Blundering into collaboration

So many organisations focus on collaboration as a marketing device. Stakeholders, especially shareholders love this news. The collaboration is seen as the goal in itself and little thought goes into the potential business opportunity or how it is to be accomplished as a joint enterprise. Further, there is another scenario where organisations ‘fall into’ collaboration over time, sometimes not even realising the relationship has become strategic and thus they are caught in the same trap.

“Our partner wants a collaborative relationship involving continuous improvement, innovation, joint problem solving and solution generation but they have not defined what any of these mean.” Director Global Software Supplier

 Hopefully, the partners should know what they want to get out of the arrangement e.g. access to a new market, new product development and so on. Then after discussion they would agree a joint target and plan.

 But, in reality the strategic objective is just a vague aspiration and the companies carry on doing their own thing with little, meaningful interaction with their partner. Many organisations still focus on technical compliance rather than capability i.e. building a bridge rather than providing a means of crossing the river. As a result, their contracts are heavy with detailed T&Cs that stifle innovation and flexibility. Without a strategic purpose and definite joint goals how can collaboration ever be expected to work?

 “Our objectives and way of achieving them, are not aligned. Their mentality is to make the most money from us, and there is very little of working as a partnership, towards a common goal, sharing objectives and risks. We all need to move towards a managed service relationship rather than one based on detailed contracts.” 10 year IT Outsourcing Relationship

 In this situation what happens to the minions? It is not surprising that with no clear action plan no one knows, especially at working level what they are to achieve and therefore how they will do it. Often the reaction is working harder rather than smarter and re-work becomes the frustrating norm. More in our next post.

 “I'm not aware of the details of our contract. Our bosses may know but it doesn’t filter down. We certainly don't have clear objectives at the working level. When things go wrong or don't provide the expected answers there is a lot of finger pointing and the relationship becomes difficult and sour.” SME Operations Manager