Second, the report briefly describes alliances in four states, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Missouri, and Utah, that bring together complementary and diverse resources to address complex problems. These states for the first time tried to create alliances among diverse organizations and to implement these collaborations in pilot or demonstration areas or, in the case of Utah, nearly statewide. In doing so, they had to facilitate the creation of and work with local collaborations. All the state alliances are continuing, so the summaries are summaries of work in progress. Because these states undertook for the first time alliances, their experiences, understandably, reflect successes as well as mistakes. Alliances may be necessary, but they are not easy to form and to implement. Each state had to learn, reflect, and adapt, and they are still adapting--a necessary pattern in all collaborations--as they continue their alliances.
I also want to express thanks to three long-time colleagues whose insights and sharing are always so valuable to me: Linda Wolf, James Forsberg, and Langley Keyes. While we may not always see things the same way, we always test and learn from one another.
Finally, I thank Debbie Jakubowski for her excellent work in preparing the camera-ready report.
Any mistakes or errors in the report are solely those of the author as are the opinions and judgements, expressed or implied.
Collaboration is not easy, but the capacity to collaborate must become a core competency of housing and community development-related organizations. Alliance partners should see collaboration as a way to solve past failures and as a new way of organizing, making decisions, and allocating resources that better matches our complex problems and rapidly changing environment than do complex vertical bureaucracies; they should see collaboration as a tool for actively creating and discovering the future, for learning, and for strategic thinking.
This report uses the experiences of four states who have engaged in collaborative housing and community development--Oklahoma, North Carolina, Missouri, and Utah--to illustrate significant concepts and lessons in forming and managing housing and community development alliances. The difficulty but also the power of collaborations range from those in which the primary output is the adjustment in each partner's output that occurs as a result of inter-independent action, to those in which the output is the synchronization of each partner's output in a way that only collaboration makes possible, to those in which the output is the inter-dependent fusion of each of the partner's outputs--creating truly new goods and services.
Alliances generally have two distinct stages, a forming or creation stage and an implementation stage. The forming stage usually consists of actions that generate enthusiasm for the collaboration and those that design the initial outline of the collaboration. Care must be taken in the forming stage to avoid or well address several potentially critical problems: overly high expectations for the collaboration, cultural dissonance, dominant logic conflict, and the spawning of lack of confidence or doubt. Similarly, the initial design decisions must be carefully made, especially in ensuring a clear, common purpose; identifying core partners, non-core partners, and the community of interest; striving to get the right balance of size and diversity; and laying out the alliance's approach to its work.
As the alliance transitions from its forming stage to its implementation stage, the alliance partners should recognize the opportunity provided by the alliance for knowledge generation and complex problem solving. If the partners ignore this opportunity and do not make knowledge generation a priority, the opportunity is rarely recaptured. Once the partners recognize the opportunity, they must see and use the collaboration as a shared knowledge generation space. Shared knowledge generation occurs when a group of diverse people create and shape new knowledge together.
Implementation is the most difficult stage of a collaboration and in this stage the partners will go through one or more sequences of learning and adapting. Collaborations that start with partners having a good degree of mutual trust will have a much easier and probably more effective launch than those where mutual trust may be low or absent. Trust is usually generated through experience, so positive prior working relationships provide a store of social capital that the collaboration can use in its early implementation work. If collaborations start with only a minimal level of trust, partners, individually and collectively, can help facilitate trust building.
In collaborations, all core partners should practice facilitative leadership, which includes managing across boundaries with no formal authority, developing a common vision, and using a consensus decision-making style. While a collaboration needs several facilitative leaders, important to managing relationships, it also requires a collaboration manager, important to managing the collaboration as a whole.
Once a collaboration starts, the partners must address several key operation and management issues. One issue concerns operational scope, which includes task definition, task integration, and skills melding. A collaboration also needs to build multiple bridges, connections between professional or technical personnel, mid-level managers, and senior managers. Effective communications are central to a collaboration, and handling this well involves knowing when to use what types of communication and ensuring that all participants are situationally aware of the collaboration. The cascading nature--the rolling out of the collaboration to other participants or vistas--presents another operation and management issue. Each cascade is in itself a miniature forming stage, and must be handled as such, with communications playing a critical role.
Collaboration partners capture value primarily through the inter-organizational learning that occurs via the collaboration. This learning, which must be a conscious intent of each partner, especially senior managers, expresses itself through the transfer or diffusion of knowledge and the integration or application of knowledge gained via the collaborative process. The absorptive capacity of the individuals active in the collaboration and each partner's skills and experience in intra-organizational learning significantly determines the extent to which inter-organizational learning occurs.
Given the nature of the specific collaborations described in this report, the state-local nexus is both important and potentially complex. The nexus requires state partners to share their knowledge with a local collaboration or end users and tailor their outputs or resources to the specific locality as appropriate. State partners should envision the state-local collaboration design as a relatively open-ended and longer-term process involving on-going dialogue and negotiation through which the collaboration creates new policy and delivery structures.
As implied in the state-local nexus discussion, collaborative housing and community development places a stress on most local or community institutions because it forces them to stretch their competencies and increase their tolerance for risk and ambiguity, and often starts a process of internal change. As states initiate and facilitate collaborations, they must think about collaboration capacity building and in doing so will need to reinterpret capacity building. States should integrate from the start a capacity building strategy with their collaboration.
Each of the four states took divergent paths, although Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Utah focused on the welfare-to-work connection. Oklahoma's collaboration had two co-managers, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Human Services, within a fairly large number collaboration partners. Oklahoma's collaboration centered on selecting four communities (three rural counties and one metropolitan county) for comprehensive welfare-to-work planning within the context of decentralizing state administration of TANF. The collaboration transitioned to a commitment for integrated funding from several state agencies and programs, to be managed by one state agency with the intent to award competitively funds to communities for implementing comprehensive welfare-to-work strategies.
North Carolina started its collaboration with five state agencies, with the Department of Commerce as the collaboration manager. The state collaboration adopted an investment or outcomes funding approach, using it in three contiguous rural counties. The state collaboration facilitated and then engaged local collaborations within each of the three counties and across all three counties. The state-local collaborations effected funding for HOME and CDBG applications, with county departments of social services being the primary players within a broad local coalition. The CDBG funds will be used for welfare-to-work outcomes.
Missouri began with a broad state coalition managed by the Department of Economic Development that focused on the poor southeastern portion of the state. But when this initiative stalled, the collaboration manager and a small set of core partners re-directed the collaboration to a statewide focus centering on the state-funded, services-based Caring Communities partnerships. But the core partners then again altered the direction to focus solely on federal and state agencies. The final result is a large state and federal agency collaboration designed to produce coherent and streamlined community strategic planning requirements for all state and federal agencies, producing a common needs assessment format as part of the streamlining.
Utah's collaboration included 16 local public housing authorities, several state agencies and nonprofit organizations. While the collaboration manager was the Department of Community and Economic Development, the Department of Workforce Services and several local housing authorities sustained central action for the collaboration, which focused on using welfare reform processes and resources to increase the self-sufficiency of public housing tenants to enable them to exit public housing and obtain less highly subsidized housing or even market-rate housing--which also increases the velocity of use of public housing, giving more very low income families access to this relatively scarce housing resource.
As the four states concluded two or so years of alliance work, three topics stand out as important in all four states. The technical assistance and capacity building issue may be the most challenging issue, one that continues to confront the state alliances. A second key issue is the recognized need for frank and candid dialogue and discussion, especially early in the collaboration, based on trust among all the partners, and on identifying and appropriately communicating with each alliance's community of interest. Third is the bedeviling nature of programs: all states struggled with the delivery of different funding streams with their specific constraints and different timing cycles.
Finally, a more subjective statement: Individual and organizational learning must become a more conscious, explicit objective of alliances. Organizations must adopt structures and processes that facilitate learning. In the long run, housing and community development alliances are about complex problem solving and learning.
Although the private, for-profit sector has experienced for 15 or more years collaborations--or strategic alliances, networked organizations, joint ventures, or even virtual organizations--the public sector and the nonprofit community have only recently seen the emergence of collaborative ventures. This report addresses housing and community development collaboration in the public sector by using, in part, the two-year experiences of four states, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah. These states are participating in a collaboration project initiated in 1996 by the Council of State Community Development Agencies.
Using the experiences of these four states does not imply they are the only states engaging in collaborative community development or are the most successful states. However, these four states have tried to create and implement collaborations that involve organizations that focus on physical development, such as community development and housing agencies, and organizations that focus on human services, such as TANF and employment training agencies. Additionally, these states have engaged local or community organizations in their collaborations, especially as they try to implement collaborations at the local level.
The report uses the experiences of these four states not so much to describe their experiences or promote their accomplishments but to illustrate key points and significant issues in collaborative community development. Consequently, it only briefly summarizes the four-state experiences in part 2. In using the states' experiences illustratively the report tries to identify and explain characteristics or factors crucial to the success of collaborations. This endeavor requires exploring theories or concepts that can help explain what must be addressed and how these must be addressed to create and manage effective collaborations. In other words, what do we already know that may help us create and implement collaborations even if we have little or no experience in using collaborations? As the report notes throughout, much experience and even concept-building is occurring with private sector alliances and collaborations, which is often largely relevant to the public sector.
Why use collaborations? And what is a collaboration, anyway? In answering these and related questions, the report uses several overlapping themes or topics, such as trust, facilitative leadership, organizational structure, communication, knowledge generation, inter-organizational learning, high performance teams, and capacity building. These themes tend to overlap because it is difficult, for example, to discuss trust without discussing communication, or inter-organizational learning without discussing facilitative leadership, or communication without discussing organizational structure.
Collaborations are essential to housing and community development and perhaps to all organizations trying to solve difficult problems or address complex issues. Further, the capacity to collaborate should now be seen a necessary core competency of nearly all public and community organizations. In the words of Gary Hamel, on the road to the future organizations that have learned how to collaborate effectively will be the windshield and those that have not will be the bug.
Collaborations are essential for three reinforcing reasons. The skills and resources essential to an organization's effectiveness are increasingly located outside an organization's boundaries and are not subject to management's direct control. Second, if we are to solve well and for the long term the housing and community development-related problems we face we will need to blend or meld resources and skills that no single organization possesses. We need to use our complementary strengths in a collaborative way. Finally, our uncertain and rapidly changing environment requires us to accelerate our learning by combining our insight and understanding so that we can strengthen our foresight and strategic thinking.
Saying that collaborations are essential to community development does not mean they are always absolutely necessary. Some problems can be well addressed through one-time, rifle-shot use of resources. Nonetheless, we are realizing that our more significant and difficult problems are inter-connected and that solving one problem may alleviate one or more symptoms in the short run, but often does little to improve significantly conditions in the long term. The policy and practice of community development is beginning to recognize the applicability of Ashby's law of requisite variety, which states that to control a situation the variety of response actions must at least match the variety of disturbances that are causing the problem or situation being addressed.
Community development-related organizations--organizations dealing with housing, community facilities, and infrastructure--have led, indeed, usually have been the sole actors, in community development or neighborhood revitalization since the late 1940s. Further, housing, usually housing rehabilitation, has usually spearheaded and dominated community development. In the mid-1980s things began to change, especially as housing organizations increasingly recognized the need for support services. On the other hand, beginning in the 1980s human services organizations began to recognize the need to go beyond treating individuals, or cases, and began focusing on families. The expanding focus of human services continued in the 1990s by putting families in the context of communities. Thus, development organizations began to recognize the importance of services while service organizations began to recognize the importance of community. Additionally, the increased blending of development and services is now being overlayed by the policy and political importance attached to employment and self-sufficiency.
Employment-centered community development provides not only an overlay to the development-services and services-community trends but also helps bridge the two trends. Development has usually had some involvement in employment, using funds for job creation or maintenance through fixed-asset financing or site and infrastructure development. Services have also usually had a connection to employment through employment training and related initiatives such as adult literacy.
Unfortunately, this conceptual or intellectual acknowledgment and understanding, slight as it may be, of the fusion of development, services, and employment has grown much faster than our ability to put the understanding into practice. In other words, a disconnect exists between what we know we have to do and how we have to approach it and the tools and practices we have to implement what we know.
Two factors, perhaps among several others, stand out as causing this disconnect. One is that the financial resources we have at our disposal are usually contained in programs, and these programs almost invariably have a relatively narrow focus--in the activities they can fund, and/or in the clients or constituents they must serve, and/or in the objectives or goals they must be pursue, and/or in the organizations that have access to them. This is like trying to walk through a complex maze with 12-foot walls and not being able to use, for example, a helicopter to provide a map of how best to walk through the maze.
Further, the managers of these public programs/funds deal with mechanisms that ensure accountability, which means that "program" and "accountability" often become synominous. Consequently, many program managers strongly adhere to traditional notions of accountability and are disinclined to blend funds and programs to address complex issues. Our usual accountability requirements limit our ability to inter-connect and adjust programs and make it very difficult to match the rapid changes in policy contexts we face.
Inherent in learning is the need to transcend specific tasks, which is difficult for professionals who tend to focus on tools, and traditional accountability requirements reinforce this tool focus. Traditional accountability procedures sometimes produce an excessive emphasis on monitoring, which can also be problematic because monitoring favors forecasts or improvisions (doing what you promised to do is more important than making adjustments that result in more effective outcomes) and constraints over opportunity (not doing something you said you were going to do to do something more cost-effective is wrong). A pre-occupation with monitoring reinforces a program focus and drastically reduces time horizons (you need to do what made sense yesterday, when you signed the contract, and not what makes tomorrow as you spend the money).
The other factor is the nature of our delivery organizations, the organizations that control and manage most of the resources that can be used for holistic community development. One might say that the nature of our community development problems are boundaryless and changing while the organizations we use to address these problems are segmented and inflexible. The segmentation can be programmatic (an organization has a small share of the resources needed to address well a problem) and/or geographic (an organization territorially serves or focuses on a small part of problem). The inflexibility can be bureaucratic (an organization is weighed down by multiple hierarchical layers, substantial division into functions, and extensive task specialization) and/or ideological (members of the organization strongly believe that there is one best way to solve a problem or that there is one priority problem that needs to be addressed). This is like trying to walk through a complex maze while encased in utter darkness.
The real bad news, however, is that these two factors tend to exist in a vicious, self-reinforcing circle. "Good" public policy tends to be policy that provides your organization with the resources to solve problems; "bad" public policy tends to be policy that prevents your organization from accessing resources or provides resources that your organization cannot access. Similarly, "good" public policy is policy that gives priority to the issue that your organization addresses and thinks is most important; "bad" public policy is policy that ignores or does not well finance the issue your organization addresses and believes is most important. Consequently, organizations and interests work the legislature (local, state, or national) to create very specific programs, and policy entrepreneurs in legislatures or foundations create programs that fit their definition of what is needed. Further, old programs are rarely eliminated as new programs are added.
These actions may not necessarily be nefarious or manipulative; they sometimes proceed from the best of intentions. But they result in an enormous hodge-podge of narrow-scoped programs. The accretion of niche-building results in a rabbit warren of structures and organizations each of which increasingly deals with a smaller portion of the puzzle as the number of pieces in the puzzle grows.
Two sets of circumstances, each of which is a different side of the same coin, drive the need for collaboration. One side of this coin is the complexity of the problem--complex problems are inter-domain (inter-disciplinary, inter-program) problems that have a significant impact on society and the solutions to which are very difficult to find because they cross many areas of expertise and for which there is always incomplete information. This complexity requires drawing from the diverse knowledge, experiences, capabilities, and processes of different organizations and people. Complex problems and cross-cutting issues increase the need to integrate and not merely coordinate resources. Collaborations are necessary for complex problem solving.
The other side of the coin is the fragmentation and resultant complexity of the problem environment. Collaboration is necessary to prevent not only working at cross-purposes but to accomplish working at reinforcing purposes. Organizations and people working together can accomplish things that they individually cannot accomplish. In other words, who we are together is always different than who we are alone and new relationships create new capacities.
What is collaboration? Collaboration has become an overused word, and its definition now is probably in the eye of the beholder. As used in this report, community development collaboration involves the extended collective interaction among three or more organizations representing diverse, complementary resources that focuses on a common complex topic or outcome. This definition implies several characteristics.
One is that the resources include both development-related and services-related resources. Thus, a collaboration is not simply a partnership among similar organizations; diversity is central to the notion of collaboration. Second, a collaboration lasts for an extended period of time. An extended period of time need not mean years. It means that the relationship exists long enough to address well a problem or attain an objective (even on a pilot or demonstration basis) and that the partners have the time to adapt to one another--a collaboration changes over time. Finally, a collaboration is not project-based or single task-based. It involves a series of projects and/or multiple activities.
This definition excludes several kinds of interactions sometimes labeled collaborations. Community development is no stranger to partnerships. There are many initiatives that involve the leveraging of funds, various infrastructure projects, for example, in which the only common denominator is money--the roles of the partners are clearly defined ahead of time. There are many examples of diverse partners coming together to complete one specific project or task, such as building and staffing a community center or a complex for the frail elderly. There are housing initiatives that involve multiple partners. But these initiatives are almost invariably project-focused, time-limited (that is, there is good understanding at the start of how long the interaction will last), and usually involve similar resources (e.g., finance, development, construction, etc.--all related to housing).
The words "strategic" and "alliance" add to the notion of collaboration. These words suggest an involvement among diverse organizations that requires a degree of mutual and long-term alignment benefitting all partners. They imply an on-going sharing of goals and objectives and a set of relationships that are fluid, future-oriented, and long term. Strategic alliances for community development, finally and perhaps most importantly, imply far more than cooperation. In cooperation, partners can still remain autonomous and relatively unchanged. A strategic alliance fundamentally changes the partners in a collaboration; a mutuality of influence and learning enables the partners to become different, more capable, than what they were as autonomous actors.
What do collaborations produce that cannot be produced by partners otherwise acting alone? Collaborations can produce three kinds of outputs that cannot be produced by participants acting alone. One is output adjustment, which occurs when one or more collaboration partners inter-independently make adjustments in their outputs. The mutual learning or influence that occurs in a collaboration leads partners to innovate; they individually produce outputs that are different than the outputs they have previously produced. This adjustment may also include the partners' using their outputs to serve new, different customers or attain new, different objectives. In other words, the knowledge gained in the collaboration and the commitment of the partners to the collaborative venture as a whole makes or permits them to make innovations and adjustments in their individual outputs. Obviously, output adjustment occurs because these adjustments are deemed to server better the needs of the customers or clients or more effectively solve problems than the traditional outputs.
An example of output adjustment is a housing agency using for the first time tenant-based assistance, and using this assistance to promote self-sufficiency.
Another type is output synchronization. In this case, the collaboration partners synchronize their outputs in a way that is impossible without collaboration. Output synchronization is often part of the rhetoric of community development initiatives. Usually output synchronization is attempted through planning and/or through targeting. In planning, a group of people and organizations assess a community, develop goals and objectives, and identify a work program comprised of multiple tasks or steps (outputs) that over time will attain or move toward attaining the goals and objectives. However, the planners rarely have control over the resources, or at least many of the resources, that are needed to implement the plan and the actual outputs usually fall far short of coordination as they are delivered. Targeting attempts to get at output synchronization less directly by encouraging or in some cases mandating that resources be allocated to a relatively small geographical area. The hope is that as these diverse resources come into a relatively small geographical area they are used in a coordinated fashion.
However, both planning and targeting are more often aimed at providing a wide or comprehensive array of outputs than at output synchronization. In collaboration, the partners that control the resources attempt to use their resources, develop outputs, in a patterned, coordinated fashion so that the impact of these outputs is much greater than if they were uncoordinated. However, actually securing output synchronization is much more difficult than it seems: organizations whose outputs are being coordinated tend to see much more coordination than the clients or customers of the coordination. Output synchronization may seem seamless to the collaborating organizations but clients or customers rarely see or feel seamlessness.
An example of output synchronization is a development agency providing funds for local infrastructure repair and community facilities, while a housing agency provides funds for the rehabilitation of houses in the community being served by the infrastructure and community facility improvements and a human services agency provides substance abuse treatment and family preservation assistance to the households receiving housing rehabilitation assistance. Further, these outputs are timed or scheduled in such a way that their sequencing adds to the effectiveness of the individual outputs.
A third kind of collaborative production is output fusion. Output fusion is the melding or blending of the outputs of the partners. The collaboration partners produce outputs that clearly could not have been produced by the partners acting independently or even inter-independently. In this instance, the collaboration truly produces something new, a truly new product.
An example of output fusion is a housing agency providing funds for the construction of a special type of housing for several formerly homeless single parent teen mothers who are being provided services by one or more human services agencies and where the human services agencies are providing financing that the housing agency includes as part of its financing pro forma for the development. One can further the degree or intensity of fusion by indicating, for example, that one or more businesses have agreed to employ the teen mothers provided they meet certain qualifications, such as threshold levels of literacy and various standards of soft skills, and that employment training and adult education agencies have agreed to provide services to help the teen mothers meet those standards.
A collaboration need not produce all three kinds of outputs. In some contexts, only one output may be very appropriate. Output adjustment is usually the easiest collaboration product. Moving from output adjustment to output synchronization to output fusion moves along a collaboration output continuum that is marked on the output adjustment end by relatively low mutual interdependence and by relatively high mutual interdependence at the fusion end. It is probable, or at least arguable, that the continuum also moves from relatively low inter-organizational learning and/or minimal complex problem solving at the output adjustment end to relatively high inter-organizational learning and/or maximum complex problem solving at the fusion end. In other words, one might argue that the more complex the problem being addressed the more the collaboration outputs need to move toward the output fusion end, and perhaps needs to produce all three kinds of outputs. At the same time, moving from adjustment to fusion is more difficult because it requires more interdependence and more learning.
