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.