Coffee growers grow collaboratively

Here is something from The Partnership Resource Centre of Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University which captures the experiences and reflections of Colombian coffee farmers who participated in a Cross-Sector Partnership for Development:

http://www.rsm.nl/the-partnerships-resource-centre/publications/how-we-have-experienced-the-public-private-partnership-reflections-from-narinos-coffee-growers/

It highlights some very valuable good practice for effectively engaging and working in partnership with local populations and communities. The key points that stand out for me are:


Carefully manage first contact and impressions

The coffee growers liked the way they were initially approached and greeted by partnership representatives. These positive first impressions encouraged local people to find out more about the partnership: what it would involve, and what it could provide and achieve.


Prepare for and deal with a significant period of disbelief.

The coffee growers had never been offered help to develop their businesses and communities. It is therefore not surprising that there was a substantial amount of disbelief within local communities that anything would actually happen and that practical support would indeed materialise. Providing highly visible and recognisable tools and resources local people would value and begin using immediately was central to overcoming this period of disbelief.


Provide education and training

Providing education and training to local communities was of particular importance because it achieved four key things:

• It showed a commitment to local people that helped overcome their initial disbelief.
• It resourced, enabled and empowered local people to become proactive within the development partnership and take control of business decisions and development.
• It provided the context or 'bigger picture' within which local farms and the coffee they produced existed. This was important because local farms became more aware of how global supply chains worked and how pricing was affected by commercial custom and practice. By knowing the context they were working within (and all the options available to them) local farms could make more informed decisions that enabled them to gain a fair and competitive price for their coffee. This increase in income benefited not only the farms and the families who owned them but also, through greater overall affluence, the wider local population.
• The informal, family and group orientated nature of the education and training encouraged local people to learn from and be influenced by each other. It also changed the nature of family dynamics, giving women and children more recognition and influence within the family business. Lastly, it encouraged local farms and others to share their experiences and learning with those not directly involved with the project, so raising the profile of the development partnership and widening its influence.                  

Push through the negativity and achieve a critical mass of support

As stated above, there was a significant degree of disbelief about what the partnership would offer. The partnership needed to not only acknowledge and address this disbelief but also push at the negativity that accompanied it, pushing through and past the threshold at which a critical mass of the local farming community would choose to adopt a more positive and enthusiastic outlook and form more optimistic expectations. 

The partnership achieved this critical mass of positive support by doing all the things previously described, plus two additional things:

• It identified, supported and publicised 'trickle effects'.
• It created an aspiration to become involved.   

Identify, support and publicise trickle effects

Trickle effects are positive outcomes that occur outside or around the edges of the area of focus of a project or initiative. In the case of this partnership, which was focused upon developing local coffee farms, trickle effects occurred in the areas of garbage collection, child care and land irrigation:

• Responsible and sustainable approaches to garbage collection adopted on private farms began to be applied to common land, so enhancing the wider local environment.
• The additional income farms and families gained as a result of their improved business and working practices enabled a new nursery to be built, so enhancing the security and well-being of local children.
• The more professional and collaborative approach to coffee growing adopted by local farms led to a locally inspired community irrigation project, so enhancing the area's agricultural infrastructure.

The partnership, by encouraging, supporting and publicising the above developments, began garnering the goodwill and cooperation it needed from local people in order to achieve its aims.


Create an aspiration to become involved

Local coffee growers were encouraged to aspire to become involved in the partnership's work through a policy of selective support. Initially, about a sixth of the total number of coffee farms in the area were carefully chosen for inclusion in the project and given the help and support they required to participate effectively. Then, as the partnership's work developed, and those farms that were involved increasingly benefited both socially and economically, other farms began expressing a desire to participate; an aspiration for inclusion that encouraged ever greater involvement and collaboration had been achieved.     



                            

Birds of a feather...

Here is an interesting article from the Guardian about seven women who have decided to collaborate to develop and promote their businesses:

http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2014/nov/03/why-entrepreneurs-are-flocking-to-collaborative-business

It highlights a growing collaborative trend towards fulfilling your own needs through helping others fulfil theirs (whilst accepting that initially others may benefit more than you). 

Being 'assertively selfless' and realising that in the longer term everybody gains from effective collaboration, regardless of short-term losses and imbalances of rewards between partners, is a characteristic of the emerging new breed of collaborative worker. To find out more about this new breed go to:

http://cuttingedgepartnerships.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/populate-your-partnership-with-new.html

Looking out for others

Here is an excellent and short TED talk by Simon Anholt, which explores the concept of 'good countries':

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_anholt_which_country_does_the_most_good_for_the_world

In this context 'good' refers to countries that look outward upon the surrounding world, seeking ways to help and support other peoples and countries. It does not mean countries that are good at looking inwards upon their internal landscapes, seeking ways to support and develop their own economies and standards of living.

