Anyone who has ever worked in a team knows that collaboration comes with many challenges but can also be deeply rewarding. The extreme cases, both in the challenges and reward potential, are collaborations with large groups of people (such as communities) or between deeply different actors (such as tri-sector engagements). Over the past years, I have had the chance to explore and advice a number of such collaborations, which has led me to experiment and refine a framework and approach for tackling one of the key challenges:
How do we make decisions and govern trade-offs between stakeholders or teams who have a lot to win by working together, yet have their own individual needs and objectives?
Before diving into the framework, let me give you a bit of context on four of the experiences that have informed its development, so as to highlight both its potential and use cases.
Use Cases
One of the first complex collaborations I got involved with was Crossmodalism — a community aiming to bring together artists, scientists, designers, and entrepreneurs to encourage collaborative projects leading to cross-pollination and innovation. Crossmodalism is a self-governed community, meaning that the community gathers around a platform put up by a core group of its members that is open to participation from the community at large.
The challenge here had two main dimensions. 1) The core group, reflecting the community, was deeply diverse. It encompassed a chef, a pianist, a perfumer, and an experimental psychology researcher, among others. The degree of diversity in world-views and values (especially related to money), made it particularly difficult to drive consensus or even consent for key decisions. 2) There was a strong desire to serve the will of the community, and a such, transparency and community-wide input became additional operational requirements.
Then there is Sandbox — an international members association and community with over 1500 members spread across more than 50 countries. Sandbox has a complex history around governance, where the community was at some point re-established under a separate brand and leadership only to regain its name a few years later. Since that episode, and for the past 3 years, Sandbox had been governed with a very traditional structure composed of a Chair, a Treasurer, and a Secretary. This structure presented numerous challenges as it concentrated a tremendous amount of responsibility in a small and under-resourced group of people, and offered little guidance for which decisions the leadership could make on behalf of the community and which decisions required community-wide input. Both challenges eventually led to the collapse of the leadership team and governance structure and a subsequent project to redesign the governance model for the community.
The third case is Convergencia — an initiative to develop a depolarising agenda for Colombia by gathering business, social, political, religious, and community leaders to identify the key topics their communities care about and, within all the discrepancies of opinion, identify the points of convergence. Convergencia was launched by 6 influential leaders including United Nations’ director for Colombia and the ex-Minister for the Environment. Their challenge was finding a viable option to give a voice and a vote regarding the future of the project to all the leaders who participated in the workshops to ensure buy-in and be consistent with the project’s values of participation, dialogue, and bottoms-up organisation.
And finally, we have the Human Centred Co-Innovation Forum (HCCIF) that was discussed between LSEE (a consulting arm of the London School of Economics) and Good Rebels (a multinational digital consultancy). HCCIF aimed to create a neutral ground for 10 to 20 organisations to gather and discuss how consumer-centrism can be expanded to include the wellbeing and alignment with co-creators (i.e. employees) and the communities where the different organisations operate. In this case, the main challenge was around creating a decision-making framework for the founding members and later joiners that would ensure an appealing value proposition by reducing risks for reputational damage and capital loss and facilitate a fruitful collaboration.
These four cases have commonalities around involving multiple stakeholders with different and occasionally polarising objectives, and the possibility for mutual benefit should collaborations be achieved. However, they all had significant differences in terms of the expertise of their members, the capital resources available, the number of stakeholders, and the ultimate mission of the groups.
The Framework
Far from being a panacea, the following framework and approach, however, does offer a powerful system to articulate the relationships between stakeholders in complex collaborations.
The approach starts by developing a common understanding of the shared identity and vision. This is accomplished through structured dialogue between the multiple participants, in convergent phases where concrete definitions for history, purpose, values, and finally vision are developed by a small group, and divergent phases where these definitions are shared with the wider group for input and feedback. Initially, this process is rather intensive as multiple quick iterations are accomplished, until a sense of general consensus is achieved. At this point, the process does not stop but rather can be made less intensive (less frequent) and we can move to step two.
In the second step, we look at the wider operating model and governance framework. Similar to the first step, the essence of the process happens in alternating phases of convergence and divergence, where dialogue is facilitated by bringing tools from Systems Thinking’s field of Cybernetics (the VSM), traditional management (RAPI, RAPIDEST, and related), and more recent research from the field of Political Science on Poly-Centric Governance of the Commons (the works of V. & E. Ostrom are an excellent reference). These tools allow the group to differentiate between and concentrate their attention on the essential areas where decisions need to be taken. By separating between multiple areas for decision-making, which have different requirements (e.g. deciding on tactics vs vision vs strategy), the group can develop a process with the optimal amount of complexity or speed by centralising (e.g. through delegation) or decentralising (e.g. by allowing each autonomy), and varying the degree of involvement and need for consensus (e.g. consensus vs democratic voting vs consent). This process, as well, should become a recurring mechanism where the group can iterate and enable constant improvement.
In the third step, we focus on developing the capacity of the team to manage the frequency and optimise the format of the multiple structured discussions from steps one and two to continue happening. For this, I find facilitation protocols to be quite useful(including format inspiration from proven self-management systems such as Sociocracy 3.0 and Holacracy, as well as Design Thinking). Essentially, in this step we want to enable the group to optimise its own time between the multiple areas that are required for effective collaboration and high performance.
After completing the three steps, the group has in place all the necessary mechanisms to self-organise, avoid major governance risks, and constantly improve. However, there are two slightly more granular areas that still require a considerable amount of attention and to which I have occasionally been asked to contribute to encourage coherence and continuity:
- Embedding the principles developed during the discussions of step 1 (Identity) into the criteria and process to include new members into the group.
- And accompanying the process to develop a public interface coherent with the governance and operating model the group has developed.
The Outcome
As previously mentioned, this framework does not aim to solve all the challenges of a complex collaboration (anyone claiming that a single framework can is delusional). However, several stakeholders of the multiple initiatives that have gone through this process have manifested profound satisfaction, primarily in the following areas:
- The process to develop a shared identity and vision sped up decision-making, was key to find a solution in numerous subsequent discussion, and also led members to face their challenges with a sense of shared purpose and community.
- Segmenting the areas for decision-making brought clarity on the role that each stakeholder was able and expected to play, thus reducing misunderstandings and unpleasant surprises, and facilitating a collegial mood and efficient work.
- Bringing further attention to the structure itself of the discussions made the stakeholders grow in self-awareness and changed their standards for what an effective meeting should feel like. It kick-started a journey of improvement.
- Opening up a discussion about rhythms and cycles led to a realisation of how disorganised, and often ineffective, some of them had been. This realisation led to multiple experiments and iterations with both formats and frequency until better combinations were reached.