Collaborations are not easy to form or to manage, and this is no secret. Putting together a collaboration requires paying attention to important start-up issues that if not dealt with successfully can significantly reduce the efficacy of a collaboration, and perhaps even cause its early demise. Simply believing that an enrichment of resources brought together by a collaboration will result in more effective problem solving may help start a collaboration, but will ensure neither the collaboration's success nor the effective use of resources. Collaborations require flexibility, adaptability, but these attributes and processes are much different than simply stumbling along from one crisis to another, or from one conflict to another. Once formed, collaborations cannot be managed like organizations and programs are managed. Developing trust and ensuring communications among partners while trying to solve complex problems that require a combination of diverse resources is a monumental challenge. Collaborations are more likely to pay off if all parties understand the essential keys to success.
Before the alliance is actually created or before any collaboration activity begins, the supporters of the alliance often promote and market the benefits and advantages of an alliance to develop or reinforce support for the alliance by the partners and perhaps even by the partners' value chains--the entities that supply resources to the partners or receive the outputs of the partners. This enthusiasm-generating phase is sometimes needed to push the partners into the design and creation phase. Partners may be reluctant to move into the creation and design phase for several reasons. Collaboration is not easy, and there is usually some recognition of its difficulties, such as the amount of time a collaboration takes, and this time is an added burden because other responsibilities are usually not taken away as the collaboration activities start. Often, managers or leaders may be reluctant to engage in collaboration because it may reduce their autonomy or flexibility.
The importance of the enthusiasm-generating phase depends in part on the stimulus for the collaboration. Sometimes the stimulus is external to the organizational partners. For example, a governor or a legislature may mandate a collaboration. Or, external events can create opportunities for collaboration but these opportunities may result in a feeling of "It looks as if we should or have to collaborate, but I really would rather not." An external stimulus may make the collaboration partners feel they are being forced to collaborate. An enthusiasm-generating phase may be necessary to turn reluctance or pessimism into acceptance or optimism.
Expectations
However, the enthusiasm-generating phase can be counterproductive. Most collaborations are probably over-hyped at the beginning. That is, the benefits and advantages of a collaboration are not only exaggerated, but the time it will take to produce the benefits are underestimated. Collaborations that start in an environment of unrealistic expectations often succumb to that unrealism when they are immediately judged by these unrealistic expectations. In the forming stage the collaboration partners must work hard at being realistic. Partners must know and agree to the purpose and objective of the collaboration, and this purpose and objective needs to be recognized as sound. Involving people who are part of the enthusiasm-generating phase in design and creation phase can be very helpful. It provides a bridge between the collaboration partners and those involved in the enthusiasm-generating phase, a bridge that can help lower the over-hyped expectations as the partners try to become realistic about what the collaboration can accomplish.
An enthusiasm-generating phase may be less necessary if the core partners fully volunteer to collaborate. In the private, for-profit sector, most decisions to form a collaboration are made for strategic reasons: the partners believe that the collaboration will be mutually beneficial to their long-term bottom-line. In these instances, one or more partners usually spend much time researching and examining options to find the right partners. The better prepared a firm enters a collaboration-- examining skills, resources, competencies, strategy, and culture, for example, and creating transition processes--the more successful the collaboration is likely to be.
Sometimes the partners decide to form a collaboration but this decision is made in response to emergent opportunities. Here, the decision is collaborate is made relatively quickly to take advantage of a current situation. If the partners view this emergent opportunity in the same light, there is less need for an enthusiasm-generating phase.
But even if the decision to collaborate is fully made by the partners, they must recognize and address barriers or potential problems in the forming stage. If the collaboration partners have cooperated before with one another and the key managers involved in the forming stage know one another, the collaboration already has a basis for success in that the route to collaboration is based on trust among the partners, both organizationally and personally. If trust and commitment are very high at the beginning, the partners are usually more ready for intensive collaboration and the investment that this intensive collaboration requires.
However, if the decision to collaborate is based solely on strategic decisions regarding the potential benefits of collaboration and the organizations and key managers really do not know one another, then there is little social capital, or trust, to draw upon. In these situations, the collaboration generally requires a quick achievement of concrete results. A collaboration based in part on trust has the ability to continue longer without having to produce concrete, specific mutual benefits, while a collaboration that has no basis of trust needs to produce much more quickly.
In addition to the problems that may be caused by exaggerated expectations and the absence of trust, other problems are often brought to the forming stage of collaboration.
Three such potentially significant problems deal with culture, dominant logic, and confidence.
Cultural Conflict
Cultural conflicts--culture being defined as a pattern of shared values and beliefs that helps individuals understand organizational functioning--may be more significant in the private, for-profit sector, but they exist in the public sector as well. Every organization has its own culture, its own way of doing things, including making decisions. How decisions are made, how people relate to and communicate among one another, how they behave in meetings, how they work in groups, are all among the many things that comprise an organization's culture. Many studies of collaboration in the private, for-profit sector conclude that cultural, including management style, dissonance among partners is the primary reason for collaboration failure.
One might think that organizations that work in the same state government, work for the same governor and legislature, might have minimal cultural dissonance problems. But often size alone presents cultural conflicts because very large organizations tend to have very different cultures than very small organizations. Other than size, perhaps the major cultural differences among public agencies are between those who focus on services and consumption and those who focus on buildings or facilities and investment. Organizations that focus on the immediate needs of individuals or families often have different cultures than organizations that focus on longer term physical infrastructure and housing needs. Organizations that provide grant funds or whose funds are meant to be spent without being repaid often have different cultures than organizations whose funds are lent with an expectation of repayment.
There is no easy way out of the cultural dissonance issue. One must recognize that it is important and partners need to be very willing to learn about one another.
Dominant Logic Conflict
Another potential problem at start up deals with the dominant logic of the partners. The dominant logic of an organization is the key objectives and purposes that the top leadership has for an organization. For a public agency, one might get a sense of its dominant logic through the agency's statutory references and formal plans and similar documents. However, the top leadership's definition of an organization's essential rationale is key, and sometimes this is not explicit. The dominant logic of an organization might be equated with its strategic intent. Senior management and policy makers often focus only on the topics that seem relevant to the organization's dominant logic.
Every collaboration has its own essential purpose and objective that must be explicitly understood and shared by every partner. An issue at the start of any collaboration is the extent to which a collaboration's purpose and objective meshes with each partner's dominant logic. Collaborations must create value, and the value collaborations generally create is the accomplishment of objectives that no partner can individually obtain. Collaborations tend to create value by mixing the unique or complementary, different resources of each partner. But having a resource or skill complementarity is not enough. Strategic compatibility must also exist.
Grasping whether dominant logic compatibility exists can be difficult because the dominant logic of each partner may not be well known, sometimes because it is not shared. If a partner's dominant logic is not known at the start of the collaboration by the other partners, it often becomes well known as the collaboration begins to operationalize its mission and purpose. At this point, the collaboration can experience a conflict that may require the partners to make adjustments in their intended actions and objectives or to consider continuing the collaboration without the partner. Both of these options can be very traumatic for a collaboration, which is why it is best if partners can gain a clear sense of each other's dominant logic early in the process. It is also another reason why building on pre-existing trust usually leads to more effective collaborations than collaborations that are simply comprised of partners with complementary resources and strategies but who have no experience with working with one another.
Dominant logic conflict suggests strongly that senior management should be well involved in the communications loop as a collaboration is formed if they are not among the generators of the collaboration. Involving senior managers in the early stages of the collaboration helps ensure they understand the purposes and vision of the collaboration. Having senior managers periodically meet to discuss the collaboration's broad goals and the possible concomitant changes that may be needed or desirable within the partnering organizations can help eliminate or minimize eventually dominant logic conflicts. The more contact senior managers have with the collaboration, the more opportunity they will have to work things out and evolve in a way that complements the collaboration.
Confidence
Finally, collaborations must often also deal with the issue of confidence. The start of a collaboration often generates doubts within its partner organizations. Employees of partner organizations can easily see the collaboration as a threat because the formation of a collaboration implicitly recognizes that each partner acting alone cannot accomplish what the collaboration can accomplish. Thoughts like "Does this mean that others think I am not doing a good job?" or "Does this mean that the work I have been doing is no longer important?" are not uncommon thoughts. Collaborations can generate anxiety and insecurity even among senior managers.
The damaging aspect of the confidence issue is that insecure people and insecure organizations do not make good collaboration partners. The exaggeration and confidence issues often go hand in hand because hyping the value of a collaboration can intensify insecurities. Trying to ensure that secure people and secure organizations are participating in a collaboration and that the collaboration's objective, purpose, and accomplishments can help eliminate doubt and insecurity.
These four potentially problematic issues--expectations, culture, dominant logic, and confidence--are called start-up issues because they are brought to the collaboration as it forms and are usually not generated from the collaboration's implementation. Because they are issues in the forming stage, collaboration partners can easily avoid paying them much attention. But if they are unaddressed, they are unaddressed at the collaboration's peril.
In reviewing these start-up issues, some differences between the private sector and state government can be suggested. In the private sector the two most significant start-up problems are the culture and dominant logic problems. Both these issues are apt to be less significant (albeit not insignificant) in state government because state agencies tend to be part of a larger common culture and tend to know one another better than many private sector firms know one another. At the same time, the partnering options available in state government may be less attractive than in the private sector because state agencies are usually monopolies, which may sharply limit if not eliminate partner substitutability. In state government one may have to start working with, and continue to work with, certain specific partners regardless of problems because there is no alternative.
The expectations and confidence issues may be more problematic in state government than in the private sector. Very few private sector firms or employees now have even a short-term (much less long-term) sense of security; there is constant change, constant challenge--reorganizations, downsizing, mergers, outsourcing. Employees in public bureaucracies have traditionally had much more security. However, if a collaboration is seen as signaling a sense of poor performance it can easily be seen as a prelude to reorganization and job or task elimination, it can generate much insecurity in an otherwise secure environment, relatively speaking. This is especially true if the collaboration is externally imposed and if its benefits are much exaggerated. Private sector firms probably more clearly understand the value and need for a specific collaboration before much action or extensive discussion occurs. The public sector may be unable to make a comparable assessment, and may have to rely more on generating enthusiasm by conceptually selling or marketing the collaboration.
Initially designing the collaboration comprises the second part of the forming phase, and it is usually a very difficult step for several reasons. Perhaps the most significant reason rests in the constant tension between a collaboration's need for both order and stability and flexibility and change. Because these competing demands wax and wane in relevance over the life of a collaboration it is too easy to be too flexible or too orderly. Overall, it may be best to err on the side of too much flexibility if one has to err at all. But both rigidity and chaos can be fatal.
Clear Shared Purpose
Unquestionably, the key task in initial design is to ensure that all partners have a common and very clear understanding of the purpose or mission of the collaboration. This is much easier said than done. Usually, a collaboration must devote one or two meetings, with some work in the interim, to develop a clear, specific (which doesn't necessarily mean detailed) purpose and mission, and the partners need collectively to talk through their understanding of the mission or purpose so that each partner knows that all partners have a common understanding. Acknowledgment by all partners to some ambiguous words on paper does not suffice nor does a nodding of the heads at the end of an informal discussion--often because no one knows ahead of time that the words and phrases are ambiguous. The process of developing a clear and shared vision and mission builds shared interests (the partners obtain a perception of mutual interest and priority in cooperation) and shared frameworks, which can guide joint analysis.
Roles
Another important task in initial collaboration design is to identify the key participants and to outline, at least generally and tentatively, their roles. The initial partners (individuals and organizations) are not necessarily the core partners. Much depends on the specific purpose and mission the collaboration develops. It is helpful to identify three kinds of key participants. One group is the core partners. The core partners regularly meet and are collectively responsible for ensuring the collaboration's success. A second group is the non-core partners. These are individuals or organizations that occasionally meet with one or more of the core partners and whose involvement and contributions are necessary for the success of the collaboration although they are not the central players. The third group is the collaboration's community of interest. The community of interest contains any entity that can realistically and significantly help or harm the collaboration. The core partners need to identify this group and strategize about how to use some members of the community of interest to help the collaboration and how to prevent some members of the community of interest from harming the collaboration. Part of this strategizing is knowing there is a need to develop a communications policy about how to keep who informed of the collaboration's progress and when to meet with members of the community of interest to pre-empt possible damage or to secure specific help. The details of this are not part of the initial design phase, but the initial design phase must recognize and generally address this topic and core partners can quickly identify key members of their community of interest.
The makeup of the core partners almost invariably becomes an issue because of the tension between getting the number of partners seemingly necessary to accomplishing the collaboration's objective and getting a number of partners appropriate to effective team work. Addressing well complex problems in the public sector often seems to require a multitude of resources and delivery systems/client connections that exist in a multitude of organizations. High performance team theory and practice strongly suggest that five to nine people form the most effective work teams. Unfortunately, the segmentation of public organizations and programs adds to this dilemma. A state department of economic and community development may have, for example, separate divisions that handle industrial solicitation and business assistance, employment training, housing, and community development. Involving all four divisions in a collaboration usually means having at least four people on the core team (more if significant segmentation exists within divisions).
Size
One of the design decisions concerns whether to try to operate the collaboration as a high performance or self-directed team or whether to try to involve as core partners all the key people necessary for addressing a complex problem. While there is no easy answer to this issue, the advantages of operating similarly to a high performance team (see Appendix B) suggest that a collaboration is probably better off with a core team of five to nine people.
One adjustment a core team can make is to ensure that the purpose-mission of the collaboration can be well addressed by a five-to nine-person core team. Perhaps a better alternative is to decide which five to nine people are absolutely essential to the collaboration and treat the rest as non-core partners of the collaboration. While deciding between more necessary and less necessary may be difficult, the less necessary people can still be involved through the sub-team process, which is the process often used in the private sector to involve a fairly large number of people in a high performance team model. In this process, a sub-set of the core team meets with one or more non-core partners to deal with issues that require the participation of non-core partners. The same core partners deal over time with the same non-core partners and the number of core-partners is always higher than the number of non-core partners.
Whatever its starting point relative to the number of partners, the leaders of a collaboration should only very cautiously expand the size of the collaboration. The downside of perhaps not fully having all the resources to address the problem in an outstanding fashion is a lack of commitment. Collaborations can easily experience runaway growth that makes the collaboration unsustainable and a very large number of partners can hamper effectiveness. Mismanagement can quickly erode the advantages generated by size and extra variety.
Approach to Work
Another design issue concerns the collaboration's approach to its work program. It is nearly impossible for a collaboration to lay out a work program in its design stage. Getting clear, common understanding of the collaboration's mission and purpose; identifying the core team, the non-core team, and the community of interest; and discussing how to address or approach their work is just about all that can be done in this stage. Some collaborations may be able to scope out a short term work program, say three or four months, and perhaps tentatively identify key tasks and dates, but the partners are mistaken if they believe tasks, assignments, and schedules can or even should be well articulated in the forming stage. Quickly trying to accomplish this usually results in being unintentionally committed to an incorrect or inappropriate set of tasks and schedules.
Ensuring resource awareness is another design phase task, which means that the partners as a whole must have a collective awareness of the specialized knowledge and expertise of the partners. Partners need to have some idea of who is an expert on what. Partners who have worked closely together in the past will be aware of who will provide a particular resource and sometimes of when they will provide it. Often, however, the partners may only know vaguely about the resources in the collaboration.
Finally, collaboration participants must know at the start that collaboration requires a lot of effort to succeed. The collaboration can achieve nothing without the investment and commitment of the partners. Enthusiasm may be high at the start, due in part to a successful enthusiasm-generation phase, but to preserve this enthusiasm the partners should constantly move, even if bit by bit, so that they will notice something tangible is constantly happening. Delay can effectively kill enthusiasm and often it is too late to recapture enthusiasm once implementation begins. Even in the start-up phase, partners cannot take a casual approach to collaboration without raising the specter of conflict and the collaboration's dissipation.
Unfortunately, public agencies have a strong predilection to address symptoms, not problems, and to allocate resources by responding to demands for those resources (usually in the form of applications for financial assistance) regardless of whether those demands represent well thought through needs and priorities. This situation exists for several reasons. One is that public agencies spend much time fighting fires, reacting to pressing problems (real or imagined). Being strategic and analytical is difficult when one is constantly reacting. Second, we are bedeviled by our fragmented and competitive delivery system. Organizations whose primary responsibilities are to address, say, mental health problems or housing problems, will almost invariably treat or see those problems as paramount even if they are not and try to get resources for them, even when accessing those resources diminishes funds available for, say, substance abuse or employment training. Third, professionalism in the public sector, indeed, professionalism generally, tends to focus on tools rather than problems, giving rise to that oft-repeated remark that "if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything soon begins to look like a nail." Fourth, the notion of accountability in the public sector tends to be anchored in programs and to be process oriented. Fifth, and relatedly, being reactive and tool and process oriented provides little time, inclination, and experience for analysis, for knowledge generation and creativity. Sixth, vertical bureaucracies tend to stifle and not encourage knowledge generation and creativity. Yet, if collaborations do not transcend these limiting or constraining conditions they may be no more effective at the long-term solving of root problems.
As used here, complex problems are inter-domain problems that have a very significant impact on society and for which it is very difficult to find something that may be called a solution. Knowledge about a complex problem tends to be incomplete and the knowledge that is available is spread in many documents and over many experts and specialists, people and organizations. Often, the data and know-how needed to address well a complex problem seems insufficient, incomplete, or in some instances contradicts each other.
Solving a complex problem generally requires economies of scope, which a collaboration can bring to the problem. A collaboration can bring people and organizations from diverse, but complementary, skills and backgrounds, and when properly facilitated can provide innovative and effective solutions. Partners in a collaboration that focuses on complex problem solving help one another pattern, re-pattern, and de-pattern their thinking; they help each other fundamentally reorganize their thinking.
When a collaboration focuses on complex problem solving its chief benefit is the stimulation of creative thinking by pooling expertise. It is one of the few ways by which the tacit and complex explicit knowledge of other agencies can be learned. This sharing of knowledge across organizational boundaries permits a union of differences that can generate creativity. Nearly all creativity and innovation in human activities comes from cross-domain experiences--the source of the new is usually the recombination of existing ideas, i.e., most innovations are created by borrowing ideas and recombining them instead of inventing wholly new ideas.
Knowledge generation is (1) executed in a context of a specific application, (2) trans-domain, and (3) reflexive. It is neither basic or applied research.
First, saying that knowledge is generated in the context of a specific application means that the knowledge being generated is attempting to solve a problem immediately at hand, such as the focus of the collaboration, e.g., welfare dependency in Okmulgee County. The knowledge generated is meant to be immediately useful both to the problem at hand and to the participants involved in its creation.
Second, to say that knowledge generation is trans-domain means three things in addition to there being a diverse set of partners working in a complex application oriented environment. One is that the knowledge evolves in the context of application. The knowledge is not generated first and then later applied to the problem by others. In other words, the solution to the problem at hand does not arise solely (or even primarily) from the application of knowledge that already exists. It is created by the participants, and because the participants are diverse it cannot be easily segmented into various domains, or professions, or disciplines. Also, the knowledge generated is communicated to those who participate as they participate. Finally, the knowledge generated is dynamic in that one of more of the partners may take this knowledge to other sites and other problems and use the knowledge that had been generated through the collaboration. It is available for use in other configurations because the partners are part of a loose network or resource providers and problem solvers.
To say that knowledge generation is reflexive means that it must include implementation options that affect that values and priorities of the partners and their clients. Thus, the partners must try to understand each others' viewpoints as well as that of their clients. The partners are accountable in that they are involved in the definition and solution of the problem and in the evaluation of performance. Knowledge generation in a collaboration is part of the collaboration's innovation process; the collaboration partners contribute to a new way of producing knowledge in which they are the consumers of the knowledge they generate.
Once they recognize the opportunity a collaboration has to generate knowledge within the context of complex problem solving and agree to make such knowledge generation a priority, the collaboration partners must see and use the collaboration as a shared knowledge generation space. Shared knowledge generation occurs when a group of diverse people create and shape new knowledge together. While it includes the sharing of existing knowledge it primarily means creating new knowledge while sharing existing knowledge. The collaboration must establish cognitive and behavioral processes to permit people to create and shape new knowledge together. These processes include informing (passing information back and forth), coordinating (connecting interdependent information), and joint complex problem solving (collaboratively using the interdependent information to generate knowledge that solves the complex problem at hand).
The recombination of knowledge usually occurs in dialogue where there is an intention to create something new. Dialogue elicits the tacit knowledge (implicit knowledge that is difficult to verbalize because it is best expressed through action-based skills) of individuals and their organizations. These processes or activities cannot be done superficially and they go beyond simply exchanging and converting knowledge to shared discovery and articulation.
Shared knowledge generation requires creating 1) mental spaces in the perception of the partners, 2) shared bonds of interest from their interactions, and 3) common understanding around the problem at hand to facilitate the collective massaging of ideas and information. Developing shared mental models of the problem and the problem context is critical to prevent the collaboration from breaking down due to competing or conflicting individual mental models. It is the shared mind of the collaboration along with the tools, such as graphics and email, that help the partners develop and synthesize knowledge.
Both meetings and time between meetings are important. The best ideas often occur when partners are working with one another, especially in informal settings, trying to develop common views rather than keeping their own individual views. Informal engagements are often best because much of the knowledge transfer that occurs is the transfer of tacit knowledge. However, the most useful knowledge creation, and the most progress, tend to occur between meetings when partners have a chance to reflect on their collective engagements. Finally, catalysts--representatives from outside the collaboration partners--can also be a very important way to bring in new ideas or accelerate the knowledge generation process.
One specific model for complex problem solving, called Compram, which stands for Complex Problem Analyzing Method, contains two cycles each with a series of tasks. The first cycle focuses on defining the problem by acquiring and communicating knowledge about why it is a problem, what the problem now looks like, how the situation that now exists came about, which organizations and groups are involved and the power they have, and how all these are related.
Compram emphasizes the need to have a "neutral" group of experts first address the problem because parties that are directly involved in the problem tend to move quickly to suggesting interventions, which often results in dealing inadequately with problems, or perhaps even trying to solve the wrong problem. Quickly inviting directly affected groups into the complex problem solving process can push the solution of the problem into the way the most powerful groups want it to go. Compram stresses that it is important to first understand a complex problem as a knowledge problem before considering it as a power problem.
