Facilitating collaboration – dilemmas and paradox

Carol Sherriff CPF

What type of collaboration do you/might you facilitate?

• Join with two or three other people and share your experience

All collaboration is relational

Relationships between companies begin, grow, and develop—or fail—much like

relationships between people.

Rosabeth Moss KanterErnest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard

Business School. She is also director and chair of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Meeting and getting attached

Love at first sight? Attraction? Two organisations meet, are attracted, and explore their compatibility.

Relationship becomes serious. They meet the family, draw up plans and close the deal.

Engagement and partnership

In phase three, the newly partnered companies, like couples setting up housekeeping, discover they have different ideas about how the business should operate.

In phase four, the partners devise mechanisms for bridging those differences and develop techniques for getting along or….

Long term relationship

Each organisation discovers that it has changed internally as a result of its accommodation to the ongoing collaboration.

….they part company.

Facilitator as relationship counsellor

• Facilitators often call in at the start of a relationship like a friend when the parties do not know each other

• Or at times of problems, challenges and trouble

• These are often the points at which the relationship is changing

• Helpful for facilitators to diagnose the stage of the relationship

Paradoxes and dilemmas

• Collaboration and competition – similarity makes collaboration easier but the organisations are more likely to be competitors, difference makes collaboration more challenging but there is less competition

• Protection and Integration - Give things up and hold onto them

• Collaborative leadership and collaborative thug – we are the good guys and the bad guys

‘The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage’ by C. Huxham and S. Vangen, Routledge 2005.

Collaborative leader/Collaborative Thug?

Research by Huxham and Vangen finds that leading successful collaboration requires• ‘the spirit of collaboration. Activities of this sort are

highly facilitative and are concerned with embracing, empowering, involving and mobilizing members. However, the same people are also engaged in activities that, on the face of it, are much less collaborative. Many of them are adept at manipulating agendas and playing the politics. We have characterized these kinds of activities as being towards collaborative thuggery…’

• ‘those who lead (collaborative ventures) more successfully seem to operate from both perspectives – the spirit of collaboration and towards collaborative thuggery – and to switch between them, often carrying out both types of leadership in the same act.’

What is your experience?

What should facilitators do when called in to a collaborative partnership• Diagnose the stage of the relationship, what are likely to be the

benefits and the challenges?• Introduce the collaborative partners to the paradoxes and

dilemmas they are likely to face• Choose appropriate facilitation techniques

• Solution focus• In your shoes• Consensus building• Conflict resolution

The collaborative journey

Sources

Kanter, R. M. (1994) "Collaborative Advantage: The Art of Alliances." Harvard Business Review, June 1994Huxham, C. and Vangen, S., (2005) The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage’ by C. Huxham and S. Vangen, Routledge.