage of a current situation. If the partners view this emergent opportunity in the same light, there is less need for an enthusiasm-generating phase.
But even if the decision to collaborate is fully made by the partners, they must recognize and address barriers or potential problems in the forming stage. If the collaboration partners have cooperated before with one another and the key managers involved in the forming stage know one another, the collaboration already has a basis for success in that the route to collaboration is based on trust among the partners, both organizationally and personally. If trust and commitment are very high at the beginning, the partners are usually more ready for intensive collaboration and the investment that this intensive collaboration requires.
However, if the decision to collaborate is based solely on strategic decisions regarding the potential benefits of collaboration and the organizations and key managers really do not know one another, then there is little social capital, or trust, to draw upon. In these situations, the collaboration generally requires a quick achievement of concrete results. A collaboration based in part on trust has the ability to continue longer without having to produce concrete, specific mutual benefits, while a collaboration that has no basis of trust needs to produce much more quickly.
In addition to the problems that may be caused by exaggerated expectations and the absence of trust, other problems are often brought to the forming stage of collaboration.
Three such potentially significant problems deal with culture, dominant logic, and confidence.
Cultural Conflict
Cultural conflicts--culture being defined as a pattern of shared values and beliefs that helps individuals understand organizational functioning--may be more significant in the private, for-profit sector, but they exist in the public sector as well. Every organization has its own culture, its own way of doing things, including making decisions. How decisions are made, how people relate to and communicate among one another, how they behave in meetings, how they work in groups, are all among the many things that comprise an organization's culture. Many studies of collaboration in the private, for-profit sector conclude that cultural, including management style, dissonance among partners is the primary reason for collaboration failure.
One might think that organizations that work in the same state government, work for the same governor and legislature, might have minimal cultural dissonance problems. But often size alone presents cultural conflicts because very large organizations tend to have very different cultures than very small organizations. Other than size, perhaps the major cultural differences among public agencies are between those who focus on services and consumption and those who focus on buildings or facilities and investment. Organizations that focus on the immediate needs of individuals or families often have different cultures than organizations that focus on longer term physical infrastructure and housing needs. Organizations that provide grant funds or whose funds are meant to be spent without being repaid often have different cultures than organizations whose funds are lent with an expectation of repayment.
There is no easy way out of the cultural dissonance issue. One must recognize that it is important and partners need to be very willing to learn about one another.
Dominant Logic Conflict
Another potential problem at start up deals with the dominant logic of the partners. The dominant logic of an organization is the key objectives and purposes that the top leadership has for an organization. For a public agency, one might get a sense of its dominant logic through the agency's statutory references and formal plans and similar documents. However, the top leadership's definition of an organization's essential rationale is key, and sometimes this is not explicit. The dominant logic of an organization might be equated with its strategic intent. Senior management and policy makers often focus only on the topics that seem relevant to the organization's dominant logic.
Every collaboration has its own essential purpose and objective that must be explicitly understood and shared by every partner. An issue at the start of any collaboration is the extent to which a collaboration's purpose and objective meshes with each partner's dominant logic. Collaborations must create value, and the value collaborations generally create is the accomplishment of objectives that no partner can individually obtain. Collaborations tend to create value by mixing the unique or complementary, different resources of each partner. But having a resource or skill complementarity is not enough. Strategic compatibility must also exist.
Grasping whether dominant logic compatibility exists can be difficult because the dominant logic of each partner may not be well known, sometimes because it is not shared. If a partner's dominant logic is not known at the start of the collaboration by the other partners, it often becomes well known as the collaboration begins to operationalize its mission and purpose. At this point, the collaboration can experience a conflict that may require the partners to make adjustments in their intended actions and objectives or to consider continuing the collaboration without the partner. Both of these options can be very traumatic for a collaboration, which is why it is best if partners can gain a clear sense of each other's dominant logic early in the process. It is also another reason why building on pre-existing trust usually leads to more effective collaborations than collaborations that are simply comprised of partners with complementary resources and strategies but who have no experience with working with one another.
Dominant logic conflict suggests strongly that senior management should be well involved in the communications loop as a collaboration is formed if they are not among the generators of the collaboration. Involving senior managers in the early stages of the collaboration helps ensure they understand the purposes and vision of the collaboration. Having senior managers periodically meet to discuss the collaboration's broad goals and the possible concomitant changes that may be needed or desirable within the partnering organizations can help eliminate or minimize eventually dominant logic conflicts. The more contact senior managers have with the collaboration, the more opportunity they will have to work things out and evolve in a way that complements the collaboration.
Confidence
Finally, collaborations must often also deal with the issue of confidence. The start of a collaboration often generates doubts within its partner organizations. Employees of partner organizations can easily see the collaboration as a threat because the formation of a collaboration implicitly recognizes that each partner acting alone cannot accomplish what the collaboration can accomplish. Thoughts like "Does this mean that others think I am not doing a good job?" or "Does this mean that the work I have been doing is no longer important?" are not uncommon thoughts. Collaborations can generate anxiety and insecurity even among senior managers.
The damaging aspect of the confidence issue is that insecure people and insecure organizations do not make good collaboration partners. The exaggeration and confidence issues often go hand in hand because hyping the value of a collaboration can intensify insecurities. Trying to ensure that secure people and secure organizations are participating in a collaboration and that the collaboration's objective, purpose, and accomplishments can help eliminate doubt and insecurity.
These four potentially problematic issues--expectations, culture, dominant logic, and confidence--are called start-up issues because they are brought to the collaboration as it forms and are usually not generated from the collaboration's implementation. Because they are issues in the forming stage, collaboration partners can easily avoid paying them much attention. But if they are unaddressed, they are unaddressed at the collaboration's peril.
In reviewing these start-up issues, some differences between the private sector and state government can be suggested. In the private sector the two most significant start-up problems are the culture and dominant logic problems. Both these issues are apt to be less significant (albeit not insignificant) in state government because state agencies tend to be part of a larger common culture and tend to know one another better than many private sector firms know one another. At the same time, the partnering options available in state government may be less attractive than in the private sector because state agencies are usually monopolies, which may sharply limit if not eliminate partner substitutability. In state government one may have to start working with, and continue to work with, certain specific partners regardless of problems because there is no alternative.
The expectations and confidence issues may be more problematic in state government than in the private sector. Very few private sector firms or employees now have even a short-term (much less long-term) sense of security; there is constant change, constant challenge--reorganizations, downsizing, mergers, outsourcing. Employees in public bureaucracies have traditionally had much more security. However, if a collaboration is seen as signaling a sense of poor performance it can easily be seen as a prelude to reorganization and job or task elimination, it can generate much insecurity in an otherwise secure environment, relatively speaking. This is especially true if the collaboration is externally imposed and if its benefits are much exaggerated. Private sector firms probably more clearly understand the value and need for a specific collaboration before much action or extensive discussion occurs. The public sector may be unable to make a comparable assessment, and may have to rely more on generating enthusiasm by conceptually selling or marketing the collaboration.
