Collaborationfor new growth:learning from leadersA GLTE Report featuring first-hand insights for pioneering collaborative leadership at the nexus of water, energy, food and climate.
GLTE, Royal Dutch Shell and XyntéoReport
Contents
Foreword 06
Executive summary 08
Collaboration: moving centre stage 14
The collaboration journey 20
Establish strong foundations 24
Develop deep alignment 36
Pilot and scale 52
Leadership for successful collaboration 60
Barriers to collaboration 68
Creating collaborative organisations 74
Taking the next steps 82
Interviewees and source material 84
Mythbusters: surprising truths about collaboration 90
Energy, food and water are all interacting and interconnected. These problems need to be solved by a coalition of different societal forces: policymakers, industrials and NGOs all working together. The capacity to collaborate … is the biggest challenge we are facing today.Ben Van Beurden, CEO, Royal Dutch Shell
“
Royal Dutch Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemicals companies with
around 90,000 employees in more than 80 countries and territories. Shell’s Upstream
businesses explore for and extract crude oil and natural gas, often in joint ventures
with international and national oil and gas companies. Shell’s Downstream businesses
manufacture, supply and market oil products and chemicals worldwide. Shell has been
reporting on its environmental and social performance since 1997, and its sustainability
performance is ranked in some leading indices.
www.shell.com
Xyntéo’s mission is to ‘reinvent growth’. As an advisory firm, it works with global
companies to identify and carry out projects that aim to enable businesses to grow in a
new way, fit for the resource, climate and demographic realities of the 21st century.
The founder and engine of the GLTE partnership, Xyntéo is also the driving force behind
The Performance Theatre. The theatre is an annual meeting for CEOs and chairmen that
aims to inspire the leadership needed to build a new kind of growth, capable of creating
longer-term value for both shareholders and society as a whole.
www.xynteo.com
The GLTE partnership connects global businesses engaged in the pursuit of resource-
efficient, low-carbon growth. It builds senior executives’ knowledge of how the changing
resource picture and climate change are affecting their businesses and industries,
and of how other organisations are responding with innovation that embeds resource
and carbon efficiency into the core of their businesses. What sets the GLTE partnership
apart is its bias for action. The partnership conceives and conducts projects that aim to
enable businesses to grow in a new way, fit for the resource, climate and demographic
realities of the 21st century. Advisory firm Xyntéo founded and runs the GLTE partnership.
www.xynteo.com/glte
require? And what incentives can support them?
We have started our journey by speaking with
39 people, each with a track record of leadership
in collaborative initiatives. Some have worked
on collaborations in the food-water-energy-
climate nexus, while others have insights from
other contexts. We have also looked at other
collaborations and the work of leading thinkers
in the field.
The insights we have gleaned through this work
form the basis for this report. We hope it will be
a starting point for thinking about collaborations,
and a living document that will evolve as we
test it with other collaboration practitioners and
accumulate their collective insights.
Forewordfrom De la Rey Venter and Dr Osvald Bjelland
The Global Leadership and Technology Exchange is a partnership of leading global companies. We have been brought together by a shared conviction that we need a new model of growth for the 21st century.
The strains created by our current model
of growth are particularly visible at the
nexus of our food, energy, water and climate
systems. The scale of these problems, and
their close interdependence, means that we
need to find significantly new and different
ways of working: business-as-usual is no
longer an option. There is a huge potential
for organisations who are able to develop
innovative responses to these challenges.
It is this opportunity for systemic, path-breaking
changes to our growth model that has led Royal
Dutch Shell and Xyntéo to work together on the
topic of collaboration, under the auspices of the
GLTE partnership. This report marks the first step
in our work together.
We believe that collaboration – working together
to achieve what we cannot achieve alone – will
be a key tool for creating this new, transformative
growth. Collaboration across industries will
catalyse innovation, creating new value through
new technologies and processes that will underpin
more resource-efficient and lower-carbon growth.
Successful collaboration between government,
civil society and industry can help to steer
economic growth that is better aligned with the
interests of society as a whole, while creating a
more stable climate for wealth creation and
high-quality economic development.
In this work we focus in particular on leadership.
Our aim is to understand more about the kind of
leadership that is required for collaborations to
succeed. What kind of mindset do collaborative
leaders need? What skills and knowledge do they
De la Rey Venter Executive vice president Joint Ventures, Shell Upstream International
Dr Osvald Bjelland Chairman and CEO, Xyntéo
6 7
Executive summary
The Collaboration Journey (p20)
Collaboration: moving centre stage (p14)
We are entering a new era of environmental stress. Water scarcity, air pollution, deforestation, and problems are growing in intensity and in scale.
Addressing these ‘wicked’, complex, environmental challenges that we face today will require collaboration across the boundaries of several sectors and industries.
Collaborations are:
Creative: they enable innovation to spring from new combinations of knowledge, resources
and technology
Open: they begin with a shared problem and allow solutions to emerge from within the group
Alive: they develop their own culture and are dynamic, experimental and nimble.
1. Establish strong foundations (p24)
It’s vital to front-load your collaboration.
Identify a common purpose. You have to know from the beginning why you are doing this and why you need each other
Create a partnership. Partners should have both a strategic fit and a personal connection. Make sure the partnership is diverse and includes quieter but potentially influential voices
Create an appropriate architecture. A neutral anchor can help. Also, define resources commitments early.
2. Develop deep alignment (p36)
Ensuring that partners are aligned takes time but is important.
Understand the context. Gathering, sharing and evaluating data help collaborations to understand poorly defined problems, to expose areas where participants’ perspectives are different, and to build trust
Create a shared narrative. Creating a short, engaging, written narrative builds trust and helps to keep the collaboration on track later. At this stage, the focus should be on the why, rather than what or how
Build trust by sharing power. Collaborations can share power by recognising that all partners are needed for the outcome, working in a shared physical or digital space, and ensuring all parties have skin in the game.
3. Pilot and scale (p52)
Moving to impact at scale is challenging but there are strategies that can help.
Brave the valley of death. Maintain a collaborative mindset and ensure that new personnel joining the project understand the collaborative nature of the work
Use pilots to build knowledge and trust. Pilots are an opportunity to get valuable information about the practical challenges of implementing ideas. They can also be beacons – showing the outside world what is possible
Scale intelligently. Think carefully about how to scale pilots – focus on the process rather than the outcome – and about how the project’s narrative is relevant to all stakeholders.
No two collaborations are the same, but the life cycle of almost all the collaborations in our research can be broken down into three phases.
8 9
Leadership for successful collaboration (p60)
Collaborations need effective leadership. Leading collaborative projects requires many skills that aren’t necessarily evident in more conventional projects. Leaders can be effective in several ways.
Use purpose to lead. Give up control and allow solutions to emerge from the group. Keep underlying purpose as the guiding principle – deviation from this is one of the main reasons collaborations fail
Show personal commitment. Collaborations need champions who are visibly committed both emotionally and professionally
Support the collaboration’s values. Ensure the collaboration’s own cultures and values come from enough different voices to be upheld by everyone. This also helps avoid returns to default, non-collaborative behaviour.
Creating collaborative organisations (p74)
The characteristics of participating organisations can play a vital role in making collaborations succeed.
Emphasise leadership based on accountability and trust. Promote and enable the right kind of leadership for collaborations – built on purpose and accountability rather than hierarchy and control
Establish strong vertical and horizontal communication. Ensure that senior leaders understand the challenges facing collaborations and that there is alignment across the organisation on the collaboration’s purpose and approach
Understand collaboration throughout the organisation. A shared understanding of the nature and value of collaboration throughout the organisation creates a supportive environment for collaborations to thrive
Reward collaborative behaviour. Creating the right incentives and reward structures for collaborative behaviour is important – and can require considerable imagination and creativity.
Barriers to collaboration (p68)
Many things can block progress – a lack of shared purpose, weak governance structures, unequal expectations and misunderstandings – but there are ways to minimise or avoid these.
Mythbusters (p90)
Collaborations can be counterintuitive. From who you should choose as partners, to how to get the most out of the partnership, the ways to succeed are not always obvious.
10 11
Case studies
Throughout the report, case studies illustrate how the collaboration journey plays out in practice.
Case Study 1: Water4Crops Addressing water shortages in India.
Case Study 2: Center for Sustainable Shale Development Developing performance standards for shale gas production.
Case Study 3: Liquefied Natural Gas in shippingExploring the potential for using cleaner fuels for powering ships.
Case Study 4: PEMANDURealising Malaysia’s goal of becoming a high-income economy by 2020.
Case Study 5: The US-China Clean Energy Research Center Enabling scientists and engineers in the US and China to work together on clean energy technologies.
Case Study 6: The H2 Mobility Project Expanding the use of hydrogen vehicles in Germany.
Case Study 7: Sustainable Food Lab Changing the food system for the better.
Case Study 8: Singapore Water PolicyAccelerating innovation in water and waste management.
Case Study 9: Tropical Forest Alliance 2020Reducing the deforestation caused by the production of paper and pulp, palm oil, soy and beef.
Case Study 10: BhavyshiaHelping India reach its Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of malnourished children by 2015.
Case Study 11: LinuxCreating “open-source” software used on millions of devices worldwide.
Case Study 12: CityLabFinding systemic solutions to the challenges thrown up by urbanisation in Africa.
12 13
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
African proverb
“
Collaboration: moving centre stage
A new era of environmental stress
First the good news. This is an age of
unprecedented growth in population
and aspiration. Over the last 100 years, the global
population has quadrupled to 7.3 billion people.
The global economy is now some 25 times
larger than it was a century ago – an expansion
accompanied by radical improvements in
technology, health and nutrition.
And now, of course, the bad news. The sheer
scale of human activity and the nature of the
economic model that has delivered these gains
are increasingly straining our natural resources.
The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere is changing the climate, affecting
not just temperature but also water availability,
storm intensity, ocean acidity, sea levels and
food production. Fisheries are collapsing,
while biodiversity elsewhere is being lost at
extraordinary rates – so fast that many scientists
believe we are entering a new mass extinction.
All this adds up to one very troubling conclusion.
In the coming decades, we face a new era of
environmental stress.
One reason is that water scarcity, air pollution,
deforestation and other environmental problems
no longer seem like abstract risks for future
generations. Instead, they are already having
an impact on businesses, by eroding the social
licence to operate and imposing growing costs
and complexity on core operations, and on
government, by undermining economic growth
and reducing quality of life.
Moreover, environmental problems are intensifying.
In some cases, systems are approaching boundaries
that have not previously been crossed. Today we
are already extracting all the fresh water that exists
in reliable sustainable sources. By 2030, if current
trends continue, there will be a 40% shortfall. Unless
water use becomes considerably more efficient over
that period, water users face some combination of
diminishing reliability, higher costs and restricted
availability – with implications for business operations,
economic growth and human welfare.
