How home cooking relates to collaboration

In Canada, I’ve had home cooking, and honest to goodness hospitality. I feel such gratitude and connection for this. I’m sitting on a plane heading to New Mexico at the moment (they have WiFI up here! I'm having one of those moments of simultaneously thinking, "I can't believe it" and knowing at the same time that WiFi in planes will feel completely ordinary in about 6 months time...) and I feel a bit choked up about it. So I’m wondering, what is it that moves me?

When I was in Ottawa on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I stayed in the house of some Quakers, whom my parents met in 1986, when we lived in Ottawa for 6 months (I was 11 at the time). Over the years, my parents have unfailingly sent their annual Christmas letter to Carol and John, and very very occasionally have stayed with them if they have been in Ottawa. Likewise Carol and John have perhaps stayed one night at my parents’ place in Reading, England, in 25 years. The offer of hospitality was unhesitatingly extended to me last week, along with home cooked food, lifts to the bus and train stations, and the 24-digit password to their WiFi.

The same again in Toronto. Allison and Bob are my second cousins, once removed (their son is my third cousin) - which means that my mum and Allison have the same Northern Irish great-grandmother. Allison and Bob put me up in 1991 when I ventured out for almost the first time to a foreign country on my own (aged 16) - and watched me emerge as a confident woman from my chrysalis of self-doubt and teenage anxiety, in the space of about 4 weeks. Then they hosted me again in 1994 at the tail end of my year out before university. And I’m not sure I’ve seen them or even been in touch in 16 years. But this week I got a big welcome and a comfy bed, and tolerance to my comings and goings, a metro card, a lift to the airport, and good food.

And in both places I had fantastic conversations. In Ottawa: The state of the Canadian government and its attitude to the churches. The state of Quakers in the world. The idea of the international commons and how to work on this legally. Ottawa as a government town. Grandchildren and farming and the Ottawan winter (which is very snowy and very sunny) and the links to solar energy schemes...

In Toronto: consulting firms and how they want experts who turn in to managers who turn in to ‘rainmakers’ (making money for the firm). How to use your distribution unit as a hub for connection to your customer, and to value your employee’s time spent making relationship, not just how much money they make. Bob recounted a tale where he was chatting on the phone to a customer far away in another part of Canada, and once they’d done the business, he asked, ‘How was your winter?’ And a whole new frontier of relationship opened up. Provence and the French Alps, and the merits of blackberries over I-phones. Regular online checks of the Belfast Telegraph and the unusual animal-related stories therein.

And that’s just for where I stayed. Then there was dinner with Tony and Marie, who I’d never met before but who barbecued salmon for me and downloaded their wisdom on transforming public services. There was breakfast with Emily who I first met in the kitchen of a Quaker camp in 1991, and today over pancakes and coffee we talked about life and death and love and books. And then there’s all the meetings and connections I have made in just a few days, through people who had willingly opened up their contact book and connected me with others.

You get the picture. I left today, gratitude in my heart, having felt nurtured and welcomed. And I wanted to extend offers of hospitality to Carol and John, to Bob and Allison, Tony and Marie, Emily, and to their children and grandchildren and unborn great grandchildren and nephews and nieces. What moves me is the way these supportive connections are offered over many years, and inter-generationally, in subtle ways, and that these then link families and communities and, ultimately, nations in understanding.

I had a breakfast when I was in Washington 2 weeks ago, with some community funders, and our discussion turned to whether the purpose of collaboration was to achieve change, or the purpose of collaboration was to be in relationship. One woman said, both. ‘The people that keep coming back to the advocacy work don’t just come back to make a difference in this town. They come back because they want to be in relationship with the people they are doing the advocacy with.’

Yesterday I had lunch with a woman who works at United Way Toronto and she said a similar thing. “We help the homeless get back in to work, through social enterprises. And what this offers them isn’t necessarily dignity or money or a home. It’s connection. Most homeless people are really isolated. When they get work, they start to belong, to feel connected. And the best thing? Sometimes, when they feel really connected, they start giving back, and being a volunteer.’

And so I want to acknowledge that this theme of mine, collaboration, is also, sometimes about just being in relationship. Offering support. Welcoming folk. Remembering how we’re connected rather than how we are different. It’s simple, and profound, and it nurtures the soul. And that’s why I have a tear in my eye, because I’m very very grateful for this and how it gets manifested in my life.