Initially designing the collaboration comprises the second part of the forming phase, and it is usually a very difficult step for several reasons. Perhaps the most significant reason rests in the constant tension between a collaboration's need for both order and stability and flexibility and change. Because these competing demands wax and wane in relevance over the life of a collaboration it is too easy to be too flexible or too orderly. Overall, it may be best to err on the side of too much flexibility if one has to err at all. But both rigidity and chaos can be fatal.
Clear Shared Purpose
Unquestionably, the key task in initial design is to ensure that all partners have a common and very clear understanding of the purpose or mission of the collaboration. This is much easier said than done. Usually, a collaboration must devote one or two meetings, with some work in the interim, to develop a clear, specific (which doesn't necessarily mean detailed) purpose and mission, and the partners need collectively to talk through their understanding of the mission or purpose so that each partner knows that all partners have a common understanding. Acknowledgment by all partners to some ambiguous words on paper does not suffice nor does a nodding of the heads at the end of an informal discussion--often because no one knows ahead of time that the words and phrases are ambiguous. The process of developing a clear and shared vision and mission builds shared interests (the partners obtain a perception of mutual interest and priority in cooperation) and shared frameworks, which can guide joint analysis.
Roles
Another important task in initial collaboration design is to identify the key participants and to outline, at least generally and tentatively, their roles. The initial partners (individuals and organizations) are not necessarily the core partners. Much depends on the specific purpose and mission the collaboration develops. It is helpful to identify three kinds of key participants. One group is the core partners. The core partners regularly meet and are collectively responsible for ensuring the collaboration's success. A second group is the non-core partners. These are individuals or organizations that occasionally meet with one or more of the core partners and whose involvement and contributions are necessary for the success of the collaboration although they are not the central players. The third group is the collaboration's community of interest. The community of interest contains any entity that can realistically and significantly help or harm the collaboration. The core partners need to identify this group and strategize about how to use some members of the community of interest to help the collaboration and how to prevent some members of the community of interest from harming the collaboration. Part of this strategizing is knowing there is a need to develop a communications policy about how to keep who informed of the collaboration's progress and when to meet with members of the community of interest to pre-empt possible damage or to secure specific help. The details of this are not part of the initial design phase, but the initial design phase must recognize and generally address this topic and core partners can quickly identify key members of their community of interest.
The makeup of the core partners almost invariably becomes an issue because of the tension between getting the number of partners seemingly necessary to accomplishing the collaboration's objective and getting a number of partners appropriate to effective team work. Addressing well complex problems in the public sector often seems to require a multitude of resources and delivery systems/client connections that exist in a multitude of organizations. High performance team theory and practice strongly suggest that five to nine people form the most effective work teams. Unfortunately, the segmentation of public organizations and programs adds to this dilemma. A state department of economic and community development may have, for example, separate divisions that handle industrial solicitation and business assistance, employment training, housing, and community development. Involving all four divisions in a collaboration usually means having at least four people on the core team (more if significant segmentation exists within divisions).
Size
One of the design decisions concerns whether to try to operate the collaboration as a high performance or self-directed team or whether to try to involve as core partners all the key people necessary for addressing a complex problem. While there is no easy answer to this issue, the advantages of operating similarly to a high performance team (see Appendix B) suggest that a collaboration is probably better off with a core team of five to nine people.
One adjustment a core team can make is to ensure that the purpose-mission of the collaboration can be well addressed by a five-to nine-person core team. Perhaps a better alternative is to decide which five to nine people are absolutely essential to the collaboration and treat the rest as non-core partners of the collaboration. While deciding between more necessary and less necessary may be difficult, the less necessary people can still be involved through the sub-team process, which is the process often used in the private sector to involve a fairly large number of people in a high performance team model. In this process, a sub-set of the core team meets with one or more non-core partners to deal with issues that require the participation of non-core partners. The same core partners deal over time with the same non-core partners and the number of core-partners is always higher than the number of non-core partners.
Whatever its starting point relative to the number of partners, the leaders of a collaboration should only very cautiously expand the size of the collaboration. The downside of perhaps not fully having all the resources to address the problem in an outstanding fashion is a lack of commitment. Collaborations can easily experience runaway growth that makes the collaboration unsustainable and a very large number of partners can hamper effectiveness. Mismanagement can quickly erode the advantages generated by size and extra variety.
Approach to Work
Another design issue concerns the collaboration's approach to its work program. It is nearly impossible for a collaboration to lay out a work program in its design stage. Getting clear, common understanding of the collaboration's mission and purpose; identifying the core team, the non-core team, and the community of interest; and discussing how to address or approach their work is just about all that can be done in this stage. Some collaborations may be able to scope out a short term work program, say three or four months, and perhaps tentatively identify key tasks and dates, but the partners are mistaken if they believe tasks, assignments, and schedules can or even should be well articulated in the forming stage. Quickly trying to accomplish this usually results in being unintentionally committed to an incorrect or inappropriate set of tasks and schedules.
Ensuring resource awareness is another design phase task, which means that the partners as a whole must have a collective awareness of the specialized knowledge and expertise of the partners. Partners need to have some idea of who is an expert on what. Partners who have worked closely together in the past will be aware of who will provide a particular resource and sometimes of when they will provide it. Often, however, the partners may only know vaguely about the resources in the collaboration.
Finally, collaboration participants must know at the start that collaboration requires a lot of effort to succeed. The collaboration can achieve nothing without the investment and commitment of the partners. Enthusiasm may be high at the start, due in part to a successful enthusiasm-generation phase, but to preserve this enthusiasm the partners should constantly move, even if bit by bit, so that they will notice something tangible is constantly happening. Delay can effectively kill enthusiasm and often it is too late to recapture enthusiasm once implementation begins. Even in the start-up phase, partners cannot take a casual approach to collaboration without raising the specter of conflict and the collaboration's dissipation.
Unfortunately, public agencies have a strong predilection to address symptoms, not problems, and to allocate resources by responding to demands for those resources (usually in the form of applications for financial assistance) regardless of whether those demands represent well thought through needs and priorities. This situation exists for several reasons. One is that public agencies spend much time fighting fires, reacting to pressing problems (real or imagined). Being strategic and analytical is difficult when one is constantly reacting. Second, we are bedeviled by our fragmented and competitive delivery system. Organizations whose primary responsibilities are to address, say, mental health problems or housing problems, will almost invariably treat or see those problems as paramount even if they are not and try to get resources for them, even when accessing those resources diminishes funds available for, say, substance abuse or employment training. Third, professionalism in the public sector, indeed, professionalism generally, tends to focus on tools rather than problems, giving rise to that oft-repeated remark that "if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything soon begins to look like a nail." Fourth, the notion of accountability in the public sector tends to be anchored in programs and to be process oriented. Fifth, and relatedly, being reactive and tool and process oriented provides little time, inclination, and experience for analysis, for knowledge generation and creativity. Sixth, vertical bureaucracies tend to stifle and not encourage knowledge generation and creativity. Yet, if collaborations do not transcend these limiting or constraining conditions they may be no more effective at the long-term solving of root problems.
