Collaboration isn't a word on the strategy page

Collaboration comes up in almost every not-for-profit strategy we work on.

Strengthen partnerships. Work collectively. Build networks. Collaborate across sectors.

And most organisations genuinely mean it.

But lately I’ve found myself coming back to a harder question: what do we actually mean when we say collaboration, and what needs to change for it to be real?

Maria Dimopoulos' session at August’s Amplify Alliance National NFP Summit, provocatively called The "C-Word" Reclaimed: Collaboration as Strategy, gave me a useful way to think about that question.

Not because collaboration is a new idea. Far from it.

But because the session pushed beyond the usual language of partnerships and working together into some of the harder questions about power, agency, systems and what genuine collaboration asks of organisations.

Those questions have also been coming up repeatedly in our recent NFP strategy and strategic planning work.

And they feel particularly relevant this week, with my fellow Ensemble co-founder Felicity Green at the Philanthropy Australia conference, where collaboration between philanthropy, not-for-profits, communities and government is an important part of the conversation.

Because collaboration is not just about whether organisations want to work together.

It is also about whether the systems, funding and decision-making around them make genuine collaboration possible.

We probably don't have a collaboration problem

The not-for-profit sector already collaborates. A lot.

Organisations share knowledge, refer people between services, participate in networks, jointly advocate, build cross-sector partnerships and bring different expertise together around complex issues.

In much of our recent strategic planning work, collaboration isn’t something organisations need convincing about.

The harder questions are:

• What are we trying to achieve together that we cannot achieve alone?

• What are we actually willing to share?

• And are the systems around us helping or getting in the way?

Competitive funding processes can ask organisations to partner one day and compete the next.

Contracts can carve interconnected social issues into discrete programs and outputs.

Reporting can focus heavily on what one organisation delivered, while giving much less attention to what changed collectively.

Funding periods can be much shorter than the relationships required to create meaningful change. And organisations are often expected to find the time and capacity for collaboration within already-stretched delivery budgets.

So simply putting “collaboration” into another NFP strategic plan isn't going to solve it.

A useful collaboration strategy needs to think about the conditions that make collaboration possible, not just the organisations we would like to partner with.

Life arrives horizontally. Institutions operate vertically.

One of the ideas I scribbled down during Maria’s session was:

Life arrives horizontally, but institutions operate vertically.

It captures something I see constantly through strategy and stakeholder engagement work. People don't experience their lives according to organisational structures, government portfolios or funding categories.

Housing intersects with health. Employment intersects with disability, education, transport and caring responsibilities. Financial security intersects with almost everything.

People arrive with families, relationships, culture, histories, strengths, challenges and aspirations, not neatly packaged service needs.

Our institutions, understandably, create boundaries.

Departments. Programs. Professional disciplines. Funding streams. Eligibility criteria. Organisational structures.

That creates an obvious challenge for not-for-profit strategic planning: If the problem crosses organisational boundaries, the response probably needs to as well.

And that means collaboration can't just happen at the edges of organisations.

Sometimes it needs to shape the strategy itself: how priorities are set, where resources go, who is involved and how decisions get made.

The harder conversation is about power

This is where collaboration becomes more interesting, and more difficult.

It is relatively easy to identify who should be around the table.It is harder to ask:

• Who sets the agenda?

• Who holds the funding?

• Who determines what success looks like?

• Who carries the risk?

• Whose evidence counts?

• Who makes the final decision?

• When are communities themselves brought into that process?

Another phrase I took away from Maria's session was power with rather than power over.

I think that is a useful test of genuine collaboration.

It shifts the question from:

“Who are our partners?” to “How are we actually working together?”

Those questions matter in cross-sector partnerships between government and not-for-profits, but also between larger and smaller organisations, funders and funded organisations, professionals and communities, and within partnerships themselves.

They are also important questions for boards and leadership teams during NFP strategy development.

Because saying collaboration matters is easy.

Being clear about what authority, control or resources you are genuinely prepared to share is harder.

Philanthropy is part of the collaboration strategy too

This is why Felicity being at the Philanthropy Australia conference this week has added another layer to the thinking for me.

If we want stronger collaboration across the not-for-profit sector, philanthropy has an important role in helping create the conditions for it.

A thoughtful funding strategy can do more than fund programs.

Philanthropy can take a longer view. It can invest in organisational capability as well as service delivery. It can back emerging ideas. It can support strategy implementation, not simply the creation of a strategic plan. And it can fund the time, relationships and infrastructure required for organisations to collaborate, rather than expecting partnership work to happen around the edges of already-funded activity.

Philanthropy can also create space for organisations and communities to help shape the response rather than simply respond to a predetermined solution.

But the same questions about power and agency still apply.

• Who defines the problem?

• Who decides what gets funded?

• Whose view of success matters? And

• How early are community organisations and people with lived experience involved?

Genuine collaboration requires more than inviting people into someone else's process.

Stakeholder engagement isn't collaboration if the decisions are already made

I think there is a similar distinction in stakeholder engagement and community engagement.

We often ask people what they think. That matters. But a more useful question is: “What can people actually influence?”

If the service has already been designed, the budget determined, the parameters set and most of the important decisions made before engagement begins, then we are consulting.

There is nothing wrong with consultation when that is what is required.

But we shouldn't confuse consultation with co-design or shared decision-making. The same applies to organisational partnerships. Collaboration becomes different when people are involved in defining the problem, shaping the approach, making decisions and sharing accountability from the beginning.

It is not just about participation. It is also about agency.

For anyone designing a stakeholder engagement strategy, that distinction matters.

Being clear about the level of influence people genuinely have often makes for better engagement and much more realistic expectations.

So what does collaboration mean for NFP strategy?

For those of us involved in not-for-profit strategy, strategy facilitation and strategy implementation, I don't think the answer is to stop using the word collaboration.

I think we need to make it work harder.

When an NFP strategy says collaborate, ask:

• Who with?

• For what purpose?

• What are we trying to achieve together?

• What will we do differently because we are collaborating?

• What are we prepared to share?

• What capability, funding and time will it require?

• How will decisions be made?

• What role should philanthropy, government and communities play?

• And what might we need to give up control of?

Because collaboration isn't something that sits alongside the real strategy. Done properly, collaboration changes how the strategy gets delivered. It changes relationships. It changes decision-making. It can change how funding flows and how success is measured. And sometimes it requires organisations, and funders, to give up a little control in order to create considerably more collective impact.

That's much harder than writing “collaboration” on the strategy page.

And probably much closer to what we mean when we put it there in the first place.