Response to "Collaboration as Mindset": Markets, Mindsets, and Mechanisms

Samir,

There are many turns to take in response to your "Collaboration as Mindset" post, so I'll start by highlighting some questions that come to mind.

Mechanics - The beginning structures of a collaborative relationship are critical to its success. The structure must build trust, encourage innovation, and incentivize equitable (not equal) production/contribution, and establish explicit expectations (what are the consequences of success?) The mechanics you outlined for a successful collaboration look like a minefield from a financial incentives standpoint. It creates a confusing world for the Executive in question regarding where both work (clients, projects, etc) and ideas should live as the two organizations evolve. If an interesting innovation came to bear, expectation ambiguity between the two organizations regarding who wants to do what could implode the entire collaborative relationship. This is not an impossible scenario to overcome, but it would require explicit negotiation and radical transparency regarding intentions from both parties to avoid miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Marketplace - One factor for the structure and mental approach to a collaborative opportunity is a careful consideration of the marketplace in question. Is this a niche and mature market, with only a few key actors and a small customer base? If so collaboration with similar organizations may not make sense. But what if the market is large, emergent, and unlikely to ever be dominated by one actor regardless of maneuvering? Also, does the market being served, whether by you, or potential competitor, still result in a net-gain for society? (i.e., making government more efficient, reducing industrial waste, innovating higher education, etc?) If so, one can take more comfort in a mindset of collaboration, because even if you don't win, or you win less, good things are happening. However, if no meaning is derived or good produced as a result of your participation in an industry other than personal financial wealth-creation and general increases in efficiency, there are no logical structures to encourage collaboration.

Mindsets - If your goal is maximize exclusive value in a marketplace to a point of dominance or near dominance, collaboration is a dubious endeavor. While working together with organizations in parallel industries or markets still remains possible, you exclude yourself from realistically working with the very people that would foster the most productive collaboration. Time and again, you see clusters of people and organizations that share intellectual traditions, instincts, goals, motivations, and capabilities almost never working together because of the desire to achieve or maintain exclusive advantage.

Even industries born out of egalitarian aims (NGO's, non-profits, foundations, etc) you see even less co-creation and co-innovation. This is where the problem really becomes evident. A disproportionate amount of NGO's time, focus, and infrastructure are devoted to one thing: preservation of the institution. Because resources are scare, and the donor pool is limited, NGO's focus less on the people they set out to serve (and even less the people that work for the organization) than they do on activities, stories, reports, and micro-innovations that will be seen as appeasing potential and current donors.

With preservation of the institution remaining the default paramount priority, participants rarely ask: Should this institution exist? Is it doing its job? Could someone do it better and will they? How much is the Leaderships' ego driving this initiative or lack thereof? This is clearly ground for another discussion.

Another critical component that defines collaborative parameters are the motivation of the participants. For an optimal collaborative arrangement, those involved should have complementary "external motivations", or motivations for acting that serve something larger or outside the organization they derive profit from. This doesn't mean that self-interested motivations must be absent. Rather, they should be coupled with other desires such as "Regardless of personal outcome, it'd be great to see this idea implemented or project developed" or "I really like this person or organization that I'm negotiating with, and seeing them succeed would be a positive outcome for me as well" or "This is important work, and society needs it immediately” A sense of shared urgency and importance, as well as mutually beneficial motivations and outcomes lubricates collaborative dialogue. This is why you see some of the most amazing projects and agile collaborative frameworks blossom from crisis. Things happen because they must, and a shared destiny is already palpable.

If both parties operate with the assumption that their counterpart will in bad-faith exploit a weakness in the collaborative arrangement, it will usually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I call the "bad actor bias" completely alters the way someone approaches conversation, negotiation, opportunity, and ideation, and is also the default legal instinct when entering business collaborations. Trust is the missing link in most of these relationships, and if you can find a triangulating artifact, or truth, whether it's faith in intention, family connection, or a healthy track record of collaboration, businesses can enter an entirely new realm of what's possible to achieve.