As used here, complex problems are inter-domain problems that have a very significant impact on society and for which it is very difficult to find something that may be called a solution. Knowledge about a complex problem tends to be incomplete and the knowledge that is available is spread in many documents and over many experts and specialists, people and organizations. Often, the data and know-how needed to address well a complex problem seems insufficient, incomplete, or in some instances contradicts each other.
Solving a complex problem generally requires economies of scope, which a collaboration can bring to the problem. A collaboration can bring people and organizations from diverse, but complementary, skills and backgrounds, and when properly facilitated can provide innovative and effective solutions. Partners in a collaboration that focuses on complex problem solving help one another pattern, re-pattern, and de-pattern their thinking; they help each other fundamentally reorganize their thinking.
When a collaboration focuses on complex problem solving its chief benefit is the stimulation of creative thinking by pooling expertise. It is one of the few ways by which the tacit and complex explicit knowledge of other agencies can be learned. This sharing of knowledge across organizational boundaries permits a union of differences that can generate creativity. Nearly all creativity and innovation in human activities comes from cross-domain experiences--the source of the new is usually the recombination of existing ideas, i.e., most innovations are created by borrowing ideas and recombining them instead of inventing wholly new ideas.
Knowledge generation is (1) executed in a context of a specific application, (2) trans-domain, and (3) reflexive. It is neither basic or applied research.
First, saying that knowledge is generated in the context of a specific application means that the knowledge being generated is attempting to solve a problem immediately at hand, such as the focus of the collaboration, e.g., welfare dependency in Okmulgee County. The knowledge generated is meant to be immediately useful both to the problem at hand and to the participants involved in its creation.
Second, to say that knowledge generation is trans-domain means three things in addition to there being a diverse set of partners working in a complex application oriented environment. One is that the knowledge evolves in the context of application. The knowledge is not generated first and then later applied to the problem by others. In other words, the solution to the problem at hand does not arise solely (or even primarily) from the application of knowledge that already exists. It is created by the participants, and because the participants are diverse it cannot be easily segmented into various domains, or professions, or disciplines. Also, the knowledge generated is communicated to those who participate as they participate. Finally, the knowledge generated is dynamic in that one of more of the partners may take this knowledge to other sites and other problems and use the knowledge that had been generated through the collaboration. It is available for use in other configurations because the partners are part of a loose network or resource providers and problem solvers.
To say that knowledge generation is reflexive means that it must include implementation options that affect that values and priorities of the partners and their clients. Thus, the partners must try to understand each others' viewpoints as well as that of their clients. The partners are accountable in that they are involved in the definition and solution of the problem and in the evaluation of performance. Knowledge generation in a collaboration is part of the collaboration's innovation process; the collaboration partners contribute to a new way of producing knowledge in which they are the consumers of the knowledge they generate.
Once they recognize the opportunity a collaboration has to generate knowledge within the context of complex problem solving and agree to make such knowledge generation a priority, the collaboration partners must see and use the collaboration as a shared knowledge generation space. Shared knowledge generation occurs when a group of diverse people create and shape new knowledge together. While it includes the sharing of existing knowledge it primarily means creating new knowledge while sharing existing knowledge. The collaboration must establish cognitive and behavioral processes to permit people to create and shape new knowledge together. These processes include informing (passing information back and forth), coordinating (connecting interdependent information), and joint complex problem solving (collaboratively using the interdependent information to generate knowledge that solves the complex problem at hand).
The recombination of knowledge usually occurs in dialogue where there is an intention to create something new. Dialogue elicits the tacit knowledge (implicit knowledge that is difficult to verbalize because it is best expressed through action-based skills) of individuals and their organizations. These processes or activities cannot be done superficially and they go beyond simply exchanging and converting knowledge to shared discovery and articulation.
Shared knowledge generation requires creating 1) mental spaces in the perception of the partners, 2) shared bonds of interest from their interactions, and 3) common understanding around the problem at hand to facilitate the collective massaging of ideas and information. Developing shared mental models of the problem and the problem context is critical to prevent the collaboration from breaking down due to competing or conflicting individual mental models. It is the shared mind of the collaboration along with the tools, such as graphics and email, that help the partners develop and synthesize knowledge.
Both meetings and time between meetings are important. The best ideas often occur when partners are working with one another, especially in informal settings, trying to develop common views rather than keeping their own individual views. Informal engagements are often best because much of the knowledge transfer that occurs is the transfer of tacit knowledge. However, the most useful knowledge creation, and the most progress, tend to occur between meetings when partners have a chance to reflect on their collective engagements. Finally, catalysts--representatives from outside the collaboration partners--can also be a very important way to bring in new ideas or accelerate the knowledge generation process.
One specific model for complex problem solving, called Compram, which stands for Complex Problem Analyzing Method, contains two cycles each with a series of tasks. The first cycle focuses on defining the problem by acquiring and communicating knowledge about why it is a problem, what the problem now looks like, how the situation that now exists came about, which organizations and groups are involved and the power they have, and how all these are related.
Compram emphasizes the need to have a "neutral" group of experts first address the problem because parties that are directly involved in the problem tend to move quickly to suggesting interventions, which often results in dealing inadequately with problems, or perhaps even trying to solve the wrong problem. Quickly inviting directly affected groups into the complex problem solving process can push the solution of the problem into the way the most powerful groups want it to go. Compram stresses that it is important to first understand a complex problem as a knowledge problem before considering it as a power problem.
The sequence in the first cycle is to form a mental idea of the problem. An iterative process of hearing, thinking, discussing, describing, collecting data, reading, asking questions, forming hypotheses, and reformulating and adjusting then results in the last step, which is when team members opine that the conceptual model of the problem has been sufficiently described.
The second cycle involves developing, implementing, and evaluating interventions. The second cycle involves using more detailed data and the collaboration setting the desired goal--the direction in which the team is going to try to change the problem. The team then discusses possible interventions that might lead to the desired goal and it does this in four environments or contexts.
The first context focuses interventions within the current situation, sort of muddling through. The second context permits more changes in the situation; there is more space in which to handle the problem, more possibilities for change. The third context broadens as wide as possible the options available, still within the context of a normal world, but possibly including changes in organizations, politics, the way people think and what they believe. The fourth and last context eliminates all constraints and permits any imagined intervention.