The sequence in the first cycle is to form a mental idea of the problem. An iterative process of hearing, thinking, discussing, describing, collecting data, reading, asking questions, forming hypotheses, and reformulating and adjusting then results in the last step, which is when team members opine that the conceptual model of the problem has been sufficiently described.
The second cycle involves developing, implementing, and evaluating interventions. The second cycle involves using more detailed data and the collaboration setting the desired goal--the direction in which the team is going to try to change the problem. The team then discusses possible interventions that might lead to the desired goal and it does this in four environments or contexts.
The first context focuses interventions within the current situation, sort of muddling through. The second context permits more changes in the situation; there is more space in which to handle the problem, more possibilities for change. The third context broadens as wide as possible the options available, still within the context of a normal world, but possibly including changes in organizations, politics, the way people think and what they believe. The fourth and last context eliminates all constraints and permits any imagined intervention.
The purpose of moving to ever broader contexts is to help people unlearn or unfreeze their beliefs and opinions. Based on the generation of a wide range of interventions, the team creates and evaluates scenarios. The team then tries to agree on the interventions and moves to implementation and evaluation.
Any problem solving methodology tries to avoid pitfalls. Some of the most problematic mistakes in trying to solve complex problems include the following:
The need always to maintain a degree of unstructured, divergent interactions, at times a very high degree, may make collaboration participation or management difficult for partners used to stable, hierarchical, command and control environments. The bounded instability inherent in collaborations not only requires facilitative leadership, but the willingness of partners to remain flexible. Seeing the collaboration as evolutionary and recognizing that the rules of engagement may need to change is helped by partners trusting one another. Consequently, trust and facilitative leadership are hallmarks of successful collaborations.
First, to say that you trust someone means that you are sure that person will perform at a threshold level of competency when and as needed. In other words, trust means reliability and competency. This is important for collaborations in two specific ways. First, most collaborations include partners because the collaboration needs the core competency of a specific partnering organization. It makes little sense for a collaboration to involve partners who are not bringing their core competencies to the collaboration. Second, it makes little sense for collaborations to involve partners that are not competent. Collaborations that are comprised largely of incompetent organizations will not be successful collaborations. In the private sector, organizations that are not as competent as their peers often seek collaborations with partners who are more competent as a way of becoming more competent. These kinds of collaborations are not uncommon. However, in such cases the relatively less competent organization is the only such one in the collaboration and the other partners have high levels of competency. As suggested earlier, this may be problematic in public collaborations where the potential partnering organizations are monopolies.
Second, when you say you trust someone it means you believe that person will forgo his or her immediate self-interest to act in the long-term interest of your relationship. This is important to a collaboration because it is very difficult for a collaboration to sanction a partner who harms the collaboration by acting in its immediate self-interest. In state government there may be a way to sanction a partner who harms the collaboration. The collaboration may have to rely on trust alone.
Partners should believe they will not receive future rewards from current or future collaborations if they behave inappropriately or selfishly. Partners should believe that the potential for short run gains from opportunistic behavior are minor relative to the potential long term gains from collaboration. If being permanently cut off from current and future collaborations is always a distinct possibility, collaborations can provide each partner with rewards and benefits over a long period of time. However, public agencies are usually monopolies, and they know that there may be no alternative to their always or usually being partners in a collaboration. Further, public agencies exist in a political environment and may often have relationships with very important decision makers or interests that can effect participation in future or additional collaborations regardless of the partner's performance in the current collaboration. Consequently, trust looms large as a way to control a public collaboration.
Generating Trust
What generates trust? Trust is usually generated through experience; the experience of past behavior is used to predict future behavior. Additionally, trust can be gained when entities that are trusted trust other entities; trust is transferred via a third party. Finally, trust can be generated through reputation or status; although one may have no experience with a particular party, that party is known as a party that performs. These three ways of generating trust refer to trust being generated prior to the implementation of the collaboration. What about situations where low levels of trust among partners at the start of a collaboration largely because of no or very little prior experience of working relationships? Collaborations that start with a low level of trust are in a much more disadvantageous position than collaborations with a high initial degree of trust, a large beginning stock of social capital.
Several guidelines can help partners engender trust where low levels of trust initially exist. One is to communicate and then to communicate some more. When partners know little about one another it becomes essential to get to know one another, and short and frequent communications can help increase familiarity. Lack of knowledge about others is hazardous to trust. Relatedly, partners should try to socialize, even if by email. Informal contact outside of the specific demands of the collaboration's tasks is especially helpful in increasing familiarity. Third, partners can volunteer knowledge or other goods or services quickly, freely, and without expectations of any quid pro quo. Similarly, partners can quickly make small commitments that are soon met. Both these last actions show good faith intentions. Equally important is not over-committing. Committing early to do something and not following through sets back trust-building.
Perhaps similar to making and following through on small commitments is partners showing interest and enthusiasm in the collaboration to the other partners. Partners should also disclose their values and make their expectations clear early in the collaboration. Naturally, this should be done with a degree of care, but it can help avoid later the dominant logic conflicts mentioned earlier.
Finally, partners should gently remind others whenever they have not met their obligations or their trust. This last point is critical because another important reason for collaboration failure is the improper addressing of discord. In the early phases of implementation, collaborations may paper over misunderstandings and conflicts to get the collaboration off the ground. But these early misunderstandings, tensions, and conflicts can fester and become worse over time. Contrary to the early rationale to avoid confrontation, these differences often do not gradually disappear.
Unfortunately, partners sometimes believe that a common vision can overcome differences and discord. A commitment to a common vision and well understood mission cannot overcome all differences and tensions. Conflicts must be dealt with, and it is usually better to deal with and resolve differences as they come up rather than to put them off to a later time. Because collaborations by their nature involve diverse partners, differences and disagreements are part of the collaboration's learning and adaptation.
Collective Actions to Generate Trust
Collaborations can take collective action to reinforce trust and help ensure cooperation. One such action is to publicize the collaboration, its mission and purpose. A link exists between publicity and reputation. An organization realizes that its reputation is an investment and is mindful of it. Consequently, publicity can decrease an inclination to take actions or pursue inaction that may harm the collaboration. The collaboration must ensure that the publicity doesn't single out or promote one partner more than another, that its focus is on the collaboration as a collective and its mission and purpose, and that it does not exaggerate expectations.
Second, collaborations can use objective information and data that are accepted as reliable and valid. Often, government agencies make decisions and enact policies with only cursory regard for data and analysis. Using reliable and valid data--data sources, figures, and methodologies that are known or well accepted--generates respect for facts, data, and objective analysis. This facilitates trust because people are more willing to create interdependencies when they feel that facts and neutral data are valued. Partners must use data and analysis carefully. A partner needs to know where data come from and/or how data were collected. Inappropriate use of data or the use of poor data usually adversely affects trust because people may think they are being manipulated to accept a certain conclusion or course of action.
Third, collaborations can consciously and explicitly strive to accomplish quick successes. Specific first-steps and outputs, no matter how small, help partners learn to work together, quickly make the relationship real in practice, and provide a basis for measuring performance. However, the collaboration must be successful in these first outputs. Faltering in its first tasks or steps, again no matter how insignificant, can put the collaboration into a tailspin from which it may be very difficult to recover. Having small but quick successes helps sustain the enthusiasm that partners may have from the enthusiasm-generation phase. The need for quick success is especially important in two circumstances. Quick, small successes are important when partners have low levels of trust or simply have no experience working together; they do not have the social capital that permit working together longer without achieving specific action results. Second, the need for quick successes may be important in collaborations that focus on planning, especially if the planning process is long term.
The value or necessity of trust increases as partners spend time on complex problem solving. Complex problem solving generally requires longer term relationships that are imbued with informal confidence and the acknowledgment of the partners' reliability. In these instances the collaboration is especially vulnerable to turnover among the managers and key personnel of the partnering organizations.
Regardless of the nature of the collaboration trust is essential. Unless the partners come together with much trust already developed through past experiences, collaborations must build trust right away. Reciprocity is fundamental to productive collaborations, which must develop behavior norms based in trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. Trust normally develops over time and through repeated actions as people become confident in the reliability of others. Trust building requires time and frequent interactions and communications.
As they begin implementation, the collaboration partners must realize they are embarking on an endeavor that may look and feel inefficient and time-consuming compared to acting alone. And they must also realize that trustful relations tend to be self-reinforcing in the positive direction, while mistrust tends to cycle in the negative direction. Learning to collaborate means learning to trust. One can talk about strategies and tactics that can facilitate trust building, but these may go for naught if there is an inherent unwillingness to trust--perhaps to take some risks and offer and accept trust to and from people with diverse backgrounds, different expertise, and even different priorities and values.
A collaboration must have more than one leader, and collaboration leaders need to be facilitative. A facilitative leader helps others learn and develop new skills and share their existing skills and perspectives with new colleagues, which results in a greater sharing of information and potential for challenging tradition or routine by bringing different points of view to collaboration decision making. A premise of facilitative leadership is that no one person can solve the problem the collaboration is addressing. Therefore, all members of the collaboration must be empowered to act; collective wisdom must surface.
Facilitative leaders are frequent and effective communicators within and outside the collaboration. They have good interactivity skills and a style that emphasizes openness, consensus building, listening and learning from others, and a willingness to accept the responsibility of leadership. They champion learning acquisition and distribution and help others unlearn traditional but detrimental practices and perspectives. Unlearning is a very hard task, and the ability to lead unlearning could be the single most important role a leader plays in a collaboration.
Collaborations present leaders with three critical challenges. Collaborations challenge facilitative leaders to manage across boundaries, to provide lateral leadership. Lateral leaders must be able to work well within ambiguous authority and surmount fragmentation. In their capacity as lateral leaders, facilitative leaders must possess some knowledge of the technical or problematic issues faced by the collaboration. A facilitative leader in a collaboration cannot stay within his or her domain but must demonstrate, either by prior experience or by concerted effort, enough knowledge of the diverse domains or interests within the collaboration to bridge discussions and foster inter-relationships among the diverse partners. Therefore, they must have good facilitation skills and be entrepreneurial--they need to be flexible, adapt to changing conditions, anticipate changes, and often make decisions quickly; they cannot be risk adverse.
Second, developing a common vision often presents itself as the first major operational challenge leaders face in a collaboration. Having a common vision is especially critical in the very early implementation phases because this commonality helps avoid fragmentation and a solitary focus on problems. A common vision can help define relationships within the collaboration and facilitate a focus on outcomes. Vision, mission, and outcomes reinforce one another and provide clear direction to the collaboration. A good vision can help manage collaborations because it can simplify and environment that otherwise may become exceedingly complex. The ability of leaders to develop and maintain a shared vision can also build and sustain trust.
Finally, a collaboration requires a consensus style of decision making. Consensus is neither complete agreement nor majority vote but is a process in which everyone has their say and in which contrary viewpoints are fully addressed and then resolved. Saying that contrary viewpoints are fully aired and considered does not mean consensus decision making results in bland or conformist decisions or decisions of the lowest common denominator. Rather, a consensus agreement is an agreement that all or nearly all the partners can support while none fully oppose it.
To operate through consensus decision making, collaboration participants must think rationally, avoid time-consuming details, operate at an appropriate conceptual level, keep goals or the collaboration's purpose and mission always in mind to avoid parochialism and provide a basis for determining priorities, and establish appropriate time horizons. While it may be very difficult for a collaboration continually to adopt decisions that completely satisfy every partner, all can always accept the prevailing view. All partners support collaboration decisions even though the decisions may not be the alternatives most preferred by all partners. Because decisions are widely accepted and supported by the partners, collaboration participants are motivated to see the decision through to completion.
While consensus decision making is the most viable decision making style for a collaboration, it may not always work well--especially as a state collaboration facilitates the creation of a local collaboration and then engages that local collaboration. An alternative, albeit somewhat similar, kind of decision making is principled negotiation. Principled negotiation is not adversarial, win-lose negotiation in which one party's gains are another's loss. Rather, it is a bargaining process in which the sides try to resolve their differences by finding a set of goals or objectives that each accepts--a common ground. In principled negotiation, the two sides work in a context of mutual trust, have a positive relationship with one another, and have shared interests or common values. There is a zone of agreement that each side can accept.
In a principled negotiation, people are separated from the problem. The two sides negotiate more against a problem than each other. The problem becomes the focal point of the negotiation, which requires active listening. Similarly, focus must be on interests and not on positions. The intent is to find shared interests by engaging in positive relationships with the other side. Objectivity must be maintained and a contest of wills and an adversarial process avoided. Finally, creative options must be generated. Premature closure is perhaps the greatest enemy of principled negotiation. Thinking needs to remain divergent as long as possible; options need to be kept open and leaders on both sides need to challenge tendencies toward early closure. In this way, education--on and for both sides--is an important part of positional negotiation.
The discussion of facilitative leadership focused on the managing of relationships but also indicated the importance of managing the collaboration as a whole. While collaborations need several facilitative managers, it would be erroneous to conclude that all partners are equal or that there is no need for a lead manager. All collaborations need an entity or a person that will handle the overall management role.
This overall management role usually contains four functions. The collaboration manager is the focal point for communication. The manager needs to ensure that the partners are communicating appropriately and that the collaboration as a whole receives the appropriate kinds of communications. Second, the manager needs to ensure the maintenance of collaboration norms, such as attendance at meetings, starting and ending times, the circulation of an agenda, the use of consensus decision making--all the guidelines and rules of behavior that the collaboration partners agreed to at the beginning. The manager also needs to ensure that everyone participates and contributes, that there are no "free riders." Finally, the manager must be the repository of information about the collaboration and the performance of the partners.
In the private sector, the manager is often the first among equals--the partner that has the most resources, the partner that is key in the collaboration. In other cases, the collaboration hires a secretariat to perform these functions. In still other cases, the manager is the entity that mobilizes the collaboration, the entity that is the original spark behind the creation of the collaboration. In state agency collaborations, the manager is usually the agency that sparks the creation of the collaboration. Collaborations in which the mobilizer is not included among the partners, which often occurs when enthusiasm-generators are external to agencies that have resources and are central to complex problem solving, have a more difficult time determining or deciding on the manager. In such cases it may be appropriate for the mobilizer to serve as the secretariat for the collaboration.
The collaboration manager tends to face two difficulties or problems, especially if the manager is a collaboration partner. The first problem is that collaboration management is time consuming. Collaboration is time consuming overall and this becomes a problem for all partners who take on collaboration work without much or any relief from their permanent, on-going jobs. This situation is more problematic for the collaboration manager who takes on extra tasks. The collaboration manager must be able to find the resources to provide support staff for its critical communications responsibilities. It is nearly impossible to piecemeal or cobble together from existing staff the kind of attention that the collaboration manager's role requires, especially in regard to communication. Organizational constraints weigh heaviest on the managing agency. Every new collaboration requires senior management's attention and increases the difficulties of coordinating operations as more partners have to be consulted.
The second problem often faced by the collaboration manager is the disconnect that sometimes occurs between the partner with the key resources, often the partner that is key in mobilizing the start of the collaboration, and the partner that has the primary relationship with the client. For example, a community development agency may be the collaboration manager because the agency has the key resources and/or was the key mobilizer but if the collaboration is focusing on welfare dependency then the TANF agency has the client relationship. Pre-existing relationships between an agency and a client must be respectfully treated. In these instances, the agency that has the client relationship must have the lead responsibility in resolving differences between the collaboration and the client.
Operational Scope
One of the most difficult issues a collaboration must address concerns its operational scope. The operational scope of the a collaboration addresses three overlapping issues: (1) task definition, (2) task integration, and (3) skills melding. The operational scope of a collaboration answers such questions as What are the tasks the collaboration must undertake? Who does what tasks? What tasks are to be done jointly?
Partners may know what they want to accomplish collaboratively but they rarely know how to do it. Given the ambiguities that exist in all collaborations, task definition must be iterative because it is impossible all at once to fill in the details. No collaboration should try to develop a complete and extensive work program at the beginning of implementation.
Collaborations can take two steps that help define tasks. Perhaps the most important step is further to articulate and validate the collaboration's purpose--its value added--and its expected benefits. As the people involved in actually implementing the collaboration further define, sharpen, and validate the collaboration's purpose, objectives, and benefits they develop a better idea of what must be accomplished. To an extent, this is a transition process that moves from purpose to outcomes to outputs and then sketches the tasks and activities that will bring about outputs. The other step collaborations can take is to develop and implement fast feedback tasks--small, easy steps that help the collaboration partners gain confidence in working with one another and determine whether they are on the right path.
Most public sector collaborations are based at least in part on skills melding. Some tasks in the collaboration's set of tasks will combine or meld partner skills or competencies. But combining different skills is very difficult because one needs to understand skills in order to meld them, and this requires familiarity with the partners' skills and competencies. Gaining familiarity takes time, especially if the skills are tacit and their use emergent. Tacit skills or knowledge are gained through experience and are difficult to put into words. For example, it is difficult to tell someone how to ride a bicycle or ice skate. Emergent skills are skills that come out in use, they emerge as situations develop and responses made. With emergent skills, it is difficult to tell someone how to behave or how to act or what to do ahead of time because the appropriate response may very heavily depend on the details of the situation in which the skills are applied and these details cannot be determined ahead of time.
Many of the skills in public agency collaborations are tacit or emergent and are gained through years of experience, for example, in working with never-married female heads of households who live in poverty, or undertaking housing rehabilitation in poor residential neighborhoods, or dealing with the impact of land use changes on traffic generation or flow. In many other cases, the skills or competencies are not necessarily tacit or emergent but are explicit, but in very complicated ways. Sooner or later most public agency collaborations get around to programs. And programs, with their statutory, regulatory, and operational details, are not easily understood by others.
Given the use of acronyms and specialized language, partners often have at least an initial difficulty communicating with one another, much less being familiar with each other's skills and competencies. And in some programs that are not relatively new, say four or more years old, a vast array of detail--sometimes accreted over time implicitly to make the program impenetrable to outsiders--can be understood only with the greatest difficulty. Often a collaboration meeting can come to a standstill when the partner who has knowledge of a certain program is absent from the meeting because no one else has enough knowledge to know how the program can be used.
Gaining familiarity with others' skills and competencies requires partners to do their homework--they have to try to understand the key skills and competencies of others. One way to help achieve this is to try to codify, make explicit, as many tacit and emergent skills that one possibly can in a cost-effective way. In public collaborations, it is often helpful to spell out briefly the basic fundamentals of the partners' programs--the statutory and almost impossible-to-change characteristics. Usually, these basic fundamentals minimally circumscribe the use of the program compared to the regulatory, administrative, and operational details loaded onto the program by various administrators and managers, to say nothing of the impact of tradition or history.
Defining tasks and dealing with skills melding raises a major question: What is the nature and extent of the interface among partners? The collaboration's partners can largely determine the interface, thus it is amenable to collaboration design and redesign. The interface can be minimal and narrow (very few tasks are done jointly by the partners, most tasks are done independently by the partners; and almost no significant tasks are done jointly) or broad and extensive (nearly all tasks are done jointly by the partners, very few tasks are done independently by the partners; and nearly no independently done tasks are significant).
What determines how minimal and narrow or how broad and extensive the collaboration interface is? The answer depends in part on the answer to this question: To what extent does the collaboration's purpose require only output coordination or synchronization versus process integration? In other words, to what extent is a true melding of skills needed? Or is there a need only for coordination where each partner makes a contribution separately and simply hands it off to the other partners? Given the tasks that must be performed, where can each partner take full responsibility for a task and when must partners work together?
The answers to these questions depend on the collaboration's purpose and the skills and competencies of the partners. Output synchronization may be the primary requirement if the collaboration is facing a non-complex problem that can be solved through well-sequenced and connected outputs from each of the partners. But even here one must ask whether the collaboration's customers or clients will see a seamless delivery or discontinuities. Output synchronization is much easier to obtain on paper or in concept than it is in the concrete and specific. On the other hand, process integration tends to be required (1) when joint learning is important, (2) where there is hard-to-plan joint problem solving and/or the problem is complex, and (3) in the earliest stages of a collaboration.
A narrow, minimal interface has several advantages. First, it lessens, perhaps dramatically, the coordination and integration needs of the partners, which can save time and money. Second, it can help circumvent organizational culture conflicts. The sharing of tasks is often a source of conflict, and having more joint tasks than necessary can be very inefficient and cause a collaboration to collapse of its own weight. The downside of trying to maintain a narrow and minimal interface is that it is much more difficult to move from a minimal and narrow interface to a broad and extensive interface than vice-versa--and most collaborations will sooner or later require broad and extensive interfaces.
Studies of collaboration in the private sector suggest that when external competition is high, the collaboration tends to move to process integration, in part because of the importance of joint learning to beating competitors. In the public sector, agencies rarely have competition, so there may be a greater inclination for separate, autonomous tasks.
A joint task that can be done early in a collaboration, and one that if done early can be very helpful to a collaboration, is joint sensemaking. This is especially true if the collaboration is working in a particular geographical area. Joint sensemaking is joint learning about the current and future environment. Partners can be pushed apart if each partner makes its own observations, draws its own conclusions, and makes its own predictions. If one partner, for example, says A and B are the most critical things happening in the community, while another partner says X and Y, and if both these pairs are inconsistent the partners will be operating on very different wavelengths. And even worse scenario is if two partners agree that X and Y are the most critical factors and one thinks X and Y are positive, advantageous and the other things they are detrimental, negative.
Joint sensemaking can help build trust and shared understanding, develop common ground, and provide a more realistic basis for future decisions. Joint sensemaking requires using common data and clarifying and debating assumptions. Partners who engage in joint sensemaking need to be patient, and should not assume that partner views will quickly and automatically converge.
What if a collaboration finds its interface inappropriate or if a collaboration is finding it difficult to operate at the interface it believes it needs? One response is to decrease task demands by re-defining tasks so they require less interface. Often tasks can be divided into many smaller, more independent pieces, which can make the tasks more explicit and make it easier for them to be done independently. Another option is to improve the interface. One way to improve the interface is to increase the "bandwidth" or the effectiveness of the interface by providing training to partners is such areas as meeting facilitation, consensus and negotiated decision making, working in high performance teams, and so on. Using more face-to-face meetings and video conferencing may help. Another way to improve the interface, discussed in the next section, is to ensure there are frequent contacts and communications among the partners at multiple levels. Finally the collaboration can move to limit the many spinoffs--sites, groups, teams--that collaborations tend to generate. Coordinating three rings under the big tent is difficult enough, must less eight or nine.
