[MUSIC] Continuing on with the thing of you are not to alone. How could you be the last to learn? Let's take a look at collaboration and all of its possibilities. Why would we want to collaborate, when it's so much easier and less time consuming to just go it alone? Well, there is an old saying, if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together. Collaboration has four main incentives. The first is, it makes best use of scarce resources. Secondly, it can increase our overall impact. It can profoundly increase that impact. Third, it eliminates duplication of effort. And finally, it can improve our reputational capital and help us reach into new constituencies, new audiences. Collaboration for our sector can achieve what competition does in the for profit sector. It can make our sector more efficient. Successful collaboration is like any relationship, it takes practice, it takes patience, and it takes trust. There are different types of collaboration, different types of investment time, energy, and organizational resources go along with the different types, and you can think of it as a spectrum. You might expect it goes from sharing resources through discrete activity, maybe a joint marketing campaign, something that's time-delineated. To a strategic alliance that's longer, that has a specific longer shared objective. To a joint venture, which will have contractual obligations for both parties and cost and revenue implications for both sides. To a full merger, and mergers are very rare in our field. They're usually driven by an attempt to create economies of scale and very few merger conversations in our field actually end up at the altar. Form follows function here. The type of collaboration you're considering should meet the need that you want to address. And, it takes practice, as we've noted. So what might make a collaboration successful? And what do you as a leader need to plan for and take into account when considering collaborating with others? Well, good collaborations are built on trust, familiarity with someone else's organizational culture, and they have to have the spare capacity to make some work. We're back to that capacity issue. All of these things we're talking about, you have to actually have the space, time and energy to do them. To impprove the odds of a good collaboration, you wanna make sure that you're communicating regularly, that you're communicating clearly, and you're building trust at every step in the process. And it can be slower than at first feels efficient. Both parties should be improving their own internal capacities. Both parties should be improving their competitiveness in the market place for resource, or even audiences. Even if they're doing this at different paces. That's what a good collaboration is, both parties are benefiting in a variety of ways from the collaboration. Everyone one involved should be willing to cross bridges when we get to them and has to demonstrate a degree of flexibility. Again, the issue of organizational capacity cannot be stressed too highly. It's very, very difficult to be flexible if you feel so pushed for time and resource. And when we talked about feedback loops earlier, when you're collaborating with someone, you have to have a shared ability to benefit from feedback loops. There are dimensions of social capital involved in any collaboration and they're illustrated here. So you can see that we think about the spectrum, there's a spectrum of trust, where you a limited trust to very deep trust, and the deeper the form of collaboration, the more comprehensive it is, the more you need to move along to the right end of the spectrum. So if you're talking about a very belief collaboration that you're gonna be doing with someone, well, you can see, trust needs to be here, but it doesn't need to be perhaps all-encompassing. If you're talking about going all the way to a merger or some sort of joint venture trust needs to be very deep. So this is just an illustration that helps you think about the different types of social capital that you're building as you move towards more collaborative ventures. So, who makes a good partner and how can you know? Well, you have to do partner screening. You have to have some form of due diligence. Does the partner have the right capabilities and resources? Do you have the right capabilities and resources? Is this the moment to be starting on a collaboration? What is your potential collaborator's strategy? You need to understand what their business strategy is, and they have to be prepared to share it with you. Do they have a track record with this kind of thing? How important is the collaboration to your potential partner? That's very, very important to figuring out what the chances are for success. It has to matter to you, it has to matter to them. So what are the big questions? First of all, what's the value of the activity that's being jointly created and shared? What are the resources that you're gonna devote to it? What is the scope of this activity, and what are its overall ramifications? These things need to be discussed explicitly. You need to examine potential partners. Talk about issues of trust, communication, social capital, and just basic fit. Does this seem like a good partnership? You need to evaluate the form of governance with your partner. Are they gonna be answering to a board that has different aspirations from yours? You need to assess your partnerships in terms of their strategic importance. What priority does this have for you? What priority does it have for the other side? Which of your relationships entail resources other than just money? Which ones are high versus low engagement? Which ones are the most desirable outside of your field? That's a very important question. There's a good checklist for thinking about collaborations and how you might partner gracefully. It's got five Fs. The first one is Focus. Are the participants' goals, yours included, complementary to one another? The second is the issue of Force. Is one partner being compelled because shotgun weddings don't end well usually? The third is the Future. Can individuals on both sides responsible commit future resources because these partnerships can take a long time to materialize into the desired outcomes. Next is Fit. Do you have similar enough cultures that you can get along? Do you have clear enough decision making routines that the partnership can progress? And finally, Faith. Is there commitment at a lot of levels in both organizations for this to work? Another way of thinking about combining all of the things that we've just covered is in this handy chart. You can see that the level of commitment should match what you want the desired outcome to be in terms of the comprehensive nature of a partnership. Just to prove that it can be done, and it can, here's a terrific example from our own field. This is an example of collective action and collaboration from the southern United States, the New Orleans Museum of Art. Historically this institution has taken a very traditional do it alone, go at it alone approach and they delivered a traditional value promise, but then things changed. Hurricane Katrina changed a lot of things, and a long time leader left the organization. The new leader saw an opportunity for change and for collective action, working with others at a time when it was badly badly needed. Through collaboration, they expanded the value of the museum and what it wants to deliver on that value premise. It moved beyond just presenting great art, to being a hub for creativity in the New Orleans community. The NOLA Project, a children's theater group, uses a sculpture garden as a venue. Story quest, which includes authors, actors and artist, reading children's literature. Family activities that they organize related to stories allow them to explore the museum in a different way through a different lens. Wellness classes, using the setting to inspire the mind and the body for people of all ages. And talks with the artists and creative filmmakers, a chance to get to know these people as individuals and understand the creative process better. Collectively, these organizations created a greater impact for the New Orleans community than any one of them could've created alone. And most importantly in doing so, they enriched the lives of people of all ages at a time when it was needed the most. [MUSIC]