The purpose of moving to ever broader contexts is to help people unlearn or unfreeze their beliefs and opinions. Based on the generation of a wide range of interventions, the team creates and evaluates scenarios. The team then tries to agree on the interventions and moves to implementation and evaluation.
Any problem solving methodology tries to avoid pitfalls. Some of the most problematic mistakes in trying to solve complex problems include the following:
The need always to maintain a degree of unstructured, divergent interactions, at times a very high degree, may make collaboration participation or management difficult for partners used to stable, hierarchical, command and control environments. The bounded instability inherent in collaborations not only requires facilitative leadership, but the willingness of partners to remain flexible. Seeing the collaboration as evolutionary and recognizing that the rules of engagement may need to change is helped by partners trusting one another. Consequently, trust and facilitative leadership are hallmarks of successful collaborations.
First, to say that you trust someone means that you are sure that person will perform at a threshold level of competency when and as needed. In other words, trust means reliability and competency. This is important for collaborations in two specific ways. First, most collaborations include partners because the collaboration needs the core competency of a specific partnering organization. It makes little sense for a collaboration to involve partners who are not bringing their core competencies to the collaboration. Second, it makes little sense for collaborations to involve partners that are not competent. Collaborations that are comprised largely of incompetent organizations will not be successful collaborations. In the private sector, organizations that are not as competent as their peers often seek collaborations with partners who are more competent as a way of becoming more competent. These kinds of collaborations are not uncommon. However, in such cases the relatively less competent organization is the only such one in the collaboration and the other partners have high levels of competency. As suggested earlier, this may be problematic in public collaborations where the potential partnering organizations are monopolies.
Second, when you say you trust someone it means you believe that person will forgo his or her immediate self-interest to act in the long-term interest of your relationship. This is important to a collaboration because it is very difficult for a collaboration to sanction a partner who harms the collaboration by acting in its immediate self-interest. In state government there may be a way to sanction a partner who harms the collaboration. The collaboration may have to rely on trust alone.
Partners should believe they will not receive future rewards from current or future collaborations if they behave inappropriately or selfishly. Partners should believe that the potential for short run gains from opportunistic behavior are minor relative to the potential long term gains from collaboration. If being permanently cut off from current and future collaborations is always a distinct possibility, collaborations can provide each partner with rewards and benefits over a long period of time. However, public agencies are usually monopolies, and they know that there may be no alternative to their always or usually being partners in a collaboration. Further, public agencies exist in a political environment and may often have relationships with very important decision makers or interests that can effect participation in future or additional collaborations regardless of the partner's performance in the current collaboration. Consequently, trust looms large as a way to control a public collaboration.
Generating Trust
What generates trust? Trust is usually generated through experience; the experience of past behavior is used to predict future behavior. Additionally, trust can be gained when entities that are trusted trust other entities; trust is transferred via a third party. Finally, trust can be generated through reputation or status; although one may have no experience with a particular party, that party is known as a party that performs. These three ways of generating trust refer to trust being generated prior to the implementation of the collaboration. What about situations where low levels of trust among partners at the start of a collaboration largely because of no or very little prior experience of working relationships? Collaborations that start with a low level of trust are in a much more disadvantageous position than collaborations with a high initial degree of trust, a large beginning stock of social capital.
Several guidelines can help partners engender trust where low levels of trust initially exist. One is to communicate and then to communicate some more. When partners know little about one another it becomes essential to get to know one another, and short and frequent communications can help increase familiarity. Lack of knowledge about others is hazardous to trust. Relatedly, partners should try to socialize, even if by email. Informal contact outside of the specific demands of the collaboration's tasks is especially helpful in increasing familiarity. Third, partners can volunteer knowledge or other goods or services quickly, freely, and without expectations of any quid pro quo. Similarly, partners can quickly make small commitments that are soon met. Both these last actions show good faith intentions. Equally important is not over-committing. Committing early to do something and not following through sets back trust-building.
Perhaps similar to making and following through on small commitments is partners showing interest and enthusiasm in the collaboration to the other partners. Partners should also disclose their values and make their expectations clear early in the collaboration. Naturally, this should be done with a degree of care, but it can help avoid later the dominant logic conflicts mentioned earlier.
Finally, partners should gently remind others whenever they have not met their obligations or their trust. This last point is critical because another important reason for collaboration failure is the improper addressing of discord. In the early phases of implementation, collaborations may paper over misunderstandings and conflicts to get the collaboration off the ground. But these early misunderstandings, tensions, and conflicts can fester and become worse over time. Contrary to the early rationale to avoid confrontation, these differences often do not gradually disappear.
Unfortunately, partners sometimes believe that a common vision can overcome differences and discord. A commitment to a common vision and well understood mission cannot overcome all differences and tensions. Conflicts must be dealt with, and it is usually better to deal with and resolve differences as they come up rather than to put them off to a later time. Because collaborations by their nature involve diverse partners, differences and disagreements are part of the collaboration's learning and adaptation.
Collective Actions to Generate Trust
Collaborations can take collective action to reinforce trust and help ensure cooperation. One such action is to publicize the collaboration, its mission and purpose. A link exists between publicity and reputation. An organization realizes that its reputation is an investment and is mindful of it. Consequently, publicity can decrease an inclination to take actions or pursue inaction that may harm the collaboration. The collaboration must ensure that the publicity doesn't single out or promote one partner more than another, that its focus is on the collaboration as a collective and its mission and purpose, and that it does not exaggerate expectations.
Second, collaborations can use objective information and data that are accepted as reliable and valid. Often, government agencies make decisions and enact policies with only cursory regard for data and analysis. Using reliable and valid data--data sources, figures, and methodologies that are known or well accepted--generates respect for facts, data, and objective analysis. This facilitates trust because people are more willing to create interdependencies when they feel that facts and neutral data are valued. Partners must use data and analysis carefully. A partner needs to know where data come from and/or how data were collected. Inappropriate use of data or the use of poor data usually adversely affects trust because people may think they are being manipulated to accept a certain conclusion or course of action.
Third, collaborations can consciously and explicitly strive to accomplish quick successes. Specific first-steps and outputs, no matter how small, help partners learn to work together, quickly make the relationship real in practice, and provide a basis for measuring performance. However, the collaboration must be successful in these first outputs. Faltering in its first tasks or steps, again no matter how insignificant, can put the collaboration into a tailspin from which it may be very difficult to recover. Having small but quick successes helps sustain the enthusiasm that partners may have from the enthusiasm-generation phase. The need for quick success is especially important in two circumstances. Quick, small successes are important when partners have low levels of trust or simply have no experience working together; they do not have the social capital that permit working together longer without achieving specific action results. Second, the need for quick successes may be important in collaborations that focus on planning, especially if the planning process is long term.
The value or necessity of trust increases as partners spend time on complex problem solving. Complex problem solving generally requires longer term relationships that are imbued with informal confidence and the acknowledgment of the partners' reliability. In these instances the collaboration is especially vulnerable to turnover among the managers and key personnel of the partnering organizations.
