Issues in Inter-organizational Collaboration

Suppose you have multiple organizations interested in collaborating with one another. They each have similar—though not identical—missions and many common areas of interest, such as events, fundraising, outreach, education, research, and public relations. Let's further suppose that there's considerable geographic dispersal of the players, which complicates the desire for face-to-face meetings. How would you set it up to succeed?

One model is to put out the call for each of the partners to identify reps from their organization for each area of interest, encourage the reps to get together with their counterparts and see what happens. There is a simplicity and purity about this approach, but it tends to be fairly chaotic, and hit or miss about who answers the call, and how things move forward.

It works better, I think, if there's an identified coordinator—a person (or persons) whose job it is to call the meeting at which the reps gather, who sees to it that everyone knows about the meeting and how to access it (we're talking web-based meetings or conference calls), makes sure there's a draft agenda, that everyone gets to speak, that minutes are being taken, and that the conversation is forward moving.

Note that none of these coordinator duties needs to be coupled with a personal agenda. That is, they can all be performed neutrally. While I get it that in Western culture we're conditioned to think of the person in charge of coordinating and running meetings to be someone with power to control (or at least steer) outcomes—think of Congressional or Senate committee chairs to grasp my point—one of the most salient features of cooperative culture is the purposeful separation of facilitation from stakeholder.

So a key point in collaborative dynamics is whether you have a coordinator at all, and, if you do, how that person (or person) gets selected. If you offer to fill that role without being asked first, there can be suspicion about your motivation. Is it to control, to enhance productivity, or both? Having no coordinator addresses the power concerns (that the coordinator, or the organization with whom they're associated, will have an advantage in the direction taken by the collaboration), yet at the expense of efficiency (without portfolio, reps will be hesitant to step into the void to perform coordinating tasks—for fear of stepping on toes or being labeled power mongers).

In an anarchistic ideal, every rep would be fully actualized: willing and able to perform coordinator duties as the situation calls for them. But I've never seen that model work well. People can be reps—and good ones—without having the bandwidth to perform coordinating tasks. Perhaps none of the reps in a given interest area will have the time or inclination to coordinate. Or maybe the reps who volunteer to handle certain coordinating tasks are not seen as capable. Now what?
 
Of course, the reps could discuss that and determine collectively how to self-organize and fill coordination roles, which includes the possibility of reaching outside their current configuration. Can you count on that happening? Probably not. Yet rather than predicting that it won't, I'm suggesting that if you recognize the need for baseline coordination, then, as a partner organization you may want a proposal on the table at the outset, establishing that each focus group will address a set of standard questions about how they will conduct business—note that I am not saying that different interest groups need have the same answers, or that the collaborative groups need to operate the same way that parent groups do:

o  Who will take the lead on scheduling meetings?

o  Who will serve as a point of contact for the group (the person to whom inquiries are directed)?

o  Who is authorized to be a spokesperson for the group?

o  Will the group operate with a list serve, and, if so, who will manage it?

o  How will reps be notified when meetings have been scheduled and the protocol for accessing them?

o  If the group is frustrated by a rep's performance (missing meetings, not coming prepared, acting stridently, etc.) what is the protocol for addressing those frustrations, including the possibility of informing the rep's parent body what's happening and possibly requesting that the rep be replaced?

o  What will be the standards for minutes, how will it be determined who will take them, how will they be disseminated, will they be available to folks outside the group, how can they be modified, and how will they be archived?

o  Will meetings be facilitated, and, if so, how will it be determined who will facilitate?

o  How will meeting agendas be drafted?

o  To what extent are reps authorized to make decisions binding on their constituent organizations?

o  If the group develops proposals, what can the group implement on its own and when do reps need to consult with their organizations? If proposals need to be shopped among the partners, who will manage this process?

o  When can the group proceed in the absence of participation from a partner group (what happens when reps miss meetings)?

o  What are the reporting standards for informing partners what the group is discussing?

o  What is the protocol for inviting additional partners to join the group?

o  How will the group make decisions?
 
While this list is not exhaustive, it's comprehensive enough to give you a good feel for what I'm talking about.