Cognitive Maps: More Info

I’ve been in a lot of Ottawa taxis today, meeting all sorts of people involved in Service Canada. I used the cognitive map as a way of recording the perspectives of interviewees. It's the first time I've done it concurrently with interviewing, rather than doing it after the fact as a way of making sense of my notes. I’ve used a couple of pictures of my first drafts in this post, to show you what the scribblings look like.

For the benefit of those I might be seeing in the next few days, and those who asked me about cognitivemapping today, I thought I’d post up a bit more information about it.

The notes below are by Professor Jake Chapman, with whom I teach systems thinking at the National School of Government.I can also recommend a very detailed set of instructions about how to do cognitive maps in this paper.

Cognitive mapping is based upon Kelly’s Theory of Personal Constructs. An individual’s constructs are their way of making sense of the world – and they also condition how they experience the world in the future.

A cognitive map is a model of ‘the system of concepts’ used by an individual to communicate the nature of a problem. Visually it looks much like a multiple cause diagram, but there are a number of differences both in its construction and in the

conventions it uses. In work with clients you can abotain, through interviewing, a cognitive map from each of the senior managers involved. You can then tuse the maps to explore differences in the way the problem is perceived – and can also combine maps to produce a ‘bigger picture’ that can be used as the basis for agreed action. This whole approach is based upon the assumption that the manager is involved in the psychological construction of their world, rather that the perception of some objective world.

Cognitive maps are extremely useful at demonstrating differences in perception or world views. The map shows how people with different perspectives reason differently about the world or problem or situation. This can be of enormous benefit in complex situations where differences in view are obviously present, but not addressed (other than at the level of argument or negating each other).

It is critical to realise that a cognitive map is as accurate a representation as possible of another person’s way of thinking. It is not my view of how they think – it is a model of how they actually think based on their own words and cannot be regarded as valid unless checked by the individual whose thinking is being represented. It is important to use the person’s own words in the map.

A key insight from construct theory is that you can clarify the meaning of a concept by asking the person “as opposed to what?”. One of my Open University colleagues once had the task of resolving serious problems in the management committee of a large national charity. After interviewing everyone he noticed that they all described their meetings as ‘sticking to the agenda’. When he did follow up interviews, which were aiming towards a cognitive map of each person’s view, he asked “meetings sticks to the agenda .. as opposed to what?” He received an enormous range of answers, including the following:waste time

• make decisions
• allow people to rabbit on
• doing any creative thinking about our problems
• let people speak out
• deal with anything urgent where we might have an impact

In a cognitive map a person's construct is represented by the original phrase (called the positive pole of the construct), three dots and then the opposite (also called the negative pole). Thus

meetings stick to the agenda … making decisions

The best way to read this is to interpret the three dots as “rather than” or “as opposed to”.

(Jake Chapman)

I’m noticing some interesting differences and similarities between the cognitive maps I made today while at Service Canada and the ones I've made from last week. So for instance, today, it was significant how big a theme the issue of a really coherent vision was - and how substantially the vision (of a service-centred organisation focused on the citizen) has been embedded at the front line and in the executive management. The themes of ‘good relationships’ were much less significant today than they have been in my interviews on the East Coast of America. Which leads me to wonder if one can substitute a bit for the other.

Collaboration and... The Dark Moments

I’ve spent all week being inspired by what my interviewees achieve. But this post is devoted to the dark moments that seem to go with collaboration.

I’ve been asking some of my interviewees to draw rich picture diagrams about what it’s like working in collaboration. I’ve also been asking alm

ost everyone the question, ‘When has working in collaboration kept you awake at night?’. Only one person has said that emphatically that it hasn’t.

(These are my recollections of what these 6 separate interviewees said, pulled together from my notes):

Interviewee 1: “I spent 18 months trying to work with City Government over them commissioning our service. They wouldn’t be clear about what they wanted, they were hard to reach, they wouldn’t call back. I couldn’t put a face on them. That kept me awake. It was the uncertainty of not knowing.”

Interviewee 2: “I feel a bit like Sisyphus: pushing the boulder up the hill. There are a lot of seething people. We’re trying to work with them, and there’s a lot of noise. Collaboration is hard.”

Interviewee 3: “With my original 3 collaborators, they get it, they’re the real leadership group. But others can be begrudging. Sometimes I ask myself, why don’t I just forget those partners? We could just do it ourselves. It’s only because it’s in my organisation’s DNA that strong civic infrastructure in local communities is important, so I keep at it.”

