Working in partnerships and across boundaries Learning lessons from leading practice Sue Pritchard Principal Consultant Bath Consultancy Group Ltd

2 © After 20 years of research and practice…  Development programmes in build capacity for partnership and collaboration  Action learning programmes to support joint working ‘on the job’  Visiting Research Fellow and teaching a Masters programme on collaboration  Writing on leading change across whole systems  Consulting in health, local government, environment, criminal justice, citizen and customer engagement  Small Country Governance project – a cross sector leadership inquiry  Chairing a health board with a statutory requirement for partnerships  Partnering with other organisations for clients…

3 © So what’s the problem…?  ‘Wicked issues’ and tough problems require complex solutions  can’t be solved from within one paradigm  Rapidly diminishing resources  Fast-changing world – globalisation, growth of networks, information  Organisations designed for yesterday’s problems (– and yesterdays assumptions about organisation effectiveness…)  In silos  Cultures fit for their own purposes

4 © Lessons from the last 15 years  Agreeing shared goals is a critical first task for the partnership  Mutual respect is a pre-condition for success  Trust needs to be built up to enable the partnership to function  All partners need an equal voice  Agreed standards of behaviour will ensure that partnership ethos are maintained  The ability to resolve differences is crucial  Get the end user or customer involved when you’ve sorted out your partnership  You need clear formal structures and procedures for partnership working  Working in partnerships is hard work!  NO!

5 © Updating the Change Equation  The "change equation" warns that all change involves pain, and because we all want to avoid pain - sometimes at almost any cost – the motivational factors have to be very strong to succeed  D x V x M must be > P  W(C) x IO x M must be > P ­ Willingness to collaborate x improved outcomes x means (or first steps)

6 © Organisation patterns – the ‘stuff’ of life  Take it personally  Have an emotional reaction  Make up a story  Evaluate others  Malicious  Insensitive  Incompetent  React  Get mad  Get even  Withdraw  Focus on the stuff DOOR ‘A’  Hear it as their experience  Understand their systemic context  Inquire to find out more  Stay curious  Stay engaged and respond  Focus on what needs to shift DOOR ‘B’ From Oshry – Seeing Systems

7 © Delivering in partnerships Integrating and Aligning Organisational effort Strategy Governance Leadership Learning Culture Technical Skills

8 © Strategy  Engaging all stakeholders  Understood throughout the enterprise  Inextricably linked to the capacity for implementation  Emergent

9 © Culture  Understanding the components of culture and how to work with them  Aware of how to impact and change cultures  Building in ‘requisite system variety’

10 © Appropriate Professional or Technical Skills  The right technical skills for the job in hand  Establishing where certainty exists, and applying traditional project management skills to deliver the known  Equally establishing where certainty does not exist, creating conditions to manage ‘adaptively’  Coping with changing strategic needs while delivering coherent tactical solutions

11 © Governance and Accountability  Accountability for alignment across the partnership, not silos  Aligning responsibility for governance with an equal ownership of effective implementation

12 © Cycles of Rapid Learning  Ensuring open and rapid feedback loops from the whole system  Learning in public – so that intelligence is readily shared across the system  Learning from achievement and failures  Identifying ‘system patterns’ and acting on them  Rewarding honesty and avoiding the ‘conspiracy of optimism’ – “speaking truth to power”

13 © Leadership  Resisting the pull to conventional models of ‘hero’ leaders  Mobilising a ‘guiding coalition’, and distributing leadership throughout the system  Developing high performing teams  Understanding both the Technical and the Adaptive Leadership Challenges  Setting the example “being the change you want to see in the world”

14 © The ‘Adaptive’ Challenge - Heifetz Leadership Challenges Direction Protection Orientation Managing Conflict Shaping Norms Type of challenge Technical Define problems and find solutions Shield the organisation from external threats Clarify roles and responsibilities Restore order Maintain norms Type of challenge- Adaptive Identify the adaptive challenge and frame the key questions Let the partnership feel the pressures within a range it can stand Challenge current roles and resist defining new roles too quickly Expose conflict or let it emerge Challenge unproductive norms

15 © Ten values underpinning effective partnerships  Optimism the partnership will work and we will achieve better outcomes than we could separately  Empathy and humility Seeking to understand the perspective and experience of other partners knowing it will be useful and important  Tenacity and courage to question assumptions and current ways of working  Learning putting learning at the heart of the partnership and knowing it is as important to honour what already works as it is to encourage new ways of thinking and acting  Relationships founded on the pursuit of mutual understanding, willingness to negotiate and working through problems between us

16 © Ten values underpinning effective partnerships  Whole system perspective resisting fragmenting or ‘one size fits all’ approaches and seeing the partnership within the wider system or enterprise  Subsidiarity Devolving partnership practices throughout the enterprise so that the right knowledge and insight is applied to the right problems  Building partnership capital appreciating peoples’ real experiences in partnering to get things done and involving them throughout in the processes that will strengthen partnering capacity  Celebrating small steps welcoming the small improvements that demonstrate the practical possibilities and potential for learning  The long view being there for the long haul rather than the quick fix

Working in partnerships and across boundaries Learning lessons from leading practice Sue Pritchard Principal Consultant Bath Consultancy Group Ltd