If you think about the significant global policy challenges that face the world, collaboration becomes essential because countries or companies acting alone simply can’t solve these problems. Collaboration is a requirement, not a choice.Merit Janow, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and chair of the Nasdaq Exchange
“
14 15
We interviewed 39 leaders with deep and broad
experience of collaborative ventures. Some have worked
on collaborations within the water-food-energy-climate
nexus, others in very different arenas – from military
operations to election campaigns.
We have also drawn on projects known to Xyntéo,
as well as published literature by theorists who work
on collaboration. We highlight case studies of practical
collaborations, and the work of some particularly
significant thought pioneers, in boxes along the main
body of the text.
Based on all this material – interviews, case studies and
literature – we have drawn out observations on what
makes a collaboration successful. We summarise these in
three areas: navigating the collaboration journey; lessons
for leaders; and creating collaborative organisations.
How we created this report
In Focus
And after the good and the bad comes the ‘wicked’.
Environmental issues are highly interconnected.
In 2007/8, a combination of higher energy prices,
droughts, scarcity of agricultural land, economic
growth and population growth contributed to
a global food price crisis. The effects were felt
by societies as far apart as Mexico, Senegal,
Bangladesh and Libya. Environmental problems
like these are known as ‘wicked’ problems,
because they are so interconnected, and interact
in complex ways with social and political systems.
Such challenges are difficult to define, impossible
to solve definitively, and require interventions at a
very large scale to have any hope of an impact
(See Churchman, Webber and Rittel on complexity
and wickedness, page 19).
Many of these strains become evident at the nexus
of the food, water, energy and climate systems. Water
crises, food crises, extreme weather events and
climate change all feature in the World Economic
Forum’s top 10 global risks for the next decade.
Why collaboration matters
OK, environmental problems are both
immediate and intensifying. So what do we do
about them? Confronting these issues will require
rapid innovation in two directions:
technological innovation – advances that enable
considerably more efficient resource use
institutional innovation – new ways of managing
scarce resources in a way that is both socially
and environmentally acceptable.
But that’s not enough in itself. The interconnected,
‘wicked’, nature of environmental problems means
that this innovation will also need to be systemic,
responding to complex interactions across the
boundaries of sectors, industries and geographies.
This need to innovate across boundaries is
driving the need for collaboration. Organisations
from different sectors, industries and geographies
will have to come together to develop solutions
that they cannot achieve alone.
Get it right and organisations will become more
innovative, achieve new growth, and create wealth that
is more widespread and more sustainable. Already,
organisations are recognising and taking advantage
of this opportunity, as you will see from case studies of
cross-boundary collaboration related in this report.
What collaboration means
Collaboration is special. It’s not just any old
multilateral activity.
Instead, collaboration is a creative activity that
enables innovation. In a way, innovation is merely
a social process that creates new combinations by
putting together different knowledge, resources
and technologies. Collaboration can do this across
organisations and sectors, enabling innovations
that are more radical than you could expect from a
single organisation.
This collective creativity is what sets collaboration
apart from other forms of interaction between
groups. It is not at all like cooperation, which is
simply dividing a known task among a number
of individuals or organisations. By contrast,
16 17
Here’s an example of complexity that we’ve all
experienced. You’re motoring along on a highway,
more or less keeping to the speed limit, when
suddenly you hit a jam and everyone grinds to a halt.
Then the jam clears for no apparent reason and the
traffic speeds up again. And there’s no accident, no
roadworks, nothing to explain the slowdown.
This is a complex system at work. Simple interactions
between many individuals can generate unexpected
behaviour at a system level. Pioneering thinkers
from mathematics, biology, computer science
and economics have found this sort of complex
behaviour in many human and natural systems
– such as the motion of a flock of birds and the
behaviour of financial traders during a crisis.
The complexity of our world can lead to ‘wicked’
problems. This notion was articulated by C. West
Churchman, Horst Rittel and Melvin M Webber,
both of the University of California, Berkeley, in the
late 1960s and early 1970s.
They observed that some problems facing society
are impossible to define unambiguously and have
no specific, closed solution. These problems don’t
have a right or a wrong answer: instead there are
many possible answers, which may be better or
worse than one another. Wicked problems are
usually connected and the solution to one wicked
problem may be the cause of another.
The interconnected, systemic nature of wicked
problems means that any solution is likely to be one-
shot – it is likely to have other impacts on the system,
some of which are unforeseeable and some of which
will create or contribute to other wicked problems.
Wicked problems include epidemics such as malaria
and AIDS, drug trafficking, terrorism, nuclear power,
the welfare system and climate change.
Existing in a web of complex social dynamics,
businesses often encounter wicked problems.
These can be a challenge for executives, especially
in organisations whose core business is to solve
‘tame’ problems in engineering or science. In a
2008 Harvard Business Review article, John C.
Camillus outlined some of the approaches that
executives can use to manage wicked problems.
Many of these relate strongly to the themes of this
report, such as working collaboratively with other
stakeholders, and focusing on action – with an
emphasis on trying out practical solutions while
acknowledging that no solution will be perfect.
Thought Pioneers:Churchman, Rittel and Webber on complexity and ‘wickedness’
collaborations start with a shared problem
and work together to develop solutions that
no individual or organisation would be able to
develop on their own.
In this sense, collaboration is an open process:
solutions emerge from the interaction of a group.
This mode of working is inherently ‘bottom up’.
Rather than implementing solutions that have
been decided by corporate decision-making from
the top down, collaborative partners develop their
own solutions. As a result, collaboration can be
challenging for people who are accustomed to
‘closed’ problems, or work in strongly hierarchical
organisations (See Creating collaborative
organisations, page 75).
Finally, collaborations are entities of their own.
They do not belong exclusively to one partner
or another. Over time, collaborations develop
their own culture and their own way of working.
This requires organisations to transcend the
transactional relationships that often typify their
interactions – buyer and supplier, service provider
and service user – and develop solutions together
that are better than they could achieve alone.
Why leadership is critical
No organisation has ever existed in a vacuum,
but now more than ever leaders need to engage
thoughtfully with the complex and interconnected
systems that surround them. Some thinkers on
business and organisations are already exploring
what this means in practice (See Michael Porter,
creating shared value, page 67).
Smart leaders know that their stakeholders go far
beyond shareholders or governing bodies of their
organisations. And they know that the answers to
the challenges they face do not lie solely within their
own organisations. Smart leaders, in other words,
are actively seeking collaboration.
Even so, leading collaborations can be distinctly
uncomfortable. You have to give up some control
in the present if you want a better outcome in the
future. You also need to bring together people from
different organisations and cultures, and build them
into an effective fighting force with its own distinct
character, identity and purpose. And you have to be
ready to tackle open-ended, messy problems that
are a world away from the order that typifies the
inner structure of corporations and bureaucracies.
If you’re up for the challenge, that’s good for you
and for your organisation, because leadership for
collaboration is moving centre stage. The ability to
collaborate is not just a desirable attribute, it is now
becoming a prerequisite for success.
The purpose of this report is to support leaders
in building successful collaborations. Much of the
material is drawn from the experience of leaders
who have successfully led collaborative initiatives
in a wide range of contexts (See In Focus: How we
created this report, page 17). In the next sections,
we explore the collaboration journey: how
collaborations begin and grow. Later, we return
to “leadership for successful collaboration”.
18 19
The collaboration journey
Establish strong foundations
Many of the successful collaborations
we encountered share common elements in their
initial stages. They began by identifying a common
purpose, creating a complete partnership and
establishing an appropriate architecture for the
collaboration. Though this may seem obvious,
many leaders described experiences where not
paying enough attention to this earliest stage
created fatal difficulties later.
Develop deep alignment
Next comes an extended period of building
trust and alignment among partners. Many
collaborations also use this period to create a
detailed narrative that describes their shared vision
for their work together and how to proceed to
action. All interviewees emphasised the importance
of this phase. By investing time and effort here you
can reap great rewards in the resource-intensive
phase that follows.
Pilot and scale
All collaborations seek to create a tangible change,
and the path to doing so is through piloting and then
scaling up the innovative concepts that emerge
from a collaborative effort.
Collaborations face challenges as they shift from
development to operation. Investment in physical
assets and new processes needs much greater
resources than the earlier stages of collaboration..
Partnerships increase in size and new people are
now involved who are often unfamiliar with (or
not incentivised to support) the collaboration or
appreciate its value.
This framework for a collaboration life cycle, with
an extended period of forming and aligning, bears
a striking resemblance to Otto Schamer’s Theory
U – a concept that some of our interviewees found
particularly powerful (See Otto Schamer, Theory U,
page 22).
The next section of this report explores each of
these three phases.
No two collaborations are the same, but the life cycle of almost all the collaborations in our research can be broken down into three phases: ‘establish strong foundations’, ‘develop deep alignment’ and ‘pilot and scale’.
20 21
22 23
Theory U, developed by MIT’s Otto Scharmer, takes
familiar practices and tools and organises them into
a process for effectively creating change.
Scharmer describes a U-shaped process in five steps.
The first is co-initiating: a group of people who want to
change a situation begin to listen to each
other and understand the group’s common intent.
The second is co-sensing: observing different
perspectives and gathering data without pre-judging
it, to develop a collective understanding of the
current system.
The third phase, and the lowest part of the ‘U’, is
presencing. Group members let go of anything that
is not essential to the collective purpose and possible
future directions start to emerge. Individual members
and the group as a whole often start to operate with
a heightened level of energy.
The fourth stage, co-creating, sees the group move
to action by trialling ideas in practice. Prototypes
should be quick and cheap to launch, so that the
group can rapidly learn lessons about what works
and what doesn’t.
The fifth and final stage of the U process, co-evolving,
involves taking the ideas that have been trialled and
prototypes that are likely to have the highest impact
on the system, and scaling them up.
Many of the collaborative leaders described
elements of the collaboration life cycle in terms
that are similar to the movements of Theory U –
even those who didn’t refer to it explicitly. This is
reflected in our description of the collaboration life
cycle including, for example, the identification of a
shared need (which has parallels with Theory U’s
co-initiating movement), understanding the context
(similar to co-sensing) and using prototypes to gain
information and trust (similar to co-creating).
Theory U applies to the micro level of individual
interactions as well as the macro level of group
interactions – a notion echoed by Jeremy Bentham,
vice-president of Global Business Environment at
Shell, who told us how he has experienced a U-shaped
process both across the whole set of collaborators
and internally within an organisation participating
in a collaborative venture.
Thought Pioneers:Otto Schamer, Theory U
You need a defined self-interest on the
part of the different groups. It is crucial
that the players have a very clear appreciation that
they can’t achieve their goals by
themselves. They have to collaborate.
Jay Cowles, president, Unity Avenue Associates;
and co-chair, Itasca Project’s Transportation Committee
“
Establish strong foundations
Identify a common purpose
It’s surprisingly easy to skip over the first vital
step of all collaborations, identifying a common
purpose. This might sound obvious, but it’s not.
