Systemic Collaboration - Sink, Swim or Sail.

This is a call to colleagues in mission-driven organizations for dialogue on a new approach to collaboration. Let’s sail together rather than sink in competitive silos.

At COP28, we hosted a workshop with expert practitioners in sustainable construction and forestry to explore what systemic collaboration might look like with the shared goal of Forest-Positive Buildings

May 24, 2023 - The situation from my vantage point, while channeling many of you, is that our socio-ecological challenges are growing in scale and complexity, as are the number of mission-driven organizations lined up to respond. We’re out on the battlefield in all shapes and sizes: dot-orgs, B-corps, dot-edus and dot-govs – all trying to make progress and fix problems.?

Meanwhile what I hear most often is that we are not working fast enough. We’re barely keeping up, let alone beating back the wildfires, rising temperatures, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and urban housing demand.?

Do we need more organizations? More funding? More people? Surely the answer to all of these is yes. But I believe there is something more urgent and fundamental that we can do together, now.

Our organizations may be motivated by the same goals, but we lack frameworks for working together effectively. The context of our goals and challenges is made up of large-scale nested systems and vast, complex interdependent variables. Meanwhile, we proceed with a high degree of structural autonomy and a low level of genuine interdependence between our organizations.

There are many structures within our organizations that do not necessarily require or reward intelligent collaboration - this includes our organizational cultures, norms, vocabulary, information systems and business models. And just outside our organizations we have the flow of funding, credibility and recognition of our outputs. (Am I rewarded for the goals I score, or winning as a whole team?) Because of this, organizational efforts are duplicated. Organizations may be ignorant, sometimes intentionally, of one another’s skills, advances, experience and insights. Organizations working on the exact same problem can find themselves in direct competition with one another. Funders end up giving money to different groups doing the same thing. Amidst these patterns good people can become cynical, ambivalent or confused about their roles and purpose, which is the last thing we need!

Examples show up in many of the “territories” that Pilot Projects works in (we are by no means immune): climate-friendly built environment, forestry innovation, tropical forest conservation, mass timber construction technology, bio-based materials, sustainable community land management, and more. Between the many organizations and initiatives in these spaces, competition for limited funding resources and pressure to demonstrate organizational (and individual) territorial leadership can lead to willful ignorance or even undermining one another. If I’m seeking a grant for my organization, I may not want to even know that someone else is doing the same kind of work, lest I have to acknowledge this redundancy and forgo some funding.

This is a colossal waste of resources – time, intelligence, creativity and money. It leads to harder work and slower progress. Meanwhile the clock is ticking, and we’re all struggling to move forward towards our common goal(s).

It is time to acknowledge that these goals can’t be achieved with more parallel effort, paid for by more or bigger grants. We need exponentially better returns on our effort. We need interdependent cooperation between organizations working in thoughtfully designed relationships with one another.

We need systemic collaboration.

Seeking Resilience: From Mechanical to “Multi-Minded” Systems

I’ve spent a lot of time on the water, so this next question is not theoretical:?

What do a log raft and an elegant wooden sailboat have in common? They share a similar purpose — to carry passengers or cargo across the water with minimal dampness. And they are made of nearly identical materials: a few tree trunks and some hemp fiber.

But while a log raft may get you where you’re going slowly with a lot of effort, a watertight, well-crafted sailboat will do the job with exponential effectiveness, slicing buoyantly over the waves. The sailboat’s goal-reaching ability is multiplied thanks to its design, which specifies interdependent roles and relationships between the various elements of its system: thin wood planks, a shapely keel, rudder, mast, and sails.? These parts - working together according to the design - become something counterintuitive and miraculous.

One of my heroes, MIT scientist and systems thinker Donella Meadows, writes that the “things'' in a system—people, cells, molecules, [wood planks, rudders, or organizations]? — are “interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time”.

The patterns of behavior are what produces a system’s “emergent properties,” and the counterintuitive but powerful results, such as the buoyancy and hydrodynamics provided by the displacement of a sleek air-filled wooden hull. Emergent properties of a well-designed system are a different order of magnitude than the low-level additive impacts of parallel work (such as paddling harder, or adding extra logs to the raft).?

