
At a basic level Collaborative Partnerships involves individuals coming together acknowledging each other’s skills and experiences and working towards an agreed outcome.
Some practical learning from experience:
So we developed a model for collaboration, but what we found when talking and working with people was that the model didn’t explain ‘how’ you go setting up a strong collaborative approach. The model has a set of principles and a step by step guide, however it is possible to simply jump from one step to the next stating that’s it’s all been done in collaboration! Of course we all start out with the best of intentions, but often deadlines and the sheer logistics of getting everybody in a room take over and decisions end up being made a little less together than was agreed at the beginning of a project.
Each of the tools below are useful for any group to be aware of a they provide and group vocabulary and agreement on ‘how’ we will work together, and ‘how’ we will communicate. A group being aware of these tools means that they can comment on the process of collaboration, which helps with things like power imbalance in a group.
This is an approach that a collaborative partnership should accept individual responsibility for, and have the ability to reflect on whether they are working in a dialogical way. ‘Dialogue’ is not in itself better the ‘debate’ however the group needs to be able to work in a dialogue in order to truly collaborate.
It is an essential component of coming together and working collaboratively and if a member of the partnership is unable to work in this way you can slip into other modes of working which are non-collaborative – see Thomas-Kilmann model above.
Print out a handy sheet on debate versus dialogue
A technique based on identifying what is working and working from that as a starting point. A lot of the time we default to identifying the problem and then decide what the solution to it is, this flips that thinking around.
David Kantor has produced a model on structural dynamics, basically how we have conversations and how they can be mapped. For collaborative groups it’s helpful to be able to understand the conversational patterns that they use individually or as groups. It’s worth taking a look at Kantor’s book ‘Reading the Room’, but for those with slightly less time here is a short summary of the first aspect of the 4 Player model.
It is essential the whole group has a clear understanding of when they are collaborating and when they are not. It should be made clear that you cannot collaborate at every decision you may need to make; however the group need to be able to identify when something will happen collaboratively or not. It is ok for the group to ask members of the partnership to work through a part of the project non-collaboratively and deliver an agreed aim, as long the agreement to do so is reached collaboratively.
Below is the ‘Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument’. The group should be aware of this model and it should form the partnership’s collective learning. It is a useful tool when considering which tasks need to be done collaboratively or not.
Click here read more on the use of the Conflict model.
We all make assumption and then work from that position, this model explores how you can take to pieces those assumptions which helps to find more dialogue approaches to finding collaborative solutions.