Real collaboration in complex systems starts with stakeholder management
Organisations depend more and more on partners, suppliers and customers. If you want to move forward, you have to look beyond the edges of your own organisation. Process agreements and meeting structures won’t get you there on their own. It starts with knowing who is involved and what really matters to them.
If you lead a project or programme that touches several parties, there’s no way around this. In complex systems, people, interests and dependencies are tangled up together, and working together is rarely simple. In that setting, stakeholder management is the work itself, and far more than a box you tick on the side.
Collaboration across boundaries stalls on interests nobody sees
A lot of partnerships run rough because nobody has a clear picture of what each party needs. You’re working on speed and efficiency, while your customer may be after certainty and transparency. And your supplier mostly wants predictability and clear boundaries.
As long as nobody understands each other’s interests, working together quickly turns into pushing and pulling. That’s why good stakeholder management pays off: you actively find out what matters to everyone affected by what you do, you try to understand it, and you involve those people.
The research backs this up. In their Cynefin framework, Snowden and Boone (2007) describe complex adaptive systems, where there is no clear-cut relationship between cause and effect. Collaboration emerges there through constant interaction, feedback and patterns that form along the way. Linear planning won’t get you there. You need a feel for interests and the ability to work with uncertainty.
Stakeholder management: listening with an open mind
Drawing up a list of stakeholders is the easy part. After that, it takes genuine curiosity. Who are the stakeholders? What do they need to be able to contribute? Where do their interests pull against each other, and where is there room to move?
If you listen actively and with an open mind, you build trust and understanding. You avoid assumptions and get support for the shared challenge.
The American organisational thinker Mary Parker Follett put it this way:
The best decisions are not the ones where one interest dominates another, but where interests are integrated.
Mary Parker Follett
That is what stakeholder management is about: bringing interests together, without massaging any of them away.
From practice: the contractors nobody had spoken to yet
At a start-up in the energy sector, I helped set up stakeholder management for a new digital platform. At first, all the attention went to what the shareholders wanted, mainly grid operators and energy companies. We had been building for six months when we realised that one group that really mattered hadn’t been involved at all: the contractors.
They were going to be the platform’s most important users. And they had no idea what was coming.
So the first joint session with all parties started by making room for frustration. The ambitious roadmap conversation had to wait. The contractors felt bypassed and wanted to be heard. Only once that had been said was there room to work together on the content.
In the weeks and months that followed, we agreed clear governance together: who decides what? We met regularly, the contractors joined working sessions, and we made working agreements that fitted the way they actually work.
That shift, from ‘you can join in later’ to ‘we’re building this together’, created real commitment. And in the end, a platform that works in practice.
No trust without structure: why governance matters
Good collaboration also needs clear rules of the game, especially when several parties with different interests sit at the table. Formal governance helps. How often it’s missing shows in regional collaboration in Dutch healthcare: the RIVM, the Dutch public health institute, sees no central governance in more than 60 per cent of the IZA regions.
What works in practice is clear roles and responsibilities, and a neutral chair who looks after everyone’s interests. Add transparent decision-making, where everyone knows who decides when, and regular check-ins that all parties commit to. How we set up roles, mandates and decision-making with organisations is explained on our Governance page.
In her work on “collaborative advantage” (2000), the organisational scholar Chris Huxham shows that collaboration only lasts if there is room for informal relationships and for formal structures. Seen that way, governance gives trust a solid shape, and is anything but needless bureaucracy.
What makes working across boundaries succeed
Besides listening and structure, four more factors make collaboration in complex systems stronger.
1. Psychological safety
Do people dare to speak up, even when interests clash? Without that safety, real collaboration never gets off the ground.
Research by Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School) shows that psychological safety is a precondition for collaboration and innovation. In settings with lots of dependencies and uncertainty, such as supply chains, you can’t do without it. We keep track of new research and practice on psychological safety on Leap Trends.
2. A shared goal
What connects all the parties? Only when the shared goal is clear and everyone owns it do people take ownership of the process and the result.
According to Lencioni (‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, 2002), a lack of shared goals is among the things that undermine collaboration most, beyond the team too.
3. A rhythm of reflection
Collaboration is never fixed. If you look back and adjust regularly, you get a network that learns, rather than a string of loose links.
Think of evaluation moments, retrospectives or peer review with representatives of everyone involved. Feedback loops like these make the collaboration resilient.
4. Leadership that connects
Control and hierarchy won’t get you far in this kind of collaboration. It takes leadership that makes room for dialogue and encourages ownership. And that knows how to weigh interests against each other.
Ron Heifetz (Harvard Kennedy School) calls this ‘adaptive leadership’: the ability to spot patterns, name interests and help people broaden their own perspective.
Working across boundaries doesn’t happen by itself
Whether you’re working on customer satisfaction, sustainable supply chains or digitalisation, you won’t get there without collaboration across organisational boundaries. And that collaboration doesn’t happen by itself.
It takes nerve to really listen. Structure that holds the collaboration up. And leadership that looks beyond its own KPIs.
We help organisations set up stakeholder management in a way that is practical and strategic. We run sessions where parties put their interests on the table, set up governance that works in practice and train teams in the conversations that matter.
Sources
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Snowden, D. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making (Cynefin framework). Harvard Business Review. hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making
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Follett, M.P. (1924). Creative Experience. A classic work on integrating interests and participative leadership. (Summary via: innovationmanagement.se)
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Huxham, C. & Vangen, S. (2000). Leadership in the shaping and implementation of collaboration agendas: How things happen in a (not quite) joined-up world. Academy of Management Journal, 43(6), 1159–1175. doi.org/10.2307/1556343
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Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
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Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass. (Book details via: tablegroup.com)
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Heifetz, R. & Laurie, D. (1997). The Work of Leadership. Harvard Business Review, January–February 1997; reprinted December 2001. hbr.org/2001/12/the-work-of-leadership