Regardless of the nature of the collaboration trust is essential. Unless the partners come together with much trust already developed through past experiences, collaborations must build trust right away. Reciprocity is fundamental to productive collaborations, which must develop behavior norms based in trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. Trust normally develops over time and through repeated actions as people become confident in the reliability of others. Trust building requires time and frequent interactions and communications.
As they begin implementation, the collaboration partners must realize they are embarking on an endeavor that may look and feel inefficient and time-consuming compared to acting alone. And they must also realize that trustful relations tend to be self-reinforcing in the positive direction, while mistrust tends to cycle in the negative direction. Learning to collaborate means learning to trust. One can talk about strategies and tactics that can facilitate trust building, but these may go for naught if there is an inherent unwillingness to trust--perhaps to take some risks and offer and accept trust to and from people with diverse backgrounds, different expertise, and even different priorities and values.
A collaboration must have more than one leader, and collaboration leaders need to be facilitative. A facilitative leader helps others learn and develop new skills and share their existing skills and perspectives with new colleagues, which results in a greater sharing of information and potential for challenging tradition or routine by bringing different points of view to collaboration decision making. A premise of facilitative leadership is that no one person can solve the problem the collaboration is addressing. Therefore, all members of the collaboration must be empowered to act; collective wisdom must surface.
Facilitative leaders are frequent and effective communicators within and outside the collaboration. They have good interactivity skills and a style that emphasizes openness, consensus building, listening and learning from others, and a willingness to accept the responsibility of leadership. They champion learning acquisition and distribution and help others unlearn traditional but detrimental practices and perspectives. Unlearning is a very hard task, and the ability to lead unlearning could be the single most important role a leader plays in a collaboration.
Collaborations present leaders with three critical challenges. Collaborations challenge facilitative leaders to manage across boundaries, to provide lateral leadership. Lateral leaders must be able to work well within ambiguous authority and surmount fragmentation. In their capacity as lateral leaders, facilitative leaders must possess some knowledge of the technical or problematic issues faced by the collaboration. A facilitative leader in a collaboration cannot stay within his or her domain but must demonstrate, either by prior experience or by concerted effort, enough knowledge of the diverse domains or interests within the collaboration to bridge discussions and foster inter-relationships among the diverse partners. Therefore, they must have good facilitation skills and be entrepreneurial--they need to be flexible, adapt to changing conditions, anticipate changes, and often make decisions quickly; they cannot be risk adverse.
Second, developing a common vision often presents itself as the first major operational challenge leaders face in a collaboration. Having a common vision is especially critical in the very early implementation phases because this commonality helps avoid fragmentation and a solitary focus on problems. A common vision can help define relationships within the collaboration and facilitate a focus on outcomes. Vision, mission, and outcomes reinforce one another and provide clear direction to the collaboration. A good vision can help manage collaborations because it can simplify and environment that otherwise may become exceedingly complex. The ability of leaders to develop and maintain a shared vision can also build and sustain trust.
Finally, a collaboration requires a consensus style of decision making. Consensus is neither complete agreement nor majority vote but is a process in which everyone has their say and in which contrary viewpoints are fully addressed and then resolved. Saying that contrary viewpoints are fully aired and considered does not mean consensus decision making results in bland or conformist decisions or decisions of the lowest common denominator. Rather, a consensus agreement is an agreement that all or nearly all the partners can support while none fully oppose it.
To operate through consensus decision making, collaboration participants must think rationally, avoid time-consuming details, operate at an appropriate conceptual level, keep goals or the collaboration's purpose and mission always in mind to avoid parochialism and provide a basis for determining priorities, and establish appropriate time horizons. While it may be very difficult for a collaboration continually to adopt decisions that completely satisfy every partner, all can always accept the prevailing view. All partners support collaboration decisions even though the decisions may not be the alternatives most preferred by all partners. Because decisions are widely accepted and supported by the partners, collaboration participants are motivated to see the decision through to completion.
While consensus decision making is the most viable decision making style for a collaboration, it may not always work well--especially as a state collaboration facilitates the creation of a local collaboration and then engages that local collaboration. An alternative, albeit somewhat similar, kind of decision making is principled negotiation. Principled negotiation is not adversarial, win-lose negotiation in which one party's gains are another's loss. Rather, it is a bargaining process in which the sides try to resolve their differences by finding a set of goals or objectives that each accepts--a common ground. In principled negotiation, the two sides work in a context of mutual trust, have a positive relationship with one another, and have shared interests or common values. There is a zone of agreement that each side can accept.
In a principled negotiation, people are separated from the problem. The two sides negotiate more against a problem than each other. The problem becomes the focal point of the negotiation, which requires active listening. Similarly, focus must be on interests and not on positions. The intent is to find shared interests by engaging in positive relationships with the other side. Objectivity must be maintained and a contest of wills and an adversarial process avoided. Finally, creative options must be generated. Premature closure is perhaps the greatest enemy of principled negotiation. Thinking needs to remain divergent as long as possible; options need to be kept open and leaders on both sides need to challenge tendencies toward early closure. In this way, education--on and for both sides--is an important part of positional negotiation.
The discussion of facilitative leadership focused on the managing of relationships but also indicated the importance of managing the collaboration as a whole. While collaborations need several facilitative managers, it would be erroneous to conclude that all partners are equal or that there is no need for a lead manager. All collaborations need an entity or a person that will handle the overall management role.
This overall management role usually contains four functions. The collaboration manager is the focal point for communication. The manager needs to ensure that the partners are communicating appropriately and that the collaboration as a whole receives the appropriate kinds of communications. Second, the manager needs to ensure the maintenance of collaboration norms, such as attendance at meetings, starting and ending times, the circulation of an agenda, the use of consensus decision making--all the guidelines and rules of behavior that the collaboration partners agreed to at the beginning. The manager also needs to ensure that everyone participates and contributes, that there are no "free riders." Finally, the manager must be the repository of information about the collaboration and the performance of the partners.
In the private sector, the manager is often the first among equals--the partner that has the most resources, the partner that is key in the collaboration. In other cases, the collaboration hires a secretariat to perform these functions. In still other cases, the manager is the entity that mobilizes the collaboration, the entity that is the original spark behind the creation of the collaboration. In state agency collaborations, the manager is usually the agency that sparks the creation of the collaboration. Collaborations in which the mobilizer is not included among the partners, which often occurs when enthusiasm-generators are external to agencies that have resources and are central to complex problem solving, have a more difficult time determining or deciding on the manager. In such cases it may be appropriate for the mobilizer to serve as the secretariat for the collaboration.
