Many of us have experienced both good and bad collaboration.
In a good collaboration value is created. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. People stick around and get involved willingly. Momentum is created and the movement grows. Bad collaboration is the opposite — value is sucked from the participants and they eventually leave.
One simple and probably obvious condition for good collaboration is that for it to happen, people or organisations need to feel that they, along with everyone else in the collaborative effort, are being treated equitably.
For collaborations like ours at the Moving Minds Alliance, focused on early childhood development in crisis situations, this simple principle has some important implications.
Firstly, it requires transparency. Transparency about how decisions get made, who makes them and what the results of those decisions are. When the collaboration involves the use of collective assets, then its important that we understand those assets belong to all of us and we all therefore should be easily able to understand how they are used.
This is important because transparency leads to accountability. If we all know what is happening, then we can also question, discuss and support or seek remedy where necessary. And, accountability leads to trust, both of which help us to feel that we are being treated equitably.
This is in my experience often harder in practice than it sounds. It requires us to be willing to open ourselves up to uncomfortable scrutiny from our peers and makes it important that we understand the hidden costs as well as the obvious ones.
On a more mundane level it means investing in establishing easy to access platforms for information to be openly and routinely shared and accessed by all in the collaboration.
For smaller or more remote organisations, the cost of collaboration might be much higher than for larger ones. Being treated equitably doesn’t mean being treated the same and if we truly believe that diversity makes collaboration much more just and impactful then this also needs very careful attention.
This post originally appearead on Medium.com on July 1st 2022
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