To get from a log raft to a sailboat, however, means pausing… dragging the logs onto shore, drawing up a design, gathering an array of special tools, and setting to work for a significant period of time. Those who stayed on the raft can keep moving slowly and steadily forward. But once the sailboat is done, it will leave the raft far behind.

What does this look like for our organizations and challenges? How can we design an interdependent system for interorganizational collaboration? How do we co-visualize the long term benefits?? And are there risks that come with these exponential outputs?

A sailboat is what the American-Iranian systems thinking guru Jamshid Gharajedaghi would call a “mechanical” system: highly efficient, but also brittle. The vulnerabilities of a sailboat are numerous. Hit a rock and the thin wooden hull could spring a leak. We could sink! We could break a shroud and lose the mast! The sails could rip, or the rudder could come loose at a critical moment! I know from direct experience: any of these failures can leave the whole system useless or worse. Abandon ship!

At Pilot Projects we see physical examples of this “interdependence-vulnerability” in the remote community forest enterprises. It is not uncommon to see expensive sawmills abandoned in the forest. One missing part can easily bring the whole system down, and we’re sent back to the less-efficient but more resilient two-man saw pit.

But wait! That doesn’t have to be the end of the story. This is where “the crew” comes in. A sawmill or sailboat is never only a mechanical system. There are people involved that have ideas of their own about how to deal with these problems. As Gharajedaghi would put it, these systems are actually “socio-cultural” and “multi-minded.” They are made up of a “voluntary association of members united by a common goal.” Each of these human and organizational components has its own independent mind, goals, and purposes that work together, communicate, negotiate, and make decisions. A multi-minded system, unlike a mechanical (or biological) one, can change both its means and its ends as its context changes. It can adapt or even reinvent itself. Our organization can be a rudder or a mast as needed. For every abandoned sawmill I have seen many that are working hard, with unique arrays of repairs, adaptations, work-arounds, and innovations suited to the local context, made possible by human ingenuity, skill, and teamwork. Here are a few I’ve visited in the past few years. (link to sawmill gallery)

With a good crew, a boat can surpass its vulnerabilities. It can be steered upwind. Leaks can be patched, a new rudder crafted from an extra oar, clever knots tied to repair ropes, broken masts jury-rigged. Like the mechanical parts of the boat, the members of a crew must know their roles. (You steer, I trim the sails, and someone else cooks dinner.) But with multiple minds in constant communication and cooperation, the same crew is fully capable of changing roles, changing strategy, and even changing the destination, should that be required by the environment –a reality often encountered throughout nautical history.

People working together as a team can invent endless solutions to new challenges. And this is the definition of true resilience. Watching a highly-skilled team who know their tools and know each other makes us believe that we can overcome insurmountable odds and do the impossible.

Our organizations can do the same by working together, if we are willing to co-design a collaboration system. We have to stop the raft, drag the logs up on shore, and get out the drafting board. (The purpose of the Klosters Workshop)

A Team of Teams

It is one thing to have a group of individuals working together as a team – itself not an easy feat. Imagine that our respective organizations (our teams) are functioning beautifully – passing the ball continuously and making one great selfless play after another. (In our fields, there are indeed many teams and team plays to admire and learn from!)?

But I want to focus on how our organizations with common missions work together, inter-organizationally, across disciplines, geographies, subcultures, and sectors. In this kind of teamwork we have a long way to go.

General Stanley McChrystal was commander of the US Joint Special Operations Task Force from 2003 to 2008, and he faced an immense challenge. He was leading one of the world’s biggest and most siloed and hierarchical organizations into battle against a much smaller and less resourced enemy insurgency (Al Qaeda) that was more resilient, networked, and adaptable. In his book Team of Teams, he describes how by necessity he painstakingly facilitated the redesign of the communication culture between organizations such as the CIA, Navy Seals, Army Special Forces, and Air Force. McChrystal moved the Task Force from a top-down framework that “efficiently” organized (and compartmentalized) units within the military, toward a complex system in which teams share information and collaborate with one another in real time based trust rather than hierarchy and “need to know”. They would now work as a “team of teams,” rather than following historic patterns of parallel play, which left them vulnerable and lumbering despite being better resourced than their adversary, and even despite good teamwork at the organizational level. The problem (and solution) lay in the way these historic and iconic organizations worked together.?