The collaboration manager tends to face two difficulties or problems, especially if the manager is a collaboration partner. The first problem is that collaboration management is time consuming. Collaboration is time consuming overall and this becomes a problem for all partners who take on collaboration work without much or any relief from their permanent, on-going jobs. This situation is more problematic for the collaboration manager who takes on extra tasks. The collaboration manager must be able to find the resources to provide support staff for its critical communications responsibilities. It is nearly impossible to piecemeal or cobble together from existing staff the kind of attention that the collaboration manager's role requires, especially in regard to communication. Organizational constraints weigh heaviest on the managing agency. Every new collaboration requires senior management's attention and increases the difficulties of coordinating operations as more partners have to be consulted.
The second problem often faced by the collaboration manager is the disconnect that sometimes occurs between the partner with the key resources, often the partner that is key in mobilizing the start of the collaboration, and the partner that has the primary relationship with the client. For example, a community development agency may be the collaboration manager because the agency has the key resources and/or was the key mobilizer but if the collaboration is focusing on welfare dependency then the TANF agency has the client relationship. Pre-existing relationships between an agency and a client must be respectfully treated. In these instances, the agency that has the client relationship must have the lead responsibility in resolving differences between the collaboration and the client.
Operational Scope
One of the most difficult issues a collaboration must address concerns its operational scope. The operational scope of the a collaboration addresses three overlapping issues: (1) task definition, (2) task integration, and (3) skills melding. The operational scope of a collaboration answers such questions as What are the tasks the collaboration must undertake? Who does what tasks? What tasks are to be done jointly?
Partners may know what they want to accomplish collaboratively but they rarely know how to do it. Given the ambiguities that exist in all collaborations, task definition must be iterative because it is impossible all at once to fill in the details. No collaboration should try to develop a complete and extensive work program at the beginning of implementation.
Collaborations can take two steps that help define tasks. Perhaps the most important step is further to articulate and validate the collaboration's purpose--its value added--and its expected benefits. As the people involved in actually implementing the collaboration further define, sharpen, and validate the collaboration's purpose, objectives, and benefits they develop a better idea of what must be accomplished. To an extent, this is a transition process that moves from purpose to outcomes to outputs and then sketches the tasks and activities that will bring about outputs. The other step collaborations can take is to develop and implement fast feedback tasks--small, easy steps that help the collaboration partners gain confidence in working with one another and determine whether they are on the right path.
Most public sector collaborations are based at least in part on skills melding. Some tasks in the collaboration's set of tasks will combine or meld partner skills or competencies. But combining different skills is very difficult because one needs to understand skills in order to meld them, and this requires familiarity with the partners' skills and competencies. Gaining familiarity takes time, especially if the skills are tacit and their use emergent. Tacit skills or knowledge are gained through experience and are difficult to put into words. For example, it is difficult to tell someone how to ride a bicycle or ice skate. Emergent skills are skills that come out in use, they emerge as situations develop and responses made. With emergent skills, it is difficult to tell someone how to behave or how to act or what to do ahead of time because the appropriate response may very heavily depend on the details of the situation in which the skills are applied and these details cannot be determined ahead of time.
Many of the skills in public agency collaborations are tacit or emergent and are gained through years of experience, for example, in working with never-married female heads of households who live in poverty, or undertaking housing rehabilitation in poor residential neighborhoods, or dealing with the impact of land use changes on traffic generation or flow. In many other cases, the skills or competencies are not necessarily tacit or emergent but are explicit, but in very complicated ways. Sooner or later most public agency collaborations get around to programs. And programs, with their statutory, regulatory, and operational details, are not easily understood by others.
Given the use of acronyms and specialized language, partners often have at least an initial difficulty communicating with one another, much less being familiar with each other's skills and competencies. And in some programs that are not relatively new, say four or more years old, a vast array of detail--sometimes accreted over time implicitly to make the program impenetrable to outsiders--can be understood only with the greatest difficulty. Often a collaboration meeting can come to a standstill when the partner who has knowledge of a certain program is absent from the meeting because no one else has enough knowledge to know how the program can be used.
Gaining familiarity with others' skills and competencies requires partners to do their homework--they have to try to understand the key skills and competencies of others. One way to help achieve this is to try to codify, make explicit, as many tacit and emergent skills that one possibly can in a cost-effective way. In public collaborations, it is often helpful to spell out briefly the basic fundamentals of the partners' programs--the statutory and almost impossible-to-change characteristics. Usually, these basic fundamentals minimally circumscribe the use of the program compared to the regulatory, administrative, and operational details loaded onto the program by various administrators and managers, to say nothing of the impact of tradition or history.
Defining tasks and dealing with skills melding raises a major question: What is the nature and extent of the interface among partners? The collaboration's partners can largely determine the interface, thus it is amenable to collaboration design and redesign. The interface can be minimal and narrow (very few tasks are done jointly by the partners, most tasks are done independently by the partners; and almost no significant tasks are done jointly) or broad and extensive (nearly all tasks are done jointly by the partners, very few tasks are done independently by the partners; and nearly no independently done tasks are significant).
What determines how minimal and narrow or how broad and extensive the collaboration interface is? The answer depends in part on the answer to this question: To what extent does the collaboration's purpose require only output coordination or synchronization versus process integration? In other words, to what extent is a true melding of skills needed? Or is there a need only for coordination where each partner makes a contribution separately and simply hands it off to the other partners? Given the tasks that must be performed, where can each partner take full responsibility for a task and when must partners work together?
The answers to these questions depend on the collaboration's purpose and the skills and competencies of the partners. Output synchronization may be the primary requirement if the collaboration is facing a non-complex problem that can be solved through well-sequenced and connected outputs from each of the partners. But even here one must ask whether the collaboration's customers or clients will see a seamless delivery or discontinuities. Output synchronization is much easier to obtain on paper or in concept than it is in the concrete and specific. On the other hand, process integration tends to be required (1) when joint learning is important, (2) where there is hard-to-plan joint problem solving and/or the problem is complex, and (3) in the earliest stages of a collaboration.
A narrow, minimal interface has several advantages. First, it lessens, perhaps dramatically, the coordination and integration needs of the partners, which can save time and money. Second, it can help circumvent organizational culture conflicts. The sharing of tasks is often a source of conflict, and having more joint tasks than necessary can be very inefficient and cause a collaboration to collapse of its own weight. The downside of trying to maintain a narrow and minimal interface is that it is much more difficult to move from a minimal and narrow interface to a broad and extensive interface than vice-versa--and most collaborations will sooner or later require broad and extensive interfaces.
Studies of collaboration in the private sector suggest that when external competition is high, the collaboration tends to move to process integration, in part because of the importance of joint learning to beating competitors. In the public sector, agencies rarely have competition, so there may be a greater inclination for separate, autonomous tasks.
