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Swimming with Sharks: Managing Strategic Change through Inter-organizational Collaboration
If you are involved in a change project working with a diverse range of organizations then beware! Behind the good intentions of collaborative initiatives often lie hidden agendas, minimal commitment, confusing language and dominating people. Participants are torn between representing the needs of their organization and being a partner in the process. This tension is described by one collaborator, in a study by Cynthia Hardy, Tom Lawrence and Nelson Phillips*, as like “swimming with sharks - they don’t always want to feed, but you need to know they’re there”.
And yet, managers are increasingly invited to jump into shark infested waters. Collaboration between organizations is seen as the effective strategy to gain the knowledge and resources to solve complex and intractable problems - whether its issues around globalization or sustainable development.
The normal advice for managers is to grin and bear it. Work on building trust, find common ground and keep communicating. But, Hardy, Lawrence and Phillips suggest there is a better way. Their study of a collaborative initiative involving pharmaceutical companies and members of the HIV/AIDS community identified the importance of keeping the tension within the collaborative relationship.
Why? They argue that it is in the struggle to be both representative of an organization and collaborator that change and innovation is possible. Managers who are able to navigate a course which doesn’t suck them into focusing solely on the needs of their own organization or the needs of the collaborative group will actually get things done. This requires balancing four essential tensions in a multi-party collaboration: interest, identification, coherence and contribution.
By studying the conversations of collaborators, the researchers argue that successful collaboration involves a series of ongoing tensions, which need to be managed but not managed out of the process. To do so requires collaborative conversations with specific characteristics:
- Conversations need to move participants from indifference to a genuine interest in the issue while avoiding obsession with the collaboration
- Conversations that create a shared identity without developing an unhealthy over-identification that would lead participants to neglect the interests of their home organizations
- Conversations that motivate contribution to joint problem-solving and innovation, avoiding the tendency toward coercion by the most powerful participants, and the equally problematic tendency toward inward-looking collusion
Sounds difficult? It is, but not impossible. The key is to know where to look when problems arise:
- if your problem is the level of interest, look at emotion in your conversations – too little can lead to indifference, while too much can spark obsession
- if the problem is the collaboration’s identity, look at the altruism of participants – a real lack can stifle development of a shared identity, while too much can lead to over-identification
- if the problem involves the contribution of participants, take a look at the collaboration’s power dynamics – concentrated power can lead to coerced outcomes, while a lack of politics and influence inside the process is a good sign of collaboration having turned into collusion
In other words, whilst swimming with sharks has its dangers you are more likely to survive and innovate than swimming with friendly dolphins!
To read the full article: “Swimming with sharks: creating strategic change through multi-sector collaboration” was published by the International Journal of Strategic Change Management, Volume 1, (1/2) in 2006 (Hardy, C, Lawrence, T.B. & Phillips, N.)
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Tom Lawrence, our editor, is the Weyerhaeuser Professor of Change Management at SFU.Read Tom's Posts
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