Interviewee 4: (Artist of the rich picture with the hearts) “Here are the government agencies, and the hearts represent the providers. I’m in the middle. There are all these crazy paths - the green ones represent tension, as do the lightening bolts. My role,

as the collaborator, is to engage with all this craziness with open arms and a smile on my face. Our goal is to weave a yellow brick road. But I need a forcefield protecting myself from the tension. Now I know why I get so tired by 2pm!”

Me: “Was it stressful?” Interviewee 5: “Oh my God! The resistance! It’s personality driven. Oh man! I was going to kill someone! They were giving you a hundred reasons why it can’t be done. But [the key instigator of the collaboration] persisted. And eventually those government departments got bought in. But taking on these discussions requires effort. That’s why leadership really helps.”

Interviewee 6: “I called all 3 and said, ‘What the f**k?’ Why didn’t they share what they knew with me? I felt at a disadvantage. I said, ‘I’m going to continue to share. I’m really disappointed, given what I’ve done for you in the past year.’

[And on the rich picture:] "I’m in the picture, trying to reach out to people on the edge, and trying to push the people in the middle further along. It’s hard. It’s lonely. The emotions I feel are hope and frustration all at the same time.”

Collaboration... and the Strategist Action Logic

I’ve got a hypothesis that it takes a certain mindset to want to work in collaboration. Someone who is capable of seeing the world from the lot of different points of view at once, and simultaneously work to appeal to all those different points of view.

Bill Torbert, a Professor of Leadership at Boston College, and huge proponent of the practice of action inquiry, might say that your action logic is a good predictor of this ability to see things from many different perspectives. (An action logic is how someone makes meaning in the world. What you bring in to your frame to make it make sense. There’s a useful description of all the different action logics in this article, and the outfit that assesses your action logic and has written the book on it all is Harthill Consulting.)

So, I’m assuming that you need to reason from at least that of an ‘achiever’s action logic’ in order to be interested in good collaboration, but that it is probably done best by those who reason from a ‘strategist’ action logic.

Achiever: “They are open to feedback and realise that many of the ambiguities and conflicts of everyday life relate to differences in perspective. They know that creatively transforming or resolving issues requires sensitivity to relationships and ability to influence others in positive ways. The tight focus on goals and objectives means that leaders working from the Achiever action-logic can be clear and decisive.”

Strategist: “When they operate out of the Strategist action-logic, people who have developed to this stage can create shared vision across action-logics, engaging with people in an iterative, developmental process that encourages both personal and organisational transformations. Strategists deal with conflict more comfortably than those with other action-logics and they are better at handling people’s instinctive resistance to change. As a result they can be highly effective change agents.... They distinguish themselves from Individualists [The action logic you pass through between achiever and strategist] through their focus on organisational constraints and perceptions, which they treat as discussible and transformable.”

When I first learnt about the strategist action logic, I was told that it was originally called ‘the collaborator’ by those who mapped action logics in the 1970's. This epithet was ditched when the concepts came over from the USA to Europe, because the word 'collaborator' had negative overtones in Europe.

Now I couldn’t possibly be certain of the action logic of anyone I’ve interviewed so far. Harthill run a diagnostic test that allows you to find out your own dominant action logic. I had toyed with asking my interviewees to take the test, but it was a bit much to ask! But I have been noticing some typically strategist ways of looking at the world, in my interviewees.

Sonia Ospina is an Associate Professor at the Wagner School of Public Service in New York University. I met her and some of her faculty on Wednesday. They teach nonprofit management, and explore social transformation, especially how the private, public and nonprofit sectors intersect to produce soical transformation for the common good.

In the last five years they have worked with the Ford Foundation who have sponsored 20 groups a year, for 2 years at a time each, to partner the Wagner School. In effect this means that Sonia gets to work with social change leaders. She says the School ‘sits together with the people’ - helping leaders do their own inquiry (which she described as their wondering, having puzzles), and their own dialogue, and using themselves as the subjects of their own research.

She described what they are doing as exploring ‘leadership as a collective achievement’, in particular how we ‘make sense together’ and ‘adapt as they go along’. The idea of paying attention not just to leadership but also how you exercise this in a collective group, that you assist your ‘followers’/co-workers in making meaning, sounded pretty ‘strategist action logic’ to me.

