The Search for Collaborative Advantage

Some Conceptual Handles

This book opened with a view that collaboration is difficult but valuable if done successfully. The book has aimed to contribute to an understanding of how to manage the difficulties in order to maximize the value – the collaborative advantage – to be gained from collaboration.

One way of viewing the way in which this book has contributed to such an understanding is at two levels. First, many of the chapters make an important contribution to a picture of collaboration in practice through highlighting considerations which can affect its success and value. Such conceptual insights can inform the actions of future collaborators or of those facilitating collaborative groups. Secondly, many of the chapters describe processes which can directly be used to assist those involved in collaboration. Thus Eden (Chapter 3), Huxham (Chapter 9), Finn (Chapter 10) and de Jong (Chapter 11) all provide suggestions for facilitation of collaborative groups, while Himmelman (Chapter 2) provides a ‘do-it-yourself’ guide to collaboration.

The value of the conceptual insights is to provide handles for debate about collaborative practice – both ‘theoretical’ debate which can move the field forward and ‘practical’ debate which can move actual collaborations forward. It is not easy to summarize the variety of experience and insight in the earlier chapters but it may be helpful simply to list some of the most prominent concepts developed there.

• 1
  Concepts relating to the nature and purpose of collaboration:

  Collaborative advantage – provides a language for legitimizing collaboration and a focus on the distinctive value of collaboration. Sustainability and consequential and constitutive value – focuses on [Page 177]keeping collaboration alive over the longer term and recognizes that the character of collaborative efforts is as important as the products. Invisible products – emphasizes the value of ‘spin-off’ improvements in relationships between individuals and organizations – such as shared knowledge and mutual understanding – which can follow from collaboration.

  Collaborative inertia and hazards – contributes to acceptance that collaboration is not straightforward and needs special attention and resources.

  Framework of collaborative rationales – highlights the variety of purposes that collaboration can serve.

  Collaborative betterment and empowerment – directs attention to the practical possibility of collaboration as a way of empowering the disadvantaged in society.

  Community involvement – directs attention to the practical need to involve community members in community-based collaborations. Convener modes – highlights the importance of demonstrating that a convenor must be seen to have a legitimacy or credibility in the role. Internal and external stakeholders – focuses attention both on who should be invited to be part of the collaboration and on managing those who will not be invited.

  Power and interest – provides a tool for considering the way in which other parties may view the collaborative purpose.

• 2
  Concepts relating to facilitation of collaborative groups:

  Morality and gentleness – emphasizes that facilitators must make a

  choice about the extent to which they direct the collaborative group.

  Facilitator roles, process and content – provides a means of

  describing, and hence debating, the way in which facilitators direct

  the collaborative group.

  ...