Collaborate?

By Curtis Ogden

Collaboration. We keep hearing the word in these troubled times, even in the echoes of history. I just stumbled across this quote from Charles Darwin - "In the long history of humankind, those who learn to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." All well and good, but what on Earth does it mean to collaborate?

At a recent training with some of Boston's brightest nonprofit leaders, my colleague and I heard once again the call to collaborate. One person spoke up and said, "We always say this, but if you look at our track record of collaboration, it is dismal. Do we really want to do this? Do we even know what we are talking about?" I came away thinking that while people may have a general (and rightful) sense that they need to work better together, they are uncertain and halting about how they should proceed.

Clearly collaboration has numerous forms and potential outcomes. Perhaps it is best to work backwards. What is it that we are attempting to do by collaborating? Build community/relationships? Be more efficient? Come up with better solutions to the complex problems we face? Become engines of innovation? Achieve greater scale and reach? Mitigate risk? Depending upon our desired outcome(s) there can be very different ways of proceeding. To build community . . . create opportunities, media, and ample time for people to connect, share, get to know one another, find common ground. To be more efficient, focus on more structured processes to build agreements and ways of strategically and creatively sharing resources (whether that is back office functions or swapping services). To address complexity, create open space, foster dissent, or decentralize participants electronically to then post and build upon ideas in a centralized workplace in pursuit of the very best solution. To innovate, make sure to bring cognitively diverse thinkers together. To extend reach, think carefully about how to bring together and knit networks with known hubs/connectors. To mitigate risk, be transparent and intentional about who you bring together, how you bring them together, and what you intend to accomplish.

Of course, there is much overlap between these goals and processes, and yet we also see much confusion about what works best in what situations. Overall, it seems we would all be well served by being more nuanced about what we mean by and expect of collaboration. The conversation continues . . .