No excuses!

How time flies when one is both working and playing hard - or at least traveling a great deal. My resolution for 2009 is to get back to blogging regularly, no excuses allowed.

I have been thinking a great deal about excuses lately. I have long noticed to what great lengths people and organizations go in order to avoid collaborating. Even projects which appear on the surface to require a great degree of collaboration are parceled out in ways that resemble the worst gerrymandering efforts, all to ensure that organizations can work unencumbered by the need to collaborate.

Frequently the excuse is time. It is true collaboration requires time to learn about each of the partners' needs, values and goals, as well as consultation, co-creation of new systems, and on-going negotiation. In some cases the project has such urgency and such a short timeframe that the benefits of collaboration are not deemed worth the time required. I understand this thinking because I am currently working on a project with nearly impossibly short and immovable deadlines (hence my recent lack of blogging).

This attitude of non-collaboration is understandable if projects are understaffed or staffed largely by people focused solely on their part of getting the job done. When people are hired from outside the organization to get a project completed they learn their client organization well enough to do the job do not necessarily have the time or knowledge base required for organizational collaboration. If people are pulled from within the organization to work on yet another project they are often overwhelmed and have little time or interest to add complexity to the work.

Unless funders are intentionally building organizational capacity for collaboration they are unlikely to provide enough funding to support the time and staff needed for collaboration. It is unlikely collaboration will take place when the appropriate people in the partner organizations do not have time, funded or otherwise, to participate in the collaborative process.

It is easy to undervalue the need for collaboration if the partners do not expect to work together on future endeavors or if they do not believe collaboration is necessary for the success of current or future projects.

All these are common excuses for not collaborating. While each is understandable, each remains but an excuse. Any excuse will do if one does not believe that collaboration adds value, not just to the individual project, but potentially more importantly, to the capacity of the partnership for future projects.

It is understandably difficult for people to value what they have not experienced, or what they have had difficulty achieving in the past. Sometimes collaboration is undervalued due to negative experience with the process. Many people lack the patience, if not the time, for collaboration. Others prefer to work solo and not open themselves and their work to the review and reworking required by the process of co-creation.

However, in the end each is an excuse for not participating in the collaborative process. In the coming year this blog will focus on the benefits of collaboration, based on my experience, as explored in research, and as reported in a variety of settings. In addition, I will continue to explore other issues related to working together to achieve common goals. No excuses allowed!