If you reflect on this set of questions, you'll observe that all of them have probably been addressed by each partner organization to establish how they'll function internally. None of this should be virgin territory. I suggest you think of it as extending what you already know to be helpful at home into your work with others. While there can a certain amount of impatience with tackling process considerations when an interest group initially gathers (it tends to be much sexier jumping into ideas for joint projects, which were the inspiration for collaborating in the first place), my experience has been that operating in the fog bank of murky process quickly erodes enthusiasm for the joint effort. If you want your group's work to have legs, you have to provide shoes.

While it may make sense, in the name of efficiency, to ask one partner group to take the lead on handling coordination functions (perhaps by virtue of access to greater resources or staff experience), at the very least all collaborative groups can walk through the checklist of organizational functions I've delineated above to keep things rolling.

Buoys in the Transition Fog

For the last four decades I've been in the community business—investigating it, creating it, living it, promoting it, and articulating it. In the last several years that primary focus has morphed to include a focus on cooperative culture (creating a greater sense of community, rather than limiting my scope to residential intentional community) and sustainability (figuring out how to define and manifest a high-quality lifestyle that could be accessible to everyone on the planet). If nothing else, it means I'll never run out of interesting things to do.

To me, the bridge between my community focus and my sustainability focus is broad and obvious. But I've come to understand that the relevance of my many years plying the waters of intentional community is not so clear to those steaming toward sustainability from a more mainstream port of call. While community is the water I swim in, I can look like a pretty exotic fish to many of the newly converted, who are entering the seas of sustainability for the first time—to the point where they're not so sure it's a good idea to have me and my ilk as a pilot for their journey.

At its best, community entails learning how to collaborate—how people with common interests and a future together can come to agreement about how to proceed, even when they start from different viewpoints, have different personalities, and prefer different strategies.

No matter how you slice it, sustainable lifestyles are going to require a higher degree of sharing than most of us are used to—there just aren't enough resources to go around at the rate were used to controlling and consuming them. While I'm not predicting this will lead to everyone living in intentional communities, I think what we're learning in the crucibles of intentional community about how to handle the social dynamics of sharing is absolutely germane to the future that's ahead for all but the über rich. 

By "social dynamics," I'm referring to how to equitably sort out who gets to use a shared resource when multiple people want it at the same time; what will be the standard of maintenance and care for shared resources; how will you navigate frustrations when you don't think these things are going well? In community, we deal with this stuff all the time. (Not always well, mind you, but we're learning, and that experience is hard-earned gold for the path ahead.)

In addition, when you digest where upward spiraling gas prices are heading, you have to anticipate a future that's based more on what you have locally than what you can buy from far away. It means developing a stable, more self-sufficient local culture based on mutual reliance. While no one is advocating a return to medieval feudalism, we will need to learn better how to make common cause, and how better to make room for outliers in our neighborhoods.

Intentional communities are R&D centers for learning how to do these things. To be sure, some are learning faster than others—it isn't all smooth sailing—yet we've been able to significantly advance our understanding about how to have constructive conversations among people holding strongly different opinions about vital concerns. And these skills export well into more mainstream situations where there is increasing need for their application. We have to find ways to solve problems that don't rely on outspending others, building higher fences, voting people off the island, or simply moving away.

Thus, when we witness the dramatic surge in sustainability programs among university curricula (like mushrooms after a spring rain), and how many Transition Towns have popped up across the country (there are currently 143 initiatives in the US, distributed across 35 states, focusing on developing positive responses to the challenges of peak oil, climate change, and economic instability), the FIC gets excited about the potential for collaboration. We figure intentional communities are already wrestling with how to integrate sustainable practices into everyday life: ecologically, socially, and economically.

In the university context, we can offer field trips, guest speakers, and adjunct faculty to programs who want to hear, see, and taste live examples of what their studying. In the Transition Town context, we can help groups learn how to bring together disparate stakeholders—people who are not used to talking with one another, such as business people and tree huggers—and find agreement that respects all parties.

That said, it's been frustrating how little headway we've been able to make (so far) with sustainability programs and Transition Town groups when offering assistance. We have not yet found the way to pitch our skill and experience in such a way that they're attractive to these groups. While we're not giving up, it's both mysterious and humbling that we're having so much trouble penetrating the fog, and appearing as buoys to help navigate safe passage to the harbor of local, sustainable practices.

Meanwhile, we'll keep ringing our bell and hope that a favorable breeze will blow some traffic our way.