Paradox and collaboration
The following is an excerpt from my dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Community ©2015
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the definitions of paradox is: “An apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition, or a strongly counter-intuitive one, which investigation, analysis, or explanation may nevertheless prove to be well-founded or true.”
Paradox is a fundamental aspect of collaborations. Paradoxes appear in the purposes, structures, and cultures of collaborations.
Paradoxes are evident in the three separate and inter-related domains: purpose, structures, and culture:
0 1. Purpose: The theory of change serving as the impetus for the formation of collaborations.
0 2. Structures: The various ways in which collaborations build management systems across organizations, organizational roles and functions, hierarchies of authority and power, and communities.
0 3. Cultures: The social and psychological expression and impact of collaborative members in their various socio-psychological environments.
The theories of change the serve as the foundations of collaborations may inherently house core paradoxes. One example is the idea that a management structure can exist and operate efficiently across separate organizational authoritative and power hierarchies without threatening the inherent identity of individual members’ organizations. Management structures of collaborations often seek to emulate the streamlined and purpose-driven models to be found in hierarchical and single-purpose organizations as if decision, actions, and outputs can be created through direction. Collaborations therefore may express and enact behaviors that are not in concordance with how collaborations actually work, which is not through authoritative mandate, but rather through relationships and actions. Chamu Surandamurthy and Marianne Lewis explain in their essay “Control and Collaboration: Paradoxes of Governance”:
Paradoxical tensions stem from perceptions of opposing and interwoven elements. Most individuals apply formal logic based on internal consistency, polarizing the elements to stress distinctions rather than interdependencies. Stressing one polarity exacerbates the need for the other, often sparking defenses, impeding learning, and engendering counterproductive reinforcing cycles. Managing paradox, in contrast, entails developing understandings and practices that accept and accommodate tensions. (397)
Paradoxes appear in the purposes, structures, and cultures of collaborations.
Accommodating tensions, first requires their recognition. In thinking about tensions inherent in collaborations, the first one that stands out relates to the relationship between the creation of a collaboration and its performance. Most of us think of collaborations as coming together to achieve particular outcomes (i.e. in- crease Latin@ educational success). We may assume that collaborations come together and perform in order to meet their stated goals in a linear process. More often than not, a theory of change is articulated that requires the involvement of multiple partners, with the theoretical assumption, that more means bigger and better. Sometimes the more partners one has at “the table,” does not necessarily translate into more action. Other times, having less partners, also does not translate into better outcomes.
Little is known about how to build collaboration efforts that follow the linear trajectory between gathering collaborators and performing. What we do know is that this linear trajectory is more often than not an illusion of our common sense. It would be common sense to believe that collaborations come together and then go to work. However, the literature demonstrates that collaborations, more often than not, are formed, and achieve little. They stall in a process of inertia that most regularly leads to failure or non-completion.
This is because organizational management structures are often at odds with the very process they claim to manage. Chris Huxham and Siv Vangen explain as follows in their essay “Ambiguity, complexity and dynamics in the membership of collaboration”:
Among the factors which tend to induce inertia are: difficulties in negotiating joint purpose because of the diversity of organizational and individual aims which those involved bring to the collaboration; difficulties in communicating because of differences in professional (and sometimes natural) languages and organizational (and sometimes ethnic) cultures; difficulties in developing joint modes of operating given that the partner organizations inevitably operate quite different internal procedures from each other; difficulties in managing the perceived power imbalances between partners and the associated problem of building trust; difficulties of managing the accountability of the collaborative venture to each of the partner organizations and to other constituencies while maintaining a sufficient degree of autonomy to allow the collaborative work to proceed; and difficulties with the sheer logistics of working with others who are based in physically remote locations. (773)
Timelines, linear theories of change (if so and so, then so so), prescribed roles based on institutional position... the stuff that often populates our action plans because they are identified as resources or enablers of the change we seek to create often serve to block forward movement. For example, one of my collaboration partners was a superintendent of schools in a suburban city. She was a strong believer in the need to revamp disciplinary processes that created a pathway away from school for Latin@ and Black boys in her district. I have been a proponent of building restorative justice processes to close that pathway and increase Latin@ and Black boys’ participation in school. The superintendent endorsed these initiatives and publicly announced she wanted restorative justice and peacemaking circles processes implemented in every single school in the district. At the same time, the teacher’s union was boycotting the superintendent’s effort to create a magnet science middle school. They also boycotted her efforts to build restorative justice and peacemaking circles processes in their schools. This dynamic resulted in a four-year delay in the launching and implementation of my programs.
