Collaborative Solutions
A Newsletter from Tom Wolff & Associates
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Contents of Summer 2005 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:
In this issue:
Collaborative Solutions - True Collaboration
as the Most Productive Form of Exchange
1. Networking
2. Coordination
3. Cooperation
4. Collaboration
Enhancing
the capacity of the other
Risks,
resources, rewards and responsibilities
Resources/Tool:
The Continuum of Collaboration
Worksheet
Collaboration is a
term that is appearing everywhere. Unfortunately, the more the word is
used the vaguer its meaning becomes. I think of a recent New Yorker cartoon
in which a kindergartner approaches the teacher, points to his pal, and
says, “Billy won't collaborate." It’s funny in the cartoon,
but what does the kindergartner mean? Being really clear about the meaning
of collaboration will make a big difference when you want to
encourage true exchange of this type. So let's start with an understanding
of what collaboration is and is not.
Collaboration is not just sitting
in a room with a variety of people; it is about creating whole new ways
for us to interact with each other. When individuals and systems interact
effectively, we can maximize our resources and find solutions to seemingly
intractable problems. Collaborative processes have the potential for creating
revolutionary changes in our communities and in our world.
A good colleague, Arthur Himmelman,
has carefully defined the kinds of exchanges that take place in community
groups. He has described the differences between networking, coordination,
cooperation, and collaboration. His definitions build on each other—the
functions of the first are incorporated in the second, and so on. As we
move along the continuum from networking to collaboration, we increase
the amounts of risk, commitment, and resources that participants must
contribute to the exchange. At the same time, the capacity to produce
significant community change also increases.
Thus the end-point of this
progression—collaboration—is the most powerful tool for community
change. Keeping in mind that the first three types of exchange all provide
foundation work for collaboration, and that each can be the most appropriate
strategy in particular circumstances, let’s step through Arthur
Himmelman’s concepts in order.
Networking
Himmelman defines networking
as exchanging information for mutual benefit. This common type
of exchange occurs when two professionals exchange business cards; when
a meeting opens with members’ descriptions of what's new at their
organizations; or when a neighborhood gathering begins with a check-in.
In a networking exchange, we hear news about opportunities for ourselves
or for our clients: staffing changes, program development, clinic hours,
and so on.
Many coalitions and partnerships
begin their meetings with a go-around of information exchange, in order
to facilitate this kind of networking. When we understand that information
is power, it becomes obvious that networking is a critical community
function. We know that consumers suffer because they don't know about
available resources. For example, lack of information can mean that
people forego health care because they don’t know about low-income
clinics. Providers are often in the same boat as consumers. Any single
provider may only have up-to-date information on one or two organizations—because
good friends and colleagues happen to work there. As a result, providers
are limited in their ability to connect clients with resources.
We can see that networking
is a key building block for good collaboration, but by itself networking
is not collaboration.
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Coordination
Himmelman defines
coordination as exchanging information and
altering activities for mutual benefit and for a common purpose.
Coordination builds on networking by adding a behavior, modifying
activities, and foci, mutual benefit and a common purpose.
Coordination increases efficient use of resources and the ability to meet
community needs. A lack of coordination creates significant problems.
Resources are wasted and the community misses out.
A lack of coordination
is a serious shortcoming in our helping system. It drives both consumers
and providers crazy. How many times do we have to give the same information
to the same people in the same organization, just because two departments
or insurers or funders have failed to coordinate their intake forms? When
the problem is pointed out, each of the offending organization’s
staff members usually responds that “I must have the information
in exactly this way in order to meet my needs.” There’s no
overview of the situation that would help staffers understand the impact
that a lack of coordination has both on the consumer and on the providers
who must process all the forms.
Activities that
encourage increased coordination can be of great benefit. In one small,
rural community, we brought together the clergy in order to address issues
of hunger. We began to talk about how to provide as many warm meals as
possible in the community. We started with a networking exchange:
we had the representatives indicate when each church group served warm
meals. This revealed that two churches provided meals on Sundays. When
the churches agreed that one would offer a meal on Sunday and the other
would serve its meal on Wednesday, we moved from networking to
coordination. The participants had modified activities in order
to provide as many warm meals as possible during each week for hungry
community members. These changes were mutually beneficial and served a
common purpose.
