Managing to Collaborate

The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage

Chris Huxham, Siv Vangen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134301669
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Collaboration between organizations on different continents can raise issues of economic development, health, the environment, risk sharing, supply chain efficiency and human resource management. It is an activity that can touch upon almost every aspect of business and social life. In this notable text, the authors combine rigorous theory with practical examples to create a useful, practical, one-stop resource covering topics such as:

• the principles of the theory of collaborative advantage
• managing aims
• membership structures and dynamics
• issues of identity
• using the theory.

The key features of the book include rich theory, drawn directly from practice, explained in simple language, and a coherently developed understanding of the challenges of collaboration, based on careful research. This significant text will be an invaluable reference for all students, academics and managers studying or working in collaboration.

Part 1

Introduction to the theory and practice of collaborative advantage

Chapter 1

Collaborative advantage

What? Why? How? and Why not?

WHAT?

The world of collaboration. It is a world in which it is possible to feel inspired. Almost anything is, in principle, possible through collaboration because you are not limited by your own resources and expertise. You can, in principle, achieve whatever visions you may have by tapping into resources and expertise of others. As a partnership facilitator once put it to us, when it works well you can feel the collaborative energy. Undoubtedly many companies do form productive collaborative alliances. Undoubtedly industry networks can be hugely helpful in developing the industry. Undoubtedly partnerships between public organizations, and those with and between non-profit organizations, do tackle social issues that would otherwise fall between the gaps. We call this achieving collaborative advantage.

‘when it works well you feel inspired … you can feel the collaborative energy’

partnership facilitator

But it is also a world filled with frustrations. People whose jobs entail trying to make collaboration work in practice often comment in ways that make the experience sound very painful. There is a lot of evidence that many collaborations make slow progress and that others die without achieving anything. We call this phenomenon collaborative inertia.

‘we’re really good at collaborating! – we’ve been cuddling each other for 10 years – but we’ve made little actual progress’

director, inter-professional research collaboration

The central questions that this book addresses, then, are these. If collaborative advantage is what people seek when they collaborate, why is collaborative inertia so often the outcome in practice? What is the nature of collaborative situations that makes them so prone to frustration? And how can such situations be managed to increase the chances that the potential for advantage will be harnessed? Our key message is that managing to collaborate involves actively managing (in order) to collaborate. A corollary is that managing collaboration is an inexact art involving a lot of judgement, but that understanding the nature of collaborative situations provides important underpinning for those judgements.

Before we say more about collaborative advantage and collaborative inertia, we must clarify what we mean by collaboration and why it matters. In this book we use the term to refer to any situation in which people are working across organizational boundaries towards some positive end. More specifically:

except in the case of collaborations involving very small (i.e. one-person) businesses, we are not concerned with collaborations between individuals, although many of our observations may also be relevant to these. Our concern is with collaborative relationships between organizations. However, we will often be focusing on relationships between individuals as part of this.

we are not concerned with purely competitive or purely conflictual relationships, and we are also not using the term ‘collaboration’ with the negative connotations that the phrase ‘collaborating with the enemy’ summons up. We are concerned, however, with the full range of positively oriented inter-organizational relationships, including partnerships, alliances, joint ventures, networks of various sorts, collaborative forms of contracting and outsourcing, joint working and so on. We are also concerned with all sectors and all collaborative purposes.

we are not concerned with intra-organizational relationships. However, collaborations between businesses in a corporation or between departments, groups or professions within a single organization often reflect the same issues as collaborations between entirely separate organizations, so the book is relevant to these.

Collaborative relationships manifest themselves in a multitude of ways, with a multitude of descriptive terminology and a multitude of purposes. Examples include: the strategic alliances between airlines and in the automobile manufacturing industry that everyone who travels by air or owns a car cannot fail to be aware of; the much publicized partnerships and action zones involving deliverers of public services such as care in the community; the equally well-publicized public–private partnerships through which much public construction work and many social services are now delivered by private companies and non-profit organizations across the world; the industry networks promoted by both regional and national governments to stimulate mutual support and wealth creation; and so on.

In generic terms, the broad purposes of collaboration may be concerned, at one extreme, at the strategic level with advancement of a shared vision, or, at the other extreme, with the delivery of a short-term project. They may require, at one extreme, considerable joint investment in action or, at the other, merely the development of a relationship and some exchange of information. For some collaborations issues of participation – either community participation in a public partnership or worker participation through industrial democracy – and empowerment are central considerations. At the other extreme, in many collaborations these issues do not feature at all.

Obviously, the detailed purpose of an organization’s involvement in a specific collaboration or collaborative relationship will be unique to that situation. (It may also be perceived quite differently by different individual stakeholders inside and outside of it, but that is a point we shall return to in Chapters 6 and 7; for the moment we’ll talk about organizations as if they could have rationales of their own.) Whether the intent to collaborate for this purpose is an explicit enactment of a strategy or policy, relatively unconsidered or a reaction, for example, to an invitation from another organization, the purpose is the basis for collaborative advantage. At a less detailed level, there are a number of common bases for collaborative advantage. These include:

Access to resource Organizations often collaborate if they are unable to achieve their objectives with their own resources. Sometimes this simply means pooling financial or human resources, but more often it implies the bringing together of different resources including technology or expertise. One common example is inter-company collaboration over taking a product to market. In simple terms, one company provides the product while the other provides the access to the market. Such marketing alliances may involve very small entrepreneurial businesses that have developed a unique product, very large companies in industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry, in which both product development and marketing are extremely complex activities, or those seeking new markets in geographical areas that they have not previously tapped. Collaborations involving organizations in the non-profit and public sectors are also often predicated on the need to share resource, expertise, knowledge and connections. For example, the police, the legal professions, probation services, schools and neighbourhood and youth groups typically collaborate over youth criminal justice issues. Similarly, economic development agencies, local government and local community groups typically collaborate over locality development issues.