Multiple Bridges
Collaborations should try to build multiple bridges for three reasons. Building multiple bridges means ensuring frequent direct contact and communication at three levels, the operational level (specialists and professionals communicating with one another), the executive or senior management level (which helps executives and agency leaders understand and share the value creation logic of the collaboration and sets the tone at lower levels), and the middle management level (where operational and strategic issues tend to be joined).
Having bridges built at these three levels can greatly improve the efficacy of a collaboration. As the collaboration proceeds through implementation the most active participants tend to be middle managers and operational personnel, although they are not simultaneously involved. At times during the collaboration snags will occur that require the intervention of senior managers, either in solving the problem or in having to acquiesce to the solution.
If the senior level bridge is not built the collaboration may find it difficult to access senior level managers or obtain their approval of necessary actions. Further, senior level managers of one partner can intervene with the senior level managers of another partner if necessary. If the senior managers don't have personal contact with one another, especially in regard to the collaboration, achieving this personal top-level to top-level interaction may become very difficult. Operational participants may occasionally find that they need to make some adjustments in their work load, assignments, or schedules with their supervisors. If their supervisors have no bridges to the collaboration, achieving these changes may be very difficult.
The general point relative to a collaboration is that multiple bridges can greatly help interface between or among partners and make the work of the collaboration much more effective. Truly active collaboration occurs when partners have developed structures, processes, and skills for bridging organizational and interpersonal differences. Multiple ties at multiple levels ensure greater communication and cooperation. Collaboration at one level facilitates collaboration at other levels. Deploying more rather than fewer people to relationship activities helps ensure that partners' resources are fully tapped and their goals and needs represented. Organizations with strong communications among functions and widely shared information tend to have more productive external relationships.
A second rationale for multiple bridge building concerns issues within the partner organizations. Collaborations, perhaps especially among state agencies, rarely involve all the units within each partner organization. While the unit or units within a partner organization that is heavily involved in the collaboration may find the collaboration's vision, mission, and tasks very compatible, other units in the organization may not. Further, a collaboration may change relationships, for better or for worse, between the unit directly involved in the collaboration and non-involved units. Inter-unit disagreements can adversely affect the performance of a collaboration. How the non-involved units perceive the collaboration can affect their behavior. If these units, for example, think that the collaboration signals a merger or major reorganization or otherwise may mean the loss of power, status, or jobs they can resist, perhaps even sabotage the collaboration. Multiple bridges can help ensure that there is an organization-wide commitment to the collaboration and either make the collaboration ineffective or shorten the life of the collaboration. And as discussed later, multiple bridges can facilitate inter-organizational learning.
Third, multiple bridges can also provide the redundancy that helps collaborations overcome problems with personnel turnover. Collaborations, unless they quickly fail, last long enough to experience personnel turnover issues among the core partners--among operational/technical personnel as well as mid-level and senior-level managers. If multiple bridges are not built, the entry to new personnel into a collaboration may be problematic.
The collaboration's core partners, especially the collaboration manager, have a responsibility to help new entrants understand the purpose, history, roles/relationships, and status of the collaboration. But this learning about and need to obtain a new commitment to the collaboration will be much more effective if these discussions are complemented by similar discussion among personnel in the home organization of the partner experiencing the personnel turnover--if other people in the organization are familiar with and committed to the organization as a result of multiple bridges. Further, multiple bridges are especially helpful when turnover in senior management occurs. Mid-level managers active and committed to the collaboration can help inform and indeed sell the collaboration to new senior managers as can senior managers in the core partner organizations. But this can happen only if multiple bridges have been built.
Communications
Everything said to this point about collaboration management acknowledges the importance of communication. Lack of communication or mis-communication may be the most common reason for the gradual dissipation of collaborations. Communications issues include the kinds of information that must be communicated, how communications should occur, and who should communicate with whom.
Using communications media. Communications media are generally viewed through a rich-lean continuum. Richer media, face-to-face communication, for example, are considered the richest media because they permit the use of more complex language, support more information, are more flexible, and allow more interactivity and socialization than lean media, such as letters. Leaner media tend to be less expensive and much less time consuming--especially when face-to-face communication requires overcoming space (when partners are geographically distributed) and when the communication must go to many people.
Rich media are no better than lean media and vice-versa. Rather, the nature of the media should best match the context and purposes for which communication is occurring. Situations and tasks with high uncertainty and ambiguity need rich media while situations and tasks with low uncertainty and low ambiguity can use lean media. Collaboration management should ensure that the appropriate media are used and that the partners experience neither communication surfeit or communication deficit.
When or how should a collaboration use rich media? Collaboration design and the first phases of collaboration implementation should emphasize rich communication, especially face-to-face communication. Face-to-face communication helps build trust, so a heavy and early dose is important at the start of a collaboration, especially when initial trust levels among partners are relatively low. Developing clear and mutually accepted vision, mission, and purpose statements are complex tasks that demand face-to-face communication. In these tasks, rich media enable rationales to be shared. Additionally, complex collective tasks, where contributions from several individuals are needed and where outcomes are predisposed to different interpretation, require face-to-face exchanges to achieve collective interpretation (which occurs when all the participants have shared understandings of the similarities and differences of meaning). The cascading transitions of collaborations also require rich media. The exchange among partners of complex knowledge, which will happen off and on during a collaboration, requires rich media.
Communicating information that is otherwise complex or difficult to verbalize, such as tacit information, requires using rich media. Face-to-face communication is especially valuable because it provides the capacity for interruption and feedback, and can be particularly important when metaphor, intonation, emotion, and gesture are important to conveying information. But as implied in the earlier discussion of operational scope and teams, the inappropriate use of rich media, especially face-to-face communication, can be very burdensome when their use is unwarranted.
The rich-lean concept of communications media was developed prior to the advent of sophisticated electronic communications. The application of this concept to electronic media is just now being systemically investigated. Early evidence suggests that in some cases electronic communications can be rich and even a substitute for face-to-face communication. For example, white boards are sometimes shown to be more effective than face-to-face communication for brainstorming (apparently, people are less reserved and more readily make contributions), while email is sometimes shown to be as almost as effective as face-to-face communication when its users are comfortable with both the technology and the other users (especially as they share mental models or common cultures with other participants). One of the unique values of email systems is that they effortlessly document even fleeting communications. Many computer mediated communications are valuable because they are asynchronous: people need not be together at the same time in order to receive the communications.
Nonetheless, even though partners may be very comfortable with computer mediated communication and with one another, collaborations should start with and periodically, if not regularly, use face-to-face communication, in part because there is a tendency for people to try to read more than what was intended in such electronic media as email and asynchronous discussions. This may be more true in the public sector, which tends to be further behind much of the private sector in the use of video conferencing, white boards, and discussion groups.
Communication strategies that support different media, including computer mediated communication, and permit users to move easily among and share them may be most appropriate for collaborations. Complex problem solving usually needs to be done face to face, while distributing non-complex information can use less rich media and be done asynchronously. Over time, a collaboration usually can rely less on face-to-face communication. To the extent that the technologies are available and useable by participants, most collaborations will benefit by having anytime, anyplace, multi-media inter-connectivity across a constantly evolving set of relationships.
Situational awareness. Using rich communication media to develop clear and mutually agreed to vision, mission, and purpose statements, to develop and sustain trust, and to share complex knowledge and information is critical to the success of a collaboration. In these instances, the communication is about the focus or subject of the collaboration, such as welfare dependency or poverty. Another important focal point for communication, however, deals with the interactions regarding the subject and the process of creating it, i.e., the process of producing the outputs and outcomes necessary to address successfully the vision and mission of the collaboration. Unfortunately, communication for this purpose, for situational awareness, is too often overlooked by collaborations, probably because it is seen as mundane, perhaps even as unnecessary detail. While all partners should promote situational awareness, the collaboration manager is particularly responsible for situational awareness communication.
Broadly speaking, situational awareness is about ensuring that all collaboration participants know in a timely manner what each other participant is doing and what the group as a whole is doing. More specifically, it deals with informing about the activities participants are undertaking, giving feedback to and acknowledging participant contributions, providing a context about and the history of shared objects (shared objects are process products of collaborations, such as meeting agendas, minutes of meetings, action lists, timelines), making sure that participants know where the collaboration is in its overall work program and its progress toward accomplishing its mission (the collaboration should be aware of itself as a dynamic whole and always be aware of its mission and its progress in completing that mission), and bringing new participants into an already established collaboration.
Many guidelines or points can be made regarding situational awareness. Having no or incomplete awareness of the activities of other participants can cause the dissipation of a collaboration. If people are unaware of what others are doing and have little sense of where the collaboration is in its entirety (What phase are we in? How much have we accomplished? How much more is there yet to do? What key tasks remain? What are the problems or issues we are facing?) they will become disoriented or lose interest and the collaboration will lose cohesiveness. People need to know where in its life cycle the collaboration is, what their own next task is, and how this task fits into the overall mission of the collaboration in order to pace their involvement as well as to guide their participation. Situational awareness becomes very important when the environment of the collaboration begins to change rapidly or unpredictably.
Participants who receive no feedback, especially no acknowledgment, of their participation tend to withdraw. The need for acknowledgment becomes particularly important when the tasks are related to abstract or strategic knowledge. The feedback and acknowledgment also help participants realize that no one participant is dominating the collaboration. Shared or coordination objects must be easily and routinely shared. Not regularly communicating shared objects and then trying to compensate for this by providing a host of them all at once can be deadly because it can cause cognitive overload--there is too much to digest, and people become discouraged. New participants in an established collaboration are especially subject to this kind of overload. People will use shared objects only if they have some sense of its context--What is this? Why do I have it? What's next. Archiving information in ways in which a participant can asynchronously access the information is especially valuable in long-lasting collaborations that deal with complex issues. Long-lasting and complex collaborations, especially those with a large number of partners, should consider establishing an intranet for the collaboration.
Collaboration participants, especially the collaboration manager, must understand that when someone's interaction value becomes negative (that is, the cost of participating outweighs the value of participating) that person is likely to withdraw from or lessen participation in the collaboration. A natural information entropy exists in collaborations that produces incoherence and/or cognitive overload. Appropriately effecting situational awareness can overcome this natural entropy.
Different communications media should be used and users should be able to move among them. For example, a collaboration manager may disseminate minutes of a meeting as a file attached to email, but these minutes should also be distributed via mail or fax because some participants may well use and rely on email and others may make minimal (or no) use of email. Collaboration participants, and again especially the collaboration manager, needs understand the importance of shared objects, such as agendas and meeting minutes (as described in Appendix B) and also of communicating in the interim of meetings. Inter-meeting communication becomes more important the further the collaboration progresses as does informal communication. Always relying almost entirely on formal communication is another mistake the collaborations often make. Some collaboration communication, especially as the collaboration progresses, must be spontaneous where people informally pass on information, share insights, and maintain buy-in. Tacit knowledge, for example, is best communicated informally.
The Cascading Nature of Collaborations
Sooner or later, nearly all collaborations cascade out from their mobilizers and initial core partners to involve other participants and, usually, other locations, and often spin off other collaborations. For example, a state agency collaboration may start off involving nearly wholly senior managers, who then eventually give way to primarily to middle-level managers and operational specialists and professionals. These collaboration participants may then begin to work with local government officials and community representatives, who then may form their own collaboration. This state to local cascading may occur in more than one part of the state. Collaboration partners must remember that each cascading represents at least a miniature forming stage, although each cascade is in a real sense a representation or extension of the initial collaboration.
When new people become centrally involved they may not share in the collaboration's vision; they may have less rapport with one another than the senior managers or collaboration initiators may have had with one another; they may be less skillful at facilitative management and have less capacity in interpersonal skills. One of the biggest changes may occur when operational personnel become involved. Operational people tend to be judged or evaluated solely on their primary responsibility, which may have little to do with the specific mission and tasks of the initial collaboration. Also, as the collaboration cascades to operations or into localities and communities differences in authority, reporting, and decision making become more noticeable. These dissimilarities need to be worked out, and this usually requires more communication than anticipated and is usually more difficult than anticipated.
One of the reasons why communication may be more difficult is that people with similar structural roles are more likely to interact with one another than individuals with dissimilar structural roles. Similarly, people with similar attributes, values, and perceptions are more likely to interact with one another than people with dissimilar attributes. Researchers in the private sector, for example, note that communications conflicts between countries and cultures are sometimes much less serious than conflicts between functions, such as sales and engineering, or manufacturing and finance. Thus, as more and different people become involved in collaboration the whole nature of relationships and communications may change drastically. Policy people may tend to communicate and interact with other policy people. Local social services staff may concentrate their communication on state social services staff. People who value grass roots participation and citizen control may interact much more with people who have similar values regardless of where they are located or the specific job they may have.
As collaborations cascade, communications becomes both more important and more challenging. The core collaboration partners must be aware of this and anticipate it. Likewise, the core collaboration partners cannot assume that there will be no need to go through some design steps again, re-acquainting some people with or getting others to understand and accept the collaboration's vision and mission. The core partners must also realize that each cascade represents both an opportunity and a challenge to the collaboration's learning and adjustment process. The operational scope of the collaboration may need to be adjusted and the complex problem solving process may need to be re-assessed or re-kindled.
The earlier section on complex problem solving discussed primarily knowledge generation. This section will discuss primarily the remaining portions of the knowledge building process, especially the transfer/diffusion and integration/application of knowledge.
The transfer/diffusion internalizes and translates the new knowledge into the organization's own knowledge and processes. Integration/application moves the knowledge that has been transferred into the organization into the organization's operations to provide new or enhanced products for its customers. The representation process conveys the organization's new knowledge to its customers so that the customers are aware of the new or improved product or service, enabling them to use the knowledge for their own value-creating processes.
Capturing Value
Organizational learning is important not only to a collaboration per se, but to each partnering organization as well. Organizational learning contributes significantly to the partnering organizations' ability to capture value from their participation in a collaboration. Through their participation in collaborations, organizations can build their own skills and competencies by learning the skills and competencies of their partners and then diffusing this new knowledge throughout the organization. Regularly using other organizations that have different knowledge bases is potentially very beneficial because to be effective in an environment of rapid change organizations must embed themselves in generative relationships, relationships that foster reinterpretations of who they are, what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Proficiency at learning, adapting, and innovating is essential for today's organizations. Knowledge building activities interact with an organization's core capabilities to create and expand the core capabilities. But an organization's absorptive capacity significantly determines the extent to which this happens, as discussed later.
Organizations generally face two issues relative to learning. In practice, most organizations learn or learn more when confronted with a crisis, although this learning-through-crisis may not be permanently internalized because organizations, like people, tend to rationalize that their successes are due to their own exploits and expertise while their failures are the consequence of external factors over which they have little or no control. A crisis forces focused attention and permits, if not requires, an organization to question current practices and past successes. Organizations are much less likely to learn when they encounter an opportunity. One issue an organization faces, therefore, is to determine or commit itself to learn from opportunity.
The second general learning issue organizations face is the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. All organizations must decide how much time and resources should be spent on exploiting their current competencies--continuing to do what they do best and becoming better at what they do best --versus exploring--moving to discover and internalize new expertise and eventually building new competencies. Too much reliance on exploitation minimizes if not destroys an organization's ability to experience generative learning. Too much reliance on exploration can be too expensive and wasteful. Most successful organizations tend to over-concentrate on exploitation (they are very good at what they do and become trapped by their competencies), and this is probably much more true of public agencies where competence tends to focus on the management of programs over which they have monopolistic control.
To learn, to capture value from participation in a collaboration, organizations must therefore (1) proactively take advantage of opportunities for learning and (2) be willing to shift resources from exploitation to exploration, something that complex vertical bureaucracies in the public sector may find difficult to do.
Knowledge transfer success largely depends on the nature of the knowledge being transferred and the nature of the receiving organization. Research in private sector organizational learning has arguably concluded that the most important factors rest in the nature of the receiving organizations--most organizations ineffectively learn not because they do not want to learn but because they do not know how to learn.
The most well-known knowledge schema divides knowledge into tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is generally more difficult to transfer because it is hard to verbalize, it is expressed through action-based skills, and cannot be easily or well codified. Tacit knowledge is best learned by experience through such processes as, for example, a master-apprentice relationship, mentoring, or the rotation of personnel. When undertaking complex problem solving a collaboration attempts to share tacit knowledge through what is called externalization in which tacit knowledge becomes explicit through an iterative process of informal discussion, story telling, the use of anecdotes, metaphors, and analogies, often occurring through collective reflection. Depending on how close the partners are and how complex and intertwined they see the problem they are addressing, partners may also engage in socialization where some observation and mentoring occurs.
Conceptually, explicit knowledge, which can be codified, put into written form, is easier to transfer. But rarely can explicit knowledge be easily placed into a set of simple instructions. It often requires, and this is the case in most public agency collaborations, direct and close relationships, which, of course, should occur as the collaboration engages in implementation.
The point of this is that the collaboration partner needs to bring into his or her parent organization as much explicit knowledge as possible in order to transfer the knowledge to the parent organization and have the parent organization apply it. The receiving organization generally needs to combine this external knowledge, the knowledge being received due to its participation in the collaboration, with its own knowledge to produce new knowledge and to apply this knowledge, often in an adapted form, to its policies and practices, to its own resources. In doing so, the personnel in the receiving organization may eventually internalize this knowledge, converting it to tacit knowledge.
But knowledge transfer tends not to be an easy task, especially if key representatives of the partnering organization think the incoming knowledge is speculative, does not have a track record, or is ambiguous; or if the knowledge is perceived to be coming from organizations that are not seen as reliable or trustworthy; or if there has been difficult or problematic relationship between the receiving organization and the other key partners. Further, many organizations are affected by a "not invented here" syndrome in which there is little motivation to accept learning from the outside. These reasons again reinforce the need for multiple bridges and for senior managers to be involved in and committed to collaboration formation.
Facilitating Inter-Organizational Learning
Given the circumstances that often must be overcome if knowledge is going to be transferred or diffused successfully, several factors can help facilitate knowledge transfer. First, there must be an intent to learn. Senior management must communicate to those actually involved in implementing the collaboration that learning is not only important but that it is one of the objectives of the collaboration, and this needs to be said from the start. Just as a collaboration will not undertake complex problem solving unless it consciously decides to do so, people will usual ignore using their collaboration experiences as a part of a process of organizational learning unless signaled by senior management. Learning can take place if there is no intent to learn but having an explicit intent helps learning.
Second, there must be a managerial commitment to learning. Learning is active, it implies change. It does little good, and may cause some harm, if senior managers communicate an explicit intent to learn and then refuse to act, to change things, based on the learning.
Third, managers must avoid performance myopia. Nearly all learning theorists and educators say we learn best, we learn most effectively, through our mistakes. But professionals are educated and trained to be successful, to avoid mistakes. People do not want to wallow in their failures, they would rather wallow in their successes, vicariously re-living achievements. Senior managers especially tend to be performance myopic--they do not want to be associated with, touched by, failure; they tend to push failure away. Senior managers tend to isolate and even ostracize mistakes and those who make them so that they cannot be seen or touched by others. If senior managers are performance myopic, the collaboration participants will cover up mistakes and not share and discuss miscues and errors--and in something as new and complicated as collaborations, there will be mistakes and wrong turns.
Innovation requires open debate about many wrong ideas. The process of creatively addressing complex problems starts with much chaos and many early mistakes in order to avoid late-stage errors. The authority to be wrong at the beginning must flow from and be consistently reinforced by senior management.
A fourth factor is having an opportunity to learn. This strongly implies the need, as mentioned earlier, for joint tasks, for partners showing their knowledge and skills through dialogue and problem solving. Task complexity implies broad and extensive collaboration interface, and this increases the opportunity for learning. Also, having multiple levels of direct contacts and communications increases the opportunity for learning.
Absorptive Capacity
The most important determining characteristic, however, in organizational learning, especially in knowledge transfer and application, is an organization's absorptive capacity. The absorptive capacity of an organization is its ability to recognize the value of new, external information and assimilate and apply it. Absorptive capacity refers to an organization's knowledge base; prior knowledge helps determine the way in which new knowledge is assimilated and used. An organization's previous knowledge base influences its learning capacity, its potential to learn. Thus, knowledge building also develops the absorptive capacity of an organization in a virtuous circle. Organizations have an absolute stock of absorptive capacity in that organizations with larger absorptive capacity generally tend to learn faster and more effectively than organizations with lower levels of absorptive capacity. But absorptive capacity is also relative in the sense that it varies with the learning context.
Absorptive capacity results from the interaction of several factors. One is the effectiveness of the organization's gatekeepers or boundary spanners. Gatekeepers or boundary spanners are people in an organization that tend to operate at the intersection of an organization's boundary and its external environment. They will have more contact and interaction with an organization's clients, other organizations, and external entities than other people in the organization whose focus is more internal. Boundary spanners tend to have a specific assignment that others in the organization do not specifically have: they monitor the external environment for important information and translate the new information as appropriate to others in the organization. Importantly, then, the quality of an organization's absorptive capacity depends in part on the quality of the individual boundary spanners.
In a collaboration, the participating partners explicitly take on a boundary spanning role. The boundary spanning role is especially critical when the partners are diverse and have little partnering experience. If boundary spanners are not curious, if they do not see linkages between the knowledge of partnering organizations and their parent organizations, if they do not see the ramifications of what is being transmitted to them, if they are unable to communicate well what they learn in the collaboration back to their home organization, then their parent organization is unlikely to learn much from the collaboration. In short, the quality or effectiveness of a boundary spanner rests in how active he or she is in knowledge creating activities and his or her level of knowledge and motivation.