Linda Gibbs is one of the Deputy Mayors of New York, working for Mayor Bloomberg. I met her on Wednesday too. We met in Bloomberg’s famous ‘bullpen’ , (the picture I took of the bullpen is the picture I've used for this post) which meant I could grab a decaf coffee from the snacks counter and see the Mayor's desk in amongst the throng. The bullpen itself sounds pretty transformational.

“Bloomberg imported the cubicle concept from his Wall Street days, and he sits at a desk the same size as the 51 others. His closest confidante, First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, is within arm’s reach. He donated the computers and pays for the snacks (bagels in the morning, salad in the afternoon). “As a work space, it is something that you do not think that you can ever get used to,” says a former bullpen resident. “But when you see the mayor hosting high-level meetings in clear sight of everyone else, you start to understand that this open-communication model is not bullshit. And that it works.” (Ref)

Linda described herself as ‘a collaboration addict’ in an environment where she knows that many might think that collaboration can be a waste of time. She has found that when there are many different players operating, and where many of the players are not directly reporting to you, that running a broad and inclusive process gets more buy in. And in turn, these have a more sustained effect. To paraphrase her, she said,

“If you are willing to share your power, and people see you giving it away, that gets a lot of buy-in, even when you, in the end, settle for 75% consensus rather than 100% consensus. The fact that you have gone through a process already of sharing power means that even the 25% that aren’t on board have more buy-in to what the final solution is.”

This focus on how to handle people’s inevitable resistance to change reminds me of the strategist action logic too.

Today I met Michelle de la Uz, head of Fifth Avenue Committee, which is a residents association based in Brooklyn. As part of bringing economic justice to the Brooklyn community, Michelle builds affordable housing. She told me about Atlantic Terrace, an eco-friendly building which has 59 affordable apartments for local families, and 20 units at market rates. Michelle has put the funding together from private financial institutions, city and federal government, and the local community.She told me that at the launch event last night were bankers, mortgate financers, a nonprofit helping first- time homebuyers, local politicians, the cabinet making business that builds eco-cabinets and employs local people, and the artist who designed the countertops out of recycled materials - and also hires long-term unemployed to make the counter tops. Michelle is intent on leveraging all the $38m of the scheme to benefit the local community.

She also told me how last night’s successful launch event was actually borne of a lot of uncertainty. The 2007 housing crash made the project's funding look very precarious. The banks were losing 40% of their staff, to the point that it wasn’t clear who she should talk to any more about the project. Persuading the bank not to foreclose on the loan took a lot of influencing and relationship building - including using influence through other relationships such as former bank employees or government. At the same time as all this, she needed to persuade the buyers of the property to stay interested.

It sounded like she was having to see the world through multiple different perspectives at once, spinning plates, just to keep everyone on board. That sounded like big time strategist action logic behaviour too.

"You need a thing'.

So much this week... A few highlights from the first half. (Pics are of the CSH's office in New Haven, Connecticut, and the subway sign next to New York City Hall, which I visited yesterday.)

Monday: spent the morning with Richard Cho and colleagues in the Corporation for Supportive Housing, in New Haven Connecticut. They are a non-profit, working with local government agencies to promote collaboration over prisoner re-entry. In particular, trying to get housing and welfare to join up to help former prisoners find work - which in turn reduces reoffending. The coll

aboration in New Haven has been going for over 15 years, so it’s a mature one and it really has made a difference. So much so that they won an award from the Harvard Kennedy School for Government, for innovation.

There were lots of great insights from this meeting. One of my favourites was the idea of having a neutral party with a stake in the whole solution. This is the role that CSH plays. The week before, I’d been talking to people who had this whole system view, but invariably they were the ones at the top of the tree, with the convening power and often with the money. I’d started to think that using this positional power was essential. But actually it’s also the ‘whole system’ view that is essential. What a good idea - appointing someone inside the collaboration to hold this view too so that they’re pressurising from the side, not just from the top.

Tuesday: I met Diane Baillargeon, former CEO of Seedco and now on President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships. Over 12 years, Diane was able to work with community groups, getting Government contracts worth, in the end, up to $45m for them to provide Welfare to Work services - and therefore ensuring that local people rather than private corporations got to benefit from these contracts, plus ensuring that those who needed work were being looked after by their own communities.

