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Some thoughts on Collaboration and Innovation

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Don’t do it unless you have to!

If you know what it is that you want to achieve, and you have the power to do it without collaborating then JFDI.  Collaboration is a tool best left in toolbox. unless you have the right job for it.

What are you collaborating for?

Be really clear on what you want the collaboration to achieve, both for you, your preferred, chosen collaborator (more on this later) and your service users or customers.  What impact do you want the collaboration to make?

Develop the vision and rationale for the collaboration – but leave the detailed planning till later

Finding the right collaborators depends on having a vision that is credible, compelling and achievable.  But leave plenty of room for your collaborators to get on board with you in refining the vision and getting down and dirty with shaping goals, projects and plans.  You want them to be collaborators remember – not just hired hands…

Choose your collaborators with care

Make sure that your collaborators being resources, abilities, skills, something to the party that you don’t have but that you need to achieve what it is that matters most to you.  Collaborations that bring to the game more of what you already have tend not to be very exciting – unless your challenge is simply to ‘do more’ rather than ‘do different’ or ‘do better’.

Surviving or thriving?

For some at the moment the need to collaborate is driven by the scissors of doom, the falling levels of investment and the rising demands on services.  ‘Collaboration’ is seen as a way to get more done at lower costs and can be a euphemism for, or a preamble to, merger where back office costs can be cut and we get to live another day.  Nothing wrong with living to fight another day, but using collaboration to innovate might mean that you get to thrive rather than merely survive.

Collaboration, like innovation, is an acquired competence

Innovation and collaboration are both complex processes that require certain skills and cultures to enable them to develop and thrive.  You can’t just expect individuals or organisations to be innovative and collaborative, any more than you can expect them to walk a high wire or speak Latin.  These things have to be learned, and learning takes time.

Get used to failure

Both collaboration and innovation are risky endeavours.  They cannot be ‘evidence based’ and guaranteed to succeed.  The more you innovate and collaborate the more you will fail.  But also the greater the chances that you will succeed.  And as long as your successes create more value than your failures destroy then you are winning.

Ponder the ‘non suicidal acts of courage’

Collaboration and innovation both demand courage.  For us to leave our comfort zones.  To risk failing, looking stupid, provoking disapproval, even anger.  There are risks we could take that, if they went wrong, would put us out of the game. These are potentially suicidal acts of courage – and sometimes they may have to be taken.  But what are the non-suicidal acts of courage that you might be able to commit to?

Olympic Gold – It all starts with a dream….

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Shaa Wasmund is a renowned enteprise guru whose own achievements both as an entrepreneur and as a provider of enterprise support have massively outweighed my own.   Shaa asserts that…

Every athlete once had a dream to stand on an Olympic stage. But, they didn’t just talk about their dreams, they put in the hours, hard work and dedication to make them a reality. They gave all they had for one moment in time.

In my experience many who achieve excellence entered their field because they loved it rather than because they wanted to stand on an Olympic podium or to be a millionaire before they reach 30.  Sometimes it IS the big dream that allows you to put in the hours of dedicated effort.  But much more frequently it is the hours of dedicated effort that eventually allow you to dare to believe in the big dream.  Most of us, to begin with at least, were not motivated by thoughts of winning on the big stage, but by pursuing our interests and exploring possibilities….

Our progress is driven by the dedicated development and exploration of passion and identity.  A journey that often begins with no real clarity over where it might lead, or how far it might go.

I think this openness to journeys that start in different places with different intensities and ambitions is absolutely critical to make the most of all potential, whether it is in sport, business or any field.

And where should we invest our time and money?  In helping people to navigate the ealry stages of their journeys.  Because late stage development is, relatively speaking, child’s play.

A Way Forward for Communities?

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Sustainable community based enterprise

There is no doubt in my mind that community based and bottom up approaches to enterprise support like those pioneered by Ernesto Sirolli and subsequently developed and transformed by projects like Bizz Fizz and on a much more modest scale Elsie, provide significant clues to the emergence of truly sustainable and enterprising communities.

But instead we get celebrity entrepreneurs and academics delivering masterclass after masterclass after enterprise competition on a seemingly endless treadmill driven by incoherent policy and the increasingly desperate search for those Holy Grails of ‘narrow’  economic development – the quick win and the high-growth start-up.
It must be time for us to develop a focus on long term, community building  approaches to sustainable development that embraces the economy, culture and social cohesion as an inseparable trinity.  These things cannot be pursued successfully as separate entities managed by different silos. They are all part of the same process of ‘development’.
We need to develop affordable processes that engage the whole community in nurturing the development of those willing to act boldly and helping more of its members to see that bold action will often reap its reward, not just for the individual but for the community as a whole.  We must help to build communities that know how to recognise and help enterprising people who are looking to make a living and leave the community better off as a result.
And we must persuade policy makers, economic planners and perhaps most importantly our fellow citizens that entrepreneurship is not the only valid form of expression for our enterprising souls.

Management and the Start Up

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I work with businesses and organisations at all stages of the life-cycle. Pre-starts, start-ups and mature businesses.

I often see management DNA develop in the start-up phase and it is seldom a pretty site. Habits and relationships are set early and become very difficult to shake off. This is largely because of the mindset of the original founder of the business:

  • This is their baby;
  • They know how they want it to develop;
  • They have exacting standards.

Consequently their management style can be brusque, directive, bruising and ultimately damaging to the long term growth of the business.

Ideally I get to work with a business pre-start and ensure that the entrepreneurs builds their management team BEFORE the business plan is developed. This way all members of the team can own the plan and a more open and collaborative management DNA can be established from the start.

However this is pretty rare.

More usually I am working with an owner manager who has already established a pretty controlling management style. Helping them to see a different way of running the business is tough enough.

Coaching them to make it happen is even tougher.

Often it takes a real shock to the business and the entrepreneur to make them realise that something has to change.  This ‘shock’ can be bankruptcy, divorce or a significant health issue.

But sometimes that is what it takes before the need to change is fully recognised.