Some collaborations are not born out of any
shared purpose, but come from organisations or
individuals with exceptional convening power
who simply draw leaders together and look for
something to do. And all collaborations need to be
very explicit about what they are trying to achieve.
To spell it out, you need to:
identify a common need that is shared by
all participants
establish that collaboration is necessary
to fulfil that need.
For example the Water4Crops initiative (Case study
1, page 26) and the Center for Sustainable Shale
Development (Case study 2, page 30) both began
by identifying a system-level problem that affected
several stakeholders who could not address the
underlying causes alone.
Usually one organisation identifies a need and
then seeks out partners to collaborate with. More
rarely, a group of organisations may identify a
shared need together.
Either way, many collaborative leaders favour
starting small – it’s easier to identify a clear shared
purpose when there are only a few partners
involved, and if you need more later you can
always approach them as the project evolves.
At this stage there’s no need to understand what
the collaboration will do or how it will achieve its
purpose. But a shared understanding of why the
collaboration exists is paramount.
Developing a common vision and
position on what needed to happen
was extremely valuable. It helped
to create a common platform among
arch competitors who were not
accustomed to working together.
Lisa Dreier, senior director, World Economic Forum
“
24 25
Case Study 1: Water4Crops
Most river basins in India are experiencing water shortages brought on by agricultural growth, industrialisation and urbanisation.
Water4Crops is a collaborative initiative that involves
over 30 research bodies, large companies and
SMEs. It is working to develop new technologies to
treat and reuse wastewater, improve the efficiency
of irrigation, and improve the management of water,
land and crops. The idea is not just to reduce fresh-
water demand in agriculture but also to help protect
groundwater contamination and water quality.
Beer and soft drinks business SABMiller is
a partner in the initiative. Vice president for
sustainability and communications, Meenakshi
Sharma, told us that openness was critical to
making the collaboration succeed: “we’ve thrown
open our brewery for people to come in and work,
in the spirit of transparency. One of the preconditions
when you think of working in collaboration is that
you’ve got to have enough trust to be able to share
what you’re doing, not just the good work, but also
the weak links. So collaboration requires that you’re
brave enough to share.”
They also found a clever way to overcome suspicion
between different groups of water users. Early in
the collaboration, Water4Crops worked hard to
understand the incentives facing farmers and other
water users, and collected data on water use
in different sectors. Sharing objective data in a
transparent way went a long way towards breaking
down barriers between different users and focused
their effort on searching jointly for solutions.
More information:
www.water4crops.org
26 27
Formally, collaboration is between organisations and institutions. But at heart, collaboration is between people. As one interviewee put it, “at the end of the day, institutions are run by people and it’s my counterpart on the other side of the table that matters”.
Many collaborative leaders emphasised the importance of the personal dimension. Per Heggenes, CEO of the IKEA Foundation, explained that when exploring collaborations he seeks to identify not only institutions whose values are sufficiently aligned to collaborate successfully, but also individuals within those organisations who understand what it takes to collaborate successfully.
While they were united in their view that personality matters, leaders were divided on the importance of trust.
Many leaders suggested that trust is a luxury not a necessity. They argue that there are situations where you’ll have to work with people you neither trust nor like, but where you both share a common purpose and need one another in order to achieve it. Some suggested that in these situations, trust is too high a bar: a combination of respect and a recognised mutual dependency – rather than personal trust – is the glue that binds the collaboration together.
These differences may well represent the varying circumstances in which our collaborative leaders have operated. Whereas as some leaders were spoilt for choice when selecting partners – such as, for example, in cross-industry technology-development partnerships, where there might be several appropriate partners available – others had worked in complex social environments where there was little freedom to choose collaboration partners.
Even when it’s not there at the beginning, trust can be built over time. Making a public commitment to a project can help to develop trust in a situation where there is little. Over time, focusing on quick wins and showing that progress is possible can help to build even more trust.
The personal dimension
In Focus
29
As in all relationships, partner choice is hugely
important. You need to understand the
motivations and ambitions of potential partners,
and be sure that their objectives are fully
compatible with the collaboration’s purpose.
Some interviewees emphasised the value
of partners who were well-aligned with the
collaboration’s purpose not just in their immediate
objectives but also in their overall strategy. As
Leo Yip, chairman of the Singapore Economic
Development Board, put it, “we always thought
of seeking to understand what the company’s
objectives are. What does it seek to do? How does
it sit within the broader strategy and within the
broader business objectives that the company
has? I think this is fundamental.”
Don’t ignore the potential of smaller partners, who
might not seem important enough to be invited to
the party, but who could end up being crucial to its
ultimate success. Patrick Rousseau, chairman and
managing director of Veolia Water India, explains
that they took care to engage closely with local
community leaders: “you cannot impose things
on people who appear not to have power, because
even though they are poor they in fact have all
the means to exercise their power in society”.
A little desk research on potential partners’
priorities can help, but in the end there is
no alternative to getting to know both the
organisations and the individuals. It’s not enough
to have a good institutional fit; you also need
a good personal fit.
And as long as you have that vital shared purpose,
a diverse range of partners can create stronger,
more resilient outcomes. The advice of Peter Voser,
chairman of ABB, was “Don’t work only with people
who have a similar thinking. In collaboration it’s
important to have a common vision, but working with
people who are different means you will have to work
to convince others and show leadership along the
way”. The Center for Sustainable Shale Development
(Case study 2, page 30) is a collaboration that draws
its strength and impact from a mix of groups with
differing agendas and cultures.
Create a partnership
“Human nature is that you will select those who are pretty close to you, and what you should do is the opposite because you need the challenge.
Peter Voser, chairman, ABB
2828
Case Study 2: Center for Sustainable Shale Development
The emergence of shale gas in the United States has changed the energy sector in North America and beyond. While there have been clear economic benefits, the fracking technology used to extract the gas has been opposed on the grounds of safety and environmental impact.
But instead of assuming that industrialists and
environmentalists should remain implacably
divided by fracking, a group of former regulators,
shale gas producers, environmental groups and
local community and environmental activists in
Pennsylvania decided to establish the Center for
Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), with the
aim of creating jointly agreed performance standards
for shale gas production.
The idea was to form an institute that could
establish leading practice and certify companies
that were adopting it – and, by doing so, positively
influence the culture in the industry as a whole.
By setting a high standard, CSSD could raise
standards across the industry without waiting
for regulations to catch up.
The legitimacy and the effectiveness of this
collaboration rests on the diversity of its
membership. This has not been without challenges.
Several partners faced criticism and resistance
from other organisations in their own sectors,
both in the oil and gas industry and among
environmental organisations.
Companies joined because they believed the centre
could change their relationship with the public by
showing tangible commitments to best performance,
something they could not achieve alone. The CSSD
partners shared data and involved independent
academic and research institutions in assessing it,
which helped to build mutual trust within the initiative
and credibility to the outside world, resulting in a
much less adversarial process than you often get
when developing environmental standards.
More information:
www.sustainableshale.org
30 31
The investment of time will create dramatic value in
the future so we should not focus
on the short-term benefits.
Huang Guoshu, vice chairman, Sinew Corporation
“Although we encountered different architectures
for collaboration in the course of this research, there
were some common features.
For example, many collaborations have a neutral
anchor: an organisation or person who leads
and facilitates the process. The idea is that the
anchor does not promote any partner’s interests
over another’s, but instead makes sure the overall
purpose is fulfilled. Many of the leaders who
acted as anchors came from relatively small
organisations, rather than one of the
main interested parties – as in the GLTE
collaboration on liquid natural gas in shipping
(Case Study 3, page 34).
The role of a successful anchor is not to be a hub
mediating between many spokes, but rather to bind
partners together by leading and sustaining
a conversation. As Adam Kahane, partner at
Reos Partners, put it: “they need to go beyond
connecting people to working together in a way
that requires everyone to take risks”.
Anchors can also act as a trusted partner – for
example by holding or using data that partners
may not be willing to share more widely.
A variant of this approach is a multi-layered
architecture, with one anchor at the centre of an
overarching collaboration across a broad set of
organisations, and then a number of more specific
collaborations within this, each with its own
anchor. This is an effective model for ventures
with a large number of partners and a relatively
general goal, where the next step is to reduce the
partners to a manageable number and focus the
work. Examples are the Sustainable Food Lab
(Case Study 7, page 48) and Cape Town’s CityLab
(Case Study 12, page 80).
To make this work, though, you need anchors who
know what they are doing. Gerald Schotman, chief
technology officer at Royal Dutch Shell, observed
that unless the anchor is sufficiently skilful,
involving someone to play this role can take away
a sense of ownership from the other partners.
Of course in the smallest form of collaboration,
a bilateral partnership,, you don’t need a neutral
anchor. Those that we encountered, such as
the US-China Clean Energy Research Center
(Case Study 5, page 40), tended to be between
organisations with a broadly similar scale and
nature, and had a governance structure that was
specifically designed to balance power.
Establish an appropriate architecture
32 33
Case Study 3: Liquefied Natural Gas in shipping
The shipping industry faces tightening emissions regulation, designed to reduce both local pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. As a result, liquified natural gas (LNG) looks increasingly like an environmentally and commercially attractive alternative.
The trouble is that no single player in the business
can act on this independently. Shipping companies
would need to build and operate ships that can
run on LNG, fuel companies would need to build a
refuelling infrastructure, and users would need to
provide demand and agree on pricing.
In other words, this is an opportunity that has the
need for collaboration at its core. So to address the
issue several GLTE partners came together to try
to develop a new class of ships powered by LNG.
Royal Dutch Shell, who supply LNG, and Cargill,
potential users, brought together technical and
commercial expertise to evaluate ways of using
LNG for dry bulk and tanker vessels. Shipping
specialist firm DNV GL provided key input on
risk management.
Xyntéo acted as anchor for this collaboration,
performing a role with at least three dimensions.
The first was operational – to manage the project
and facilitate meetings between the participants.
The second was to provide a degree of neutrality,
balancing power in the collaboration. The third was to
embody the values and purpose of the collaboration.
More information:
www.xynteo.com/projects/scoping-the-use-of-
lng-in-shipping
34 35
Of course, when you embark on any project it’s
important to understand the context that you’re
operating in. But with multi-sector open collaborations
the context becomes paramount. And it’s surprisingly
easy to assume that you know the background
without digging into it deeply enough from the
outset. Many leaders stressed this point and urged
collaborators to define the situation in as much detail
as possible, as early as possible in the collaboration.
One way to do this is to pool resources by sharing,
discussing and collectively agreeing on empirical
data, such as geographical information, resource
use, technical parameters and economic variables.
This reduces the risk of misalignment later on and
can help the team to shape their priorities. For
example in the Water4Crops project (Case Study 1,
page 26), data on water usage helped define areas
where the collaboration could focus its efforts to
improve water use practices.