Shared risk Sharing of risk as a reason for collaboration is, in a sense, the direct opposite of the access to resource argument. In this case, the organizations collaborate simply because the consequences of failure on a project are too high for them to risk taking it on alone. We are talking here of collaborations in which the primary purpose is to share risk, rather than those in which the partners have agreed to share the risk associated with a collaboration formed for other purposes. Cost-intensive research and development collaborations between organizations with similar resources are typically of this sort.

Efficiency We should state up front that we see efficiency as a problematic notion for collaborative advantage and we will be saying more about this later. However, efficiency arguments are often made for collaborating and take many forms. Governments have often argued that commercial organizations are more efficient providers of services than public ones, and so have promoted public–private partnerships for public service delivery. A quite different perspective on efficiency stems from the notion of economies of scale. Thus, for example, adjacently located public authorities may collaborate over the provision of a service, even though they each have the expertise to deliver it. Similarly, companies may outsource support activities such as cleaning and catering to other companies who can gain economies of scale (for example, in bulk purchase of supplies) by contracting to provide these services to many organizations. A third perspective is concerned with operational efficiency. Many purchasing and supply chain alliances are of this sort; with the purchasing organization gaining efficiencies through arrangements which, for example, ensure delivery of components at the time of need and at an agreed price, and the supplying organization gaining efficiencies through having a relatively predictable market. A fourth perspective relates to concerns with coordination of public service delivery to avoid duplication in service provision that cannot be justified against public expenditure.

Co-ordination and seamlessness The provision of public services which appear seamless to the citizen-user has been a concern of many governments in recent years. Thus, for example, services for families with needs related to special education might be holistically serviced through provision of health, social services and education services ‘co-located’ together in a special school building. This ‘one-stop shop’ philosophy has also often been used as the basis for collaborations between service providing small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or larger locality-based commercial organizations. Examples range from complete wedding services, in which small companies collaborate to provide invitations, reception facilities, cars, flowers, clothing hire and so on, to construction industry collaborations in which major construction work is commissioned via a single customer entry point which provides access to architects, interior designers, builders, electricians, plumbers and so on. Co-ordination is not, however, only or always concerned with seamlessness. Repetition (i.e. duplicating activity), omission (i.e. leaving gaps in activities), divergence (i.e. diluting activity across a range of activities) and counter production (i.e. pursuing conflicting activities) are pitfalls associated with organizations acting without reference to each other that those promoting collaboration seek to address (Huxham with Macdonald, 1992).

Learning As with the arguments for efficiency, those for learning take a number of guises. While collaborations are commonly set up to pursue some joint activity, some are created with the, on the face of it more modest, aim of mutual learning. Networks of organizations in the same industrial or service sector, or concerned with the same area of public service delivery and networks of organizations (non-profit, public and/or private) in a locality are often created with this as at least part of their raison d’être. In some industries learning partnerships have been deliberately created. For example, in the automobile industry staff from vehicle manufacturers have acted as trainers and consultants to staff in the vehicle component manufacturing companies that supply them. In other cases, learning from a partner organization may be an undeclared (to the partner) strategic reason for a company to form an alliance or joint venture, so reducing the need for it to form access to resource alliances in the long run. Other manifestations of learning as a rationale for partnership include multi-agency group ‘let’s-see-how-they-do-it-there’ visits to foreign locations and multi-agency learning networks associated with publicly funded demonstration projects with the role of distilling the learning from the project and considering how it may be disseminated.

The moral imperative – there is no other way Some would argue that the most important reason for being concerned with collaboration is a moral one. This rests on the belief that the really important issues facing society – poverty, crime, drug abuse, conflict, health promotion, economic development and so on – cannot be tackled by any organization acting alone. These issues have ramifications for so many aspects of society that they are inherently multi-organizational. In a seminal article, Eric Trist (1983) argued that they existed in what he called the ‘inter-organizational domain’. Collaboration is thus essential if there is to be any hope of alleviating them.

We have listed these examples of generic possible bases for collaborative advantage in order to give a sense of the types of situation with which this book is concerned. Similar lists can be found in many books on collaboration (Child and Faulkner, 1998; Nooteboom, 2004). Presented in this way, these different forms of collaborative advantage may seem rather abstract. Certainly, few real collaborations would fit neatly into a single category and some might have elements of them all. In Chapter 2 we aim to inject some life into these rather static notions of collaborative advantage by providing some brief descriptions of real collaborations.

WHY?

It would easily be possible to fill the pages of this book by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction to the theory and practice of collaborative advantage
• 1 Collaborative advantage What? Why? How? and Why not?
• 2 Cases of collaboration
• 3 The principles of the theory of collaborative advantage
• 4 Action researching collaboration
• Part II Themes in collaboration practice
• 5 Grappling with advantage and inertia
• 6 Managing aims
• 7 Negotiating purpose
• 8 Membership structures and dynamics
• 9 Coping with trust
• 10 Using power
• 11 Issues of identity
• 12 The meaning of leadership
• 13 Doing leadership
• Part III Collaboration in practice
• 14 Using the theory Managing tensions in collaboration practice
• 15 Managing to collaborate – and getting a buzz from it
• reference
• Index