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A Template for Resolving Collaboration Issues


Issue

Strategy

Steps

Can't do it alone
Recognizing that the issue(s) crosses the boundaries of several organizations
Listen and document how issue affects different organizations in different ways

Accepting the solution is distributed
Recognizing knowledge is distributed


Recognizing resources are distributed


Recognizing mandates/ or authority is distributed


Identifying who needs to be involved and what they contribute

Need to engage partners and bring them to table
Governance becomes distributed


Establish what rules are required to participate
Build Trust
Need to secure an initial  willingness to trust
Reduce / eliminate entry and exit barriers


What 'hooks' can be offered? Potential benefits identified

Need to re-affirm trust
Share respective impacts of issue

Need to build relationships of trust
Ongoing sharing of organizational knowledge and insights

Need to satisfy contingent cooperation
Establish mechanisms for transparency & information flow


Establish practical achieveable targets for each partner

Create governance structure
Preparation of governance modeling
Collective Learning
Establish common knowledge base
Preparation of  issue review, cases, needs assessment or studies

Engage in meaning making
Enagage in facilitated joint interpretation of study results

Establish relevance and priorities
Establish consensus
Collective Decision Making
Establish how collective decisions will be made (consensus, majority, etc.)
Establish how will collective decisions be transferred to home organizations?

Addressing multiple accountabilities
Establish relastionship between collective body and participating organizations

Identifying power imbalances

Collective Action
Address free-rider tendency
Establish champions for horizontal communication


Establish regular feedback mechanisms for exchanging information

Establish partner commitments
Publicize commitment


Ongoing partner management


Identify partner benefits/ value added from joint work


Recognize achievements
Monitoring & Evaluation
Identify assessment and evaluation mechanisms Prepare a report annually and at end of project with the use of third party evaluators


Re-evaluate environment and project's relevance to it


Evaluate the continued need for collective action -- is the project still needed, can it be done by others, should it be done by others, can we afford it, can it be spun off?




Based on Garratt's model of a learning board, this can be summarized into a Learning Model of Partnership Governance as depicted below:

CC_Governance_Model

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