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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.