The process of gathering, sharing and evaluating
data jointly at this early stage can also help
build trust and confidence, expose areas where
participants disagree over matters of fact and,
if necessary, trigger further research or data-
gathering to resolve these differences. Sharing
proprietary data and intellectual property can be
difficult for companies and governments: some
collaborations, like the US-China Clean Energy
Research Center, have spent considerable effort to
find ways for participants to do this (Case Study 5,
page 40).
Just as important is the realisation that for
complex problems the answers might not all be
out there. Building trust and alignment doesn’t
require an exhaustive set of data on all aspects of the
problem: the key is that all the collaborators agree
on the data that does exist and work through
disagreements over matters of fact. Piloting
ideas to test the waters can sometimes be a more
powerful way to deepen understanding than trying
to accumulate more data.
In Malaysia, the government’s Performance
Management and Delivery Unit established a data-
sharing and scrutiny exercise on an enormous
scale. Civil servants collected data that was
then taken on a roadshow, and was shared and
discussed with members of the public. The public
loved it and the process meant they were much
more ready to buy into the policy decisions that
followed. (See Case Study 4, page 38 for more
information on PEMANDU).
It’s not just data that can cause dissent. There are
often differences in the way participants perceive
the context of a problem, depending on their
mindset, culture and history. Upmanu Lall, director
of the Columbia Water Center, has worked on
many water-related collaborations around the
world. “Wherever we work, we reach out to local
NGOs, government agencies and corporations.
What we find is that invariably each entity has a
very idiosyncratic view of what the problems are
and they don’t match anybody else’s”.
While none of our interviewees has a fail-safe
approach for overcoming differences in perception,
many agree that it is worth investing time and effort
to create as much alignment as possible. In the end,
there is no substitute for talking, listening and trying
to understand the motivations and culture of the
other partners. The next phase in the process,
creating a shared narrative, can also help with this.
Develop deep alignment
We reach out to local NGOs, government agencies and corporations. Invariably each entity has a very
idiosyncratic view of what the problems are there and they don’t match anybody else’s.
Upmanu Lall, director, Colombia Water Center
“
Understand the context
36 37
Case Study 4: PEMANDU
Since independence, Malaysia has had decades of rapid economic growth and it is now an upper-middle income country. The government has set the objective of making Malaysia a high-income economy by 2020, while following a growth process that is both inclusive and sustainable.
To support this goal, the government established
the Performance Management and Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU) in 2009. PEMANDU is tasked with
identifying how this goal can be achieved across
a range of economic sectors that are intended
to deliver this growth. It has used a process of
intensive “labs” to share expertise and create a
detailed implementation strategy for each of the
growth opportunities that have been identified.
Ministers are then obliged to commit to the goals
publicly and are tested on their delivery. The
policies and implementation strategies are huge
collaborative efforts, spanning both the public and
private sectors, and involving different government
departments, companies and civil society.
The staff of PEMANDU are drawn from many
departments of the civil service, but they share the
same working space. This allows them to develop
ideas quickly and test some of these rapidly
through pilot programmes – for example, they
tested a policy idea for the retail sector on
a small shop.
Idris Jala, deputy-chairman and CEO of PEMANDU,
explains that after an extensive process of
gathering data and formulating policy ideas, the
unit organises roadshows where they exhibit their
data and conclusions and invite a discussion with
members of the public – a process that has built
considerable public trust and confidence in the work.
More information:
www.pemandu.gov.my
38 39
Case Study 5: The US-China Clean Energy Research Center
The US and China together contribute more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and both countries have a central role to play in mitigating climate change.
In November 2009, President Barack Obama
and President Hu Jintau launched the $150 million
US-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC).
With participation from universities, research
institutions and industry, the CERC aims to enable
scientists and engineers from the United States
and China to collaborate on clean energy projects.
Intellectual Property is a key consideration for
companies participating in collaborative R&D.
To address this, the CERC has introduced a new
framework for the protection and distribution
of IP between China and the US. The idea is to give
research partners the confidence they need to
share information while maintaining rights for the
technologies they develop and ensuring they get a fair
share of the rewards from technology breakthroughs.
The CERC supports a broader agenda of
deepening collaboration and cooperation between
China and the US, including the announcement
in November 2014 of a joint commitment by the
two countries to make specific reductions to CO2
emissions over the coming decade.
More information:
www.us-china-cerc.org
40 41
The most frequent and emphatic advice we
received from collaborative leaders was to agree
on an explicit, written, common narrative for
the collaboration. This narrative should lay out
the partners’ shared vision: the goal of the work,
the context, and possibly the principles that the
partners will initially use to guide them as they work
together to find solutions.
This is not a project plan or a roadmap – it doesn’t
focus on the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of what the
collaboration partners will do together. Instead,
it focuses on the ‘why’: the underlying purpose
of the collaboration.
Practitioners suggest that narratives are most
effective when they are:
calculated – analytically rigorous and firmly
rooted in empirical facts
captivating – able to inspire and connect
emotionally with the collaboration participants
concise – shorter than two pages.
Leaders identified several advantages to creating a
shared narrative. First, as with sharing data, the process
of creating a shared narrative builds trust and provides
partners with experience of working together.
Creat
e a
shared narrative
Second, a shared narrative forces partners to
reach an explicit agreement on the central
points of the collaboration. This process can reveal
differences of opinion. One leader commented that
the ability to form a shared narrative is an acid test:
if partners can’t agree on a common narrative,
then there is probably little scope for the
collaboration to succeed.
Finally, a shared narrative becomes a tool that a
leader can use to retain focus. Collaborations can lose
momentum as time elapses and practical challenges
accumulate; some leaders advocate minimising
this risk by returning to the narrative frequently to
remind partners of the purpose and vision for the
collaboration. This resonates with the findings of
Robert Axelrod on cooperative behaviour – the
more you emphasise future payoffs, the more
incentive there is for collaboration in the present
(see Robert Axelrod and the implications of game
theory, opposite page).
Create a shared narrative
42 43
The 20th century saw the emergence of a
branch of mathematics known as Game Theory,
for analysing situations where two or more people
have the opportunity to cooperate.
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, two
prisoners are being interrogated by police. If both
remain silent, they will each spend a year in prison.
If one gives evidence against the other, the first
will go free and the other will spend five years
in prison. But if both give evidence against one
another, they will each spend three years in prison.
In this situation, the best overall outcome is for the
two prisoners to cooperate by remaining silent. But
unless a prisoner can ensure that the other will
cooperate, the logical thing to do is give evidence.
But of course if both prisoners do this, they both
end up spending an extra two years in prison.
More sophisticated games give a different
outlook. In 1984, Robert Axelrod published The
Evolution of Cooperation, which explored the
implications of game theory for cooperation in
a number of spheres, from ecosystems to the
trenches of World War I. Axelrod studied games
more complex and realistic than the Prisoner’s
Dilemma, in particular where there were repeated
opportunities to interact and cooperate over time,
rather than a one-off opportunity.
Axelrod drew useful lessons about how to cooperate
successfully. Emphasise the value of future positive
pay-offs as much as possible. Change the effective
payoffs to make cooperation more attractive.
Encourage a culture of altruistic behaviour. Practise
reciprocity. Ensure that an individual’s behaviour is
recognised, so that it can be rewarded or punished
by other participants.
It is striking how many of these theoretical
insights are reflected in the experience of the
collaborators we spoke with. Many of them, for
example, advised leaders to keep reminding
participants of the future rewards from achieving
the goal of the collaboration, and to recognise
and reward collaborative behaviour.
Thought Pioneers:Robert Axelrod and the implications of game theory
43
Case Study 6: The H
2 Mobility
Project
Transport accounts for almost a quarter of energy-related CO
2
emissions globally. One of the promising technologies that may enable a lower-carbon future for transport is the fuel cell: a technology that can convert hydrogen fuel into electrical power, creating only water as a by-product.
Fuel-cell powered cars are already feasible and
have a number of attractive qualities – they are fast
to refuel, are able to store enough fuel for very long
journeys and create no tailpipe pollution.
Building the partnership
The H2 Mobility Project is a cross-industry
collaboration that is working to expand the use
of hydrogen-powered vehicles in Germany.
The consortium includes six members: Air Liquide
and Linde, suppliers of industrial gases; Daimler,
an automotive corporation; and Shell, OMV and
Total, oil and gas companies.
Even before building a single fuelling station, the
consortium has invested a considerable amount
of time in identifying a common purpose and
creating deep alignment.
Common purpose
The collaboration is helping to overcome a chicken-
and-egg problem that faces hydrogen cars (and
other new transport technologies): without a robust
refuelling infrastructure, drivers will not want to use
hydrogen-fuelled cars; but if there are no hydrogen-
fuelled cars, there is no commercial case for building
a refuelling infrastructure. Thus, all members of the
partnership are needed to achieve the ultimate goal.
The project is currently working to build one
hundred refuelling stations over the next four
years, and to expand this to four hundred by
2023: a total investment of €350 million. This will
accompany a planned 250,000 fuel-cell vehicles by
the same date.
Understanding the context and setting an
appropriate architecture
Following its inception in September 2009, the
participants came together to develop a fact-
based analysis of vehicle power trains that could
meet the EU’s long-term goal to reduce emissions
by 80% by 2050. This achieved two things. It
created a common understanding of the context
that highlighted the importance of hydrogen in
decarbonising road transport, and a shared set
of data and assumptions that were accepted by
all partners. It also helped to shape a common
narrative and vision that was shared by the group.
The consortium has also thought deeply about
resourcing and the roles that each partner will play
at an early stage – a difficult process, but one that
has helped to lay strong foundations for the work
to come.
Common narrative and sharing power
The group developed innovative ways to address
differences and ensure that power was shared
equally among them. On one occasion, when there
was a lack of alignment, they gathered together
and used flipcharts to note areas of mutual
agreement and areas of disagreement.
At the end of this process, there were five flipcharts
of agreement and only one of disagreement –
a moment that reminded all participants of their
common purpose and their shared interest in
making the collaboration succeed.
44 45
The moment you marginalise a ‘less powerful’
partner is the moment you lose
the partner and ultimately the collaboration.
Matthew Thomas, managing director, Prospect Madison
“The power dynamics of the collaboration are
vital. As Matthew Thomas, managing director
at Prospect Madison, puts it, “the moment you
marginalise a less powerful partner is the moment
you lose the collaboration and the partner”.
One way of sharing power is to work in a shared
space that belongs to the collaboration as a whole
rather than an individual player. Adam Kahane,
Partner at Reos Partners, believes the conceptual
shared space of the Sustainable Food Lab was
crucial for maintaining energy and direction,
by bringing partners together continually even
during times of setback and disappointment.
The shared space also helped to level the
differences in size, power and resources between
partners (see Case Study 7, page 48).
Idris Jala says that moving collaborators into a
shared physical space was a good way to break
down silos and build an ethic of working jointly.
Some leaders also cited shared digital spaces such
as social networks.
