A note from me

The first Dodo Club Newsletter of 2024! Of course, I wish all readers a fulfilling and life-affirming year ahead. It’s amazing what can be accomplished in a year.

You can’t expect a quiet entry into the new year in The Netherlands. This is the one time in the year when people are allowed to set off fireworks – and they do! For hours, you cannot escape the bangs and flashes wherever you are.  The authorities have tightened up safety requirements and I’ve noticed slightly more responsibility being exercised than in the past, but it can still get pretty wild.  

We have had up to 19 people staying in our home over the past few days so things have been pretty crazy inside the house as well. Ages have ranged from 7 to 92, with additional family and friends alongside our usual household. So preparing and even eating meals together has been quite an exercise, not to mention introducing different types of activities to entertain teenagers or younger adults or older folks. At one point there was almost a home factory building gingerbread houses, involving both intense concentration and bursts of laughter loud enough to drown out the sound of the fireworks outside. 

So we have seen a whirlwind of activity involving multiple collaborations of different sorts, and it seems wholly appropriate to focus this particular Newsletter on this topic. I hope you find insights of some value to you.   

My Bi-Weekly Guide

Building a Collaboration Pipeline – 5 Steps:

Achieving any major change involves coherent action from multiple parties with individual capabilities and interests that, initially, may not be aligned. So, regardless of the nature of the major goal you are seeking, this topic is relevant. This is why “Collaboration” was highlighted in the last Newsletter as one of the “C” characteristics essential for building Strategic Character, and why we’ll consider different aspects of this in the next few Newsletters. In this particular Newsletter we’ll focus on the pipeline of 5 different types of collaborative activity that can progressively move developments from initial ideas to action at scale. 

1. Convening:
Once awareness of a challenge or opportunity is emerging, it is valuable to convene potentially interested parties to share any initial perspectives and insights. This is generally a straightforward process with many organisations and individuals already well-experienced in setting up conferences, seminars or meetings. This convening activity is valuable for building and spreading awareness but also for identifying potential partners for developing the next collaborations in the pipeline.  

2. Understanding:
While the first step above generally involves very limited resource commitment, subsequent steps involve progressively greater commitments.  This second step, however, is both essential and yet still involves relatively modest resources. Before moving to more significant investments, it is essential to build a rich and reasonably deep understanding of the terrain or activity under consideration. This is where a thought-leadership collaboration needs to be developed. This partnership may involve a mixture of commercial, not-for-profit, academic, consultancy and think-tank organisations.  

3. Experimenting:

Flowing down the pipeline from the initial two varieties of collaboration will be ideas for small-scale pilot project investments for further learning or for testing insights practically or for indicating potential future commerciality. These experimental investments generally require collaboration from a different cluster or configuration of partners. This may be a sub-set from the “Understanding” partnership but will generally also involve one or more “local” partners as projects always take place in particular locations or in particular markets.  

4. Demonstrating at Scale:

This is the big step-up where the chain often breaks. Whether considering major future commercial investments or implementing major policy changes, there is still the need to have the initial major investment or implementation at full scale. This requires a major resource commitment before progressing further, but may be difficult to justify in isolation as a one-off. To motivate this commitment, as much attention to aligning understanding and interests within each party will be required as aligning understanding interests between parties.  

5. Roll-out:

By this stage, all the previous activities will have generated sufficient confidence that the innovative investments, or approaches, can be rolled out with reasonable expectation of success. This may well still involve multiple parties e.g. vertically or horizontally in supply-chains. However, by now, the innovation is at the entrance to “business-as-usual”, and “collaboration-as-usual” approaches can be used in carefully developing partners and working with them. 

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

What is your experience in developing collaborations across boundaries, and what have you learned?

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