McChrystal’s insights to foster a Team of Teams:?

• Prepare for complexity (unpredictability) by fostering adaptability and resilience.
• Culture trumps technology, data, efficiency and top-down management
• Nurture a culture of competence and entrepreneurialism amongst teams
• Shared trust and purpose imbues teams with an ability to solve problems

What the Task Force finally achieved after much experimentation, risk-taking, trust-building, silo-dismantling, and re-design of relationships was a whole that functioned like the famed Navy Seals team on a mission – a system composed of highly skilled individual organizations, each with a strong mind and mission of their own, but even stronger bonds of trust communication and drive towards the common mission.?

Driven by necessity to keep pace with an agile [adversary] and a complex environment, we had become adaptable. We fused a radical sharing of information with extreme decentralization of decision-making authority. …Gone were the tidy straight lines and right angles of a traditional org chart; we were now amorphous and organic, supported by criss-crossing bonds of trust and communications that decades of managers might have labeled as inefficient, redundant or chaotic.?- Gen. Stanley McChrystal

Most mission-driven organizations working in the same context have neglected to intentionally design the connections between co-contextual organizations to “team-ify” their impact. They’re more like the loosely tied log raft or an uncrewed sailboat than they should be. The result is slow movement, wasted energy and a lack of resilience.

In systemic “team of teams” collaboration, common purpose takes priority over individual goals for all organizational members, even though these remain important. This paradigm calls for existing organizations - teams of people – to build their skills and capacity while they come together to collaborate. Each organization is like a seasoned crew member on a challenging sailing expedition.?

From Parallel Play to Roles and Relationships

Powerful results come when stakeholders have designed a system for their collaboration such that each participant’s contributions are essential to the whole. It is the whole system that matters most. Meadows, Gharajedaghi, and their mentor Russell Ackoff, go further by stressing that the context of the system is much more important to understand than its parts. This brings us back to the power of design which is fundamentally integrative, over analysis which is dis-itnigrative. As Gharajedaghi writes, “The best way to understand a system is to redesign it.”?

Using a systems thinking lens, we can create (and therefore understand) complex interdependence between stakeholders in three key ways. First, we can co-create a purposeful community bonded by a common mission, relative to its context. Second, members of this community can discover how role-playing can serve the common mission, and the needs of the organizational ‘parts’-- as well as provide structure and flexibility as members adapt to, and take on, different interdependent roles. Within this system boundary, members can foster trust and multidimensional relationships between roles. And third, we can empower members and leaders to challenge institutional jurisdictions, hierarchies, and management typologies that might restrict the lifeblood of information and resources, or the members ability to re-design the roles and relationships as needs change.?

The Co-design journey

Designing a system for collaboration between mission-driven organizations is never going to be a straightforward task. It’s a constant process of design (and redesign) supported by working principles that can be found in related literature and our own collective experience.

While leadership is intrinsic to design (even synonymous with it), the principle of co-design suggests that a new collaboration system can’t be envisioned by one mind, or built from a top-down perch. Diverse stakeholders, with their unique understanding of the context and of their own strengths and capabilities, must participate in the design. Members must agree on the shared purpose of their collaboration system and believe that working together, in a particular way with particular roles (the design), will improve the outcomes for all.

Second, co-design is a constant process, a state of mind that allows the collaborative system to be reshaped as it confronts its complex environment. Member organizations should be in for the “long haul,” knit together by ability and desire, and constantly communicating, like the crew of a ship. If things aren’t working, all members understand the significance and are able to make decisions and changes to keep things on course. Insights can also be shared that will guide the re-design. Having collaborators who are invested in the co-design process will drastically increase the system's success.

A key factor in “team-first” decision-making and successful redesign is trust — bonds that can only grow out of relationships. Within and between organizations, this means some face-to-face contact is likely necessary, especially in the early design phase of any inter-organizational systems collaboration; trust comes in part from embodied interaction, even if those collaborations partially migrate to virtual platforms later. Getting together in person to co-design is a core principle.

Trust requires, and allows for, some hard decisions and tough-minded thinking on behalf of leaders. For a system to truly accelerate progress, everyone can’t perform the same functions in parallel. Every organization can’t be “the sail.” Instead, partners have to think about who is best suited for various roles in the system. Who has the capability? Who is positioned ideally? Whose interests, passions, and strengths are ideal for this role?

