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.
2 comments:
Charlotte McNulty's story shows the significance of a Champion leader, but it's not just anyone who can make a difference. It has to be someone who is respected and has sufficient authority to command attention and make things happen. How that kind of respect is earned is worth exploring. I'm sure passion and commitment play a big part (does that sound familiar?)
In the Virginia example the consortium-building leadership came from the State Governor's wife, so she was able to use her position (and the Governor's contacts). But how does someone who does not have that kind of status get to be the catalyst?
This from LOU, who works in the arts sector in the UK:
2 things in response to your comment about collaboration making a difference, from my experience.
1) I'm interested that you have taken a strongly practical route to what 'makes a difference' about collaboration - ie cost savings. People usually say something like collaboration makes things more than the sum of their parts. It appears true that for many people, particularly those that work in the arts, collaboration in and of itself is assigned a value quite apart from what is achieved as planned 'outcome'. This is usually talked about the arts as relating to the fact that artistic collaboration allows for additional quality/inspiration/learning/sharing/depth and that this can be translated to collaboration in any field as a contribution to the individual development and even wellbeing of those taking part.
However, it is also true and rarely vocalised that collaboration has an extra cost - it takes more effort and time on those individuals' behalf to achieve meaningful collaboration - eg, extra meetings as you mention in one case study. This is rarely a monetary cost in my sector - possibly because the time of those in the arts is cheap /workers subsidise the sector by expecting to regular working additional hours for nothing anyway. Usually the individuals involved deem the extra cost to themselves to be worth it, either because they have benefitted as individuals, or because they deem the planned outcome to be of a higher quality due to collaboration and thus are proud of their involvement.
I mention this because you ask why people do not collaborate more and I think this is one of the reasons - if collaboration is made as an addition to somebody's normal work, not discussed as a contribution to the normal work and thus offset by extra resourcing, it's not sustainable. (Might this also potentially impact on the cost benefits you are calculating?)
2) One of the key benefits to collaboration in the projects I work on is knowledge/skill sharing, both peer-to-peer and cross-sector. This would be a major contribution to reduction in costs, if people were able to do it more regularly. You get a consortium together and once they have overcome their cynicism or fear, people suddenly cascade information/knowledge/contacts to each other incredibly quickly. However shift on a year and personnel/regime change has effectively destroyed most of the network's power, any best practice discovered and agreed on by the group has been filed somewhere obscure - including the hardwon knowledge of why it's important to collaborate and how to do that effectively - has been lost. This latter point can take so long to 'discover'! The hardwon gains of the initial collaboration seem to melt away. Another unsustainability issue - it's as if the system is pre-programmed into silos and trying to break out of those long-term is not possible. I wonder if trying to keep that knowledge bank alive and intact is key to promoting collaboration generally or if that is just the way it happens.
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