Whenever people
agree to announce each other's activities in their newsletters, recruit
for each other's events, or modify their practices in light of each other’s
activities, they are coordinating their activities for the mutual
benefit of providing better service to a community.
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Cooperation
Himmelman defines cooperation
as exchanging information, modifying activities, and sharing resources
for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose. Cooperation builds
on the exchanges of networking and coordination and adds the new concept
of sharing resources.
Risk and involvement increase
as each participant antes up resources in a cooperative relationship.
This represents a crucial shift, and we’ll come back to it in a
moment. First, though, we need to look at common purpose. Although
Himmelman includes common purpose in coordination, in our experience
we see common purpose really become critical in cooperative exchanges.
Common purpose is
more complex than mutual benefit. In order to acknowledge mutual
benefit, participants can simply describe their intentions or goals. In
mutual benefit, an exchange meets the needs of the various organizations,
but those needs may not be based on a common vision. Common purpose
implies more than this. In order to clarify and articulate a common purpose,
participants need to engage in discussion. They have to take the time
to become involved in a visioning process about where they want to go
as separate entities, and then they have to determine what parts of their
visions are held in common.
Tom Wolff & Associates
often leads communities or coalitions through visioning processes. Each
time we are involved with this step we are astonished anew that—even
in communities where people feel that they have very disparate ideas—we
find common visions as soon as we ask people what they would like to see
happen in the next few years.
Now our consideration of cooperative
exchange can return to the element of sharing resources. Here
Himmelman has included the magic word: resources. That means
dollars, staff hours, equipment, space, and other materials that actually
get work done. As soon as resources are on the table, an exchange frequently
gets more edgy. Many see resources as what makes the world go around.
Once we start to share them, we need greater levels of trust.
Nonetheless, cooperation can
be simple. A number of human service agencies may decide to share a booth
at the Cambodian Community Festival over the weekend. In order to cover
they cost of the booth, they need to pool resources.
Cooperation can take on a more
complex form when several agencies combine funds to create a shared staff
position. We sometimes see this with outreach workers. When a number of
agencies would like to increase their effectiveness in a specific community,
but none of them has enough money alone to fund an outreach worker –
they can turn to cooperation. For example, one agency can contribute literacy-project
outreach money, another can chip in diabetes-program outreach money, and
a third can come up with HIV-prevention outreach money. Together, they
can fund a worker who provides outreach out to the identified community
on all three issues. The three agencies find a common purpose—making
community resources accessible to the specified community—and they
share resources to make it happen.
The risks are clearly higher
in the shared-staffing example than in the weekend-booth project. Will
each agency get its money’s worth? Who supervises? Who gets credit?
Cooperation is a very useful
form of exchange. Our fragmented health care system (which affects everyone)
and our inability to help the un- or underinsured (which affects mainly
people with lower-incomes) both result in part from a lack of cooperation.
If various agencies cannot come together and find a common purpose, their
efforts remain piecemeal and they fritter away valuable resources. When
organizations feel competitive toward and distrusting of each other, they
don't share. As a result, each group may end up with inadequate resources.
Crucial tasks never get done. On the other hand, if resources are pooled
through cooperative efforts, as in the example of the outreach worker,
common purposes can be achieved.
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Collaboration
Finally, we come to collaboration,
which builds on networking, coordination, and cooperation. Our definition
already includes the concepts of exchanging information, modifying
activities, sharing resources, and having a common purpose. To
reach collaboration, Himmelman adds enhancing the capacity
of another for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose
by sharing risks, resources, responsibilities, and rewards.
The key phrase relating to
collaboration, as you’ll have noted from the emphasis, is enhancing
the capacity of another. For a helping system in which many components
are often competitive or even hostile, this is a revolutionary concept.
In addition, Himmelman specifies the increased engagement of each party
within the exchange. Participants share resources, and they also share
risks, responsibilities, and rewards. These three extra elements—risks,
responsibilities, and rewards—are inherent in the sharing of resources
through coordination, but their importance comes to the foreground
in collaboration because the amount of resource-sharing increases.
Collaboration is a radical
concept. It takes time and it takes dedication to achieve. Once we have
a system of collaboration in place, we can accomplish significant changes
in our systems and we can dramatically increase the effectiveness of
our work—individually and together. Three examples demonstrate
the possibilities.
