Starting Points for Strategic Collaboration

The start point of every strategic collaboration is the moment when a shared problem, opportunity or experience is identifiedhappens and no one organisation can deliver a complete solution. 

A shared problem might be rising demand across mental health services. A shared opportunity could be the regeneration of a town centre. A shared experience might be implementing new national policy across health, education and community partners. These starting points provide a purpose for collaboration.

With this approach, shared purpose becomes the strategic intent, providing a foundation for collaboration and guiding how partners work together to create meaningful change. 

Strategic collaboration only works when there is a commitment to the time and resources needed to work together, and potential to progress the outcomes and outputs created together. Creating a Statement of Intent or other shared document to frame the purpose, and connect it to the priorities of partners and people involved can be useful. Everyone involved must be able to both contribute to the collaboration, and benefit from it – this supports commitment and effort to be prioritised and maintained.

Messy middle of transformation.

The ‘messy middle’ of strategic collaboration has many sub-phases.  There is the getting to know each other, the identifying of strengths, perspectives, preferences and needs.  It’s messy because there are real people involved, people with real lives and challenges in and outside of work.  

We find this part takes time and involves intentional building of shared understanding and relationships.  When collaboration has focused on aligning around a shared ambition and making decisions together, it can adapt to changing circumstances like,

• A partner changes role.
• Funding timelines shift and resources are tight.
• Expectations are unclear and key decisions get stuck.
• A new organisation wants to join.

None of these are signs collaboration is failing, they’re a normal part of collaborative work. 

In the messy middle, both practices and processes need to be intentionally designed and enabled. Practices are the behaviours, ways of working, communication approaches.  Processes are the operational elements, how decisions are made, how information is shared, how progress is reviewed and how communication flows across partners. 

Facilitate change, don’t direct.

Momentum and facilitation are more important than directing people during strategic collaboration. Unlike traditional leadership or management, strategic collaboration depends on bringing people together around a shared intent, maintaining alignment and adapting as the work evolves. This requires strong relational skills, the ability to communicate with different audiences, manage expectations and sustain momentum, even when progress is complex or non-linear. 

Facilitating the messy middle is a balance of ‘holding the thread’. Holding the thread means continually reconnecting people to the shared intent, helping them understand how today’s decisions contribute to tomorrow’s outcomes.  Continuing to tell the story of the shared work and involving partners in the narrative, builds a feeling of collective ownership.  

Then there’s the project management element, connecting actions with strategy, coordinating progress, working with people.  Conflict and pressure must be navigated and resolved, to strengthen the collaboration.  Changing people, priorities and systems can derail strategic collaboration. The experienced facilitator and collaboration partners will need to stay focused yet flexible and adaptable.

Often this work attracts new opportunities in (because there is positive energy and communication around the work) and so these need to be folded into the work or redirected to other projects. 

Codesign, Coproduction and Strategic Collaboration.

Codesign and coproduction are progressive approaches, often used by public services, to design and deliver services or projects with communities and people.  These approaches recognise that the people closest to the challenge often understand it best. But without proper resourcing and with scarce time and energy, codesign and coproduction projects can feel like they go around in circles.  Some of the challenges we see with these approaches are;

• People with lived experience being involved in ways that are tokenistic, exploitative or unintentionally over-professionalised. 
• Teams working in public services, burning out as they battle procurement and management systems designed for provider-led delivery rather than people-led coproduction.
• Projects taking so long that they lose energy, budget and trust between people and partners.

Supporting structures for real change.

Strategic collaboration takes the best parts of codesign/coproduction, working with real people, trust-building, meaningful involvement, sharing of power, creative thinking and collective action. It then layers on a strategic frame to create real change – Intent, Process, Practice, Result.

At A Brilliant Thing CIC, we support strategic collaboration through two complementary approaches:

• Human Skills to enable people to collaborate effectively.
• Healing-Centred Design® to enable systems to collaborate effectively.

Together, they support strategic collaboration by creating the conditions for lasting social change.

Completion and powering future change.

We belive strategic collaboration has an end point.  This does not mean people stop working together or even stop collaborating after this point, instead it means that people are able to feel the satisfaction of completion.  Completion allows partners and stakeholders to see the tangible results of the work together.  Positive outcomes and outputs are more likely to be created when people know there is time allocated to complete work and share results. 

A ‘show and tell’ approach works, so hold an event, create a public document or develop a toolkit to help with this. At the completion point  partners can celebrate collective achievement and rethink and refine any future collaboration.  

This approach isn’t about getting more people around the table. It’s about creating the conditions for collective action, so collaboration becomes more than another meeting.Strategic Collaboration is the infrastructure through which lasting social change is designed. 

Building completion into a project does not stop progress, it powers the next phase.