Another means of sharing power is to design
clear break points where participants can decide
whether to continue or walk away. This lets people
keep control of their participation, and renews
the legitimacy and unity of the collaboration
when they do decide to keep working together.
Establishing clarity over how partners can leave
and join a collaboration echoes Elinor Ostrom’s
observations of how to manage common resources
(see Elinor Ostrom, managing the commons,
page 50).
Build trust by sharing power
46 47
Case Study 7: Sustainable Food Lab
The Sustainable Food Lab began by bringing together 45 leaders from government, food processors, retailers, banks, non-governmental organisations and citizen and worker movements. With very different backgrounds, drawn from Europe, the United States and Latin America, these people had a common purpose: they wanted to change the food system for the better. All also realised that their individual efforts were not enough to create systemic change.
Starting from this common purpose, the
group used the Theory U process (see Otto
Schamer, Theory U, page 22) to create a shared
understanding of many of the challenges facing
the food system, while simultaneously building
trust among the participants.
Quite a few initiatives and projects then emerged
from this shared vision. Though some foundered,
many others succeeded. Today the Lab is working on
several continents with agriculture and development,
more climate-friendly agricultural practices and more
sustainable commodity production.
More information:
www.sustainablefoodlab.org,
and Power and Love: A Theory and Practice
of Social Change, Adam Kahane
48 49
51
It’s best to start with a small pilot, run it for a full year, and
make sure that you can actually really
document and prove the success. That’s your sell in.
Once I had a single case that showed
what could be done, the support and
enthusiasm within our company was
unbelievable.Guido Verijke, former chairman,
Better Cotton Initiative
“
In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to
receive the Nobel Prize for Economics, awarded for
her work on collaborative behaviour.
She focused on how people collaborate to manage
common resources such as fisheries and grazing
land. These resources have a finite capacity, but are
open to use by many individuals. This can result
in the ‘tragedy of the commons’: the resource
is degraded by over-use because nobody feels
sufficiently responsible to restrain their own use,
so eventually everybody loses out.
Ostrom’s work was based on years of observation.
She spent time in Maine looking at how communities
managed fisheries; in Switzerland to observe how
mountain farmers shared pastures; and in Kenya
and Nepal to see how farmers shared water resources.
She concluded that the traditional distinction
between the private sector and the state is much
too simplistic. Communities in a wide range of
contexts collaborate to manage common resources
without being coerced into doing so by an external
authority. So the tragedy of the commons is
not inevitable, even without government regulation.
She also found that collaborations work best where
participants can communicate face to face regularly.
Also, people collaborate more readily when they
recognise that their individual actions can make a
significant difference to the outcome. And providing
low-cost routes to leave the collaboration gives
participants an incentive to ensure that the project
remains worthwhile for everyone involved.
These observations reflect many of the lessons
drawn by the leaders we spoke with: the need for
regular communication, reminding participants
of the potential for achieving results together, and
providing regular gateways for participants to leave.
Thought Pioneers:Elinor Ostrom, managing the commons
50 51
Pilot and scale
Probably the greatest danger point in collaborations
comes when a project moves on from the design
phase, and seeks to pilot and scale its ideas.
Personnel often change. Resource requirements
increase. And pilots often uncover unanticipated
consequences and complications that can sap the
energy of the collaboration.
Although there is no way of avoiding these challenges
altogether, there are ways to mitigate them.
More than one of our interviewees emphasised the
importance of maintaining a collaborative mindset –
recognising that collaboration is a dynamic process
of creation to fulfil a purpose, with many possible and
equally valid ways of doing so. This is particularly true
when responding to unanticipated developments
and failures, where collaborators may revert to a
more transactional relationship and seek to assign
blame, rather than search jointly for solutions.
One option is to think ahead, and bring in some of
the people who will be involved in pilots and scaling
at an earlier stage, so they understand the purpose
of the collaboration, feel ownership and get used to
a collaborative style of working.
If you want to know whether a collaborative project
is going to fly, you obviously need to pilot it. Even at a
small scale, pilots can provide valuable information
about the practical challenges of implementing ideas.
Indeed, in a complex and dynamic system, pilots may
be the only way to understand the effects of implementing
an idea. There are usually unintended consequences in
such situations, and not all pilots will succeed. Pilots also
create additional trust as the collaboration team work
together to make them happen.
Many collaborative leaders advocate a “fail fast, fail
often” attitude towards pilots. Explicitly acknowledging
that they are primarily tools for gathering information
puts the emphasis on joint learning, and ensures
that the collaboration is not destabilised by failures or
unintended consequences.
However, while collaborations must become
accustomed to failure at the piloting stage, more
than one interviewee emphasised the importance
of taking smart risks, by building success into
early pilots as much as possible. Patrick Rousseau
of Veolia Water India and Guido Verijke of the
Better Cotton Initiative both highlighted the value
of successful pilots in getting buy-in from external
stakeholders for scaling up.
In Malaysia, the government’s Performance
Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) has
repeatedly tested new policy ideas in the field by
running pilot projects (see Case Study 4: PEMANDU,
page 38). In Singapore, collaboration between the
public and private sectors on piloting new water
treatment technologies has yielded significant
benefits for both (see Case Study 8: Singapore
Water Policy, page 54).
Many experienced collaborators say that the pilot-
and-scale stage is actually the second of two main
danger points in the collaboration journey (see In
Focus: The twin valleys of death, page 57).
Brave the valley of death Use pilots to build knowledge and trust
52 53
Case Study 8: Singapore Water Policy
Singapore’s small area, dense population and scarce freshwater supplies have forced it to develop one of the world’s most innovative water management plans.
The country plans to eliminate its dependence
on water imports by 2060, using an extensive
urban rainwater catchment system combined with
wastewater reclamation and desalination to boost
supply, plus water pricing and efficiency measures
to cut demand.
The government recognised that new technology
would be critical for achieving this vision, and
that the private sector would need to be involved.
By creating a supportive business environment,
including financial incentives, they have
encouraged companies to move their R&D
on water issues to Singapore.
Private companies gain from this collaboration by
being able to pilot new technologies on a real water-
treatment system, while the government gains
from developing a hub of world-leading water-
management expertise in Singapore.
This approach has brought additional benefits
by creating commercial opportunities for
Singaporean companies overseas. For example,
Hyflux, which produced the membranes used
in Singapore’s desalination and water plants,
has now built water-recycling plants in China.
54 55
The path of collaboration is fraught with difficulties, but there are two
particular low points that can cause the enterprise to fail. Think of this
as a W shape.
After strong beginnings with a sense of common purpose and mission,
things become harder as collaborators work towards creating a collective
narrative and identifying each participant’s roles and responsibilities. All
parties now have to learn to share power, which can lead to tensions;
and explore the scope of their work together in detail, which can reveal
conflicting expectations. Energy is being spent with no immediate rewards.
If a deep internal alignment emerges along with a truly shared vision, the
collaboration regains momentum and heads back up into the light.
Then the collaboration seeks to pilot its ideas, which often sends it
plunging into the second trough of the W (see Brave the valley of death,
page 52).
Resource requirements increase, which means seeking approval and
buy-in from senior leaders in the participating organisations. This can be
difficult enough in just one organisation but doing it simultaneously with
many organisations is often paralysing. If you manage to build this external
alignment, you will have navigated the second valley successfully and be
heading back up to the heights of collaboration.
It’s worth being aware of these low points, as these are the places where
collaborations need the strongest support.
The twin valleys of death
In Focus
57
The two pieces of advice I would give are be prepared for the long haul and give up on the idea that you can control or manipulate the results. Otherwise you won’t get very far.
Adam Kahane, chairman, North America, Reos Partners.
“
When your pilot is working effectively, the next step
is to scale. But this almost always requires buy-in
and commitment from people and organisations
that have not been involved directly before, a
painful process that kills off many collaborations.
Among those we examined, only a few
collaborations navigated the path beyond this valley
of death (above). The Tropical Rainforest Alliance is
one example of an initiative that may now be able to
achieve systemic change at a global scale (see Case
Study 9, page 58).
This is where the narrative can help. Thinking carefully
about how the narrative of the collaboration relates
to the narrative and priorities of external stakeholders
can make the scaling process much more effective.
Successful pilots can also help by showing
stakeholders what has already been achieved.
Some leaders discussed the importance of
focusing on precisely what is being scaled.
For example, Meenakshi Sharma, vice president of
sustainability and communications at SABMiller India,
pointed out that the solutions for a successful
pilot project are often very dependent on the local
context: a particular choice of technology, say, or
business model. Even if this works for one pilot in
one context, it may not be the appropriate solution
in other settings.
As a result, it may be valuable to think of scaling
not to reproduce the same technology or business
model, but rather to reproduce the discussion and
collaboration that yielded a successful outcome
at a pilot scale. The outcome may be a range of
different technology or business model choices in
different settings, but the goal and the process of
deciding on these are the same.
Scale intelligently
56 57
Case Study 9: Tropical Forest Alliance 2020
The Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 aims to reduce the deforestation caused by the production of paper and pulp, palm oil, soy and beef.
The Alliance is a tri-sector collaboration, with
participants from government, NGOs and
industry – including McDonald’s, Unilever, Nestlé,
Cargill and Coca-Cola. Participating companies
have committed to purging their supply chains of
products from deforested areas by 2020.
The scale of private-sector participation means that
TFA 2020 has a decent chance of creating change
at a system level. Members account for 15% of the
total consumer market and more than 50% of the
global trade in palm oil. Given the inefficiency of
keeping oil from different sources separate, this
may be enough to prompt the entire global market
to switch to sustainable palm oil.
The initiative is supported by another collaboration,
the Banking Environment Initiative, which is
a group of banks that help companies and
their suppliers develop appropriate finance for
sustainable commodities.
More information:
www.tfa2020.com,
New Climate Economy report.
58 59
Leadership for successful collaboration
New leadership skills
Use purpose to lead
The defining feature of successful collaboration
leaders is their ability to use the underlying
purpose to drive the collaboration forward.
Leaders of non-collaborative projects within single
organisations can exercise authority by relatively
simple means such as their control over hiring and
performance appraisals. They also have considerable
sway in determining the solutions to the problems
their teams are tackling.
However, leaders in collaborations generally
don’t have direct hierarchical authority over all
the participants, as they are from many different
organisations. Nor can they dictate solutions –
collaborations must find answers interactively.
Instead, collaboration leaders should articulate
the purpose of the collaboration strongly at the
outset, and then maintain the partners’ focus
on that purpose throughout. There are several
practical approaches that can help, such as using Credit: AJP/Shutterstock.com
Leading collaborative projects requires many skills that aren’t necessarily evident in more conventional projects. In most of the successful collaborations we looked at, there was strong leadership both from a CEO or equivalent and from someone responsible for the collaboration at an operational level.
the opening section of each project meeting to
remind everyone of the purpose, and dedicating
time to co-creating a shared narrative for a
collaboration during its early phases.