Case Examples:
Example One:
Example onerequired
many years to come to fruition, and it produced profound results. The
Mayor's Task Force on Deinstitutionalization was a collaborative effort
that took place in a small New England city during the 1980s. Its intention
was to coordinate efforts within the community among those organizations
that dealt with people with mental illness who were being deinstitutionalized
from the state mental health hospital and the local VA Hospital. These
people in need of support interacted most often with members of the
Police Department and with emergency service workers from the Department
of Mental Health. When these two groups of helpers entered the Task
Force, they didn’t trust each other. Working together, they began
first to understand and then to build trust. At that point, the police
and mental health representatives were able to sit down on a weekly
basis and go over their caseloads together—discovering an overlap
of about 40%.
As they learned to know and
respect each other, they could collaborate in handling, and ultimately
in preventing, some difficult and dangerous situations. Through these
exchanges the police were delighted, and able, to enhance the capacity
of the emergency service workers, and the emergency service workers
were delighted, and able, to enhance the capacity of the police.
Example Two:
Example two comes
from eastern Tennessee and was a project of the Cocke County Collaborative
(formerly the CONTACT program), a community-based social-change and
community-building organization. This collaborative takes a holistic,
grassroots approach to social change in their area (see case study -
http://www.waittfoundation.org/images/present/resources/resource_files/e_tennessee.pdf)A
few years ago this program brought together white youths who were learning
videography with black elders, with a long history in the community.
The common purpose was the recording of oral histories of the community.
This videography experience set the stage for amazing interracial, intergenerational
collaborations that enhanced the capacities of all participants. The
white youth and the African American elders truly collaborated.
Example Three:
Example three
occurred on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where the Lower Outer Cape Community
Coalition worked to promote the livable wage for workers. The livable
wage is an alternate concept to the minimum wage. The living
wage is calculated according to what a family must earn to live in a
given community in the most basic way. It includes the expenses of child
care, housing, transportation, and other essentials, based on local
costs. The coalition determined that staff members at hotels, motels,
and restaurants in the area needed to earn about $15 an hour in order
to live in the community where they worked.
The coalition brought
this data to the local Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber members’
first response was derisive laughter. However, as the discussion deepened,
the Chamber members began to understand that the livable wage calculations
included only the essential expenses of holding a job. They then began
to understand the problem more personally. It turned out that many Chamber
members could not keep their stores, restaurants, and other businesses
fully open because they could not find workers—even during the
busy summer season. Workers were not available because they were unable
to locate affordable child care and housing.
There was indeed,
mutual interest: the businesses needed more workers, and the workers
would be happy to clock more hours—if they could afford to pay
their bills at the end of the day. Out of this collaborative effort
was born the Business Human Service Collaborative for Affordable Housing
and Child Care, which became a powerful force working to enhance the
capacities of both businesses and workers on Cape Cod.
Risks, Resources, Rewards, and Responsibilities
What's involved in collaboration?
First, collaboration isn’t easy. Himmelman describes four Rs that
are basic to the collaborative process: risks, resources, rewards,
and responsibilities. Let's look at a generic example of a coalition
that is working to collaborate.
First there’s risk.
When the coalition takes a controversial point of view, the mayor or
state government may get angry and attack the coalition. That’s
clearly an issue of risk. At that point, do the coalition members all
point to the coalition coordinator, or do they as a whole say we took
this risk together and we will face the consequences the same way?
Sharing becomes more challenging
when the topic is resources. The greatest difficulty of collaboration
often becomes clear when resources are put on the table. Who gets to
have the resources, and who determines how they get used? If the project
is a community effort and the health-and-human-service community wrote
the grant proposal, do the agency administrators set aside resources
for community members, or do they divide up the dollars first and then
inform the community members that all resources have been spoken for?
Finding ways to fairly and equitably distribute resources—whether
those consist of cash, educational opportunities, office supplies, or
any other asset—is a key element in collaborative success.
Rewards, too, must be shared.
If the coalition achieves great success and is acknowledged with an
award to be presented by the mayor or the state government, who gets
to step up and accept the prize? The coalition coordinator or the whole
group? We often feel that a spotlight is only big enough for one. Yet
if you have ever been lucky enough to be honored for a group effort,
you know how the spotlight can expand and how good it can feel to share
the sense of accomplishment.