A second factor that determines an organization's absorptive capacity is the absorptive capacity of individuals within the organization. Even if boundary spanners perform their role well, an organization may learn little if the people with whom the boundary spanners have contact have low absorptive capacity themselves. To an extent, diversity if also key in this situation. If members of an organization are somewhat diverse relative to background, interests, etc., there is apt to be a better chance of making a connection between the knowledge brought into the organization by the boundary spanner and the internal, extant knowledge because the likelihood of making novel connections increases. Individuals who continually accumulate knowledge have a much better ability to put new knowledge into memory and retrieve and use it (i.e., the more you know, the easier it gets--learning is cumulative). Intensity of effort is also important--individuals who process information more deeply are more likely to make connections between new and extant information.
A third factor concerns the processes, especially communications, and structure of the receiving organization. Personnel with new information must report back to other employees and to managers. Many organizations fail to realize the full potential of their learning relationships because they have internal barriers to communications that limit learning to the relatively small set of people involved in the collaboration. New knowledge has to be reported, validated, and acted on, and these activities cannot occur unless the communication processes and structure are set up to encourage this.
The organization does not learn if only one member learns. Knowledge transfer and application require direct communication that should occur irrespective of role, hierarchy, or location. Learning requires conscious and explicit structure and processes. There must be regular review processes, face-to-face meetings with senior managers, and career and perhaps even financial rewards for learning; and above all the personalization of failure must be avoided. Organizations that are highly segmented and marked by many multiple layers of hierarchy may be incapable of learning well, especially regarding knowledge brought from the outside. There is little way around this simple fact: the best preparation for learning within a collaboration is skill in intra-organizational learning.
Taking new and seemingly unconnected knowledge and making it part of one's or of an organization's overall integrated knowledge (melding new knowledge onto extant knowledge) often requires what is called scaffolding. Scaffolding can take time, especially when the new knowledge is not closely related to one's domain knowledge. The new knowledge must enter a zone around a person's domain knowledge where connections can begin to be made so that the new knowledge is understood and then integrated into the domain knowledge. Until this scaffolding takes place, people may feel insecure, puzzled, or even worried about the information they are getting from their collaboration partners.
Scaffolding suggests the notion of relative absorptive capacity, mentioned earlier. An individual or an organization's ability to learn is greater when there is some relationship between the new knowledge and the extant knowledge. Most organizations have a difficult time integrating new knowledge unless they have made an effort to develop some competencies related to the incoming knowledge. If the receiving organization has some familiarity with the new knowledge and has compatible values, norms, priorities, and strategies with the contributing organization, then scaffolding and learning is easier. The notion of relative absorptive capacity brings us back to the whole notion of trust and strategic intent among the collaboration partners.
State Engagement with Localities/Communities
The state - local nexus is can become very complicated. Effectively carrying out this engagement requires the state collaboration to pay attention to the issues raised in the earlier cascading discussion: the state collaboration must roll out its collaboration and engage the local/community partners with as much care and attention to process and principles as forming and implementing the state collaboration. Further, the engagement of local/community participants raises a host of important capacity building issues that are treated in the next section. This section focuses on the representation aspect of knowledge building, mentioned earlier.
In the representation phase, the state collaboration shares with its local/community partners the knowledge it has gained in its knowledge generation phase: the identification and examination of the problem and the favored interventions or solutions. Further, it shares the ways in which they have or will adjust or synchronize their resources (usually programs) and the new set of resources (also usually programs) available for the first time due to the fusion or melding produced by the collaboration. The state collaboration's outputs cannot be simply placed down in a local/community setting. Rather, the placement and use must be tailored to each setting, and this requires the state collaboration to negotiate with a set of local/community participants.
The state partners can do this in two ways. One way is gradually to involve local/community partners in the state's collaboration so that when the state finishes its knowledge generation it has done so in cooperation with local/community partners. A second way is for the state collaboration to finish its knowledge building work and then engage the local/community partners in a second iteration. The first way is cumbersome unless the collaboration intends to pilot or protoype in one or perhaps two localities because it brings too many people into the collaboration process. And even with the first option, the state partners would usually still need to enter into site-specific negotiations.
In most instances, local/community participants are used to seeking funds in the program boxes historically presented by state agencies. Further, they are unused to forming collaborations to seek a multitude of resources or to address comprehensively their problems. Thus, state collaborations must usually nurture local participants and not metaphorically dump their collaboration onto them. At the local/community level complex problems are probably addressed more as a power problem than a knowledge problem: competing delivery organizations are likely to move directly to interventions, perhaps after briefly identifying the problem according to their values, priorities, and experience. Consequently, one of the key assignments of the state collaboration partners when they engage local/community partners is to hold back convergence on quickly identified interventions based on power and to spend time on the knowledge problem trying to build a consensus within that framework.
Local conditions and capacities become a starting point for the ending phase of state collaboration implementation. The state partners should adopt an interactive approach that gives local participants influence in the agenda and pace of implementation. The state-local partnership should jointly identify the detailed criteria and benchmarks on which to base the release of funds and measure progress.
Incomplete Contracts
Collaboration may be considered a design activity--an open-ended and long-term process involving on-going dialogue and negotiation through which the collaboration creates new policy and delivery structures. Participants continue to learn new things as the process unfolds. Because change is ever present and knowledge frequently tacit, collaboration is like planting a seed, and evolutionary growth takes place as learners use the seeded environment to undertake specific activities and outputs. As this evolution occurs, new requirements or components may come into existence and additional knowledge not contained in the seed may be generated.
When a collaboration moves into the implementation phase, it is likely to bring about one or more financial contracts. The collaboration partners should determine the extent to which these contracts should be traditional "complete contracts" that spell out in detail the activities, outputs, processes, obligations, and time frames versus "incomplete contracts."
Because of problems in defining and transferring tacit knowledge, complete contracts are often infeasible or at least undesirable. When many different people from different organizations work closely together each of them may need to access information possessed by others, and these interactions can become very complex and making complete contracts unworkable. If the detailed nature of outcomes is both unpredictable and unknowable, contracts must be simpler and relationships based more on trust. Organizations may need to believe that things will be worked out as situations arise. Complete contracts discourage flexibility and unanticipated actions.
Incomplete contracts should obviously include the explicit legal mandates that adhere to the funds around which the contract is based. However, rather than specifying activities so that no room is left for learning (e.g., the rehabilitation of 10 single-family homes to code standard Y at a cost of X), the contract provides a band of possibilities (e.g., housing assistance costing no more than X dollars provided to at least 10 TANF-qualified families with the expected outcome of at least six months of employment at $6 per hour for each family).
In a contract, the "inner boundary" defines the essential core of the job in which the roles and responsibilities are clearly defined: if these things are not done, then the contract requirements have been unmet. The "outer boundary" defines the outer limits of discretion. The area between the inner boundary and the outer boundary provides the space for innovation, initiative, and learning. In a complete contract the inner and outer boundaries are the same, or nearly so. In an incomplete contract, a much wider band exists between the inner and outer boundaries.
The capacity building discussion is also a discussion about sharing or giving away power. To what extent are state governments, foundations, even, willing to give up or share power? On the one hand, states cannot be afraid to fail. On the other hand, states must be accountable. It is easy to be at one extreme or the other. States can let communities try a variety of options as they collaborate, giving them the power to choose how to use funds as long as it is within the context of collaboration, not wanting to dictate what they do or to second guess their decisions. Or states can express their distrust of communities, letting communities know that states don't trust their judgement, by refusing to fund activities requested by communities because states trust their own judgements more so than the communities'. Focusing on mutually acceptable outcomes rather than activities can greatly help in the sharing of power and ensuring accountability.
In reinterpreting capacity building states may face tough decisions. The tough decisions often relate to working with the stronger localities and communities and making them more strong, or working with the weaker localities and communities to increase their low capacity. Collaboration is not a quick fix--it is a very time consuming and an intensive process. Collaboration is not an end, it is a means to an end that can have potentially significant effects on complex problems.
If the capacity of localities is such that their engagement in collaborative community development would trivialize it, would make ineffective use of it, then the state collaboration may want to avoid engaging these localities until the state has become experienced in collaborative community development and the locality has increased its capacity to use it. However, the most pressing problems often lodge themselves in low-capacity localities and bypassing these localities may simply intensify the critical problems their residents face.
On balance, it arguably seems that collaborative community development is too precious and too new to wreck initiatives on the shoals of minimal capacity. Poorly implemented collaborations take time away from other tasks and stretch already thin resources to the breaking point while not significantly improving outcomes. Through competent oversight, states should make tough resource decisions when initiatives fail to meet realistic goals and must eventually be in a position to redirect resources away from organizations and localities that are not taking a collaborative approach to those that can.
The above observations imply two conclusions. First, state partners should initially work with stronger localities and in those that are less strong the partners should scale down expectations, although not minimize them, to what can realistically be achieved. Second, a state collaborative community development initiative should include from the beginning a capacity building strategy that particularly aims at (1) increasing the capacity of weaker localities so that they may eventually engage in collaborative community development and (2) providing capacity building in the stronger localities simultaneously with engaging them in collaborative community development. A capacity building strategy should be integrated from the start with a collaborative community development strategy.
A state technical assistance strategy should have two components. One component should target making state program design and delivery more flexible so as to encourage learning and innovation and reduce obstacles to collaboration, but to do so in the context of delineating clear outcomes and working with localities to develop outcome-based evaluation systems and to disseminate research and evaluation findings.
The second component should be a strategic, long-term, locality-specific approach to capacity building that undertakes a realistic appraisal of what needs to be done and can be achieved under local prevailing conditions. Such a strategy must take time for adequate institutional appraisal and adopt a process approach. The importance of process means that the state should consider providing staff support for group process work, for developing local leaders who can serve as change agents, and for facilitative leadership training. It is a strategy that emphasizes explanation, demonstration, facilitation, and advice.
A key in small communities is to make sure the right people are part of the collaboration, and to avoid dueling collaborations. States should avoid creating in small communities topical collaborations, where once the issue or topic fades away the people involved fade away as well. Working with communities in the sense of building capacity for collaborations requires using people whose competencies cut across silos. States need to ensure that collaborations are working and we need to ask the right questions at the local level. Before local collaborations get off the ground, in the concept and design phases, states need to start asking questions like, Who have you really talked to?
Offering simple technical assistance from the outside seems rarely to result in permanent change--as soon as the outside resources leave, the community stops developing and waits until the next visit. Providing effective technical assistance requires specialized skills. People providing this assistance need to be able to help the community reach the point where they can do it themselves.
Because state partners have a broad frame of reference (i.e., multiple agencies, institutions, and resources) they should make as one of their objectives the coordination of institutions charged with capacity building so as to strengthen linkages and ensure complementarity. Suppliers of capacity development should forge links with client organizations to determine their needs in partnering with them, and give preference to supporting organizations that have themselves developed a capacity building strategy. Training as a major focus of capacity building should be connected to technical assistance and implementation experience. Finally, a state's collaborative capacity building strategy should give high priority to monitoring, evaluation impact assessment and research and its dissemination using traditional and new media.
By itself, collaboration will not create vibrant communities and although it may more efficiently and effectively use resources in the long run, it cannot automatically generate the expertise needed. Competent and effective collaboration should be highly valued and much sought after and this implies a serious commitment to capacity building. Ineffective and incompetent collaborations should not be propped up and maintained for their own sake.
As these changes occur, the participants should keep two things in mind. One, each partner tends to be subject to the bias of self-serving attributions: individuals tend to over-attribute favorable outcomes to actions they themselves have taken while they tend to attribute adverse outcomes to external causes. Thus, without the reinforcement of periodic collective review and a sense of trust, it may be easy for a partner to believe that the positive outcomes of a collaboration are due to his or her actions, while the negative outcomes are due to the actions of the other partners.
Second, the gains or benefits of a collaboration do not come in a single moment of time. They come over a period of time, in some instances to all the partners and in other instances to some (or only one) partners. The gains that come to partners individually come when the partners know how to learn and take unselfish advantage of the benefits that collaborative action can bring to them. Often the benefits of a collaboration are not known, cannot be known, ahead of time. Partners need to be receptive to adjustments in the pursuit of joint benefits; inflexibility can prevent future benefits from occurring.
Because collaborations are new and few public agencies are experienced with collaborations and because collaborations are time-consuming (one might suggest that as with high performance teams 70 percent of the benefits of a collaboration occur in the last 30 percent of the collaboration's time frame), the most appropriate way to judge the collaboration is not to compare it to what would have or might have happened without the collaboration. In some instances the collaboration easily accomplishes some things that simply could not have been accomplished by the partners acting alone although these accomplishments may be relatively minor in significance. In this case, the collaboration may be too easily judged a success. In other instances, perhaps most of the time, the collaboration may accomplish little, especially if opportunity costs are considered. In these instances, the collaboration may be too easily judged a failure.
A collaboration should be judged against the best realistic outcomes that would likely occur if the collaboration operated effectively and efficiently. As more experience is gained with collaborations, as learning, re-evaluation, and re-adjustment become more successful, collaborations will become more successful.
The final phase of the learning, re-evaluation, and re-adjustment process deals with the institutionalization of the collaboration. That is, do the partners maintain the collaboration and transition the collaboration from a tactical focus on a specific outcome or problem to a strategic alliance that addresses other problems and/or other communities? Answering this question well requires an adequate assessment of the collaboration's performance and a sense of how much more effective the collaboration can become if an alliance is maintained.
Partners in a collaboration should see it not only as a way to solve past failures but as a new way of organizing, making decisions, and allocating resources that better matches our complex problems and rapidly changing environment than does complex vertical bureaucracies. Partners in a collaboration should see it as a method for actively creating and discovering the future, for learning, for strategic thinking.
State government agencies, indeed nearly all government agencies, are complex vertical bureaucracies, that is, they have multiple levels of hierarchy, divisions by function (often by programs), and task specialization. In many respects, complex vertical bureaucracies do some things very well. But students of organizations question whether complex vertical bureaucracies--in the public sector or the private sector--have characteristics that facilitate effectiveness in current and future conditions and environments.
Studies of vertical bureaucracies tend to reach several common conclusions. Vertical flows of information tend to be slow and biased: communications must often flow up before they flow across, most people pay much more attention to messages received from their superiors than their subordinates, and as information flows upward in a hierarchy the good news stays and the bad news is gradually dropped. Vertical bureaucracies tend to have an insular focus; do a poor job of environmental scanning; and do not well absorb new, external information. They tend to have unproductive levels of secrecy and organizational loyalty that impedes information sharing. They tend to be inflexible because of their task specialization and fixed division of labor and have a difficult time adjusting to or working well in the cross-functional, ambiguous, changing, teaming nature of most collaborations. Functional segmentation and task specialization make it difficult for diverse people to come together to address complex problems. Vertical bureaucracies are extraordinarily adept at recapturing change--change initiatives, whether internal or external in origin, tend to be isolated from the rest of the bureaucracy and then gradually overcome over time. In part because of many levels of review, they seem to be incapable of fast response.
Many students of organization also tend to make similar conclusions about the kinds of organizational structures most appropriate to today's environment. The rapidly changing, discontinuous, and very difficult to predict environment seems to require organizations that have different characteristics than those found in vertical bureaucracies. Our changing technologies, especially communications technology, seem to require different organizations as well. An era in which knowledge and information technologies are becoming increasingly important demands that every worker act as a manager and as an entrepreneur. Employees are expected to contribute to organization knowledge building by developing knowledge relationships inside and outside the organization. Contemporary organizations need a leveling of both knowledge and authority; no longer can knowledge and authority be assumed proportional to position in a hierarchy. Given these demands and needs most organizational analysts conclude that vertical bureaucracies do a poor job of accessing and then internalizing tacit knowledge or complex explicit knowledge.
An organization with a rigid identity, one that thinks it is important to retain its structure and maintain formal definition, has a minimal level of adaptability and often seems threatened by changes in the environment. Such an organization is apt to continue to spend resources on what it does best rather than explore new terrain. In flexible, adaptable organizations jobs lose much of their formal definition and are constantly redefined. Each employee has to understand the overall environment and strategy of the organization. Security comes from being flexible, being able to react quickly, and being able to cut across functions to get the best people possible for the assignment at hand.
A successful organization in this context avoids the ends becoming the means (process is less important than outcomes) and avoids sub-optimization (which occurs when each sub-unit tries to maximize for itself without trying to maximize the overall effect of the organization). An organization that is not attached to its forms, definitions, or products is best suited for the continual thinking necessary for strategic action. Organizational characteristics best suited to collaboration and networking include a radical decentralization of tasks, powers, and responsibilities. Employees become responsible for making their own decisions. There is a de-layering of the chain of command and greater use of horizontal coordination through the use of cross-functional teams and a fluid division of labor. Organizational boundaries become blurred: what is "in" the organization and what is "out" of the organization become much less clear. Some tasks are outsourced or contracted out so that the "internal is externalized" and activities that were formally conducted through arms-length transactions become done so cooperatively that the "external is internalized."
In the coming years, as the pressure to use collaborations and alliances increases, as the need for complex problem solving becomes more apparent, and as information technology continues to develop at sprint speed, it will be interesting to see if the nature of complex vertical bureaucracies negates the effectiveness, or even fully impedes the creation, of collaborations or whether the significance of collaboration and complex problem solving produces major changes in complex vertical bureaucracies, effectively turning aside decades if not a century or more of tradition and practice.
North Carolina and Missouri were selected in the first RFP round. North Carolina's collaboration focuses on welfare reform and is designed specifically to implement a welfare-to-work outcome. The managing partner is the Department of Commerce, which administers CDBG program. Missouri's collaboration, after two earlier, different initiatives, ended up focusing on creating a common strategic community planning process that over 20 different federal and state agencies could accept and promulgate. The managing partner in Missouri is the Department of Economic Development, which administers the CDBG program.
Oklahoma and Utah were selected in the second RFP round. Oklahoma's collaboration focuses on welfare reform, especially the welfare to work transition. Oklahoma decided to have collaboration co-managers: the Department of Commerce, which at the start of the collaboration administered the CDBG, HOME, and ESG programs, and the Department of Human Services, which administers the TANF program. Utah's collaboration focuses on welfare reform, especially welfare to work for public housing residents. At the state level, the collaboration manager is nominally the Department of Community and Economic Development, which administers the HOME, CDBG, and ESG programs, but operationally the key players are the coalition of local public housing authorities and the Utah Department of Workforce Services.
The following pages summarize each state's collaborative activities through to the end of 1998 or early 1999. Each state's summary ends with a comment by the author that relates several events or actions of a state's collaboration to one or more of the themes or topics discussed in part 1. These are personal observations from the perspective of an outsider made to be illustrative and are not necessarily be agreed to by state participants. To keep the size of the paper manageable, only several observations are made for each state.
The department also believed that welfare reform challenges required the full engagement of local communities, that the department by itself could not make welfare reform work fully successfully. To move in this direction, the department decided to issue an Invitation to Bid to select four pilot communities that would each receive $50,000 (with a $50,000 match required) to prepare a comprehensive community services plan related to welfare reform. But the department remembered the relative failure due to the lack of local services planning expertise and assistance of an earlier state-based initiative that required local planning for family and youth services. Therefore, the department was interested in tapping into the local planning expertise of the Department of Commerce.
The Department of Commerce possessed expertise in local planning in two regards. First, the department had started several years earlier its "building blocks" program which, largely through the department's regional offices, provided on-site consultation and technical assistance to help communities prepare a development-based plan that emphases business expansion, retention, and recruitment; local public works; employment training; and housing and community development.
Second, the department administered a variety of programs, such as the Community Development Block Grant, HOME, Emergency Shelter Grants, and Community Services Block Grant, that work with local communities in a development capacity. The department also prepared the consolidated plan required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The two departments, Human Services and Commerce, decided to use the opportunity of COSCDA's RFP to merge these planning activities, initially in the four pilot communities to be chosen through the Department of Human Service's ITB.
Oklahoma's collaboration formally began in early May 1997 with the initial meeting of the core partners, which included key representatives of the Department of Commerce and the Department of Human Services. The core partners decided each representative on the core team should have a designated back-up or "shadow." Whenever the primary representative was unable to participate in meetings, his or her shadow would have been attending meetings all along and would not have to be briefed to participate. The purpose of the shadows was to ensure continuity during the life of the team.
"The four selected communities, through their local planning structures and the provision of technical assistance and resources provided by the Partnership Team, are role models for other communities whose mission is to move TANF clients from dependency to self-sufficiency, seeing the following accomplishments:
The action plan also contained specific steps or tasks and assigned specific responsibilities and timelines for each task.(1) The task due dates ranged from the end of November 1997 to June 1998.
The core partners met in July 1997 with representatives of the four communities to share information and identify technical assistance needs. They again met in October to discuss assessments, the community planning grants, local resource availability, mapping, data, and technical assistance. In mid-January 1998 the full state team met with representatives of the four pilot communities to hear reports first on the status of the state action plan and, second, on the status of planning and welfare reform in the four communities.
The initial time schedule had the four local pilot communities completing their plans in the summer of 1998, but this schedule slipped. The rural communities completed their plans in December 1998 and while Tulsa submitted its plan in January 1999 several recommendations and reports remained to be completed.
In each community, the lead agency created a collaboration of many service providers, representatives of the business community, and others who were interested in undertaking welfare-to-work planning. Two rural communities essentially created new collaborations, while Tulsa supplemented an existing collaboration. One rural community tried to use a local workforce task force as its collaboration to avoid creating another collaboration with many of the same participants. However, this task force did not meet during the early months of the grant period and the community belatedly formed a new collaboration for its planning activities.
One rural community and the Tulsa community emphasized data, information, and analysis--they concluded that very little data was available about TANF clients and that this made planning difficult--while the two other rural communities mixed planning and action. In all four communities, the focus was on services and employment and little attention was paid to housing and physical development. Only in Tulsa were housing or community development entities involved in the planning. Overall, child care and transportation dominated the problem-setting. All communities experienced some degree of cooperation problems but these were largely overcome as the collaborations met and worked. All communities established task forces or work groups.
