...The idea is to function together...

Ben Okri's words, from the poem Lines in Potentis, curl up the side of City Hall in London. We walked past them on our way to the C40 Cities Sustainable Finance Forum today, and these caught my eye. The full poem is here https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2003/10/lines_in_potent.html

A sustainable city is a shared endeavour: working coherently, as a single system. Built through collaboration. To meet the Paris Agreement's "beautiful aspiration", as Mark Watts of C40 called it, will require huge investment in infrastructure to use energy and fuel more wisely, generate low carbon power, provide water and deal with waste water, move people around.... Today's meeting was about how investors can make it happen.

We were given a glimpse into the challenges of that collaboration today by two Chief Financial Officers of municipalities. Sue Tindal of Aukland and Kevin Jacoby of Cape Town seemed to really enjoy comparing their contexts: too much rain, not enough rain; plenty of lenders willing to lend at great rates, recent national downgrading to junk status; the different legal duties and budgetary constraints. It was fascinating stuff. Strict rules on transparency, sudden political changes of direction, the need to respond to disasters like flood, drought or earthquakes... all of these things make cities a challenging partner for an investor.

When different organisations come together to collaborate, of course they need to have shared goals, otherwise collaboration is pointless. What's less obvious is that they need to also have shared processes: decision-making cycles, review points, communications channels. Sue and Kevin helped us understand how these things vary from city to city.

And it can be easy to assume that the way your organisation does things is the best or the only possible way. My experience is that organisations are genius at finding ways of doing things which are unique to them. Like the fish that cannot see the water it's swimming in, these ways of doing things become in effect invisible, until the point at which they bump up against an organisation with a different set of assumptions about how the world works. Telling each other about your needs and constraints early on is crucial in collaboration - it builds tolerance and can help explain otherwise baffling delays and setbacks.

So when you're collaborating, have honest conversations with collaborators about limitations and obligations, and about how decisions are made. Exercise your curiosity about the uniqueness of your collaborators. Because the idea is to function together.

There's more on the importance of understanding organisational culture in my book Working Collaboratively: a practical guide to achieving more.