Collaborative Work & Trust--The Basic Research on Scaling Systems Change

Trust is the lubricant that enables the spread and adaptation of innovations.

Trust and strong relationships support tacit knowledge transfer, which allow people to absorb new and complex ideas... to believe in those ideas... to get help and moral support... and to obtain investment from others such that they can reach the "positive change finish line".

Trust and strong relationships are also the catalyst for system-wide transformation.

Networks matter because networks are an ideal environment to nurture trust and strong relationships across organizations. Not all network activities are created equal however.

One of the most important take-aways from my research:

Network activities that lead people to interact and collaborate in meaningful ways, over a sustained period of time, are one of the most effective mechanisms for developing strong and trusting relationships

Want more? Read on to dive into this part of my research. This is one part in a series of bite-sized articles on my dissertation on catalyzing change in?#HigherEd. Learn more about the series and find other articles in?Part 1. Why study C-BEN?

So what was my dissertation about?

Mine was a study of inter-organizational social capital, the influence of network organizations, and the spread of innovative competency-based education (#CBE) practices in the?Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN).

I used?#SocialNetworkAnalysis?(#SNA) to explore how inter-organizational relationships and network organizations advance and support the spread of new policy and practice in #HigherEducation.

Importance of Tacit Knowledge Transfer to C-BEN

Tacit, or complex knowledge, is not easily transmitted, resulting in significant difficulty when organizations seek to adopt or adapt new ideas within their contexts (Polanyi, 1966).

In (C-BEN), higher education institutions (HEIs) experiment and collaborate on work to decouple higher education from the credit hour ( Amy Laitinen , 2012).

This audacious goal involves:

• Separating course offerings from academic calendars, and backwards designing curricula from competencies;
• Exploring new faculty models in terms of teaching, advising, and assessment;
• Transforming tuition structures and financial aid processes;
• Implementing new transcripts, technologies, and systems as necessary infrastructure to support these changes; and,
• Engaging with accreditors and the U.S. Department of Education on policy that supports innovation while assuring quality.

This scope of work clearly sits in the domain of tacit knowledge.

Breaking through the Tacit Knowledge Transfer Barrier

A persistent challenge—preventing many practices from spreading and impeding the scale-up of innovations—is the tacit knowledge transfer barrier.

The spread of new CBE practices depends on the ability of organizations to navigate and overcome this barrier ( Raymond van Wijk et al., 2008).

The recipe for success is common sense: successful tacit knowledge transfer is a function of strong relationships and trust.

And strong relationships and trust are associated with a history of work between partners, frequent and deep interactions, and an intimate understanding of context ( Keith Goffin & Ursula Koners , 2011; Morten Hansen , 1999; Aks Zaheer et al., 2010).

These relational factors--strong relationships and trust--are key to the spread of innovations from one organization to the next, and exponentially more important for system-wide transformations where long-term structural challenges, bureaucratic inertia, and policy status quo may be the obstacles.

This is where C-BEN was able to shine over the last decade.

C-BEN and Adaptive Challenges

C-BEN is not just building relationships and disseminating knowledge through newsletters, reports, conferences, and webinars, and they're not just focused on spreading complex practices from one organization to the next.

C-BEN's big harry audacious goal involves system-wide changes. Since 2012 when the Lumina Foundation and others convened 30 institutions and others with the US DOE, accreditors, and others, C-BEN has been facilitating deep collective problem-solving processes among HEIs that have resulted in network-wide learning and the co-creation of new practices and policy.

This is difficult and generative work within a complex system ( Sandra Waddock et al, 2015). C-BEN is up against what scholars have referred to as an adaptive challenge (Heifetz, 1994; Mary Uhl-Bien et al., 2007) or wicked problem ( Steve Waddell , 2016).

Adaptive challenges are characteristic of the knowledge era and distinguished from technical problems, which are solvable with existing expertise and resources in current bureaucratic systems. Adaptive challenges generally require:

• New ways of thinking;
• Innovation;
• Loss for at least a subset of individuals; and,
• Collective agreement to changes, which necessitates complex and networked approaches (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007).

Beyond spreading practices, network organizations like C-BEN can enhance our ability to confront adaptive challenges.

Networks organizations can strengthen relational network structures and build trust. They can convene diverse expertise to try to solve problems that lie outside the authority or expertise of any one organization to solve. Through sustained investment of time and resources, these networks can catalyze system-wide learning and innovation processes individual organizations cannot.

Inter-Organizational Collaborative Work and Trust

To this point, this article has been centered on theory and purpose. Now for some data!

Using social network analysis in my study, I obtained survey responses from 100+ highly involved actors in the CBE network and had extended conversations with 40+ individuals. With a glut of data, I then analyzed the dimensions of the key collaborative relationships (strong ties) that individuals described to see what I could learn.

An unsurprising but important finding is the strong positive correlation between trust and collaborative work.

This included an 80% correlation between collaborative work with moderate to high levels of instrumental trust, and a 72% correlation with moderate to high levels of expressive trust.

This was for a non-trivial amount of network participants too. Within the CBE ecosystem, 60% of individuals in strong relationships had engaged in collaborative work with one another, and many of these strong relationships began or evolved through these collaborative projects.

What's more, 77% of those engaging in collaborative work had been involved in projects that were intentionally organized (e.g., involvement with C-BEN’s intensive and collaborative problem-solving projects, or activities within a CBE sub-network).

This finding is important because it confirms a pathway for developing strong ties and trust in networks. This supports tacit knowledge transfer and results in an amplification of our ability to implement new ideas in organizations.

Even more important, the collaborative work that grows relationships that help individual organizations implement new practices is also the inspiring and invigorating work that can move a whole system forward.

The final takeaway

• To strengthen social capital across an inter-organizational network... find ways to engage individuals across organizations in meaningful collaborative work over a sustained period of time.
• Meaningful collaborative work is the surest approach to generate trust and strong relationships that support tacit knowledge transfer... a precondition to the spread of innovations across organizations, and the potential to lead positive change in broader systems.

Afterword

Acknowledgements

I'm extremely grateful to my advisor?John Nash?and the rest of my committee members, along with too many others to count (see acknowledgements in the dissertation). The research also would not have been possible without support and funding from the?American Institutes for Research,?Lumina Foundation,?Spencer Foundation, and the?National Academy of Education. Tremendous gratitude to them plus many more!

Author's Disclaimer

My dissertation isn't perfect, and I freely admit there are some flaws in my research design and methods. I plan to talk through some of these issues as part of the series, including elaborating on what I feel would be a refined and effective research design for future studies.

That said, I am confident that the findings I claimed in the study are valid.

• I modified my research design and analytical procedures to only report statistically significant findings that I felt extremely comfortable with.
• I was able to further substantiate these claims with a mixed methods study that collected massive amounts of data (far more qualitative data than I formally analyze), from which I could triangulate across data sources.
• I also had 10+ years as a practitioner in a related field to aid me in interpreting the data and findings.

Want the full dissertation now?

Find my dissertation?here. Cite my work too (full APA citation below):

Haupt, B. W. (2021).?Catalyzing Change in Higher Education: Social Capital and Network Leadership in the Competency-Based Education Network?[Doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky]. UKnowledge Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/edsc_etds/102