With hindsight, the state core partners concluded that the state should have been much more clear in its ITB. The state indicated the grant funds were for planning and that funds for implementation may be available once the planning was completed. (One community interpreted this as a implicit commitment for implementation funding.) However, the communities that tried to do planning-only activities tended to be less successful because they found it difficult to sustain energy and drive with a planning-only work program. The communities that began early to mix planning and action were more successful, especially if a concrete product "win" occurred once or more during the planning process. Instead of moving ahead in the last half of 1998 to fund perhaps 12 more community planning efforts, the state core partners decided to hold off further planning funding until 1999. Whenever it begins, in the second phase of planning the state will consider providing simultaneously both planning and implementation funds. The experience with the four pilots and changes in state agency leadership (in both Commerce and Human Services) also helped stall much of the state collaboration's initiatives.
More significantly, however, the state collaboration was unable to use Commerce's building blocks program to assist the four welfare to work planning pilots. Changes in the department's leadership significantly reduced the importance assigned to the building blocks program, gradually dissipating its resources to where the department's regional teams became focused on a very different priority. The department's regional representatives provided in an ad hoc and informal way some technical assistance to each of the four communities but this did not amount to a major, coordinated initiative. The Human Services department did provide consulting assistance to the four communities, but this was provided later than intended. The issue of sustainable technical issue remains a concern in Oklahoma. While Commerce's regional office personal provided some informal assistance to the communities, it was late and minimal.
Human Services staff in the four counties were very involved in the four pilot planning processes and the county offices became a core partner in the local collaborations. The department also made a major effort to provide the four pilot communities with data on TANF recipients and related information on service resources. But overall, the state core partners generally acknowledge that the four pilot communities needed much more technical and capacity building assistance than the state either recognized ahead of time or was able to provide subsequently. Further, the state belatedly recognized that the same type of assistance and processes could not be well applied to both rural and metropolitan communities.
In mid-1998 the state's core partners began discussing the concept of developing a set of state agency discretionary funds that could be used to help the pilot communities (and others) implement their plans, provided the pilot communities demonstrated their capability to use well the funds. By the end of 1998, the Oklahoma collaboration had a commitment for four pieces of funding: $150,000 from TANF, $50 to $100,000 from the Community Services Block Grant Program, $50 to $75,000 from the Child Care Development Fund, and $200,000 from labor welfare-to-work funds. Additionally, the housing finance agency had made an open-ended commitment to give priority in the award of HOME funds to selected communities with housing needs; however, these funds will not be integrated with the other funds, but will be separately granted by the housing finance agency. The state core partners view the CSBG funds as the most flexible and therefore central to the state's desire to maximize flexible funds for communities.
The Department of Commerce decided not to include now CDBG funds because these funds are over-subscribed (the department uses a wait-list that more or less guarantees funding for eligible projects that could not be funded in a given application round due to insufficient funds). Additionally, since the CDBG program in Oklahoma primarily funds water and sewer projects, the department wants to wait to see the kinds of activities being funded by the integrated funds before considering the commitment of CDBG funds.
The integrated funding, except for the HOME reservation, will be pooled at and administered by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. The collaboration will implement integrated funding in 1999.
The state core partners discussed alternative models for governing the integrated or pooled funding. One approach would pool funds and then program by program move the funds to various specific local providers. But the core partners disliked the idea of bypassing the existing community structure. Another alternative would pool the program moneys at the state level at a single state agency but send the funds to a single community structure, which seemed a better option to the core partners. They tentatively decided that the fiscal agent should be a public agency. A neutral third party, designated by the community, would allocate the funds to specific providers for specific activities. The core partners want to see a community governance structure in place, with the identified stakeholders at table, really showing how these stakeholders will be serious partners. The community would have had to gone through a visioning and planning process with a needs assessment, identification of the issues they want to address, and identification of the strategy and the outcomes to be met.
Given a caseload reduction of over 50 percent in the state, what really is a value added of communities working together? Why pool money across agencies to give back to communities instead of letting each community put together applications for funding from each agency separately? The state core team believes the pooled money will fund a value-added piece. The integrated funding will not pay for anything for which current dollars are available for funding. Oklahoma is looking at spending dollars for systems development. The state's core team was uncomfortable with giving dollars for emergency assistance for clients. For example, transportation is a critical welfare-to-work issue, and three of the four pooled funds can help pay for transportation infrastructure development. The state team has to deal with some contract issues, and a key player here is the state's central contracts agency and whether it will permit pooled funding.
The integrated funding is not necessarily only for the four communities that have completed their planning tasks through the ITB. Other communities have done work and may be more ready to use funds. The core partners want to see a community governance structure that is ready, especially fiscally. The core partners are spending much time on five topics: governance, needs assessment, vision, planning strategy, and outcomes and evaluation, trying to develop baseline cut points to determine whether communities are ready. The informal Oklahoma planning team reviewed Georgia's community collaboration readiness matrix to see if a similar assessment tool could be used in the state(2).
At the state level, the pooled funds will be administered either by single entity or single agency. Probably one agency will have fiscal control over all the funds with a single common reporting structure that covers all programs. The core partners are trying to streamline the process as much as possible. An interagency evaluation team will select the communities that will be provided access to integrated funding.
The change in agency leadership in both the department of human services and the department of commerce raised the issue of how useful it is to have formal power, and that perhaps not everything can be done with informal power. The agency heads at the time the collaboration were aware of the collaboration, and both spoke at an early meeting of the collaboration team. However, their involvement was more one of acknowledging the collaboration and permitting it to proceed than of personal support and commitment. Now with two new agency heads, the collaboration team is facing a reality check, trying to gauge the two new leaders' support for the collaboration.
This changing set of circumstances has raised issues not only of how to obtain top leadership support (and its relative importance) but also of the dysfunction of key participant turnover in a collaboration and of the notion that collaborations need both to obtain create value for the collaboration per se but also to ensure that the participants can capture value as well.
The large collaboration appeared to operate successfully in the beginning, thanks in part to the use of a professional facilitator to produce an action plan. However, the large collaboration began to fade away and by mid-1998 the core partners put the work of the large collaboration on hold. While there may have been several reasons for the (at least temporary) demise of the large collaboration, at least one stands out. The large collaboration action plan could not sustain the active involvement of such a large collaboration comprised of many very busy people. The action plan had soon to tie to the work of the four pilot communities and then soon to many more communities. But as the planning work in the pilot communities fell behind schedule, getting off to laborious or at least slow starts, a disconnect appeared between the state level work of the large collaboration and the processes of the four pilot communities.
Although representatives of some members of the large collaboration did work in the four pilot communities, only the core partners, and especially the Department of Human Services, maintained a strong connection to the four pilots. Several of the key people among the core partner collaborators knew each other well and had a prior working relationship. The start-up level of trust among some of the key partners went a long way toward keeping working on the collaboration initiative. But this was not the case with the larger team and, simply put, the large collaboration was too large to sustain interest and commitment as the four pilot planning processes slowly spun out.
Second, the cascading of the state collaboration to the local planning collaboration was not as strong as it could have, and perhaps should have, been. While there were several meetings between representatives of the four pilot communities and the core partners or the larger state collaboration, only one to three people represented the pilot communities, the meetings were held in the state capital, and the pilot communities were often part of a larger agenda and meeting. The state collaboration did not move as a group into the four pilot communities to engage the local collaborations to promote the state vision and purpose and ensure acceptance by and integration with the local collaborations. The state core team engaged in a relationship with the four pilot communities that was more akin to a arms-length contractual agreement than of generating and sustaining a local collaboration.
Third, the Oklahoma collaboration struggled with local capacity issues. Part of this struggle dealt with the inability of the collaboration--largely for reasons beyond its control--to integrate building blocks into the community welfare-to-work planning. When new leadership in the Department of Commerce decided to minimize the building blocks effort and assign the regional offices new priorities, the bridges between the core partners and the home organizations was not strong enough to delay or work around this issue, perhaps in part because the leadership of the Department of Human Resources was also changing. Although the Department of Human Resources provided consultant services to the four pilots, it came to late and was not enough.
Finally, the core partners learned from what their experiences and made significant adjustments in the collaboration. They temporarily halted the work of and with the large state collaboration, tried (with mixed success) to add implementation activities to the four pilot planing processes, and, most importantly, came up with the concept of integrated funding and decided to move in this collaborative implementation direction rather than to a second phase of planning. The core partners had enough professional and mid-level management bridges built to permit agencies to carve out funding pieces from several programs and agencies to ensure eventually implementation of the integrated funding concept. Further, the core collaboration moved ahead even before the integrated funding was finalized to develop a local capacity schema to ensure that the communities that would be awarded funds would have the ability to use those funds well.
The staff from these four program areas that had earlier worked together on consolidated plan agreed to develop a collaboration to explore the role housing and community development resources could play in welfare reform. The team wanted to do a better job of coordinating not only planning but also resource allocation--to look comprehensively at the state's service delivery system. Housing and community development resources served low- and moderate-income people, but not the very low income levels of welfare recipients. The state collaboration wanted to see how it could foster the goals of "Work First," the state's welfare reform initiative.
The consolidated plan team added a welfare reform representative from the Department of Human Resources, and this revised set of participants became the core partners. After several meetings, the state team decided to add formally a representative from the JTPA program, which is also administered by the Department of Commerce. While the state team remained small during much of 1997, several team meetings included representatives from other agencies or programs. Before moving to work in its priority demonstration communities, the team members met collectively with their political-policy supervisors to ensure their continued support of the initiative. The North Carolina team continually strove to ensure that its broader community of interest was aware of their operations and accomplishments.
"To increase employment and earnings of households receiving Work First Family Assistance and those emerging from welfare so they may obtain adequate housing and needed services in order to reduce dependency on public resources leading to the most self-sufficiency possible."
Once the core team settled on a purpose statement, it moved to quantify desired objectives and outcomes. The state partners spent a great deal of time developing outcome statements, purpose, and objectives. Early on, they bought into the philosophy investment and outcomes. The core team debated whether to include quantitative standards, deciding that they would--with the understanding that the specific quantitative outcomes would have to be determined in conjunction with the local representatives who would be responsible for implementing activities and using state funds. The state team saw these quantitative objectives as starting points, but starting points that communicated their seriousness in outcomes and in taking an investment approach. The team's objectives include the following:
The core partners thought that the federal enterprise zone administrator, a three-county nonprofit coalition already operating in the demonstration area, would give the state an initial broad-based entry or contact. Although the team desired to treat the three-county area as one "project," conversations in August 1997 with key local representatives suggested that this might be difficult. After initial engagement with the local communities, the larger state collaboration expanded to include representatives from the local communities, including the executive director of the local (three-county) enterprise community managing organization and a representative of the relevant regional planning council. Although not from new state agencies, several other state agency representatives were added as well.
From July through November 1997 the state core partners concentrated on two activities. First, the team reviewed, both formally and informally, their work as a team. The result of this review was to adopt actions and behavior conducive to high performance teams, such as setting ground rules for team behavior, distributing within one week minutes of team meetings, setting agendas ahead of time, developing a work plan, and taking time at the end of each meeting to assess performance. Moving to this position significantly energized the state collaboration, which was beginning to dissipate as a cohesive entity due to all work being performed jointly at times of team meetings, and helped sharpen roles and responsibilities, tasks and actions.
Second, the team tried to get a better understanding of welfare reform in North Carolina. A key issue that made the team's effort more difficult was that the North Carolina legislature did not enact welfare reform legislation until the summer of 1977. North Carolina had a state-supervised, county-administered welfare system. Welfare reform further decentralized decision making so that the 100 local departments of social services became the key decision-making agencies within a very broad state policy framework. The legislation also permitted a number of counties to opt for very devolved implementation of welfare reform. As the team met and negotiated with its three local communities, each county tried to determine its own approach to welfare reform, although none of the three target counties pursued the devolution option.
State legislation also required each county to submit by January 15, 1998 a welfare reform plan to the state. Consequently, especially in Edgecombe County where the state HFA-financed rental housing development project is located, the state team was able to get local housing representatives involved in the committees preparing the county welfare plan. Each of the three county TANF plans mentions housing. As a small aspect of the collaboration, the commerce department provided assistance from its regional community planning staff to the county departments of social services for the preparation of the state-mandated county welfare reform plans.
Prior to the negotiations regarding the use of Community Development Block Grant funds in the pilot area but within the time frame of the collaboration, the commerce department funded through the its CDBG empowerment reservation a business incubator ($750,000 grant) that also contained funds for the development of a skill center.
Also earlier in the collaboration, the state's housing finance agency awarded HOME and tax credit funds for the construction of rental housing with support services. For the housing piece, the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency wanted to see if it could replicate a model of producing rental housing with a support service package and do it more efficiently, making it easier for a developer, especially a nonprofit. The HFA set aside Home and tax credit funds, providing nearly all the financing, and awarded the funds to a 36-unit rental housing construction application. The local department of social services provided, through TANF, case management and a community development corporation put together a service package with day care, basic education, and financial counseling (and hopes to add employment training). The rental housing development will also be the service delivery site. The support services money is not capitalized, but is for a finite period of time and funds a staff position. The nonprofit developer for the rental housing is also the developer of the business incubator.
Because of timing issues with the HFA's allocation of the low income housing tax credit, the HOME funds could not wait on the process the core partners were using with the localities, which focused on CDBG funds. Although both the need to commit HOME funds very early in the collaboration and the award of funds to a specific rental project in the demonstration area came as a surprise to the other core partners, the nonprofit developer was the same developer that would be implementing the CDBG-funded business incubator and skill center.
By the end of November 1997, the state core partners had met with all three counties, meeting with local government officials, including the county human service administrators and community representatives. In January 1988 the state team and the local representatives agreed to use the team consensus model of decision making and to try to perform similar to a high performance team to prepare the work program and funding outline of Halifax County's application for state implementation funds.
Because the process had been taking longer than anticipated, the commerce department required the three counties to submit by March 1998 a letter of intent for CDBG funds that would state their interest in applying for funds and preliminarily and generally indicate the activities for which they might seek funding. The primary purpose of this letter of intent was to inform key commerce department officials and others that the funds reserved for the demonstration were soon going to be awarded. Reserving any program's funds for a certain purpose makes these funds unavailable to other potential grantees or for other purposes and it is always politically difficult and administratively difficult (HUD, for example, tries to ensure that its grantees commit and expend money relatively soon after receipt of their line of credit) to have funds sit unused and generally inaccessible.
Subsequent to the receipt of the letters of intent, two core partners, whose participation had been slipping, no longer participated in the state team. The ESG and HOPWA representatives felt they had little opportunity to change the allocation of resources in their programs since a large portion of their funds maintained funding of prior grantees. Additionally, these representatives were the only program staff for these two programs and when they saw their programs could not assist the counties they determined their participation would be very cost ineffective.
The exit from the state collaboration of these two representative followed that of the state's TANF representative, who stopped participating in January 1998 in the state collaboration. The TANF representative was the second of two people to represent the TANF program on the state team. As the TANF program began implementation at the state level, the TANF agency began re-assigning personnel to new tasks and TANF representation on the state collaboration became unimportant. At the same time, county department of social services offices became key decision makers of how most TANF funds were to be used. The commerce department, the manager of the state collaboration, was never notified of the TANF agency's withdrawal from the collaboration.
As a result of these changes and the earlier award of HOME funds by the state housing finance agency representatives of the commerce department became the primary, and often the sole, state representatives to work with the counties after March 1998. Also around this time (late 1997), the collaboration manager lost a secretarial staff position that had been crucial to the dissemination of collaboration materials and shared objects.
The intensive face-to-face communications and hands-on work with the counties had a major positive result, but also surfaced a tension between the state and the local communities. The positive result was that for the first time in each of the three counties county managers and/or assistant county managers, county housing and community development staff (including public housing authorities), social services departments and public health agencies, and various community based organizations met to discuss a common issue (welfare to work under the state's welfare reform policies) and prepare a single application (single for each county) for funding. These diverse participants created good working relationships, often began performing as a real team, and learned much from one another.
Probably the most substantial issue the commerce department faced concerned the challenge of getting the local partners to understand that the state partners were not talking about just putting money into a budget to "serve, serve, serve." Rather, they wanted to invest in outcomes to see what was different at end of the funding process and expenditure of money. Traditionally, most state agencies go out to the localities with program packages, and localities and communities duly respond to obtain funds from a variety of these program boxes. But now the commerce department was telling the local and community representatives that they themselves were to design what they thought best gets at the state's previously developed and communicated outcomes, which themselves were somewhat negotiable. The state team, however, discovered that the local and community representatives found it very difficult to accept that the state was willing to let them design their set of activities and overall program. When it comes to delivering their services they are good, but the locals, especially the departments of social services, seemed unable to focus on outcomes, on end results.
Most of the early discussions indicated the local teams wanted to use CDBG funds primarily if not solely to fund staff positions that would then provide services to TANF clients. Consequently, the commerce department indicated that any request for funding staff would be limited to 50 percent over a two-year period of time (i.e., CDBG funds would not pay more than 50 percent of the costs of a position) and the applicant would have to show how the position would be fully funded for another two-year period once the two-year CDBG contract ended.
The state team repeatedly had to emphasize that it wanted the locals to undertake a collaborative action, while in the past everyone was doing their own separate piece. The state team stressed that it was important for them (the local collaborations) to tell the state the objectives they are trying to meet and how these are tied directly to the activities being proposed.
As the state partners pursued these discussions with the local collaborations, the county social services departments appeared to know little about the pre-TANF housing conditions or circumstances of their welfare recipients.
The state team had thought collaborations were already working at the local level, but discovered these local collaborations were really just doing their own little piece, not focusing on the total person and not wanting to assess whether their interventions made a difference. Consequently, the state negotiations with the local collaborations became very intense, and at one point, the commerce department seemed almost ready to pull the entire $800,000 of reserved CDBG funds. The state core partners concluded with hindsight that they much change at the local and community levels, perhaps too much to accomplish in a relatively very short period of time.
As a result of negotiation with the local collaborations, the initial state collaboration's performance target were amended to read as follows.
Outcome statement: The goal of the county Work First Partners Project is to increase employment and earnings of heads of households receiving Work First assistance and those emerging from welfare so they may obtain adequate housing and needed services in order to reduce dependency on public resources leading to the most self-sufficiency possible
Objectives:
The state team learned that the welfare reform-housing and community development connection requires intense involvement at the local project delivery level, which is very staff intensive at the state level. In each of the three counties the county social services departments played the lead role in developing the applications, and they are used to obtaining, processing, and spending money differently than what occurs through the CDBG program.
At the end of December 1998, the commerce department funded two of the four applications: Wilson County for $199,251 and Halifax County for $200,000. The department initiated further discussions with Edgecombe County and the COG, hopeful that adjustments in their applications would eventually result in grant awards. In assessing the four applications, the department weighed three criteria. "Community partnership," weighted 20 percent, considered the members of the partnership that developed and would administer the program, with special emphasis on Work First program participants. "Program design," weighted 50 percent, referred primarily to how well the proposed activities connected to and implemented the state collaboration's outcomes and objectives statements. "Financial feasibility" was weighted 30 percent, and this criterion primarily referred to the leveraging of other funds and commitment to future plans; the leveraged funds had to be committed at the time of application.
The department readily funded the applications from Wilson and Halifax counties because they were the most ready to go, with only very minor adjustments needed. In these two counties the county managers and/or assistant county managers sustained substantial participation in the local collaborations and were involved in the preparation of the applications. These counties also had cohesive support from senior management of the core local partners. Both proposed work programs include the use of a variety of assistance and resources not funded through the CDBG application.
The Halifax County primary partners are the county social services and health departments and a mental health center. The county's work program proposes to tie together three major activities and focus them on 30 hard-to-serve TANF clients. One major activity is an employer's benefits package, a well-organized collateral group of services prepared for employers that is designed to assist the Work First population. The package includes (1) state distressed area tax credits and federal work opportunities tax credits; (2) intensive support services (such as counseling on job acquisition, performance, retention and employer-employee relations; home visits; child care and transportation assistance; and mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment); (3) a wellness package that emphasizes preventive health care and includes maternal and child health care, family planning assistance, wellness programs, and primary health care; and (4) supervisory training for employers and managers of Work First employees designed to help employers successfully cope with the behaviors, attitudes, and outlooks of Work First participants that occur outside mainstream work environments.
The second major activity focuses on the expansion and development of small businesses (such as child care and transportation related to welfare to work and yard maintenance and janitorial work) and will also include a Work First temporary employment assistance agency, on-the-job training through JTPA, and skills training for both general and specific job skills through the local community college and/or the regional skills center. The third activity is an intensive and assertive outreach to Work First participants.
The Wilson County work program focuses on providing self-sufficiency support services to 50 Work First participants, of which 22 lack a high school diploma or GED and 15 have little or no work experience. These 50 families are now residing in one of two public housing developments managed by the Wilson Housing Authority. The operational partnership includes the county department of social services, the housing authority, the Opportunities Industrialization Center, and several community based organizations.
The activities that will be funded include client assessment and case management, job creation (through a piecework employment program that works with national marketing companies), and a faith-based partnership that will comprehensively (some proposed activities include adoption assistance and the provision of clothes for interviews and employment) focus on job retention and try to prevent participants from recycling back into welfare assistance.
Both applications follow the investment-outcomes format required by the commerce department. For example, one of the commitments of the Wilson County application is that 100 percent (of the 50) of the heads of households will be off TANF and employed by December 31, 2000; 80 percent will be earning a minimum wage and working at least 35 hours per week by December 31, 2000; and 10 percent will be earning above the minimum wage and working 35 hours or more per week by December 31, 2000. One example from Halifax County is that 20 percent of the participants will be employed by June 15, 1999 and 75 percent of the participants will be employed by September 1, 2000.
North Carolina is unsure about replication of the demonstration. The commerce department has made changes in its CDBG program to permit other communities to apply in the future for the same purposes as developed for the three county pilot area. The North Carolina collaboration plans to hold in the spring statewide meeting to talk about this and other collaborative efforts. Other communities apparently are interested.
