Facilitators are like relationship guidance counsellors, they are called in when collaborative relationships go wrong. What should they do?

1. Facilitating collaboration –
dilemmas and paradox
Carol Sherriff CPF

2. What type of collaboration do you/might
you facilitate?
• Join with two or three other people and share your experience

3. All collaboration is relational
Relationships between companies begin,
grow, and develop—or fail—much like
relationships between people.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard
Business School. She is also director and chair of the
Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative.

4. Meeting and getting attached
Love at first sight? Attraction? Two
organisations meet, are attracted,
and explore their compatibility.
Relationship becomes serious. They
meet the family, draw up plans and close
the deal.

5. Engagement and partnership
In phase three, the newly partnered
companies, like couples setting up
housekeeping, discover they have
different ideas about how the
business should operate.
In phase four, the partners devise mechanisms
for bridging those differences and develop
techniques for getting along or….

6. Long term relationship
Each organisation discovers that it has
changed internally as a result of its
accommodation to the ongoing collaboration.
….they part company.

7. Facilitator as relationship counsellor
• Facilitators often call in at the
start of a relationship like a
friend when the parties do not
know each other
• Or at times of problems,
challenges and trouble
• These are often the points at
which the relationship is
changing
• Helpful for facilitators to
diagnose the stage of the
relationship

8. Paradoxes and dilemmas
• Collaboration and competition –
similarity makes collaboration easier
but the organisations are more likely
to be competitors, difference makes
collaboration more challenging but
there is less competition
• Protection and Integration - Give
things up and hold onto them
• Collaborative leadership and
collaborative thug – we are the
good guys and the bad guys
‘The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage’ by C. Huxham and S. Vangen, Routledge 2005.

9. Collaborative leader/Collaborative Thug?
Research by Huxham and Vangen finds that
leading successful collaboration requires
• ‘the spirit of collaboration. Activities of this sort
are highly facilitative and are concerned with
embracing, empowering, involving and
mobilizing members. However, the same
people are also engaged in activities that, on
the face of it, are much less collaborative.
Many of them are adept at manipulating
agendas and playing the politics. We have
characterized these kinds of activities as being
towards collaborative thuggery…’
• ‘those who lead (collaborative ventures) more
successfully seem to operate from both
perspectives – the spirit of collaboration and
towards collaborative thuggery – and to switch
between them, often carrying out both types of
leadership in the same act.’
What is your experience?

10. What should facilitators do when called in
to a collaborative partnership
• Diagnose the stage of the relationship, what are likely to be the
benefits and the challenges?
• Introduce the collaborative partners to the paradoxes and
dilemmas they are likely to face
• Choose appropriate facilitation techniques
• Solution focus
• In your shoes
• Consensus building
• Conflict resolution

11. The collaborative journey

12. Sources
Kanter, R. M. (1994) "Collaborative Advantage: The Art of
Alliances." Harvard Business Review, June 1994
Huxham, C. and Vangen, S., (2005) The Theory and Practice of
Collaborative Advantage’ by C. Huxham and S. Vangen,
Routledge.