Since collaborations are often iterative processes,
involving trial and error, collaboration leaders are often
confronted with decisions over whether to change
course or adopt new approaches as the project
progresses. With an eye firmly on the purpose,
it’s much easier to make these such decisions.
Show personal commitment
Collaboration leaders are much more effective
when they are visibly committed to the initiative
at an emotional as well as a professional level.
Collaborations are risky enterprises both for the
participating organisations and for the individuals
involved. The payoff may be large, but it is also
uncertain, and there are considerable costs.
The leader needs above all to inspire, particularly in
the early stages where costs are great and benefits
are yet to appear.
Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb differentiates
between different sorts of leadership: instructional
leadership, based on techniques that can be taught
or learnt; institutional leadership, with an authority
that comes with an individual’s position in an
organisation; and inspirational leadership, which
relies on trust, loyalty and relationships, and is
deeply personal. The most successful collaboration
leaders are the inspirational ones.
But how to demonstrate personal commitment
in practice? One way is to involve leaders that
are likely to stay in post for the duration of the
collaboration. Another is to consider not only the
leaders’ skills and abilities but also their values.
Are their personal and professional interests
well-enough aligned with the purpose of the
collaboration to let them champion it credibly both
to the collaboration partners and the outside world?
Support the collaboration’s values
As collaborations form and evolve, they often
develop cultures and values of their own, distinct
from the culture of any of the organisations that
are participating. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom
documented the emergence of such norms in her
studies of collaborations around the world (see
Elinor Ostrom, managing the commons, page 50).
As the World Economic Forum’s Lisa Dreier put it,
“all of the groups we worked with have developed
their own culture of constructive collaboration and
will often address issues by peer-to-peer feedback
or advice if they feel someone is acting out of line”.
That does not mean leaders are out of the loop.
They can support the emergence of values within
a collaboration by ensuring the process feels
inclusive. If people feel their views are being heard,
they are more likely to engage in forming norms
and values, and to address situations where they
feel that other participants are breaking their
collective rules.
Several leaders spoke of the importance of
adopting an inclusive, listening style of leadership,
including General David Petraeus who emphasised
the value of what he refers to as the “Big Tent”
approach. For operational leaders, a key component
of this inclusivity is to be present with participants –
we explore this in more detail on page 65 in
The role of operational leaders.
60 61
You must constantly expose
people to what the benefits can
be, and why this is necessary to deal
with challenges that are very
different today from what they were yesterday.
Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary, India
“The role of CEOs and other senior leaders
All our interviewees agree that the CEO’s support
is pivotal to any business collaboration. CEOs need
to be very visible in their commitment, and take
practical steps to support the collaboration and
its leadership.
Provide material resources
Perhaps the most important practical way
in which CEOs can support collaborations is
to provide enough resources. Several of our
interviewees have experienced collaborations that
failed through inadequate resourcing, sometimes
when participants overestimated their partners’
ability or willingness to contribute. Resource
needs can change unpredictably, so CEOs need
to make sure that resources remain adequate for
the project’s needs throughout its lifecycle. This
is particularly important at certain danger points
along the path of collaboration (see In Focus:
The twin valleys of death, page 57).
Demonstrate commitment
It is important to be visibly committed to the
collaboration. Of course, leaders cannot spread
themselves too thinly. Peter Voser, former CEO of
Royal Dutch Shell, observes that: “it will not work
if a CEO tries to dance at too many weddings”.
The CEO’s remaining term also matters. Visible
support means little if the leader’s tenure could
end before the collaboration gains momentum. After
that initial bedding-in stage, however, a leadership
transition should be less of a problem. Deepak Jolly,
vice president of Coca–Cola India, spoke of planning
for a collaboration to last two CEOs so the new
incumbent can continue championing a collaboration
after the transition.
Support and empower operational leaders
Collaboration leaders face challenges that are
not typical of internal projects. They must be
accountable to other collaboration partners;
respond flexibly to unanticipated developments; and
maintain the collaboration through its early stages,
where a long time can pass before results are visible.
CEOs need to understand these challenges and
maintain realistic expectations of the timescales
involved, which can be much longer than in a
conventional internal project.
They also need to allow operational leaders
discretion to take decisions without having to
consult many levels of management. Those inside
the collaboration will understand both constraints
and opportunities better than anyone, and having
this discretion allows them to maintain credibility
and accountability with the other partners.
62 63
The role of operational leaders
Operational leaders face a host of challenges that
do not exist in more conventional projects. They
are the guardians of the vision and purpose, and
have to be accountable to all the participants while
maintaining a level of neutrality.
Retain vision and celebrate progress
Leading a collaboration to a successful outcome
means continually reminding participants why they
are collaborating, so that they don’t lose sight of the
initial purpose.
When a project hits difficulties, participants tend to
revert to more familiar modes of interaction that are
competitive or transactional. As Lieutenant-General
Sir Graeme Lamb put it, “you have to have a leader
with depth and strength of conviction that, even
under pressure, collaboration is still the answer”.
Unexpectedly, some of our interviewees pointed
towards the need for developing inner strength
to keep focus when the situation becomes
overwhelmingly complex. One suggested spending
one-third of working time exploring data; another
third engaging with people; and the final third
“staring at a blank wall” to reflect on the data and
the personal interactions.
It is also important to celebrate even small
successes – particularly at the early stages of the
collaboration journey – to build confidence, trust,
momentum and commitment.
Maintain responsibility and accountability
Collaboration leaders should be responsible for the
success of the collaboration as a whole, rather than
for realising the goals of any one partner. They also
need to be accountable, demonstrating to all partners
that they are holding the collaboration to its original
purpose and that progress is happening. This requires
a high degree of openness and transparency.
Remain close but retain neutrality
In many of the successful collaborations we have
explored, the project was led by someone from an
organisation that was separate and independent
from all the other participants. This neutrality
supports the development of trust. For example in
tri-sector collaborations (involving industry, NGOs
and civil society) the international organisations
and not-for-profit institutions may be seen as more
neutral than commercial companies, which can
make them a natural choice as collaboration leaders.
However, not all successful collaborations use a
neutral leader. We saw some successful partnerships
between corporations of a broadly similar size where
a stable balance of power came instead from giving
equal authority in decision making (see Establish an
appropriate architecture, page 32).
Collaboration leaders also need to work close
to the ground. Several interviewees say that key
factors in success are an intimate familiarity with
realities on the ground and a deep understanding
of the motivations of other partners and the
obstacles they face. Matthew Thomas of Prospect
Madison calls this contextual intelligence: the
ability to understand the priorities and concerns of
different types of organisation. Often, experience
of working in different kinds of organisation can
help to develop this ability.
64 65
You have to have a leader with depth and strength of conviction that, even under pressure, collaboration is still the answer.Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb
“
Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School
is one of today’s most influential thinkers on
business and organisations. Much of his work has
focused on competition – his five-forces analysis
of competition dynamics is taught in business
schools around the world.
Over the past decade, he and Mark Kramer, co-
founder of social impact consulting firm FSG, have
been articulating a concept they call creating
shared value. They argue that the interests of
business and society are not a zero-sum game
mediated by governments and regulators. Rather,
these interests are deeply interdependent, and so
it is strongly in the interest of business to create
economic value in a way that also creates value for
society by addressing its needs and challenges.
In the words of the authors, “the principle of shared
value creation cuts across the traditional divide
between the responsibilities of business and those
of government or civil society”. Because it doesn’t
matter to society whether value is created by the
private sector, the public sector or NGOs,
the challenge for all three sectors is to find the most
effective ways to work with each other to address
some of the complex needs of modern society.
The concepts underpinning shared value are
reflected in a number of the collaborations we
encountered in interviews and other research:
initiatives like Water4Crops (Case Study 1, page
26) show business working with NGOs and
government across sectors to address social
problems, while enhancing their own ability to
create value in their core business.
Thought Pioneers:Michael Porter, creating shared valueAs collaborations depend so much on communication, language must be
clear, precise and inspiring.
It is vital to maintain both clarity and accuracy in communication. Make it
simple, but don’t twist the message in order to simplify it. The messenger
matters as much as the message, particularly when working across sectors
or with civil society in tri-sector collaborations.
Above all, use language to inspire and unite participants. This means close
and regular communication and careful attention to the way things are
said. Matthew Thomas, of Prospect Maddison, observed that language can
be used very differently in different sectors. For example, the word ‘equity’ in
a commercial context is synonymous with ownership of a company, while
governments and NGOs tend to use the same word to mean equality or
fairness. Even when such differences sound trivial, the misalignment and
misunderstanding that can result are not.
Michael Daddo of the Shannon Company highlights the power of
developing a shared narrative in helping collaborators to find a common
language (see Create a shared narrative, page 42).
More than one of our interviewees stressed the importance of using
language that is positive and creative to describe a purpose. One gave the
example of requiring participants to express their desires as a positive
statement rather than a negative one. This focused them on the inspiring
mission of working towards a positive change, rather than working in
opposition to something.
Language matters
In Focus
66 67
Barriers to collaborationAll collaborations run into difficulty. Many, perhaps most, fail (see Case Study 10, Bhavyshia, page 72). So what are the problems most often encountered in collaborations, and how can they be overcome?
Case Study 10page 72
Lack of shared purpose
Description
A collaboration may find
itself without a clear shared
purpose, maybe because the
group was convened without
a clear need in mind or the
collaboration has not invested
enough time in aligning on
their shared purpose.
How to overcome
Start with a small group of
committed collaborators, who
have a clear collective need
and complementary skills and
abilities, and invest time in
defining together the shared
purpose of the collaboration.
01
Weak design or execution of governance structure
Description
Collaborations can lose
momentum and direction if
they lack a clear governance
structure or when senior
leaders from participating
organisations deviate from it.
How to overcome
Establish a clear governance
structure at the outset, with
for example clearly defined
decision points and meeting
schedules, and stick to it.
02
Deviation from shared purpose
Description
Collaborations can be derailed
if the direction of the work
moves away from the purpose
that they have agreed.
How to overcome
Continually remind
participants of the shared
purpose of the collaboration.
Having a written shared
narrative can support this.
03
Misalignment of mutual resource expectations
Description
Collaborations rely on
investment of resources from
all partners. Organisations
can overestimate the ability
or willingness of others to
contribute, or underestimate
how much they themselves
need to commit. This can lead
to collective under-resourcing
and failure of the collaboration.
How to overcome
Have an early and explicit
discussion on resourcing.
This may involve jointly
agreeing on a relatively
small resource commitment
at the outset, with defined
gateways where partners can
increase their commitment
later in the project.
04
68 69
Misinterpretation of actions
Description
Collaborations can suffer
when one organisation
misinterprets another’s actions.
This is usually unintentional
– though there are examples
of intentional misconstruction
particularly where projects
are highly politicised – but the
effect is to erode trust.