A joint task that can be done early in a collaboration, and one that if done early can be very helpful to a collaboration, is joint sensemaking. This is especially true if the collaboration is working in a particular geographical area. Joint sensemaking is joint learning about the current and future environment. Partners can be pushed apart if each partner makes its own observations, draws its own conclusions, and makes its own predictions. If one partner, for example, says A and B are the most critical things happening in the community, while another partner says X and Y, and if both these pairs are inconsistent the partners will be operating on very different wavelengths. And even worse scenario is if two partners agree that X and Y are the most critical factors and one thinks X and Y are positive, advantageous and the other things they are detrimental, negative.
Joint sensemaking can help build trust and shared understanding, develop common ground, and provide a more realistic basis for future decisions. Joint sensemaking requires using common data and clarifying and debating assumptions. Partners who engage in joint sensemaking need to be patient, and should not assume that partner views will quickly and automatically converge.
What if a collaboration finds its interface inappropriate or if a collaboration is finding it difficult to operate at the interface it believes it needs? One response is to decrease task demands by re-defining tasks so they require less interface. Often tasks can be divided into many smaller, more independent pieces, which can make the tasks more explicit and make it easier for them to be done independently. Another option is to improve the interface. One way to improve the interface is to increase the "bandwidth" or the effectiveness of the interface by providing training to partners is such areas as meeting facilitation, consensus and negotiated decision making, working in high performance teams, and so on. Using more face-to-face meetings and video conferencing may help. Another way to improve the interface, discussed in the next section, is to ensure there are frequent contacts and communications among the partners at multiple levels. Finally the collaboration can move to limit the many spinoffs--sites, groups, teams--that collaborations tend to generate. Coordinating three rings under the big tent is difficult enough, must less eight or nine.
Multiple Bridges
Collaborations should try to build multiple bridges for three reasons. Building multiple bridges means ensuring frequent direct contact and communication at three levels, the operational level (specialists and professionals communicating with one another), the executive or senior management level (which helps executives and agency leaders understand and share the value creation logic of the collaboration and sets the tone at lower levels), and the middle management level (where operational and strategic issues tend to be joined).
Having bridges built at these three levels can greatly improve the efficacy of a collaboration. As the collaboration proceeds through implementation the most active participants tend to be middle managers and operational personnel, although they are not simultaneously involved. At times during the collaboration snags will occur that require the intervention of senior managers, either in solving the problem or in having to acquiesce to the solution.
If the senior level bridge is not built the collaboration may find it difficult to access senior level managers or obtain their approval of necessary actions. Further, senior level managers of one partner can intervene with the senior level managers of another partner if necessary. If the senior managers don't have personal contact with one another, especially in regard to the collaboration, achieving this personal top-level to top-level interaction may become very difficult. Operational participants may occasionally find that they need to make some adjustments in their work load, assignments, or schedules with their supervisors. If their supervisors have no bridges to the collaboration, achieving these changes may be very difficult.
The general point relative to a collaboration is that multiple bridges can greatly help interface between or among partners and make the work of the collaboration much more effective. Truly active collaboration occurs when partners have developed structures, processes, and skills for bridging organizational and interpersonal differences. Multiple ties at multiple levels ensure greater communication and cooperation. Collaboration at one level facilitates collaboration at other levels. Deploying more rather than fewer people to relationship activities helps ensure that partners' resources are fully tapped and their goals and needs represented. Organizations with strong communications among functions and widely shared information tend to have more productive external relationships.
A second rationale for multiple bridge building concerns issues within the partner organizations. Collaborations, perhaps especially among state agencies, rarely involve all the units within each partner organization. While the unit or units within a partner organization that is heavily involved in the collaboration may find the collaboration's vision, mission, and tasks very compatible, other units in the organization may not. Further, a collaboration may change relationships, for better or for worse, between the unit directly involved in the collaboration and non-involved units. Inter-unit disagreements can adversely affect the performance of a collaboration. How the non-involved units perceive the collaboration can affect their behavior. If these units, for example, think that the collaboration signals a merger or major reorganization or otherwise may mean the loss of power, status, or jobs they can resist, perhaps even sabotage the collaboration. Multiple bridges can help ensure that there is an organization-wide commitment to the collaboration and either make the collaboration ineffective or shorten the life of the collaboration. And as discussed later, multiple bridges can facilitate inter-organizational learning.
Third, multiple bridges can also provide the redundancy that helps collaborations overcome problems with personnel turnover. Collaborations, unless they quickly fail, last long enough to experience personnel turnover issues among the core partners--among operational/technical personnel as well as mid-level and senior-level managers. If multiple bridges are not built, the entry to new personnel into a collaboration may be problematic.
The collaboration's core partners, especially the collaboration manager, have a responsibility to help new entrants understand the purpose, history, roles/relationships, and status of the collaboration. But this learning about and need to obtain a new commitment to the collaboration will be much more effective if these discussions are complemented by similar discussion among personnel in the home organization of the partner experiencing the personnel turnover--if other people in the organization are familiar with and committed to the organization as a result of multiple bridges. Further, multiple bridges are especially helpful when turnover in senior management occurs. Mid-level managers active and committed to the collaboration can help inform and indeed sell the collaboration to new senior managers as can senior managers in the core partner organizations. But this can happen only if multiple bridges have been built.
Communications
Everything said to this point about collaboration management acknowledges the importance of communication. Lack of communication or mis-communication may be the most common reason for the gradual dissipation of collaborations. Communications issues include the kinds of information that must be communicated, how communications should occur, and who should communicate with whom.
Using communications media. Communications media are generally viewed through a rich-lean continuum. Richer media, face-to-face communication, for example, are considered the richest media because they permit the use of more complex language, support more information, are more flexible, and allow more interactivity and socialization than lean media, such as letters. Leaner media tend to be less expensive and much less time consuming--especially when face-to-face communication requires overcoming space (when partners are geographically distributed) and when the communication must go to many people.
Rich media are no better than lean media and vice-versa. Rather, the nature of the media should best match the context and purposes for which communication is occurring. Situations and tasks with high uncertainty and ambiguity need rich media while situations and tasks with low uncertainty and low ambiguity can use lean media. Collaboration management should ensure that the appropriate media are used and that the partners experience neither communication surfeit or communication deficit.
When or how should a collaboration use rich media? Collaboration design and the first phases of collaboration implementation should emphasize rich communication, especially face-to-face communication. Face-to-face communication helps build trust, so a heavy and early dose is important at the start of a collaboration, especially when initial trust levels among partners are relatively low. Developing clear and mutually accepted vision, mission, and purpose statements are complex tasks that demand face-to-face communication. In these tasks, rich media enable rationales to be shared. Additionally, complex collective tasks, where contributions from several individuals are needed and where outcomes are predisposed to different interpretation, require face-to-face exchanges to achieve collective interpretation (which occurs when all the participants have shared understandings of the similarities and differences of meaning). The cascading transitions of collaborations also require rich media. The exchange among partners of complex knowledge, which will happen off and on during a collaboration, requires rich media.