Probably the major points in the North Carolina collaboration centered on moving a system from a process focus to an outcome or investment focus, on the constraints of federal rules and regulations, and on another aspect of the topic of trust. A dilemma the commerce department faced, and to an extent still faces, is the disconnect between the state collaboration's emphasis on investment and outcomes and the social services organizations focus on processes and services. The dilemma relates in part to where in cycles of change organizations and institutions find themselves. Generally, state and county welfare agencies had been judged solely on the basis of process until the advent of TANF in 1996. So, there was no basis, no foundation, tradition, or history of wrestling with outcomes. At the same time, North Carolina was one of the last states to come to welfare reform, and much of the bureaucracy seemed to resist until the last minute the start of a work first, non-entitlement welfare program. As organizations join to collaborate they will be at different places in performance and development; there are windows of opportunity as well as maximum points of confusion. These internal dynamics must be understood as organizations come together to collaborate.
The issue of federal statutory and rules constraints in North Carolina's case centered on the CDBG program and economic development. This specific issue has a larger representation: federal (and state) resources are allocated through programs, from narrowly circumscribed sets of activities to boxes of activities. Communities and localities are used to applying for resources through sets or boxes of activities. When a state gives a fairly blank slate to a locality and says, "Tell us what activities you want us to fund and how these activities achieve the outcomes we want," the locality often cannot well respond because there is no guidance, no sets or boxes of activities that it can plug into.
In North Carolina, the state found that localities could not respond easily or well to the blank slate and when they began to do so they often were asking for activities that did not fit well within the state's (and/or the federal government's) boxes. In this specific example, the localities were interested in employment support, yet the state's economic development category defined economic development, as does Congress and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, as job creation. The state was able to amend its program, but the example illustrates how confining definitions and standards can be.
The issue of trust is one between the state, which might give a blank slate to a locality, and the locality's response to that blank slate. If the state does offer a blank slate, to what extent can it respond to the locality by second guessing or declining to fund the activities proposed? What if the state agency has no confidence that the proposed activity will achieve the intended outcome while the locality is convinced it will?
The core collaboration was on the verge of dissipating when members adopted a high performance team model that re-invigorated the collaboration. The high performance team model was helped when the managing partner nearly simultaneously was able to obtain support staff to communicate an appropriate amount of situational awareness information. This support staff lasted for about a year and the communications provided to the local and state partners were very important; the collaboration's communications were adversely affected by the end of this support.
The impact of reduced situational awareness communication was less adverse than it might have been, however, because at this time the state collaboration was involved in considerable face-to-face meetings with the local collaborations. The cascading of the state collaboration to the local pilot areas involved much time and face-to-face communication on the part of both the state and local collaboration participants, especially on the part of the state collaboration manager. The state team worked very diligently to ensure that the local collaboration participants understood the purpose of the state collaboration and that their grant applications reflected the objectives of the state collaboration. The intense face-to-face communication was very necessary at this phase of implementation, and was relatively effective in ensuring a successful cascade to the local areas.
Although the core partners did make an attempt to build communication through multiple bridges, the effort was not as sustained or successful as it might have been. Perhaps the biggest loss was the loss of the state TANF agency participant, which occurred near the end of 1997. Although TANF administration in North Carolina is greatly decentralized to the county level--and the county social services departments were instrumental in each of the three county applications for CDBG funding--it is possible that the local collaborations may have missed an opportunity to access as part of their local initiatives funds administered by the state TANF agency.
The initiative to respond to COSCDA's RFP came from among staff of the Community Development Block Grant program. In responding, the CDBG staff touched base with several other state agencies who were to be part of the collaboration, such as social services, housing finance agency, health, and the regional Private Industry Council of the selected potential demonstration region of the state, the poor 12-county bootheel in southeastern Missouri. In addition, business development and the Job Training Partnership Act programs, housed in the Department of Economic Development, were part of this initial collaboration. However, this larger collaborative team was not as significantly involved in the collaboration as were members of North Carolina's and Oklahoma's. Compared to the other three states, Missouri's proposed collaboration rested heavily on a single agency, the Department of Economic Development, especially the CDBG staff, and had less initial social capital or trust at the start of the collaboration than those in the other three states.
The state selected the bootheel region for two reasons. First, it is the poorest region of the state. Second, several local collaborations were underway in this region on which the state desired to build. The three most prominent were a federal rural enterprise community, a Department of Justice Weed and Seed site, and a Caring Communities site, which was in its planning stages. It was one or more of these or similar local collaborations that the state desired to nurture. Thus, unlike the other three states, Missouri did not centrally focus on welfare reform.
The initial formal state collaboration meeting occurred in early December 1996 and the second occurred at the end of December. During these two meetings, a purpose statement and a action plan outline were developed. The mission statement follows:
"To focus public and private resources on assisting individuals and families to achieve long-term self-sufficiency within the context of community development. The initiative will produce models of integration and linkages among new and existing efforts in targeted communities in Southeast Missouri in the areas of (1) employment opportunities, (2) job skills, training, and education, (3) housing, and (4) support services."
However, two events intertwined to delay and ultimately revise the state's collaborative initiative. A January 1997 snowstorm closed state government on the day of the third scheduled meeting of the collaboration. In February, before the meeting could be re-scheduled, the lead agency, the Department of Economic Development, began a major reorganization that lasted for several months. The reorganization significantly affected, both organizationally and personnel-wise, the CDBG program and the division in which it was housed. Consequently, the state's collaboration stalled from January 1997 to July 1997.
The department decided in the summer of 1997 to continue with the collaboration but became uncertain about its initial direction, especially the focus on the bootheel region. The tentative selection of the bootheel became seen as problematic in two regards. First, for the past 20 years or so the state and federal government in various ways had given priority to the bootheel in allocating resources, yet there appeared to be little to show for it. Second, the department became increasingly skeptical of focusing a potentially significant increased level of resources into one part of the state. These concerns about the initial regional resource targeting decision matched another concern: if the state wanted to build on local collaborations, shouldn't the state level collaboration build on an existing collaboration rather than strike out on a entirely new collaboration.
In the fall of 1997, the Department of Economic Development became the seventh state agency to join the Caring Communities partnership. With its inclusion, the department determined that it would reorient its collaboration by initially keying on the 14 local Caring Community partnerships, building upon these collaborations, which were scattered throughout the state.
Second, the department decided to use CDBG's community revitalization strategy, a relatively new set of federal actions and permissions within the state CDBG program, as the vehicle to expand the nature of the local partnerships. The department felt more comfortable with this arrangement in part because it had made a major change in its 1997 allocation of CDBG funds to reward and facilitate local collaborations and was pleasantly surprised in August 1997 when several localities submitted extraordinarily good collaborative work programs for CDBG funding.
The department expected the use of the community revitalization strategy to alter the state's consolidated plan by making the strategy an integral part of local collaboration and CDBG decision making. If a local collaboration did not meet community revitalization strategy requirements, the state could develop its own standards for participation. However, Missouri expected to limit the program to areas that met the revitalization criteria (contain at least 70 percent low- to moderate-income persons and/or be a federally designated empowerment zone or enterprise community and/or have all census blocks with a poverty rate to 20 percent with at least 90 percent having a poverty rate of 25 percent).
The initiative would continue with the same goals and outcomes and would still build on local collaborations. The state collaboration agreed that the Caring Communities program best matched the intent of the state's collaboration, but also believed that other local collaborations would also be able to receive funds. The state collaboration's intent was eventually to prepare a significant pool of state agency discretionary funds that could be used to fund local partnerships that also integrate community revitalization strategies.
The re-started state collaboration, now focusing on the Caring Communities partnership, decided that much of the early vision and mission work done in late 1996 remained relevant, although the action plan outline, especially its timelines, would have to be thoroughly redone.(3)
The current Missouri community planning collaboration has four major components. One component is an informal community-based strategic planning initiative. Missouri has no state executive order or legislative mandate regarding community strategic planning. The informal state planning collaboration partners just agreed they needed to develop a common state-federal agency goal in regard to community strategic planning. The core collaboration partners, now primarily the Department of Economic Development, the Department of Social Services, and Central Missouri Electric Cooperative, first identified all the federal or state level individuals involved in local planning as well as the required content and methodology of community planning.
Subsequently, about 28 state and federal agency representatives (in addition to the core partners the larger collaboration included the state departments of agriculture, elementary and secondary education, health, mental health, natural resources (seven divisions of this department) public safety, emergency management, and the housing finance agency and the University of Missouri's university extension as well as the administration and treasurer's offices; the federal departments of housing and urban development, agriculture, public health services, corps of engineers, and commerce) conceptually agreed to a core five-step community strategic community planning process: needs assessment, visioning, action plan, implementation, and measurement and evaluation.
The planning collaboration did not further define strategic community plan because "we wanted each community to define within the five-step framework what it is they want to do." The Missouri planning collaboration created, published, and disseminated a tool kit of six resources regarding the five-step process. Communities can select the resources they want to use for one or more of the five steps. The state collaboration partners provided the tool kit at regional meetings with local and community representatives.
The Missouri collaboration also identified all current state-related planning organizations, such as Caring Communities, Missouri Community Betterment, university extension, and rural cooperatives--entities that have tried to bring planning content and practice to local communities. This group ended up being comprised of about 23 federal or state agencies. This larger informal collaboration then talked about the carrots that might be available to help communities undertake strategic planning. Representatives of these agencies became involved in the regional training that was used to highlight actual best practices of strategic community planning. The Missouri collaboration thought the only way to convince communities that this--following the consensus five-step core format--would work was to show them successful examples. The state collaboration team brought these actual best practices examples to local communities through regional meetings and workshops, and this process evolved into the statewide regional resource teams now being developed by the state.
These regional meetings represent the first time Missouri had brought together to the local level all the federal and state planning players. Heretofore, each federal or state agency that triggered or helped communities engage in local planning operated in silos, not understanding or even caring about the various multitude of planning interventions and requirements being placed on communities. Now, they are collaborating on developing a system to ease greatly the varying planning activities that localities and communities must go through to apply for various state or federal funds.
The second component is an attempt at state level to derive a commonly accepted outline for the first step of a strategic community plan, that of a needs assessment (sometimes called asset mapping) because the state collaboration realized all communities must undertake a needs assessment for meeting the plan requirements of many different state or federal programs--yet communities had to do the task differently for every agency. The Missouri collaboration met with 23 technical assistance and financing agencies to try to establish one common needs assessment document. While the collaboration did not want to develop one specific strategic planning process, it is developing one specific community needs assessment, with the localities and communities doing the rest of the steps as they chose. The Missouri collaboration's effort to develop a common needs assessment turned out to be more difficult than the collaboration manager anticipated. However, in February 1999, the state planning collaboration had agreed to develop by April 1999 a common needs assessment format and to circulate this format to the state's regional planning councils, to whom localities often contracted to prepare their plans, for review and comment.
The third component is to get all state and federal agencies who require or initiate local planning to accept a single planning document and process from a locality or community.
The fourth and final component will be to mold the work being done in the first three components into a statewide and department (Department of Economic Development) strategic plan, which would give incentive funding or increase the likelihood of funding for communities that use the strategic planning process developed through the collaboration. This community-based planning process and incentive funding will enhance not only the department's strategic outcomes, but also the outcomes set forth by the governor's Show-Me Results initiative.
The Missouri community planning collaboration acted on a premise that the Caring Communities methodology would not really best serve the communities because only seven state agencies are involved--it perceived the Caring Communities collaboration as not large enough because it missed several important players at state level as well as federal government agencies. The planning collaboration tried to create a comprehensive community-based planing system that drew in all relevant federal and state agencies. Caring Communities was at disadvantage because they had no planners or community development staff; the program started solely from the services side. The planning collaborative has a much larger network of players than Caring Communities. The planning collaborative wants to be able to be as holistic as possible, looking at much more than services.
One of the dilemmas the Missouri planning collaboration found itself in concerned the integration of its community strategic planning initiatives with those of Caring Communities. Once the Missouri collaboration decided to expand its scope beyond the Caring Communities initiative it began working with a much broader set of partners. Part of this broader community strategic planning endeavor did involve mid-level staff who were involved in Caring Communities. However, it wasn't until fairly late into its process that the informal planning collaboration put its mission centrally into the Caring Communities scope of operation and activity. At this time, the first- and second-tier agency heads, who join to run Caring Communities in almost a joint venture fashion, began to hear for the first time about the planning collaboration's work and the collaboration's desire to ensure that the Caring Communities planning process fitted within the planning collaboration's strategic community planning framework.
The planning collaboration's initiative to change the Caring Communities planning process came in horizontally in from the outside (middle-level managers in many state and federal agencies developed the planning collaboration and then the state middle-level managers brought it to the Caring Communities partnership agency heads)--it did not come as an early or internal agenda item, percolated within and worked on over time by the partnership.
The initial response of the Caring Communities partnership led to the Missouri planning collaboration agreeing to prepare a "white paper" on how its planning framework could be used by Caring Communities. The little arms-length dance that occurred raised three overlapping issues. One is the issue of tactics. Should the planning collaboration have made a more formal and much earlier entry into the Caring Communities process to ensure that the top agency level leaders in Caring Communities understood and supported the planning collaboration's objectives? Or was it appropriate for the planning collaboration to work with mid-level staff and complete much of their design and consensus work with the broader array of federal and state agencies before making formal entry into the Caring Communities partnership?
The second issue is trust. The Caring Communities partnership is a collaboration, with the core agencies having been involved in the program for several years. To an extent, the partnership operates as a joint venture because there is a separate pool of funds appropriated by the legislature for Caring Communities--Caring Communities does not pool the operational or program funds of its partners. Thus, some argue that Caring Communities operates more like a multi-faceted, independent, vertical silo than a fluid, flexible collaboration. Given its mode of operation, one can ask whether this more formal, perhaps even someone closed partnership--Caring Communities--can begin to work well with a more broad, much newer, more amorphous collaboration--the planning collaboration. Since trust is important for the success of any collaboration, it may take a bit of time and interaction to develop a trust level between the Caring Communities leaders and the planning collaboration.
The third overlapping issue deals with communication. The planning collaboration tended to involve mid-level, front-line workers, and operated informally. While some communication between the planning collaboration and the Caring Communities partnership occurred, it was mid-level to mid-level and the communication between the mid-level and agency heads was not strong. The communication has been such that the top-tier Caring Communities leadership has been only slightly aware of the planning collaboration. This disconnect shows how difficult it may be to communicate simultaneously well vertically and horizontally, especially when dealing collectively or singularly with vertical bureaucracies. The Missouri planning collaboration believes it could have done a better job of making connections, of communicating. Additionally, they have a concern that as they begin to formalize their informal process, they may alienate some Caring Communities participants. Earlier integration may have been able to avoid or at least diminish this risk.
As Missouri's informal planning collaboration broadened, it eventually included more participants than those of the other three state collaborations. However, the collaboration focused on a topic that had a great deal of similarity among all the organizations since they all required or encouraged communities to prepare local plans. Although these organizations may come at planning from different perspectives, e.g., transportation, natural resources, they all worked within a broad planning framework. This probably made the collaboration's work in Missouri easier than those in the other three states.
Near the end of 1998, the Missouri planning collaboration's work evidenced a problem caused by the lack of multiple bridges. Nearly all the participants in the planning collaboration were mid-level managers or professionals and while they may have worked well together they operated without much contact with senior managers. The absence of any senior-level bridges showed in the reception the planning collaboration's recommendations or work had in the Caring Communities partnership, comprised of senior state managers. Although the lack of a senior-level bridge may not have been a critical deficiency, with hindsight the planning collaboration probably would have approached the Caring Communities partnership both earlier and in a different style than it did.
Perhaps more than any of the three states, the Missouri core partners, especially the managing partner, illustrated the importance of flexibility and adaptability. They encountered many obstacles, some of these the result of collaboration action or inaction, some of them outside the collaboration's influence, and in each instance had to re-think and re-position the collaboration. In each change it made, it reduced or lessened the potential financial and operational impact of the collaboration partners so that the collaboration's resources and capabilities better matched the proposed objectives.
The Task Force evolved into a State Policy Committee comprised of the Department of Work-force Services (the Department of Workforce Services was created in 1997 through a major reorganization and combination of state government agencies: employment security, unemployment insurance, labor market information, JTPA, TANF, child care, food stamps, and the displaced homemaker program), its regional directors, eight participating public housing authorities, the Department of Community and Economic Development, the Utah Housing Finance Agency, the Utah CDC, and several other non-profit participants. The Committee has generally met quarterly since March 1997 to refine SUCCESS, set time frames for completion of the initiative, and incorporate other resources into the program.
Two other committees were also formed, both reporting to the State Policy Committee. The Casework Coordinating Committee, composed of PHA staff and Workforce Services caseworkers, meet as necessary (usually monthly), to work out barriers to implementation of SUCCESS, such as to request waivers of burdensome federal regulations and tackle issues related to the set-up of the program. The Data Tracking Committee, composed of staff from the eight (now seven) participating public housing authorities, Workforce Services regional caseworkers, and the University of Utah, initially met monthly to set-up and implement a data tracking system for SUCCESS which will be used to track client progress. Regular meetings were planned to refine data, resolve any problems and maintain regular communication. Both TANF and non-TANF households are being tracked as they enter and progress through the SUCCESS program (about 30 percent of SUCCESS participants are TANF clients).
All parties involved in SUCCESS view the data tracking system as a very important component because it gathers appropriate base-line information on each client which can be used to monitor the results of each families' efforts in reaching self-sufficiency. Data characteristics such as average rent, total rental payments, total families on public assistance, annual income, types and amounts of public assistance received, and balance of each SUCCESS participant's escrow account will be collected. These reports will aid in case management and provide a tool for program restructuring and evaluation. The agreement to develop the data reports came about through many meetings and discussions among the PHAs, state officials and the University of Utah.
As SUCCESS became operational, several regional committees were created, comprised of regional DWS staff and local housing authority staff, to handle decisions regarding operational detail on a region by region basis.
As public housing units become vacant, PHAs will make these units available to families actively participating in these programs by adopting local preferences allowing such participation to be a priority for tenant selection. State FEP caseworkers are assigned to provide case management to families participating in SUCCESS. Together, the FEP case-workers and the local PHAs have formed partnerships to provide a continuum of employment-focused services, including case management, employment services, and affordable housing. Each client works with a caseworker to develop a self-sufficiency plan that includes employment, education, and market-rate housing, including homeownership, goals. Necessary services, such as child care and transportation, are also arranged as part of the case plan.
Participating PHAs have established resident escrow accounts where the tenant's portion of increased rent due to increases in earned income will accumulate and be credited to them after successful completion of their case plans. Escrow accounts can be used for any activity that furthers the family's goal towards self-sufficiency, including home-ownership. Escrow accounts that are aimed at eventual homeownership will be matched by a "soft second" loan (0-percent deferred loan that must be repaid when a home is sold) from the state appropriations to Utah's Olene Walker Housing Trust Fund. In addition, the Utah Housing Finance Agency will make available a downpayment and closing cost contribution equal to 4 percent of the loan amount to assist the family with the purchase of a home. For those participants who choose to rent in the private market, the Utah Housing Finance Agency will ensure that SUCCESS participants are given priority to rent any available UHFA tax credit rental units. The Utah CDC will also help participants who choose homeownership by giving these families first priority to purchase homes rehabilitated or newly constructed by the CDC. In addition, SUCCESS families will also be eligible for a down-payment assistance grant provided by the CDC and a $1,000 allowance to purchase household appliances.
The State CDBG Policy Committee (a separate committee from the collaboration) approved the allocation of $49,000 to SUCCESS to be used to clean up credit problems of families in non-entitlement areas who are trying to qualify to purchase a home. If the initiative proves successful, more state CDBG funds may be allocated in the future to assist additional families. A self-appointed committee composed of State Policy Committee has been formed to develop the eligibility criteria for the CDBG credit assistance program.
The same consortium of housing authorities participating in SUCCESS submitted an application to HUD in March 1997 for its Moving to Work Demonstration Program. Moving to Work is a three-year demonstration program that provides increased flexibility to PHAs in the administration of their public and assisted housing funds. The Utah Consortium's application was approved in October 1997. The approval grants the consortium much latitude in restructuring their public housing programs, which will ultimately help them manage the SUCCESS initiative. Moving to Work will allow individual housing authorities to choose from a menu of options which could include: establishing flat rents, term limits for public housing, and escrow accounts for all participants among others. While the consortium estimated an end of 1998 starting date, the program's start has been delayed, due primarily to escrow account funding issues with HUD, and the start date is now estimated to be mid-1999.
In part related to the personnel turnover, department case workers began at times to feel overwhelmed. The legislation creating the department mandated very general job descriptions for most positions and the case managers, called "employment counselors," were in the central jack-of-all trades position. The counselors could not specialize in SUCCESS work nor avoid their other work, which, they were sometimes informed, took priority. The counselors continued to provide case management assistance to SUCCESS clients (per the department's early agreement with the local public housing authorities) after these clients stopped receiving public assistance; but because the clients no longer received public assistance the department considered these cases closed--consequently, many counselors had many more cases than what the department's tracking system indicated. This happened often because the department's welfare to work (family employment program) time frame is three years, while SUCCESS' is five years.
The new leadership at DWS eventually acknowledged the case manager workload issue and committed at the end of 1998 to re-examine workload distribution. DWS also re-affirmed its commitment to continue joint training for case workers in the department and in the local public housing authorities, where some personnel turnover also occurred.
A second issue dealt with confidentiality. By the end of 1998 the housing authorities and department workers remained unclear about the kinds of information that could be shared by the department with housing authorities. Informally, the housing authorities and the department routinely shared case management goals and client employment plans and rent and income information. However, the housing authority case managers also wanted to explore access to the department's computer system. Although a read-only access apparently occurred with one major housing authority, to the benefit of both the housing authority's and the department's case managers in the region, the issue remained ambiguous and unsolved through 1998. Access is likely not to be forthcoming because the department's huge computer base contains many more clients and information than what may be necessary for SUCCESS.
A third issue concerned data tracking. The data tracking committee stopped meeting regularly in June 1998 and tried a different approach to data tracking involving fewer meetings and greater reliance on individual housing case workers compiling and submitting monthly reports. This change resulted in data sharing lapses between some PHAs and the University of Utah. Additionally, instances of mis-coding (primarily the housing codes, which determines whether a family is in SUCCESS) occurred at both the department and public housing authorities caused in part by personnel turnover, the absence of training, and the unavailability to SUCCESS participants of the code list. Data problems were more prevalent in the smaller housing authorities. The data tracking committee started meeting regularly again in January 1999 and along with the delivery of more training appeared to be on the way to solving the problem.