Finally, we look at sharing
responsibilities. Unfortunately, the most common story for coalitions
is that of the Little Red Hen. In this folk story, as you’ll probably
remember, the Little Red Hen asked for help in planting the wheat, harvesting
the grain, grinding the flour, and baking the bread. All the other farm
animals were too busy for those tasks, but they all showed up to eat
the finished loaf. . In successful coalitions, everyone shares the responsibility.
In true collaboration, everyone does some of the work.
In future newsletters, we
will talk more about how to build collaboration. As a step in that direction,
you can use the tool included in this newsletter to evaluate the ways
in which your current projects depend on the techniques of networking,
coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. The tool itself, simply
by raising awareness, can help organizations move toward collaboration.
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Conclusion
The process of Collaborative
Solutions (see Collaborative Solutions Newsletter Fall 2004 issue http://www.tomwolff.com/collaborative-solutions-fall04.html)
is the basis of the work of Tom Wolff and Associates. All of our work
depends on the above definition of collaboration.
We are convinced of the enormous power of the collaborative process. We
have seen it in action. We have helped create it in communities and organizations.
Can you imagine the following situations?
What if two hospitals in the
same community didn't fight competitively, but collaborated to build each
other’s strengths?
What if a city’s mayor
and its neighborhood associations worked together to improve both the
city’s management and the neighborhood association, instead of attacking
each other?
What if the rich and the poor
in our communities worked to enhance each other’s capacities?
What if the United States saw
its relationships with other nations as collaborative?
And what if we and our closest
neighbors also dedicated ourselves to enhancing each other’s capacities,
and therefore each other’s lives?
Can you imagine a world like
that? And wouldn’t it be a great place to live?
We can do this work—one
step at a time. At each step, we will be required to combine our resources,
to take risks, and to take responsibility. Then we can also share the
rewards.
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Reference
Himmelman, A. On Coalitions and the Transformation of Power Relations:
Collaborative Betterment and Collaborative Empowerment
American Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 29, no. 2, April 2001,
pp. 277-285
Himmelman, Arthur T. "Communities Working Collaboratively for a Change."
In Resolving Conflict: Strategies for Local Government, edited
by Margaret Herrman. Washington, D.C.: International City/County Management
Association, 1994, 27-47.
For a free copy of a summary of Arthur's thinking on collaboration, write
him at ArthurTHimmelman@aol.com,
and he will send you a copy of his paper, "Collaboration for a Change."
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Resource/Tool:
The Continuum of Collaboration Worksheet
The following tool can
help you and your neighbors assess how your efforts are making use
of networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. The tool
allows you to mark how frequently you now employ each of these exchange
processes, and to indicate how frequently you would like to use each
process in the future. This evaluation can help move organizations
toward increased collaboration.
Reference:
Himmelman, A. On Coalitions and the Transformation of Power Relations:
Collaborative Betterment and Collaborative Empowerment
American Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 29, no. 2, April
2001, pp. 277-285
Himmelman, Arthur T. "Communities Working Collaboratively for
a Change." In Resolving Conflict: Strategies for Local Government,
edited by Margaret Herrman. Washington, D.C.: International City/County
Management Association, 1994, 27-47.
For a free copy of a summary of Arthur's thinking on collaboration,
write him at ArthurTHimmelman@aol.com,
and he will send you a copy of his paper, "Collaboration for
a Change."
The Continuum of Collaboration Worksheet
Instructions: Given the definitions of networking,
coordinating, cooperating and collaborating, identify the following:
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With an “x” identify which functions are most frequently
used in your collaborative efforts
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Discuss how you might like to change this “mix”
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With an “o” identify where you would like to be (which
functions you would like to use more frequently, etc.)
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Discuss and note what your collaborative needs to do to make
this happen
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Use Frequently |
Use Sometimes |
Hardly Ever Use |
Networking
Exchanging Information |
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Coordination Exchange
Information
Alter Activities
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Cooperation
Exchange Information
Alter Activities
Share Resources |
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Collaboration Exchange
Information
Alter Activities
Share Resources
Enhance Capacity |
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