We talked around all sorts of things - having a sort of ‘price of admission’ (not an actual financial amount) - where Seedco could afford, at that point, to insist to the incoming community group, ‘if you want to play in this territory, then you must... (collect this data, work this way)'. But in return, Seedco would work hard to respect its collaborators. They weren’t seen simply as sub-contractors, but as partners, to whom Seedco made a long term commitment and promised to take the burden for some of the riskier upfront costs. My favourite bit of the meeting with Diane was when she boiled it all down at the end and said, “This is messy. Not clean. And you need a thing. You can’t collaborate without a thing that you're all committed to. So don’t put your energy into collaboration unless it’s worth it, and the thing is worth it.”

More on interviews, and info on rich pictures

What great advice I’ve had from colleagues and friends in the last few days, on interviews. You've all encouraged me not to see facts and feelings as separate, and to plan to incorporate the personal as well as the organisational into what I'm doing. As the erstwhile JCM says,

"It has to be facts and feelings, because context is everything (the facts of the situation, the extent to which the leader has allies and alliances they can rely on and build on, etc)."

One bit of advice I'm going to have in mind over the next few days, (thanks to a great conversation with Sharon on Friday, and an email from Gene) is to consciously explore the question, “How is what they are saying true for me?”, and being open to asking the people I interview, particularly when they talk about others, “How is what that colleague of yours did, also true for you?”

I’m also interested in Jake's suggestion that I try out cognitive maps. - I’ll let you know how this goes. They were always my least favourite system tool, so I'll be stepping out of my comfort zone here.

Advice that I have found particularly exciting and challenging. From Kemp:

“Don't think too much. Your head is not the lead player here. Why don’t you experiment asking your head to sit the next meeting out. Go in unprepared. No agenda. Watch and listen and ask your allies to reveal what is present? Why not not plan? We are all pretty traumatized and traumatized folk always need to know what happens next. So let it ride and experiment.”

And from Jake:

“The more I think about it the less I would be inclined to have a series of questions of any inclination. My strong recommendation is to see the whole process

as an action inquiry in which you want to discover what is currently unknown - and to be open to being surprised and confounded by what you discover.”

I did ask a few of my interviewees last week to draw me a rich picture diagram. I wanted to put a bit of information on the blog so that people I meet know in advance what I’m talking about, if there is an opportunity to use this technique.

In drawing the picture I’ll use Jake’s helpful instructions, and invite interviewees to:

use as many pictures and as few words as possible

resist the temptation to draw flow diagrams, organisational charts or other formal diagram types – make it a picture

draw the picture on an A3 sheet and aim to use all the paper

use colour to convey emphasis and feeling

when you have finished take a look at your picture; what strikes you? is there anything missing you want to add? In particular, where are you in the picture?

There are two rich picture diagrams below.

The first is one I did of ‘work life balance’. On it are me and my husband, facing out of the picture, busy (the clock squeezed).

Along the bottom are pictures of a long list of things I want to do along the bottom, in ‘me time’, including cups of tea with friends, getting work done, watching films, playing music and reading. In the middle are our children and their childminder who makes them safe and happy during the day. What struck me after I did it was the pivotal position of our childminder, and how essential she was to making our work-life balance operate. She got a pay-rise after I did the this exercise!

The second is one about deporting failed asylum seekers, one of the responsibilities I had in my last job. I had a strong sense of all the hurdles there were to the process. This included the difficulty of getting people redocumented, given their nations' reluctance to co-operate with the process, the limited detention space, and the important need to ensure justice was done properly when considering the asylum seeker's claim for protection. Doing this picture made me realise that my sense of this being difficult and hardgoing was well-justified!

In reacting to the pictures my interviewees draw, I’ll be asking myself,

What strikes me immediately?

What stands out? What is the strongest colour, what does it highlight?

What is the overall feeling conveyed?

Are the items connected or disparate? Does it convey chaos or order?

How is this different from your perspective?

It's obvious - but working together does make a difference

Where collaboration makes a difference.

When I met Professor Keith Grint of Warwick University a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned that he had found a real lack of empirical data on whether collaboration works. He felt that distributed leadership is often espoused in theory, certainly in the journal he edits (Leadership), but not backed up in practice.

I’ve heard a few examples this week where I think it’s self evident that collaboration is making things work more effectively and that working in silos was less effective.

Saving money and keeping children with their families.