Instead, my programs were implemented through the police department, as they embraced the initiatives I proposed as part of their ongoing community policing strategies. Because the initiatives were introduced by an unlikely and unusual education reform partner, teachers, students, parents, elected officials, and other non profits wholeheartedly supported training and implementation activities. As it turned out, it was far more advantageous for me to partner with the police to successfully implement a school reform effort, than with the actual superintendent of schools. Mandated change was a roadblock in the successful implementation of my collaboration’s plan. This lesson shaped my collaboration’s culture going forward since it became evident that the use of a model premised on institutional roles as defining the roles and actions of collaboration members was inappropriate for the actual environment of relationships we were trying to impact.
I argued for and adopted a far more relational approach with more emphasis on “real time” action and with a more experience driven process of identifying, tracking, and measuring outcomes (mostly by using mixed-methods research techniques like appreciative inquiry and school-based data collection). Although my collaboration’s effort came together for the singular purpose of increasing Latin@ student success in the public schools, the most important aspect of our work was the arduous and often confusing task of creating opportunities for collaboration members to just do things together and build relationships with each other. These two processes generated increased investment of time, energy and resources from partners, trust, new intervention ideas, course correction opportunities when the plan became derailed or failed, and more meaningful ongoing professional development opportunities. The result was that a number of secondary outcomes were produced that we simply could not have imagined. As the primary outcomes of the partnership were so ambitious it would take years to reach them, these secondary unpredictable and unexpected secondary outcomes breathed life into the collaboration and maintained engagement from existing partners while the membership list expanded every year of the five-year initiative. The relationship building process included:
0 1. Initial one-on-one meeting with each partner seeking to get to know their respective organizations (its work, the partner’s role and purview of activities, the various partnerships the partner was already engaged with, what made the partner tick, what drove their commitment to their work). These meetings felt very much like free flowing conversations seeking to just begin the process of making sure the partner felt seen, heard, and engaged in the goals my collaborative sought to create.
0 2. Follow up one-on-one meetings seeking to explore the intentions the partner brought to the partnership, their sense of how the partnership should operate, determine its work, map out its plan, and carry out its tasks over the long term. In addition, I sought to determine the role the partner envisioned as exciting for his/her involvement in the collaboration. A good general guideline is that members of your collaboration should have one-on-one time with you at least every two months. You might ask why. What will there be to talk about during the fourth meeting. You will simply run out of topics to discuss. My answer is that you would be surprised. Often, there are unspoken needs that bring a person or organization to the table in a collaboration. Finding out what each member’s needs are allows you the opportunity to offer support, resources, and advice in return. Relationships in a collaboration should not be all about the collaboration itself. They need to be reciprocal in order to continuously strengthen your membership ranks.
0 3. The development and implementation of interesting and appropriate professional development opportunities in order to engage partners (institutional and community-wide) in conversations that would not otherwise occur in the daily routines of their lives. The main goal was to begin to create opportunity for different partners to engage each other so they could begin to build a shared language, shared understanding, and trust with each other.
Key barriers this strategy tackled were:
0 1. A sense of invisibility often normalized by simply showing up in meetings, mostly saying nothing throughout those meetings, and giving a rubber stamp agreement on a collaborative effort’s agenda.