How to overcome
Use clear, simple and regular
communication. This can
include simple steps such as
ensuring that all partners are
invited to and informed of all
meetings.
05
Persistence of default behaviours
Description
Sometimes, collaborations
happen between
organisations that are used to
interacting in a different way
– for example as buyer and
seller. It can be hard to prevent
people from reverting to
their ‘default’ behaviour while
collaborating.
How to overcome
Remind participants of their
shared purpose, and of the
culture values and norms of
the collaboration.
06
Lack of internal collaboration
Description
Collaborations rely on
investment of resources from
all partners. Organisations
can overestimate the ability
or willingness of others to
contribute, or underestimate
how much they themselves
need to commit. This can lead
to collective under-resourcing
and failure of the collaboration.
How to overcome
Maintain clear internal
alignment on the
goals and objectives of the
collaboration,
and consistent internal
communication.
07
70 71
If you want to break down
inhibitions and defensiveness,
be as open and as non-possessive
with informationas possible.
Pavan Sukhdev, founder and CEO, GIST Advisory
“
Case Study 10: Bhavyshia
Collaborations fail regularly. Many of the leaders we interviewed had experienced failure repeatedly. Although failure is frustrating, it often yields useful lessons, and sometimes it can even sow the seeds of future success. The Bhavyshia Alliance is a case in point.
In 2006 in India, 55 million children under five
years old were underweight. That is 43 per cent of
the age group, one of the highest rates in the world.
And although the government gives more than $1
billion per year to tackling the issue, the level
of malnutrition has declined only very slowly.
The Bhavishya Alliance, consisting of 52 people and
their 26 organisations, was founded to help India
reach its Millennium Development Goal of halving
the number of malnourished children by 2015.
The alliance aimed to unite a diverse range of
stakeholders, but found itself increasingly divided
by tensions between government bureaucracies
and grassroots NGOs, between experts and
laymen, between donors and recipients, between
men and women, between international
consultants and Indian nationals. In the end,
the project was suspended.
Participant Adam Kahane says that the collaboration
had failed to address explicitly some of the
underlying differences of opinion and approach
between the collaboration partners. Although
grievances and disagreements were occasionally
voiced, the group never worked through to find
workable compromises and common ground.
Lacking a common narrative and vision, the group
found itself unable to proceed together towards
meaningful action.
Since this difficult initial experience, many of the
participants have reconvened and begun to re-
build the alliance. This resulted in a number of
innovative tri-sector initiatives aimed at improving
child nutrition in India, including programmes to
empower adolescent girls and to improve the
quality of nutrition in childcare centres.
More information:
http://www.synergos.org/knowledge/12/
bhavishyaalliancelegacyandlearning.pdf
72 73
Creatingcollaborative organisationsDo some organisations collaborate more successfully than others and, if so, why?
Our interviewees agree that the culture of
participating organisations can play a vital role
in making collaborations succeed. We have
grouped their lessons into four areas.
Emphasise leadership based on accountability and trust
Collaborative leaders are most successful when
they are accountable for progress to the entire
partnership. Accountability engenders trust and
confidence in a leader will grow as he or she delivers
on their commitments to the partnership.
Collaborations move in ways that are sometimes
unexpected and they can lose momentum easily.
So leaders need the freedom to make decisions
quickly and respond to unforeseen events. That
means giving them a clear mandate, empowering
them to act and providing adequate resources.
In organisations that are highly hierarchical and
centralised – where decision-making that deviates
from the original scope of a project has to be
approved by layers of senior management –
there is tension between the rigidity of the
corporate culture and the flexibility needed by
collaboration leaders.
Sometimes such organisations may be able to work
with partners of a similar size, with similar corporate
cultures and structures. In such collaborations,
steering committees of senior leaders meeting
regularly can address bottlenecks and make course
corrections – an approach well suited to small
collaborations with two or three participants.
An alternative is to adopt a corporate culture
that distributes power through the organisation
and creates an environment more conducive to
bottom-up decision making. This means a system
based on trust and accountability, rather than on
command and control.
Accountability based on measurement and structure is less important than accountability that comes from building trust. Self-driven accountability seems to be associated much more with successful collaboration than engineered accountability.Arun Sundararajan, professor of business, New York University
“
74 75
Establish strong vertical and horizontal communication
A collaboration can become frustrated if partners
get mixed or contradicting signals from different
parts of the same organisation. Horizontal, peer-to-
peer communication should prevent this, but it can
require a special effort in organisations where there
is a strong vertical separation between different
functions.
Vertical communication in both directions is also
vital. CEOs and other senior executives need to
listen to collaboration leaders who have the best
understanding of realities on the ground. In turn,
collaboration leaders need to understand how
their work fits with the company’s overall direction.
Understand collaboration throughout the organisation
A widespread understanding of the nature and
value of collaborations can help create a supportive
environment within an organisation. For example,
knowing that the early stages can take a long time
without yielding visible results can help to ensure
that collaboration leaders do not face unreasonable
expectations at the outset.
It’s also useful and supportive to have a clear
framework for describing both the value and
the cost of a collaboration.
Reward collaborative behaviour
Organisations can set incentives that reward
collaborative behaviour. It may not be possible to
quantify the benefits of collaborative behaviour
in the same way as, say, a sales target, so
organisations may have to be innovative. In online
collaborative software development, for example,
peers can rate their collaborators’ contributions and
register their appreciation for helpful contribution.
All this feedback contributes to an individual’s
reputation (see Case Study 11, Linux, page 78).
Even the most enlightened and thoughtful CEOs are not used to making compromises, making tradeoffs, acknowledging the quality of a competitor’s idea. I think the next generation of CEOs will have to have very different skill sets, and collaborative working will be one of them.
Gavin Neath, former senior vice president for sustainability at Unilever
“
76 77
Case Study 11: Linux
One of the most striking and unexpected phenomena to have emerged from the development of the internet is “open source” software – computer code that is free to use and share, often created by a large number of contributors working in their spare time.
A widely used example is Linux, an operating
system first released in 1991 and in constant
development ever since. Linux is the software
engine for millions of digital devices, including the
Android system that powers most of the world’s
mobile phones.
Arun Sundararajan of the Stern School of Business,
New York University, attributes the success of the
Linux collaboration to two factors. One was the
leadership of the project’s director, Linus Torvalds,
whose strong vision of what the software could
become served both as a focus and inspiration
to programmers. The other was a system
for recognising contributions: programmers
gained reputation and visibility for their efforts.
This combination of shared vision and assured
recognition has provided enough of an incentive
for thousands of programmers to contribute over
more than two decades.
78 79
Case Study 12: CityLab
Cape Town is the second most populous city in South Africa. It faces challenges including the need to reduce unemployment (now at more than 20%), improve healthcare and education, reduce poverty, and bring down a crime rate that is double the national average.
At the University of Cape Town, the African Centre
for Cities (ACC) is conducting research into cities,
with a focus on finding systemic solutions to the
challenges thrown up by urbanisation in Africa. Its
director, Professor Edgar Pieterse, was frustrated by
the divide between academics, policy researchers
and policy makers in addressing these challenges.
So the ACC created CityLab to allow different
stakeholders – academics, community
organisations, NGOs and government officials –
to collaborate in designing educated,
implementable policies for South Africa using a
combination of empirical research and practical
knowledge. Four ACC researchers are even
embedded in Cape Town’s city administration,
creating a hybrid policymaking-academic entity.
Over a two-year period they work on multi-
stakeholder topics that the city finds difficult to
deal with, such as climate-change adaptation
policy. This is a long enough timeframe to allow
strong working relationships and trust to develop
between collaborators.
More information:
www.africancentreforcities.net/
programme/citylab/
80 81
This report marks the start of an exploration of collaboration. We hope it will contribute to building a stronger understanding of how collaborations work, with the ultimate aim of increasing the success of collaborative ventures in the future.
One way we will take this work forward is to
create a new dynamic learning network of
collaboration practitioners within Shell: executives
who are now grappling with the realities of
leading collaborative projects across both internal
and external boundaries. They will be testing and
building on the collaboration insights from our
initial research – getting practical and sharing
what they learn, peer-to-peer.
Xyntéo and Shell will also be working to apply
the lessons from this report to practical
collaborative projects, in turn learning new
lessons from these experiences.
There is scope for doing more. For example this
work could evolve to develop several collaboration
networks within a number of different organisations,
creating a platform to learn not only within our own
organisations but also beyond them.
To learn more about the work we are doing,
to give feedback or more examples of effective
lessons for collaborations or to become involved
in any other way, please visit the Xyntéo
website at www.xynteo.com or contact us at
Takingthe next steps
Everything today is about building a
story that people believe in and
that people can be involved and
engaged in.
António Mexia, CEO, Energias de Portugal
“
82 83
Interviewees and source material
Case study sources
Material is drawn from
n Interviews with collaborative leaders
n Projects in the GLTE community, such as
LNG in shipping
(www.xynteo.com/projects)
n The Policy Shapers project, which Xyntéo has
been undertaking in conjunction with Shell
(www.xynteo.com/projects/policy-shapers)
n The New Climate Economy report –
Xyntéo participated in the preparation of
this landmark publication in 2014
(www.newclimateeconomy.report/)
Collaborative leaders
Jeremy Bentham
is vice president of Global Business
Environment at Royal Dutch Shell.
He has been responsible for Shell’s
Global Business Environment team
since 2006. His team is best known for developing
forward-looking scenarios to support the company’s
strategic thinking and direction-setting.
Rati Bhattacharya
is delivery manager for sustainability
projects at Tata Consultancy Services,
a global IT services, consulting and
business solutions provider. She
focuses on defining and implementing sustainability
strategies for manufacturing industries. Her areas of
work include water credit-debit models and working
with water-intensive industries on water neutrality.
Dr Mick Blowfield
is a professor at the University
of Wolverhampton and a senior
visiting associate at the University
of Oxford. Dr Blowfield’s research
focuses on private sector transition in a resource-
constrained economy and specifically on business as
an agent of change in the context of climate change.
Flavio Corsin
is the country manager for Vietnam
and Asia-Pacific aquaculture
manager at the IDH Sustainable
Trade Initiative. He is experienced
in developing relationships with Asian governments
and has valuable insights into what drives changes
in the Vietnamese commodity sectors.
Jay Cowles
is president of Unity Avenue
Associates and co-chair of the
Itasca Project’s Transportation
Committee. He was a founding
member of the Itasca Project, an employer-led civic
alliance focused on building a thriving economy
and improved quality of life in the US’s Minneapolis-
St Paul metropolitan area.
Michael Daddo
is managing director of specialist
behaviour-change consultancy
The Shannon Company in
Australia. The Shannon Company
works collaboratively with business, government
and academia to inspire people to change, willingly
and for good – good for themselves, their family, the
organisation they work for and society as a whole;
and for good – a permanent change.
Lisa Dreier
is senior director for food security and
development initiatives at the World
Economic Forum (WEF) in the US.