(Photo is of the back of Virginia State House of Representatives)

Charlotte McNulty, Executive Director, of Virginia’s Office of Comprehensive Services (for children) described a ‘beautiful’ piece of legislation, the Comprehensive Services Act, passed in the State of Virginia in 1993, which mandated collaboration over children’s services. It was full of foresight and quite inspired, and very prescriptive and clear. It pooled funding from 8 agencies. Its purpose was to get agencies to spend less money on residential care for children, and to protect children WITH their families rather than away from them, by providing a better continuum of care.

But, Charlotte explained, this beautiful document was thrown at localities, who were unprepared for its thrust. The majority of localities didn’t know what to do, and most floundered to make sense of it. (I smiled to myself wryly at this point and thought of all the beautiful policies I had written that seemed to take years to get implemented, if at all. In the Prime MInister’s Strategy Unit we were often reminded to address ‘feasibility’ in our policy design, alongside ‘acceptability’ and ‘suitability’ but frankly we tended to focus on the latter two.) In the localities that floundered, collaboration often got worse and as a consequence the cost of residential care went up.

In 2007, the First Lady of the last Governor, Tim Kaine, decided to change all this. Together with the Secretary of Health and a key special adviser, they convened a collaborative working group at State level to improve matters. They got the key State agencies, from schools to the courts, in a room every 2 weeks. “We collaborated and we talked”, said Charlotte McNulty. Fifteen years late, the Comprehensive Services Act finally got implemented, properly, with technical assistance and support to localities rather than a framework they didn’t understand. In the last 3 years, the number of children going in to residential care has reduced from 18000 to 15000. The data I have says that in 2005, 17,000 kids in care cost the State of Virginia $194m - so you can also imagine that reducing to 15000 made a huge difference financially.

Getting heard.

The Connect U.S. Fund only funds NGOs that work in collaboration. Alexandra Toma, its Program Director, and I met in a coffee shop near Farrugut Metro Station in Washington DC. She has set up a working group of NGOs working on nuclear material issues. Before, there were lots of NGOs working separately. The scene was quite loose knit, and people were not talking to one another.

At Alex’s instigation, the group of NGOs started meeting monthly. She included some people from the Government as part of the discussion. The discussion began as information sharing, going round the table saying what people were up to. But relationships got built and a sense of common purpose grew. Soon they agreed to work on a top 5 common asks of the US Government on fissile material. Once these were agreed, they were able to present them, with a much more united voice to Government. In fact President Obama wrote a letter to the Working Group saying, “Keep up the good work”. This sort of recognition and access was unheard of before the working group was in existence.

Protecting children from repeated trauma. Terri Lee Freeman, the President of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, told me about Safe Shores. This Children's Advocacy Centre acts as a central point for social services, education, justice, mental health and others, and is the agency that engages directly with the child. As the DC website says,

Before the development of the Safe Shores - The DC Children’s Advocacy Center, child and adolescent victims were subjected to repeated interviews, often by agency personnel who had not received the specialized training necessary to elicit reliable information from traumatized children at different developmental levels.

Now that Safe Shores is in place, the abused child only has to tell their story once, not to lots of different professionals. It's not new - in fact it was first instituted in the 1980's - but it's a brilliant little idea that does make a difference.

The question this left me with was, if collaboration is so effective, why doesn't it happen more often? Why do people struggle to collaborate? I'm also seeing a pattern where leadership is critical. It takes someone to convene and hold the space for this collaboration to be initiated. Does it really have to be someone at the top of the food chain? I have some hunches, but I'll save them for another post. Feel free to tell me yours.

Interview approach: the facts? Or the feelings?

Preparing myself for interviews

I’ve got some great meetings lined up in the next few weeks, to explore this ‘collaboration’ theme. Amongst other visits, this week I’m visiting the Council on Virginia’s Future, next week I’m meeting the Deputy Mayor of New York City to talk about how to join up corrections and welfare, the week after I’ll be seeing Service Ontario, and the week after that takes me to a demonstration project on alternatives to juvenile detention based in New Mexico.

How do I make the best of each of the meetings I have? I want to collect information that allows me to start drawing more generic conclusions. But I am meeting a wide range of people. Some will be local managers, others will be State or national civil servants. Others still will be politicians. I also fear pursuing knowledge narrowly, unaware of my own blindspots.