0 2. Especially with parents and students, or any community volunteer, I found a deep seated sense of distrust and insecurity when relating to “agency people.” Building opportunities to share and explore, learn together, opened doors for community building between community members and “agency people.” Often, parents, students, and other members of the community who participated, would reveal in follow up one-on-one meetings that they were surprised that “agency people” could be so tender, compassionate, and caring. Their perception of institutions was that such organizations are primarily concerned with protocols and procedures and not so much with rich human relationships. Creating such opportunities, enabled community members to identify more readily with “agency people” and to begin to see them primarily as simply people, who much like themselves, labored intensely to improve community conditions.
0 3. Unequal power relationships were further flattened when people were able to learn new content together. Community members did not defer to educators as the holders of all knowledge, and educators appreciated each community member’s learning disposition. Trust could be built on the understanding of a shared goal and a shared disposition to recognizing what was unknown, learning new content, and then putting it into practice. A general rule of thumb is that there should be a learning activity in every meeting.
The process of developing shared activities included:
0 1. Scheduling collaboration meetings at a time and on days that worked for all members of the partnership. This is a daunting challenge that requires building a good balance between who is present and who is absent. For example, most interagency collaborative efforts might find it easy to set up collaborative meetings during the workday. Granted, people are busy, scheduling meetings requires a lot of moving other responsibilities around. Nevertheless, it is possible for “agency people” to move those responsibilities around. This is not so for day laborers, or factory or hospitality workers. Finding time to be together is the first litmus test of whether or not your collaboration is set up to engage diverse stakeholders that bring communities together with institutions. If you have an easy time finding time to be together, it is likely that you need to further diversify your collaborative effort.
0 2. Mixing up meeting activities between “outcome driven” activities like tracking performance of the collaborative implementation efforts, and “learning directed” activities like problem solving exercises, and ongoing professional development activities.
0 3. Creating a reason to come together to do something every six weeks. The point is that you do things together build trust, are fun, and are meaningful to the community(ies) you serve.
Key barriers this strategy tackled were:
0 1. Difficulties in languaging across disciplines or fields. Each academic discipline and career normalizes different language. How social scientists, linguists, medical doctors, and social workers language how they see the world has been shaped by their various fields of study. It is the same with community residents who may not be formally educated by are nevertheless part of an organization they work for, a neighborhood, a family, and/or an ethnic/racialized group. These differences in language are bridged by getting to know each other and doing things together to begin to build what complexity theorists such as Nicholas Peroff call a Common Body of Metaphor (CBM): a set of stories shared by a collective group that begin to give it a sense of a distinct identity. (28)
0 2. Because collaborations are faced with tackling complex recursive problems, collaborative efforts often lose momentum when the complexity and time demands begin to surface. A good rule to keep in mind is that the more complex and persistent the problem being tackled is, the more time and resources it will take to resolve the problem. Building opportunities to do things together, however, small, maintains momentum, and serves to further cement connection, commitment, and co-mentoring opportunities. The latter is important as collaborative members begin to deepen relationship, and begin to turn to each other for opinions, advice, and resources. Once genuine relationships begin to brew, human needs show up. Although most collaboration efforts simply do not name this dynamic, this is the central dynamic that leads to collaborative inertia. Naming it allows its management and strategic use.
0 3. Collaborations are a conglomeration of relationships between people. As such, they require immense care and ongoing maintenance, just like any other relationships do. As such, collaborations require careful attention to detail, mindfulness about people’s feelings, about what they care about, and ongoing dialogue. One would not simply continue to ask for favors from friends. Indeed, we often take the utmost care of not asking for favors and we are hyper-vigilant about making sure our friends feel valued and seen. Well, despite much rationalization about why collaborations are different (voices in my head that say things like “Well, people are being paid....”), they simply are not. When it comes to engaging people’s commitment, will, and sometimes even their passions, a leader of collaborations must be aware of the softer aspects of the relationship building process. In other words, how people feel is as important as what they think, and do. Huxham and Vangen say that, “…collaborations require ongoing nurturing due to their constantly changing and complex nature” (800). This change and complexity is the result of the fluid nature of human lives, regardless of organizational efforts to establish order and linearity within complex community contexts.