By early 1999, 20 SUCCESS clients had "graduated" and 10 clients had become homeowners, with the median income of these new homeowners being about 50 percent of area median income, and the average home price being $117,400. The Utah Community Development Corporation, a statewide CDC, was the manager of the state trust fund monies for SUCCESS. The Olene Walker Housing Trust Fund expended $63,000 in one-for-one matching of the escrow accounts (the state match ranged in size from $3,500 to $14,000) for SUCCESS families from $500,000 set aside from the Trust Fund for SUCCESS.
Relative to homeownership, the state policy committee agreed at the end of 1998 to require home ownership training for SUCCESS families prior to their accessing state funds for homeownership assistance and to examine the policy of the housing authorities holding onto escrow accounts after they had completed SUCCESS but before they are ready to purchase. The housing authorities now hold the escrow account when requested by the SUCCESS participant to ensure that families receive a state match even if they do not purchase a home as they exit from SUCCESS.
By the end of 1998, no SUCCESS family had used state housing finance agency assistance. The state policy committee agreed to provide training to DWS counselors on the assistance available from the housing finance agency and to develop a standard tax credit contract that could be used by all housing authorities, as several developers were having difficulty with inconsistent contracts among the housing authorities.
The state policy committee agreed to delay expanding SUCCESS to Section 8 families primarily because of the large volume of potential Section 8 clients. The Utah collaboration, however, is looking forward to being able to use Section 8 vouchers for homeownership, a federal policy change expected to become operational in 1999.
Finally, an expanded partner base became a tangential benefit of Utah's SUCCESS initiative. By the end of 1998 several banks had expressed interest in working with SUCCESS, probably using the newly created Utah Community Reinvestment Corporation created by 9 banks. Further, five Salt Lake City area banks offer the HOME$tart program, a grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle that provides up to $3,000 in match funds for people whose incomes are 80 percent or less of median and want to purchase a home, and are beginning to use this program with SUCCESS families.
The collaboration organized itself well, creating committees to do the important operational work, yet maintaining a state policy committee for policy overview purposes. For the most part, these committees, especially the regional committees and the case worker committee, met frequently and regularly. All committees set agendas and wrote and disseminated minutes of their meetings, permitting all participants to keep track of progress and issues. The committees worked to provide an appropriate balance between extensive and broad and narrow interfaces. Roles and responsibilities were well defined and clarified over time as issues arose.
Another function of the committee structure and meetings was the building of bridges at all three levels, senior management, mid-level management, and professional/technical. These multiple bridges proved valuable as the collaboration responded to significant personnel turnover, being able to sustain enthusiasm and commitment among all the partner organizations. Additionally, the policy committee maintained the involvement of senior managers and permitted the timely addressing and resolution of policy-related issues.
Because all key participants were engaged in statewide the collaboration, Utah experienced few cascading problems. The data tracking, regional working, and case worker committees helped significantly in the cascading of the collaboration to mid-level and operational personnel. The only problem, and it appeared to be very minor, dealt with the some problematic interaction with the smaller housing authorities, which may have been more the result of scale and expertise then the cascading of the collaboration. The regional committees and the flow of information to and from the other committees helped the collaboration successfully cascade throughout the entire state.
While a data tracking problem became apparent in the last half of 1998, it appeared to be fixed by early 1999. The Utah collaboration is collecting much more data than the collaborations in the other three states. As the outputs and perhaps even outcomes become known, the Utah collaboration may be able to expand its problem-solving scope.
One recent significant change has been the development and replication of various "one-stop" centers. In some states, the one-stop effort has been very comprehensive and innovative. In Oklahoma, where there are about 50 one-stops, the collaboration centers on employment support, but the Oklahoma core partners nonetheless believe Job Training Partnership Act participants need to make a paradigm shift. As the Oklahoma collaboration begins to implement its integrated funding arrangement, one possible option is to rely heavily on the local workforce boards. Some state collaboration partners are very reluctant to move in this direction unless the JTPA (now WIA) participants change significantly. In Missouri, for example, the one-stops are numerous but are still missing big pieces, such as resources for and a focus on disabled people. The one-stops still perhaps too often see their role as only that of job placement, and concentrate on their own specific product. One-stops may be changing this, but in the eyes of some the local boards must become more broad-based.
An effective one-stop center can provide common intake, and this approach can help avoid a narrow, and oftentimes self-defeating, targeting to TANF clients. People who are moved into employment and have a TANF label attached to them often move into a hostile work environment for that reason. Their entry into the work world may be easier if they get job ready and are similarly moved through the employment system along with everyone else. Also, regardless of how innovative, broad-based, or representative local workforce boards are or are not, they do bring in employers and many other key actors in the community.
The technical assistance and capacity building issue probably stood out as the most important issue. This issue relates both to the state level but most especially to the local or community level. The personal skills so important for effective collaboration, such as facilitative leadership, high performance team skills, interpersonal and computer-mediated communication skills, and consensus and negotiated decision making are not generously found in government agencies, whether at the state or local level. Further, many communities as well as state agencies have little or no experience in working with diverse organizations to integrate multiple programs for purposes of complex problem solving. Finally, to the extent that state technical assistance and capacity building activities exist they tend to be program or project-focused, are often reactive and tactical rather than strategic and proactive, and their intervention is usually short term and ad hoc.
The state participants strongly acknowledged the need for technical assistance and capacity building at the local and community level and strongly advocated the desirability of establishing a technical assistance and capacity building initiative be explicitly designed to support and reinforce collaborative community development initiatives. But they also realized that this is much more easily said than done. Technical assistance and capacity building must almost be individually tailored to each community, which includes recognizing that rural and urban needs, including how the state collaboration engages the local community, are probably very different. States need to re-think their technical assistance and capacity building activities to help prepare communities and their leaders, as well as state organizations, for collaborative community development and complex problem solving.
The second issue is in a way part of the first issue: the need for frank and candid dialogue and discussion based on trust and the need to identify and appropriately communicate with the community of interest. The lack of communication or mis-communication can be very problematic. Sometimes it may be the lack of resources that prevent situational communication from occurring; sometimes communications may seem unimportant and soon no one pays it any attention, and then no one pays the collaboration any attention. Sometimes the communication problem is less within the collaboration than between the collaboration and its community of interest. Sometimes the communication problem centers on not understanding that each cascade, especially the engagement of a local collaboration, requires a significant re-energizing of communication. Sometimes the communication problem is between each participating partner and his or her parent organization and then back within the parent organizations. Sometimes individuals fail to communicate with one another as they should because they lack skills or dislike confrontation in favor of papering over disagreement in hopes they eventually fade away or remain unimportant.
The many causes of and opportunities for poor communications makes one realize all the more the critical importance of effective communication. This is a fact of collaboration from which collaboration managers especially cannot escape.
The final key issue is the bedeviling nature of programs. States struggled with the delivery of different funding streams that have specific constraints and different timing cycles relative to when funds are available. Oklahoma came up with its integrated funding concept because the partners otherwise could not figure out how to deal with providing synchronized resources to communities. Regardless of how well their state team performed, North Carolina found it impossible to coordinate HOME and CDBG funding and was unable to find a way to access ESG and HOPWA funds. The other states in the collaboration recognize the pooling concept as a potentially good way to overcome the piece-by-piece and painstaking cobbling of programs.
A last observation on issues from an outside observer deals with complex problem solving and organizational learning. Complex problem solving is not easy. Each of the states' alliance partners basically adjusted their outputs: through the collaboration experience, most partners adjusted their outputs to serve better the shared, common purpose of the collaboration. Utah showed, additionally, some evidence of output synchronization: through their collaborative interaction the partners produced outputs in a patterned, connected, sequenced fashion. Synchronization in Utah will become increasingly important as more public housing residents graduate from SUCCESS. Oklahoma's integrated funding approach, which will become operational in 1999, presents an opportunity for output syn-chronization as well as output fusion. The extent to which Oklahoma's integrated funding moves up the complex problem solving scale, from output adjustment, to output synchronization, to output fusion, may depend on how well the local collaborations address complex problems and on how innovative or creative state agencies can be with the concept of integrated funding.
To an extent, North Carolina and, more so, Oklahoma made early efforts to access and use data and analysis, and Utah is committed to collecting and analyzing data at the back end. But the absence of good data, the relative lack of experience in analysis, and the time pressures to get funds committed helped minimize these efforts. Using the language of part 1, all states implicitly tended to follow a power approach to complex problem solving where delivery organizations identified the problems and the interventions.
While there is little question that many collaboration participants learned a great deal as they went through the collaborations, they learned as they muddled-through. And one wonders the extent to which any member of the home organizations of the participating individuals learned as well.
Learning, individual as well as organizational, must become a more conscious, explicit objective of collaborations, and organizations need to adopt structures and processes that maximize learning. For in the long run, collaborative community development is about complex problem solving and learning. As we develop learning organizations and become perpetual learners, we must become accustomed to acquiring, studying, and applying information as it is needed for complex problem solving.
For each rating topic the assessment has several criteria and benchmark indicators that are used to rate a community from a low of one point to a high of ten points. The low benchmark is labeled "beginning" and the high benchmark is labeled "proficient." The one or more benchmarks in between are labeled "intermediate."
The following identifies the five rating topics and the benchmarked sub-topics within each topic; however, to keep this endnote brief only two markers are illustratively provided.
Governance
Marker-- "proficient" = Collaborative membership includes representatives of parents, grassroots organizations, business, clergy, and local government. Members and participants reflect the diversity of the community in race, ethnicity, age, gender, point of view, and influence.
"Beginning" = public agencies comprise the membership.
Planning
Marker-- "proficient" = A single, strategic, countywide plan with baseline data, benchmark objectives, and multiple strategies is being implemented through the collaboration and has ownership from both collaborative members and the community at large.
"beginning" = A plan has been developed by a small group in response to a grant announcement.
Financing
Evaluation
Service Strategies
Proposals must be postmarked or delivered to COSCDA no later than March 14, 1997
This request for proposals describes how states may request the use of resources available from the Council of State Community Development Agencies to help develop or nurture a collaboration that addresses the housing and development-related needs of lower-income people and communities. A grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to COSCDA through the National Affordable Housing Training Institute permits COSCDA to make resources available for this purpose.
The RFP contains a statement of purpose that identifies the requirements of the assistance, followed by a section that states the required contents of the response. It also contains a description of the selection process and a summary of the immediate post-selection process.
COSCDA has tried to keep to a minimum the work required to prepare the RFP. While the RFP permits a great deal of flexibility, a state should ensure that it can commit to the following minimum requirements before preparing its response to this RFP.
1. Themes. The RFP response must identify a central, priority theme around which the collaborative policy and program design will occur. This theme will be the initial organizing focal point for the collaboration. While a state may identify any theme, it should consider the following: COSCDA will select at least one state that chooses a theme related to either (1) welfare reform, (2) self-sufficiency or economic opportunity, or (3) prevention and early intervention.
2. Home-centered collaboration. The HOME program must be part of the state's collaboration.
3. Use of the CDBG and/or McKinney programs. Either the CDBG or one or more of the McKinney homelessness programs must be part of the collaboration.
4. Involvement of a state human service agency. One or more of the state's human service agencies must agree to participate in the collaboration. The state will determine the specific nature of this agency and the activity(ies) that will be included. However, unless a strong argument can be made otherwise, this agency must focus on one or more of the following: education, welfare, child abuse/care/protection, or mental health/alcohol and substance abuse.
5. Consolidated plan. The state must acknowledge that its policy and program design work will involve and relate to its consolidated plan, as prepared or as to be amended.
6. Collaborative team. The state must identify its initial collaborative team, which at a minimum will include those who have supervisory or policy management responsibility for the HOME program and the CDBG and/or one or more McKinney programs, and for the human service activity(ies) selected by the state.
7. Participation in national workshop. The state must agree to participate in COSCDA's national workshop that will be held toward the end of its contract with HUD (the workshop will probably occur in early 1998). This participation must involve at a minimum representatives of the major programs and activities involved in the collaboration.
1. Brief description of collaborative initiative
The initiative may relate to a pilot or demonstration program or to an effort that will examine making changes throughout the entire scope of several programs. A state has a great deal of flexibility in determining the nature of its collaboration. The description must (and please identify each section and follow this sequence in your response) include the following sections:
A. State the primary theme around which the collaboration will focus and briefly explain why this theme is important to the state.
B. State the goal and intended accomplishments (what may success look like?) of the collaboration.
C. Identify the lead agency for the collaboration and the agencies and programs that definitely will be part of the collaboration and, as well but separately, the agencies and programs that may be part of the collaboration.
D. Briefly describe the tentative roles/contribution of the programs (that have been identified above as definitely being part of the collaboration) in the collaboration.
E. Identify the geographical area(s) of the state intended to be affected by the collaboration.
F. Briefly describe the tentative intended role of non-state agency organizations and institutions (such as local governments, community based organizations, the business community, public housing agencies, citizen groups) in the design and implementation of the collaboration.
G. Identify the tentative approximate time-frames of the major interim steps or products of the collaboration starting from the month of collection to a possible time frame for the allocation of resources.
H. Briefly describe the proposed, albeit tentative, use of resources that COSCDA can make available (e.g., technical assistance, consultants, some travel funds, materials) and the specific issues or topics or processes that the state believes are best suited to be addressed by these resources.
J. Identify the initial collaborative team by name, title/responsibility, and agency, and designate the initial team leader, including her or his telephone and fax numbers as well as E-Mail.
The description (items A through J) should be no longer than 3,500 words, about seven single-spaced pages.
2. Background/rationale for the collaboration
The response should describe and explain the prior events or experiences that have led the state to respond to this RFP and the relationship between this background and the proposed collaboration.
The background statement should be no longer than 1,000 words (about two single-spaced pages.
3. Additional Resource Statement
If the state intends to complement the resources provided through this RFP, e.g., state funds for focus groups, consultants/travel (other than what will be provide through COSCDA), the response should identify these resources and their approximate dollar value.
4. Signature of participation
The response must include signed statements of participation/involvement agreements by the heads of agencies or their designees who have the authority to enter into memoranda of understanding. These letters should express familiarity with the substantive content of the response.
COSCDA may informally consult with national associations that represent the programs and activities included in the response.
COSCDA intends to make its decision and notify the selected states within two weeks of the RFP response due date. COSCDA intends to inform the states that were not selected of the reasons why they were not selected.
Once a state has been selected, COSCDA will undertake a brief reconnaissance of the state, reviewing recent materials and documents and discussing issues with state representatives. Subsequent to this review and discussion, COSCDA will provide each state with broad options for a collaborative policy and program design and process. An initial site visit will settle the fundamental broad aspects of the collaborative design. As work progresses, a work program will evolve that will include at least the following: (1) the anticipated changes, or at least the direction of these changes, in the state's HOME and/or CDBG and/or McKinney programs; (2) the relationship between these changes and the potential changes in the other state programs; and (3) the process of engaging localities and the local delivery system in final design and implementation of the collaboration.
COSCDA's role will largely revolve around two tasks. First, COSCDA will prepare one or more consulting teams for the state-based work program. These consulting teams will be composed of several people representing one or more of the following: (1) COSCDA staff; (2) peer resources from other states; (3) staff from national public interest, trade, advocacy, or professional organizations or regional or national intermediaries; (4) "practical" academics or researchers; and (5) for-profit consultants. COSCDA anticipates that this team(s) will make at least two site visits to each selected state. Second, COSCDA staff will frequently communicate with each state's collaborative team, offering advice and providing assistance as necessary, e.g., obtaining relevant materials from other states, meeting with federal officials.
A work group is not a team and cannot become a team. A work group interacts primarily to share information among its members; it helps its members perform their individual tasks. A work group has no sense of mutual accountability and faces no performance challenge.
A pseudo-team begins to take on the nature of a team because there is some interest in sharing a performance goal and a common purpose. However, this interest is very minimal and the team as a whole is not focused on collective action.
A potential team does face a collective performance need and has a much better sense of itself as a team than a pseudo-team. However, it has little sense of collective responsibility in large part because its goals are unclear (i.e., the goal is confusing or ambiguous or members of the team have different interpretations of the goal) and the team has not developed a common approach, a joint method, of achieving the team's purpose.
A real team is committed to a common purpose, a common goal, a common approach, and a real team holds themselves mutually accountable. A real team has all the basics of a team and can perform as a team.
A high performance team has the basic characteristics of a real team but has them more intensely to the point that it behaves qualitatively different than a real team; it also has several other qualities that tend to make its performance more effective than a real team.
Most group process or team facilitators suggest that an effective team has five to 10 members; some suggest that a team can be effective with four to 12 members; and others (very few) say a team can be effective with up to 20 members. A team with fewer than four or five members does not have the diversity and complementarity necessary for success. A team with more than 12 (perhaps 20) members is too large for several reasons: (1) developing consensus becomes much more difficult; (2) it becomes easier for people to slack off, not to work or participate with any degree of intensity or regularity, and (3) it is more difficult to develop and sustain a high level of commitment to the team's purpose and action plan.
2. Self-directed/empowered - A high performance team determines its own work plan; it has participative and focused leadership; it continually learns and improves; and it involves everyone. Team members hold each other accountable. They often select their own leadership and usually operate on a consensus basis.
3. Trust/Respect/Support - The team's communication among its members is open, spontaneous, and shared. A high performance team values diversity of opinion and encourages risk-taking and creativity. A high performance team well handles confrontation and conflict (which is likely to occur given the nature of the communication among team members), in part because it sees conflict and confrontation as opportunities to explore new ideas and to focus on common ground and in part because the confrontation is not personal but deals with ideas and opinions related to the team's goal and purpose. Disagreement is expressed and discussed civilly. Meetings are informal and relaxed.
4. Self-Assessment - A high performance team always monitors itself. It regularly assesses its performance both internally and in regard to its external relationships. High performance teams usually setaside the last 15 minutes of each meeting to identify what worked and what didn't work during the meeting and to identify any corrected action that may need to be taken. Also, high performance teams often use every third or fourth meeting to review progress to date, comparing their performance and accomplishments to their mission and work plan and other expectations.
5. Good External Communication - A high performance team knows its community of interest (i.e., organizations, people, etc.) who while not team members are important to the success of the team. The team builds credible external relations with its community of interest.
1. mission/purpose - a clear, concise statement of the team's purpose.
2. tasks - a clear statement of the major tasks the team needs to take to accomplish its purpose, along with a time frame, especially the completion date, and individual assignments for the key tasks.
3. scope or boundaries - a statement that indicates what is appropriately within the purview of the team so that the team knows its boundaries or constraints.
4. goals/objectives - a statement of the goals or objectives the team needs to achieve if it is to achieve its purpose; the goal or objective statement should include quantitative targets or should at least be stated in terms that are measurable. Without such a statement, it is difficult for a team to determine how it is performing.
5. outcomes - a statement that describes the expected outcomes or achievements that will occur if the team successfully accomplishes its purpose; the consequences of team success.
6. members - the names of the team members with their addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, and e-mail addresses.
In addition to the above elements, team charters often include one or more of the following.
7. resources - a statement of the resources that will be provided to the team, including the provision of any training that team members may need.
8. management commitment - a statement that defines or identifies the commitment of upper-level management to the team.
9. background or context - a statement that provides basic information regarding the background or context of the team, which helps to explain why the team may have been created and why it is addressing the problem on which it is working.
10. ground rules or meeting agreements - a listing of the norms or agreements that team has made regarding how it will operate and what are the process obligations of each member of the team, sort of the rules of the game.
The following is an example of an actual team agreement:
The action plan should not be considered an unchangeable document. Every so often the team should review its action plan to determine whether it should be revised. The action plan also serves as a tool to help the team monitor performance. But the team should remember that planning and implementation tend to be iterative.
Second, a summary of a team meeting should be produced for each team meeting and distributed no later than a week or so after the meeting. Meeting summaries should be clear, crisp, and very readable. They should include the following information: (1) date and place of meeting, (2) list of meeting attendees, (3) decisions made, (4) actions taken (e.g., team assignments) (5) issues or problems raised, perhaps to be resolved or solved later, (6) supporting documents/materials reviewed by the team, and (7) name of team recorder for that meeting.
Communication among the team during the interim of team meetings is very important. If one or more members of the team discovers or completes something important to the team, he or she should communicate that to the team and not wait until the next team meeting. (It would be helpful if each team member printed multiple labels with her or his address on them and distributed a page or so of labels to each team member; a team member should have the telephone numbers of other team members as part of his or her one-touch or frequently called number system; e-mail addresses of team members should be in an e-mail address book.) Meeting handouts should be sent to those who were unable to attend the meeting; and these people should be briefed as to what happened at the meeting.
Often, teams will distribute at the start of a meeting a summary of activities that occurred since the last team meeting and may start the meeting giving everyone a chance to digest what has happened since the last team meeting and to refocus on the team.
Internal reasons why teams fail generally include (1) personal conflict, (2) power struggles, and (3) poor communication. Additionally, the absence of a clear purpose, one that is bought into early by all members of the team, is the primary reason why some teams never get off the ground, floundering from the very beginning.
This phasing of team growth illustrates that team work often is not easy and helps explain the importance of a good team charter and why often 70 percent of a team's work is completed in the last 30 percent of the team's life. It also helps to explain why a facilitator is sometimes essential, primarily to ensure a good start and to help a team move past its storming phase into its norming phase. It is also helpful to note that team growth is not necessarily linear; that is, a team can at any time move from its current phase back into an earlier phase. Again, a good team charter, meeting rules, and leadership can prevent this slippage from occurring.
Finally, the team growth process helps one recognize that all teams must well deal with three distinct processes. They must be able to perform task process well (that is, set an agenda and benchmarks and time schedules). They must be able to perform maintenance process as well (that is, handle team dynamics and interpersonal relationships among team members). They must be able to handle task performance well (that is, they must provide a good product within the expected time frame). Handling these three distinct processes requires balance; an effective team cannot concentrate on one or two of them to the exclusion of others.
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