She leads the Forum’s New Vision for
Agriculture initiative, which serves as a platform to build
collaboration among stakeholders to achieve a vision
of agriculture as a driver of food security, environmental
sustainability and economic opportunity.
Dr Theuns Eloff
was vice-chancellor of North-
West University in South Africa.
He played a leading role in
post-apartheid South Africa by
galvanising the drafting of the country’s new
constitution as well as the integration of universities
that had been racially segregated. As his second
term as vice-chancellor has come to an end, he is
now a director of companies and consultant at large.
Reverend John Freeth
is former chief advisor to Archbishop
Desmond Tutu. He played a pivotal
role in South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, which
demanded profound collaboration between parties.
Thomas Gensemer
co-founded and was CEO of
digital agency Blue State Digital.
There, he created and managed
the 2008 and 2012 social media
campaigns for President Obama which mobilised
13.5 million Americans; causing charities, brands and
Republicans alike to take note. He is now US chief
strategy officer for Burson-Marsteller, a global public
relations and communications firm.
This report draws on interviews that Xyntéo conducted with 39 collaborative leaders, as well as case-study materials from those interviews and other sources known to Xyntéo, and published literature.
84 85
Ilkka Herlin
is chairman of cargo-handling
solutions provider Cargotec. Mr
Herlin also heads the Baltic Sea
Action Group, which brings a
number of partners together to clean one of the
world’s most polluted seas.
Huang Guoshu
is vice chairman of Sinew
Corporation, which has developed
an innovative business model
in China that works with local
government to develop a sustainable agriculture
industry chain and create a harmonious
community with farmers.
Idris Jala
is minister and CEO of the
Performance Management and
Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) for
the Malaysian Prime Minister’s
Department. PEMANDU aims to transform the
social and economic performance of Malaysia by
involving relevant stakeholders.
Merit Janow
is dean of the School of International
and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia
University in the US, and chair of
the Nasdaq Exchange LLC. She is
an expert in international trade and investment.
Ms Janow was previously a judge on the World Trade
Organization’s Appellate Body.
Deepak Jolly
is vice president of Coca-Cola
India and South West Asia. As
a water consumer, Coca-Cola
is well versed in working with
government and civil society to ensure safe and
consistent water access.
Adam Kahane
is director of Reos Partners. Reos
is a social enterprise that helps
businesses, governments and
civil society organisations address
complex social challenges. Mr Kahane has had an
extensive career in collaborations, working in more
than 50 countries with executives and politicians,
generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade
unionists, community activists and United Nations
officials, clergy and artists.
Lieutenant-General
Sir Graeme Lamb
is a retired British Army officer,
former commander of the Field
Army and former director of the
UK Special Forces. He was also deputy commanding
general of multinational forces in Iraq and special
advisor to the US General Stanley McChrystal
in Afghanistan. As a respected leader of joint
operations, Lieutenant General Lamb understands
the leadership required for successful collaboration
under extreme circumstances and at a large scale.
Upmanu Lall
is director of the Columbia Water
Center. Affiliated with Columbia
University and the Earth Institute,
the centre seeks to find creative
solutions to water challenges through collaborative
projects in several countries.
Li Junfeng
is deputy director general of the
Energy Research Institute at the
National Development and Reform
Commission in China. Responsible
for setting up the legislative framework for low-
carbon development in China, he consults regularly
across boundaries to achieve common goals.
António Mexia
is CEO of Energias de Portugal
(EDP), one of Europe’s major
electricity operators. EDP’s successful
experience in working in Angola
with the Clinton Global Initiative and UNHCR has
led to insights on the role of the private sector in
collaborations.
R Mukundan
is managing director of Tata
Chemicals, which has interests
in chemicals, crop nutrition and
consumer products. The Mumbai-
based company participates in many local initiatives
in India for improving agricultural practices and
farmer livelihood.
Gavin Neath
is former senior vice president
for sustainability at Unilever. The
multinational consumer goods
company has worked through
the Consumer Goods Forum to successfully
operationalise the Tropical Forest Alliance, an
international collaborative effort dedicated to the
conservation of tropical forests.
Mona Nilsson
works for Scandinavian furniture
retailer IKEA as change manager in
its traceability programme. She led
the implementation of a change
concept, training 7,000 managers, and oversaw
IKEA’s largest and most successful change project,
which targeted 65,000 users.
Karen O’Brien
is a professor at the Department of
Sociology and Human Geography,
University of Oslo. She has been
involved with Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment
reports and serves on the scientific committee for
Future Earth, the 10-year global change research
initiative.
David Petraeus
is chairman of KKR Global Institute,
partner at KKR, visiting professor
at City University of New York
and a Judge Widney professor
at the University of Southern California. He is a
former director of the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and was a four-star general in the US Army,
commanding US and coalition forces during
the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has unique
collaborative insights, including the necessity to
collaborate across the forces and through coalitions.
Patrick Rousseau
is chairman and managing director
of Veolia Water India. As a world
leader in water services active in
India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,
Veolia Water has collaborative experience in what is
one of the most water-poor regions on the planet.
Shyam Saran
is the former Indian foreign
secretary. He also served as Indian
Ambassador to Nepal, Indonesia
and Myanmar, among other
positions, and as India’s special envoy for climate
change from 2008 to 2010. He has extensive
experience in international negotiations and
domestic policy implementation.
86 87
Gerald Schotman
is the former Chief Technology
Officer and Executive Vice
President for Innovation/R&D at
Shell. His role was to ensure that
Shell develops and implements the right technology
to deliver energy projects across the world.
Meenakshi Sharma
is vice president of sustainability
and communications at SABMiller
India, India’s leading beer producer.
As one of the biggest water
consumers in a water stressed region, it
has significant practical collaborative experience.
Dave Steward
is the former South African
Ambassador to the UN and chief
of staff to former South African
President FW de Klerk. These roles
gave him a unique perspective on the collaborative
effort required to transition to the modern South Africa.
Pavan Sukhdev
is founder and CEO of GIST
Advisory, a consulting firm
that helps governments and
corporations discover, measure,
value and manage their impacts on natural and
human capital. Mr Sukhdev led a G8+5- project on
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
(‘TEEB’) to develop a global study on the
economics of biodiversity loss.
Arun Sundararajan
is professor of business at New York
University. His research interests
include the sharing economy,
collaborative markets and
digital disruption.
Matthew Thomas
is the managing director of
Prospect Madison, a leadership
advisory firm aimed at enabling
cross-sector leaders to create new
solutions to society’s most pressing challenges, and
serves as a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral
Commission. He has spoken to audiences at the
White House and World Economic Forum,
and published his research in the Harvard
Business Review.
Robert Thurman
is professor of Indo-Tibetan
Buddhist studies at Columbia
University, holding the first
endowed chair in this field of
study in the US. He is an influential and prolific
American Buddhist writer and academic, with
deep collaborative insights.
Atsuko Toda
is the Nigeria country programme
manager at the International Fund
for Agricultural Development
(IFAD), an international financial
institution of the United Nations. Ms Toda has lead
collaborations in several countries that work with
rural people, governments, donors and non–
governmental organisations. The government of
Vietnam previously presented her with an award
honouring her work in the country.
Ivar Valstad
is project manager at Norsk Hydro.
Previously he was responsible
for overseeing the collaborative
projects Xyntéo facilitates through
its Global Leadership and Technology Exchange
(GLTE) programme.
Guido Verijke
is former chairman of the Better
Cotton Initiative, a cross-sector
collaboration that aims to
reduce the amount of water and
chemicals used to grow cotton and to improve the
social and economic prospects of cotton farmers.
Peter Voser
is former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell.
Before his appointment as CEO in
2009, he was chief financial officer.
Mr Voser pioneered the role of
business in water-energy-food-climate stress nexus
collaborations.
Leo Yip
was chairman of the Singapore
Economic Development Board
from 2009 to 2014. The board
has pioneered new forms of
collaboration between business and government
that has attracted many globally leading companies
to build up a significant presence in Singapore to
drive their business, innovation and talent activities
for not just Asia but also the global market.
88 89
Mythbusters: surprising truths about successful collaborationOur conversations with collaboration leaders helped to bust some myths about collaborations to reveal some of the misperceptions that can cause them to fail.
You don’t have to like the people you’re collaborating with.
Sometimes there’s no alternative but to work with
people you don’t like, and may not even trust – but
it is possible if you have a shared purpose and
recognise that you need one another (see Focus
box: The personal dimension, page 29).
You can’t know what the answer will look like when you set out.
Collaborations have to start with a shared problem,
which requires all the partners to address. But no
single partner has the answers: the collaboration
has to create these together. (See Identify a
common purpose, page 24).
More can be less.
It’s tempting to assume that a broader coalition
can bring more weight to solving the problem.
Sometimes collaborating with many organisations
makes sense, but for others the result is a bloated
or divided effort that leads nowhere. The difference
between enough and too many is defined by two
questions: do all the participants share a common
purpose and are they all necessary to achieve it?
(See Create a partnership, page 28).
How you gather data is as important as the data itself.
Different stakeholders see problems through
different lenses. Involving everyone in the
process of gathering or verifying data can help to
overcome difference in perception. So the process
of data-gathering can be as important as the data
itself. (See Understand the context, page 36).
Collaborations need leaders more than managers.
Collaborations are always difficult and so they
need more than management: they need
leadership. Collaborative leaders seldom have
direct hierarchical control of those they are
leading, so they have to articulate a strong sense
of purpose to drive the collaboration forward (See
Use purpose to lead, page 60).
Don’t be tempted by quick commercial opportunities.
If the chance comes for one of the partners to
sell something to another, this can risk shifting
the mindset of the participants from relationships
to transactions. (See Persistence of default
behaviours, page 70). It can be wiser to ignore the
small prize of a quick commercial transaction to
allow the collaboration to mature and deliver more
substantial gains later.
Even with a long-term perspective, quick wins matter.
Collaborations are inherently medium- to long-
term plays: an investment of resources now that
will yield a prize in the future. While focusing on
the end result is important, it’s essential to give
participants a taste of early success – to give keep
the momentum when energy starts to flag.
Scale your team before you try to scale your project.
When a collaboration moves to piloting and
scaling, new people often enter the teams. Though
they can bring new energy and insights, they
may also not share the collaborative mindset
and sense of purpose. It can be helpful to involve
these people earlier, so they begin to take on the
collaboration’s culture and values before the pilot
phase. (See Brave the valley of death, page 52).
90 91
GLTE, Royal Dutch Shell and XyntéoReport
Xyntéo alone is responsible for this document and any errors it contains
Xyntéo © April 2015
Registered address: 3 Wesley Gate, Queen’s Road, Reading RG1 4AP, United Kingdom
Registered in England number: 5314641 | VAT registration number: 857 5824 79
Designed and typeset by oneagency.co
Shell Trade Marks reproduced by permission of Shell Brands International AG