Everyone seems to be seeking to collaborate to tackle life’s difficult problems. Whether it is managing water, planning cities, creating policy, developing strategies, collaboration is increasingly seen as the necessary process. Yet I feel we often overlook some important components or ‘units’ of collaboration when seeking to work together.

What is a unit of collaboration? It is simply a way to picture a subset of relationships, where collaboration will be important. Imagine a project manager inside a local government authority tasked with improving water quality in a much-loved and much-stressed local catchment. Being smart our manager realises that Council alone can’t affect change across the catchment, so success will only come from collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders to create and implement solutions together. This realisation drives a number of process, all focussed on what will it take to create a collaborative group comprising a cross-section of stakeholders from across the catchment.

Right here is one of the units of collaboration; a specific component of the whole system that must learn to work together if the project is to succeed. This unit of collaboration is probably the most obvious. After all, if we are going to work together to improve our catchment it is clear that we need to get catchment stakeholders in the room.

In this situation it is easy to focus is on how to set up and support such a collaborative group. In doing so it is also easy to overlook other units of collaboration, putting at risk everything our project manager is seeking to achieve.

There are multiple additional sets of relationships or ‘units of collaboration’ that are equally important. In the case of our Council example they could include:

  1. The project team unit, collaborating around questions such as: how will we work together to make this happen, and do so collaboratively?
  2. The management unit comprising the project manager and her boss, and her boss’s boss, who collaborate on questions such as: how will we meet the needs of the Exec and ensure the authorising environment on this project, while ensuring we walk the collaborative talk?
  3. The branch or division unit, who collaborate on questions such as: how will we resource this project internally, given its implications for the whole team?
  4. The organisational unit, collaborating on questions such as: how will we bring the assets and strategy teams together on this journey so that implementation is smoothly integrated?
  5. The governance unit comprising elected reps and senior bureaucrats, facing collaborative questions such as: how will we all get our fingerprints on this project so that there are no surprises for any of us?

Each of these can be considered a ‘unit’ of collaboration and each is critical to the success of the project as a whole. Yet we often overlook them, for a number of reasons, including:

  • It can be scary and difficult to try to improve collaboration up the chain of command;
  • The need to improve collaboration in these units is invisible. We often just don’t see it so we continue to focus outwards;
  • Working on some of these relationships implies a need to change how we think and behave, and that is hard. We would rather not go there. Much easier to work on our external relationships than our internal relationships and processes.
  • The business as a whole is not really interested in collaboration and unprepared to put any effort into understanding it and learning how to do it better. Much more comfortable to pretend that collaboration is only about how that project team works with those stakeholders.

Of course the consequence of ignoring these important relationships is that we never really collaborate. Despite the best efforts and intentions of our project manager, she is severely hamstrung by the lack of collaborative capability within the organisational system. Her relationships with external stakeholder may be good but the ability of the organisation to back up the talk with a different way of supporting and implementing the catchment project means that business as usual continues to rule. How could it be otherwise?

What to do about this? The key finding is how important it is to focus on the smallest units of collaboration, just as much as the larger, more obvious and external units. Every collaborative project or process is made up of multiple components over multiple scales. The smaller tend to be less visible, often more difficult, easier to ignore, but if we are serious about working differently with others, we have to commit to that at every scale across the project, whether internal or external. This realisation lies at the heart of our most popular capability building program, Collaboration Builder, which helps people get results while working on their external and internal collaboration.

So, what are your units of collaboration and how are you ensuring that collaboration is happening in every one?