I’ve come up with two possible approaches to the interviews, and I’d welcome comments on which you think might work best, or whether there’s a third way. Option one is questions on specific areas of influence for the centre. It focuses more on the external ‘facts’ of the collaboration. Option two is a more personal approach, exploring the internal world of the person in the partnership.

I’m currently leaning towards option two. (Yesterday it was option one, but a fantastic conversation over my first US breakfast, with Kemp this morning, helped me think more thoughtfully about option two.)

Starting with my ‘research question’: My current formulation is “What should central Government do, and avoid doing, to allow effective collaboration at a local level?”

Option one: The external

This is based on a list of the sorts of interventions that the centre can make, that can influence local collaboration.

I’m hypothesising that there are five areas of influence:

1. How the central authority organises organisational structures, including those of partnerships;
2. How they organise funding, for example whether funding is made conditional;
3. How they oversee performance;
4. How they attend to professional development in the key professions under consideration, and
5. How they react to crises and failures.

I’ve represented these in a diagram, with some examples.

I also think there might be a spectrum for each of these themes, of prescriptiveness. How much has the centre set out the detail of what must happen, and how much has it let that be subject to other pressure mechanisms, such as market forces, choice, and participation. Or what blend of prescription and ‘leaving it to others’ has been manifested in each area of influence?

If this is the case, then I would ask questions like

1. How do you organise yourselves/ how have you organised the partnership working? What are the structures like? Who has authority to do what? And who makes decisions about that?
2. How are you funded/how do you organise funding? What conditions are attached to the funding? What’s your view on whether the extent to which the way you are funded helps or hinders your work?
3. How do you know you’re succeeding, and how do you know you’re providing a minimum standard of service? What happens if it looks like performance is getting worse? How does the performance management system help or hinder your work?
4. How are you prepared, professionally, for your role in the collaboration? Who sets these standards? What helps? And what’s lacking from your professional development, which would support you in collaboration?
5. How does ‘the centre’ behave when things go wrong, or when it’s clear that something isn’t working?

Option two: The personal

This approach comes from the premise that whatever one is doing in the world, this mirrors in some way, one’s internal world. If I’m going to be a student of partnership and collaborative working, I’m effectively learning from those who care deeply about working in partnership. Why do they care? What inner struggles do they face? So instead of asking about all the ‘stuff’ - the external facts and strategies, I would be asking about their internal journey. This, after all, is more often kept in the shadow and maybe I could bring it more in to the light.

In thinking about this approach, I was brought back to why I’m so interested in collaborative working. I recalled a time this summer when I felt particularly fulfilled in partnership. And in a particularly important partnership - that with my husband, Paul. It was a moment where I sang a song to my husband. It was a song I’d been working on this summer, the first I’d written since I was at school, and I felt a bit shy of it. I’d sung him the odd snippet. But then one evening he asked me to sing him the whole thing, and I got up and performed it properly. No self-consciousness, no irony, just full hearted and playful. He was completely delighted and moved. I felt really seen and heard. And in turn our partnership was strengthened because the theme of the song meant a lot to both of us. So I think it’s that when I feel accepted and celebrated for myself in my entirety, in particular my gifts, and that these gifts create something even more special with others, I feel truly at one. This is what I long to create for others.

I would be interested to explore this more with those I meet in the next few weeks. How can I make people feel safe to tell me stories about this that they aren’t used to telling, except perhaps to their life partners or close friends?

The questions might be something like:

1. Is there a time when working in partnership has kept you awake at night? What was worrying you?
2. Can you tell me about a time when you felt like you’d achieved what you wanted with partnership working? What did it feel like? How did you feel about the other people involved?
3. What is it about working in partnership with other organisations that’s really important to you? Why are you so committed?
4. Can you draw me a rich picture about working in collaboration, bringing in your emotions and your opinions about the collaboration you’re involved?
5. What would make the collaboration fall apart, if it were taken away?
6. If you could change something tomorrow about the collaboration, what would it be?
7. What was the most difficult aspect of working collaboratively in the last few years? What did that feel like? How did you overcome it?

And then... If the conversation went really well, I could phone them up a week later to talk about all the topics in option 1!

I would be really interested in your thoughts about these approaches.

Who's it all for, anyway?

“What EXACTLY is it that I’m exploring about collaboration?”

