Three deficits that can hinder radical collaboration and how to address them

Addressing urgent global issues such as climate change, poverty, food insecurity, and conflict is becoming increasingly complex. There is a need to deliver rapid, large-scale solutions that are often outside the scope of any organisation or sector.  Therefore, radical collaboration – i.e. collaboration across diversity and difference –  is essential to tackling these social challenges. 

Radical collaboration harnesses collective intelligence to help create a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable future. However, it doesn't come without its challenges.  

Unlike conventional collaboration, radical collaboration doesn't just require us to partner with those who see and make sense of the world in a similar way to us and are driven by similar interests and values, but also with people we might not necessarily agree with, like or trust. 

I recently engaged a group of diverse knowledge holders and practitioners working on issues related to climate action to ask them about their experience of what gets in the way of collaboration across differences. Three deficits were common across their responses: deficits in shared understanding, trust, and mutual respect.

In this article, I expand on these deficits and how to address them.

1. Deficits in shared understanding

Misalignment in understanding the problem, the solution, expectations, and the lack of a shared language were named as key challenges to effective collaboration.  In one instance, it took years for a scientist-policy-maker team to come to a mutual understanding of how each team member understood the problem and what was needed. 

This misalignment most often manifests because no time is taken to unpack assumptions and expectations amongst group members at the beginning of an initiative or project. In the context of time-starved, under-resourced teams, taking time to ensure that everyone is on the same page to begin with is not seen as a priority, especially in light of all the “actual work” that needs to be done.

Moreover, unspoken team dynamics (including power dynamics) often prevent individuals from naming their confusion or lack of understanding or naming divergent agendas to the entire team. 

2. Deficits of trust 

Trust deficits are common when new collaborative spaces or teams are established. These deficits may present themselves as explicit or overt types of mistrust—for example, the mistrust between labour and business and between grassroots community-based organisations and larger INGOs. 

But invariably, they manifest in other, often more subtle ways, within and across organisations. Reasons for this could include:

• Lack of transparency: Organisations may not trust one another’s agendas, especially when these are not transparent or articulated.
• Existence of pre-existing relationships and partnerships: Pre-existing relationships and partnerships amongst some members of a team or group can result in experiences of inclusion and exclusion. 
• Power asymmetries: For those who are marginalised, silenced, or undervalued, questions around who has a voice and decision-making power, who will win and who will lose in the process fuel mistrust. For those with apparent power and rank, their mistrust might present as resistance to opening up the space for feedback or comments for fear of the(ir) agenda being challenged or hijacked.
• Fear of being co-opted: In multi-stakeholder processes, actors often represent the interests of a particular constituency, and being seen to agree or align with their apparent adversaries may be perceived as ”collaborating with the enemy”. Further, there is often a fear that multi-stakeholder processes are performative and are a set-up for being co-opted to serve a particular interest or agenda.
  
  

3. Deficits in mutual respect 

Deficits in mutual respect result from explicit or implicit bias. Whose knowledge or opinion matters most and why? Who gets to set the agenda or make the decisions, and why? Who is centred or marginalised, and why?

Biases are attitudes or stereotypes that unconsciously affect our understanding, actions, and decisions. Everyone has biases, which are activated involuntarily and without conscious awareness or intentional control—these are often referred to as implicit biases.

These implicit biases are based on learned associations between particular qualities and social categories, including race, gender, language, class, and religion. 

Over and above fuelling mistrust, the consequences of this deficit in mutual respect can account for much of why practitioners and policymakers struggle to bring their experiential knowledge back into the world of science (because experiential knowledge is often weighed as inferior to scientific knowledge by scientists), and also why common language is not easily built.

Furthermore, these biases entrench the structural inequities and social and environmental harms we are addressing in our work. 

How to  address deficits in shared understanding, trust, and mutual respect

We need to work at both the individual and collective levels to address these deficits. 

At the individual level, there is a need to build capabilities and competencies of more people to be able to:

• Understand and become curious about people who see and experience the world differently from them,
• communicate their positions more effectively in a way that others can understand, 
• learn how to build trust with others, and
• do their own personal work to own their implicit biases, prejudices and assumptions.

This will help foster respect amongst people who think, see and understand the world differently. 

It’s important to bring together groups of people to enable transformation in these domains on a collective level. What might this look like in practice? 

Participants of the ProGREEN Fellows Program

In 2022, Reos Partners and START International designed and facilitated the Promoting Gains in Renewable Energy (ProGREEN) Fellows Program. This program accompanied a group of Francophone early-career renewable energy scientists and professionals from West Africa on a journey toward strengthening personal and interpersonal leadership competencies for effectively collaborating with others and navigating the challenges of addressing complex socio-ecological problems. 

This program received over 400 applications which were competitively reviewed and narrowed to fellows from Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. 

Essential to this program was supporting Fellows in cultivating five “meta-competencies”, which are particularly important for developing shared understanding, trust, and mutual respect. 

1. Reflexivity is the ability to focus on ourselves and critically reflect on how our assumptions, experiences, and positionality influence how we see, experience, and make sense of the world and how others see, experience, and make sense of us. Reflexivity can help build contextual awareness, sensitivity, and respect when working with diverse people, illuminate power relations and power dynamics in a group, and help spotlight potentially problematic assumptions that can hinder the success of collaborative work.
2. Empathy is about trying to understand the world through someone else’s eyes – to experience it as they do – even if we have a different perspective or opinion. Developing this competency is especially useful when we hold very different worldviews or perspectives from others we need to work with. 
3. Flexibility is the capacity to adjust to change quickly and calmly so that we can effectively deal with unexpected challenges. Building flexibility competence increases our faith in our ability to handle a wide range of situations, even in the face of conflict or change.
4. Courage is the willingness to examine one's own beliefs, mental models, and blindspots to tune into uncomfortable conversations or issues. Both individuals and groups require courage to address potential power differentials in a group and have meaningful, difficult conversations. It is important to note that the stakes for practising courage are different for different people within a group due to the power differentials.
5. Curiosity is the willingness to “lean in” or “lean forward” to learn and understand more about ourselves, how others perceive us, and the world around us. It is the readiness to try things out and be curious, even about the things that are hard and make us feel uncomfortable. Developing this competency can strengthen the efficacy of the other competencies. 
   
   

Conclusion

Addressing the deficits of shared understanding, trust, and mutual respect that stand in the way of effective collaboration is possible. However, this will not happen without paying attention to what is needed and investing time, resources, and expertise to address these deficits. 

At an individual level, there are many people who, as a matter of necessity or vocation, find themselves as bridge-builders and interconnectors between different interests or perspectives and who are seeking the skills and capacities to help diverse teams align and understand one another, build trust and mutual respect. Building these capacities could be in the form of courses, training, peer support networks and coaching, many of which already exist. 

At a collective level, a critical first step is to allocate time and budget for alignment at inception and throughout an engagement or project cycle and enlist expertise to facilitate this alignment in a way that generates trust amongst all stakeholders.