Being good and supporting others enables a country to gain social capital that helps it form, develop and sustain mutually beneficial relationships with other countries. After all, with which would you rather do business? A country with a reputation for doing good, or a country with a reputation for self-interest?

But looking outward with the intention of doing good for others is not enough. A country that is serious about doing good for others needs to challenge its deeply held assumptions about how to do and achieve things effectively. This is because looking outwards and doing good for others inevitably involves collaboration, and collaboration reverses assumptions about how to be effective and successful.

This reversal is summed up by four principles that underpin the dynamics of the collaborative world:

1. The more we keep the more we waste
2. The more others take the more we gain and the less the cost the more the value  (These two ideas are so closely related that they effectively act as one principle.)
3. The more we control the less we control
4. The more we collaborate the more we come into conflict

I explain these principles and give examples of them in action here:

http://cuttingedgepartnerships.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/surviving-and-thriving-within-weird.html

The sharing imperative

Here is a link to an excellent short article by Bala Chakravarthy (Professor of Strategy and International Management, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland), about the importance of sharing knowledge, expertise, resources, etc., across organisational boundaries:

http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/learning/management_thinking/articles/pdf/cross_sharing.pdf?PHPSESSID=q4casqgo8nf6cf1hbnu11il3e4

Sharing effectively across organisational boundaries is becoming increasingly difficult because of the retrenching and centralising initiatives many national and international businesses are implementing in response to the recent (and ongoing) economic crisis.

The four practical actions described by Professor Chakravarthy will help your organisation achieve an effective balance between structural efficiency and overall organisational development, growth and effectiveness.

The article takes about ten minutes to read (well worth the investment of time) and is an abridged version of a larger article, the references to which are given at the bottom of the last page.

To integrate, or not to integrate: that is the question:

Here is a research briefing from the Social Care Institute for Excellence that examines the factors which promote and hinder joint and integrated working between health and social care services:

http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/briefings/files/briefing41.pdf

It briefly describes four different approaches to joint working between health and social care services (see page four). These are:
 

• Discrete and targeted. (Services working jointly but maintaining their separate systems and approaches to meet the needs of a specific group of people.)  
• Discrete and inclusive. (Services working jointly but maintaining their separate systems and approaches to meet the needs of the greater population.)
• Integrated and targeted. (Services working closely together and merging their systems and approaches to meet the needs of a specific group of people.)
• Integrated and inclusive. (Services working closely together and merging their systems and approaches to meet the needs of the greater population.) 

Consideration of the above approaches can help inform the decisions you make when setting up and developing a collaborative initiative, whatever its purpose. 

Which of the above approaches, or mix of the above approaches, would help your collaboration achieve its objectives most effectively? Would the time and effort required to integrate services be worth the benefits achieved? Would the more immediate advantages of connecting but not changing existing services be more valuable to your collaboration than the longer-term benefits of integration? Do the current context and challenges of your collaboration require it to change its joint working approach from discrete to integrated, or from integrated to discrete? Does your collaboration require a narrow focus on specific issues and people, or does it need to broaden its remit and seek to appeal to and engage with other related issues and new and different people? 

Many problems and difficulties associated with collaborative working are caused by incorrect assumptions about the level of joint working required and the scope of activities that need to be undertaken. Help yourself to form correct assumptions about how you need to work with others and what you need to do together; pause to reflect upon the above four approaches and how they may or may not help your collaboration achieve its purpose.

Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success: 3rd Edition Now Out!

I have just finished the 3rd Edition of my book 'Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success'.

It now has a new chapter 'Surviving and Thriving within the Weird Space of Collaborative Working: the Four Principles to Live by'.

You can download the 3rd Edition by clicking on the link to your right.

The more we collaborate the more we come into conflict: key questions to ask

It is not always appreciated that collaboration is a two-edged sword. The more effectively we collaborate with others the more likely we are to come into conflict with those with whom we are not collaborating.

Nations collaborating through alliance systems led to the outbreak of the First World War and contributed to the prolonged conflict of the Second World War. Nations collaborating to create the nuclear bomb led directly to the tensions of the Cold War between the West and the East, tensions that have never really gone away.

Today, collaboration between Ukrainian Separatists and Russia has brought both into conflict with not just Ukraine but also Europe (a collaboration within itself) and the USA (as its title suggests, yet another collaboration within itself, if slightly more merged than Europe). Almost wherever you care to look, the formation of committed, strong and effective collaborations creates and attracts conflict, either from existing collaborative groups, or collaborative groups that are created in response to the perceived threat of a collaboration.