I’ve been asking myself this question because I met three thinkers about the UK Government in the last week, and I felt a bit of an academic amateur as I prepared to see them. The first was Nick Pearce, head of the Institute for Public Policy Research and formerly a policy adviser to Gordon Brown. Second: Professor Keith Grint of Warwick University, who has written and taught prolifically on leadership and systems thinking, especially how you deal with ‘wicked’ and ‘tame’ problems. Finally,Professor Sir Michael Barber, formerly the head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, now of McKinsey Consulting, and involved with target setting and monitoring for the Blair government from 1997 until 2007.

Why have I been feeling like an amateur? Maybe because it’s five years since I worked in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and I feel rusty at the discipline of defining a ‘research question’ and ensuring that my methodology fits what I’m trying to explore. And also because I worry that ‘improving collaboration between different parts of government and the nonprofit sector when they’re working on complex problems’ sounds nebulous.

It was in explaining my project to Michael Barber that I realized there was a particular part of the system for whom I am inquiring. It’s obvious but it’s important. It’s for those who sit in the centre: in the Whitehall department, the devolved government, in the Governor’s office, or the Mayor’s office. The people who do strategic planning, and set and negotiate departmental budgets, who create the frameworks within which local agencies operate. The ones who create legislation, audit regimes and regulation, who direct the inspectors and design delivery structures. The ones who reach for ‘choice’ or ‘contestability’ or ‘guidance’ ‘new organisations’ or ‘the demos’ to influence local actors. Basically, Ministers and Senior Civil Servants, Strategy Units and Whitehall policy units.

This project is NOT, therefore, for the Headteacher, or the GP commissioner, or Director of Children's Services, or the Police Chief Constable, or Prison Governor who need to think about how to collaborate better in their local area. I can see this is ground that has already been well trodden, with some very useful resources out there.

(Some of my favourites are The Partnering Toolbook, Talking the Walk, and other resources from ‘The Partnering Initiative’, which are fantastic, with guidance even on how you have partnering conversations, a sample Partnering agreement, even an articulation of ‘the 12 phases of the partnering process’. Similarly the Leadership Centre for Local Government has published a nifty resource for local leaders on the back of the Total Place pilots, with lots of suggestions and nuggets about how to approach joining up services.)

No, this project is for those who think they are ‘pulling levers’ from the centre. Even that articulation of the role is one of the problems. In these environments there is no clear relationship between cause and effect, and I can feel myself flinching at the mechanistic metaphor of ‘pulling levers’. But it is for those people who are in the middle of the spider’s web, in the, ineptly named, control room, for the ones who try to effect change over a national or State-wide canvas. The ones who often wreak massive damage, with the absolute best of intentions.

The change of Government in the UK, with its change of ideology and the coincidence of a massive funding crisis, mean that Senior Civil Servants and Ministers are doing things differently. On the bonfire are Local Area Agreements, the Audit Commission, targets including for the Police, hospitals and schools, and 150 quangos. In their place? The Big Society. And Cameron’s four principles - choice, contestability, local accountability, and payment by results.

But what does this mean for the Senior Civil Servant? What should those shaping and designing the contours of the system, setting out the ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’, watch out for, if they want to promote collaboration? To articulate an anxiety I’ve heard expressed once or twice in Senior Civil Service circles, “So what are we going to do when we don’t have a twenty million pound budget to throw at the Minister’s latest initiative, when we can’t set a national target, or set up a quango, and I don’t have a new unit in our Whitehall department to monitor the target and the quango?” Put cynically, what is the Senior Civil Servant’s role when they don’t have an empire to build?

Michael Barber didn't quite answer that question, but he did give a helpful steer. I’m paraphrasing a bit but the gist of it was this: “People make a mistake when they think you just have a choice between prescription and letting go. You do need to think carefully about what you prescribe and what you don’t prescribe. But you need to attend to how strong the other mechanisms, like the market, or democratic accountability, are that are at play. You may need to blend prescription and devolution but in different aspects of the system.”

Keith Grint said it in a different way. He was arguing that we need ‘clumsy solutions’ to wicked problems. We need to know that we don’t know the answer, and try stuff out, without trying to make it elegant. We need to mix and match. To quote from his paper, “Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: the Role of Leadership” (2008)

[These leaders] make progress by stitching together whatever is at hand, whatever needs to be stitched together, to ensure practical success.

My inquiry, therefore, is focused on how to help Senior Civil Servants and ministers go about their system design, without damaging the desire and the practice of collaboration at a local level.