How, in other words, can we reconfigure our particular organization to play a stronger and interdependent role within the system, with defined and choreographed and adaptable relationships with our organizational peers?

This may mean that a leader needs to shift the focus of their organization and take on a role that will better serve the collaborative whole. Each organization will still need to accomplish its own goals, and provide this for its individual members. But it will prioritize the mission of the larger collaborative team. That can be a tough sell for founders or leaders of mission-driven organizations built from their personal passions, and used to a lot of freedom of movement and decision-making! Certainly, organizations will need to maintain the metabolism that lets them prosper: sources of revenue, credibility, trust from stakeholders, and exciting work for everyone in the organization. But this kind of radical shift toward considering how, on a voluntary basis, an organization can integrate itself into a stronger system can make all the difference between flailing toward a goal and picking up speed — and that needs to matter to us all.

Finally, a culture of systemic collaboration requires visionary sources of funding that encourage organizations to work with one another. This might mean, for example, that a funder requires organizations to show evidence that they’re collaborating with other grantees in order to renew a grant. An incentive for collaboration can go a long way toward nudging organizations to dig into the design process with one another.

Ideally, such systemic collaborations can incorporate both large, well-established organizations and smaller, scrappier ones in the same space, taking advantage of different levels of stability, risk-taking and agility. That means spending time identifying diverse actors in the space as well the capabilities and needs they might have – needs that might include something as granular as travel funds to participate in collaborative design.

There are many factors to consider here — for instance, when might “redundancy” in roles actually be desirable? When might two organizations working in parallel strengthen the system, and when do they weaken it? What factors might create a more resilient system, so that if one component fails, others can pick up the slack? If one navigator of the sailboat suddenly gets seasick, should we make sure other crew members know how to use a sextant? These are important matters to be considered in the design process and its iterations. But, in the end, they’re arguments for greater #systemic_collaboration.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Five steps toward systemic collaboration

1. Build a “community of practice,” with a semi-permeable boundary, that includes players of different sizes, speeds and skills
2. Look for a system boundary, wherein groups are already working toward a common goal.
3. Envision how groups within this boundary, working in a systemic fashion, with well designed roles and relationships, could advance a common objective.
4. Start forming trust by co-designing systemic roles and relationships, even as members continue with their respective missions. Build and test a pilot project.
5. Ask questions: What kind of trust, sacrifice, re-tooling, and design skills would be necessary to accomplish this objective?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Future, If We Dare

For mission-driven organizations, it’s vital that we systematize our efforts, locally and globally. Individuals, companies, NGOs, cities, forests, and countries need to seek out the roles we can, and maybe must, play in the global system(s). In order to scale up change — something we all know is imperative — we can no longer afford to be satisfied with parallel play and protecting our organizational boundaries..

Systemic collaboration represents a new way of thinking about our efforts — a field of innovation that will help us learn to compromise, work together, and form a true team with radical interdependency.

We can take this even further: perhaps the innovation we need most is in the relationships between the many participants and roles in the global system. This represents a cultural challenge, with many ways of working and thinking having to come together in harmony. But the history of human progress is full of examples of people creating functional systems to bring about astounding achievements, often in the form of powerful cultures of cooperation and high-stakes role playing.

The big question we all have to ask ourselves remains. What role do we and the organizations we lead have to play in the global systems of shared meaning, wealth, and thriving nature? If our organizations engage in true systemic collaboration, with shared goals and radical interdependencies, then re-designing our relationships must be primary.

Postscript: A Question to Funders

How might systemic collaboration change the way that funders design their grants? Typically, grants have a short lifespan. But if this kind of collaboration requires commitment of the participants over time, then grants may need explicit requirements that grantees contribute to the larger system – its design, maintenance, innovation, improvement, and more. Perhaps a percentage of any grant may be earmarked for organizations to commission “other” teams that might work alongside them.

Or, perhaps, a radical idea: funding is allocated to the “whole” team, and the organizations within the team decide how to allocate the funds according to their roles and contributions. What other ways might funding change and adapt to encourage this new way of working together?

-----------------------------------------------—-----------------------------------------------