An interesting 'slow-burn' of a conflict (potentially fuelled by collaboration) could be developing at the top of the world. The Arctic Council, responsible for the preservation and managed exploitation of the Arctic territories (a difficult balancing act if ever there was one), consists of Arctic states with the power to make decisions, indigenous Arctic peoples with a right to permanent seats on the Council and, interestingly, a growing number of observer states and organisations with no power to make decisions, but the ability to influence the Council through making investments and providing specialist expertise. Recently, a block of Asian states (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and India) were admitted as observer states. At the moment, historical mistrust and grievances (especially between China and Japan), differing perceptions and competing and differing interests inhibit their effective collaboration with each other. (Indeed, India may well have a policy of impeding China's influence, especially where access to and control of energy reserves are at stake.) However, if some catalyst were to appear which made collaboration between the Asian states attractive or essential, for example an urgent and pressing need for resources and guaranteed access to them, old grievances and lesser interests could be put aside. The separate Asian state observers could form into a powerful 'Asian Collaborative' that could use the combined leverage of its investments and expertise to gain influence and power within the Council and open up access to the resources it needs. This would inevitably lead to even greater collaboration between the Arctic states and the indigenous peoples to counteract the Asian states growing influence. This would be a clear example of more collaboration leading to more conflict.

Key questions:

• Who will our collaboration threaten? How can we reassure them, work with them or, if necessary, minimise and/or deal with the consequences of conflict with them? (Some of the Arctic states that sit on the Arctic Council felt threatened by the inclusion of five Asian states as observers. It was felt that their presence and increased influence on the council's work, which would be magnified if they began to work as a collaborating 'Asian Block', would weaken the sovereign authority of the Arctic states and begin to marginalise the influence of the indigenous peoples represented on the Council. The Asian states have sort to reassure the Arctic states by emphasising their willingness to abide by existing laws and conventions, making significant financial and specialist contributions in the ways requested by the Arctic Council, and emphasising their interest in environmental research and safeguarding both the Arctic environment and the welfare of the indigenous peoples who live there. Some of the Asian states have also sort to reassure the council by publishing their own Arctic policies, which clearly set out their vision, aims and intentions with regard to the Arctic.      
• If we become stronger who could become (or perceive that they become) weaker? What are the implications of this over the short, medium and long terms? How could others' weakness (perceived or actual) adversely affect us? (Russia perceives an expanding European Union as threatening its influence and interests on its South West Border. This has contributed significantly to the current conflict between the Ukrainian Government and Russian backed Ukrainian Separatists and the economic tensions, through tit for tat boycotts, experienced between Russia and the European Union. The political situation is characterised by a slow pace of development and carefully planned, set piece moves from all players. This is because each player is carefully considering and analysing the consequences of each move they make, both for themselves and others. They are keen to avoid a situation where any player feels so weakened or threatened by the other that the conflict ignites and the tensions increase, which would create a situation where all sides are damaged politically, economically or even physically through increased conflict.)       
• How much do we respect others' valued resources, knowledge and interests and do we do enough to help safeguard them? (The actions described above and taken by the Asian states to reassure the Arctic states of the Arctic Council illustrate a strong attempt to show respect for the interests of others. In this case, however, they may be a little undermined. This is because the reasons for taking the actions ever so slightly emphasise a preoccupation with enhancing national reputation and credibility, rather than taking them because they are intrinsically the right things to do. This is a point that will not go unnoticed by one or two of the Arctic states.)     
• If our collaboration is beginning to encroach upon areas traditionally dealt with and perceived as owned by others, do we know the traditional tolls that need to be paid and are we willing and able to pay them? What would be the consequences of not knowing or paying them? (Seal hunting and making seal products are an important part of the traditional economy and way of life of a number of Arctic states. Part of the conditions of entry - part of the toll to be paid - for a place on the Arctic Council includes an acceptance of, or at least non-opposition to, these activities. The Asian states (and Italy) were willing to pay this toll and so were granted observer status on the Council. The EC, however, has banned products made from seals. This perceived opposition to a much valued and traditional practice was enough to block the EC's application to become an observer. The EC is currently merely an 'ad hoc' observer, which means that it has to request to be present at each and every meeting. Somewhere during the process of negotiation for entry to the Council the EC must have decided that lifting its ban on seal products was a toll it was not willing to pay, and that the consequences of not being fully present on the Arctic Council were manageable and acceptable. This makes sense when you consider that several of the Arctic states and official observers are also EC members, which means the EC is almost present by proxy anyway.)

To see the full post click Here.

For more about collaboration go to: Sleeping-with-the-Enemy-Achieving-Collaborative-Success-2nd-Edition.