Communicating information that is otherwise complex or difficult to verbalize, such as tacit information, requires using rich media. Face-to-face communication is especially valuable because it provides the capacity for interruption and feedback, and can be particularly important when metaphor, intonation, emotion, and gesture are important to conveying information. But as implied in the earlier discussion of operational scope and teams, the inappropriate use of rich media, especially face-to-face communication, can be very burdensome when their use is unwarranted.
The rich-lean concept of communications media was developed prior to the advent of sophisticated electronic communications. The application of this concept to electronic media is just now being systemically investigated. Early evidence suggests that in some cases electronic communications can be rich and even a substitute for face-to-face communication. For example, white boards are sometimes shown to be more effective than face-to-face communication for brainstorming (apparently, people are less reserved and more readily make contributions), while email is sometimes shown to be as almost as effective as face-to-face communication when its users are comfortable with both the technology and the other users (especially as they share mental models or common cultures with other participants). One of the unique values of email systems is that they effortlessly document even fleeting communications. Many computer mediated communications are valuable because they are asynchronous: people need not be together at the same time in order to receive the communications.
Nonetheless, even though partners may be very comfortable with computer mediated communication and with one another, collaborations should start with and periodically, if not regularly, use face-to-face communication, in part because there is a tendency for people to try to read more than what was intended in such electronic media as email and asynchronous discussions. This may be more true in the public sector, which tends to be further behind much of the private sector in the use of video conferencing, white boards, and discussion groups.
Communication strategies that support different media, including computer mediated communication, and permit users to move easily among and share them may be most appropriate for collaborations. Complex problem solving usually needs to be done face to face, while distributing non-complex information can use less rich media and be done asynchronously. Over time, a collaboration usually can rely less on face-to-face communication. To the extent that the technologies are available and useable by participants, most collaborations will benefit by having anytime, anyplace, multi-media inter-connectivity across a constantly evolving set of relationships.
Situational awareness. Using rich communication media to develop clear and mutually agreed to vision, mission, and purpose statements, to develop and sustain trust, and to share complex knowledge and information is critical to the success of a collaboration. In these instances, the communication is about the focus or subject of the collaboration, such as welfare dependency or poverty. Another important focal point for communication, however, deals with the interactions regarding the subject and the process of creating it, i.e., the process of producing the outputs and outcomes necessary to address successfully the vision and mission of the collaboration. Unfortunately, communication for this purpose, for situational awareness, is too often overlooked by collaborations, probably because it is seen as mundane, perhaps even as unnecessary detail. While all partners should promote situational awareness, the collaboration manager is particularly responsible for situational awareness communication.
Broadly speaking, situational awareness is about ensuring that all collaboration participants know in a timely manner what each other participant is doing and what the group as a whole is doing. More specifically, it deals with informing about the activities participants are undertaking, giving feedback to and acknowledging participant contributions, providing a context about and the history of shared objects (shared objects are process products of collaborations, such as meeting agendas, minutes of meetings, action lists, timelines), making sure that participants know where the collaboration is in its overall work program and its progress toward accomplishing its mission (the collaboration should be aware of itself as a dynamic whole and always be aware of its mission and its progress in completing that mission), and bringing new participants into an already established collaboration.
Many guidelines or points can be made regarding situational awareness. Having no or incomplete awareness of the activities of other participants can cause the dissipation of a collaboration. If people are unaware of what others are doing and have little sense of where the collaboration is in its entirety (What phase are we in? How much have we accomplished? How much more is there yet to do? What key tasks remain? What are the problems or issues we are facing?) they will become disoriented or lose interest and the collaboration will lose cohesiveness. People need to know where in its life cycle the collaboration is, what their own next task is, and how this task fits into the overall mission of the collaboration in order to pace their involvement as well as to guide their participation. Situational awareness becomes very important when the environment of the collaboration begins to change rapidly or unpredictably.
Participants who receive no feedback, especially no acknowledgment, of their participation tend to withdraw. The need for acknowledgment becomes particularly important when the tasks are related to abstract or strategic knowledge. The feedback and acknowledgment also help participants realize that no one participant is dominating the collaboration. Shared or coordination objects must be easily and routinely shared. Not regularly communicating shared objects and then trying to compensate for this by providing a host of them all at once can be deadly because it can cause cognitive overload--there is too much to digest, and people become discouraged. New participants in an established collaboration are especially subject to this kind of overload. People will use shared objects only if they have some sense of its context--What is this? Why do I have it? What's next. Archiving information in ways in which a participant can asynchronously access the information is especially valuable in long-lasting collaborations that deal with complex issues. Long-lasting and complex collaborations, especially those with a large number of partners, should consider establishing an intranet for the collaboration.
Collaboration participants, especially the collaboration manager, must understand that when someone's interaction value becomes negative (that is, the cost of participating outweighs the value of participating) that person is likely to withdraw from or lessen participation in the collaboration. A natural information entropy exists in collaborations that produces incoherence and/or cognitive overload. Appropriately effecting situational awareness can overcome this natural entropy.
Different communications media should be used and users should be able to move among them. For example, a collaboration manager may disseminate minutes of a meeting as a file attached to email, but these minutes should also be distributed via mail or fax because some participants may well use and rely on email and others may make minimal (or no) use of email. Collaboration participants, and again especially the collaboration manager, needs understand the importance of shared objects, such as agendas and meeting minutes (as described in Appendix B) and also of communicating in the interim of meetings. Inter-meeting communication becomes more important the further the collaboration progresses as does informal communication. Always relying almost entirely on formal communication is another mistake the collaborations often make. Some collaboration communication, especially as the collaboration progresses, must be spontaneous where people informally pass on information, share insights, and maintain buy-in. Tacit knowledge, for example, is best communicated informally.
The Cascading Nature of Collaborations
Sooner or later, nearly all collaborations cascade out from their mobilizers and initial core partners to involve other participants and, usually, other locations, and often spin off other collaborations. For example, a state agency collaboration may start off involving nearly wholly senior managers, who then eventually give way to primarily to middle-level managers and operational specialists and professionals. These collaboration participants may then begin to work with local government officials and community representatives, who then may form their own collaboration. This state to local cascading may occur in more than one part of the state. Collaboration partners must remember that each cascading represents at least a miniature forming stage, although each cascade is in a real sense a representation or extension of the initial collaboration.
When new people become centrally involved they may not share in the collaboration's vision; they may have less rapport with one another than the senior managers or collaboration initiators may have had with one another; they may be less skillful at facilitative management and have less capacity in interpersonal skills. One of the biggest changes may occur when operational personnel become involved. Operational people tend to be judged or evaluated solely on their primary responsibility, which may have little to do with the specific mission and tasks of the initial collaboration. Also, as the collaboration cascades to operations or into localities and communities differences in aut