Springing Into a Transformational 2019
Bringing Transformational Partnerships to Life at ‘Springboard! 2019’, article by Jaya Myler
How do you bring clean water, toilets and hygiene to school children in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines to support their education? How can you improve the lives of rural communities in Asia bearing the brunt of the growing ‘toxic tide’ of e-waste? And how can you provide safe drinking water to remote communities in a marine sanctuary?
Asia P3 Hub walked through some of the organisation’s transformational partnerships that are addressing these challenges, at its year-end event Springboard! 2019 on 6 December, as well as sharing the impact of the organisation’s achievements in 2018, and looking forward to next year, with around 40 members of its community of champions, supporters and friends.
The event was co-hosted with Asia P3 Hub’s trusted partner, Kohler Company, and provided an opportunity for the two organisations to walk through their partnership and bring to life how they have moved from a transactional approach to a transformative one, and how all partners can benefit from sharing resources and collaborating for greater impact.
The event also explored the ‘alchemy’ of partnering that creates value for all partners and makes it greater than the sum of its parts. Here are some of the highlights.
Asia P3 Hub in action: impact in 2018
Asia P3 Hub’s Executive Director, Christy Davis shared the Hub’s working model, and highlighted four examples of the organisation’s achievements in 2018.
1. Sourcing effective solutions — the Hub’s partnership with Kohler Asia-Pacific is a perfect example of how to take pockets of a really valuable transactional activity and combine them to create a more strategic roadmap. The two organisations are partnering to bring clean water, hygiene and sanitation to children and communities across Asia. One project takes a human-centred design approach to provide water to a remote community in Indonesia.
2. Co-create solutions — the launch of a social impact challenge, provides a platform where challenge-owners (communities) are part of the problem validation and solutioning process. Asia P3 Hub curated the challenges working together with communities and World Vision, and packaged them together for global collaboration. The winning solution team will win a cash prize and pilot their solution in partnership with the communities.
3. Leveraging last mile presence — Asia P3 Hub leverages the last mile presence and reach of World Vision, to facilitate collaboration with other sectors to transform lives. The Hub’s partnership with Solar Water Solutions brings cutting-edge water solutions to address the needs of rural communities in Asia.
4. Cultivating eco-system — a multi-sector e-waste research project and roundtable just concluded in partnership with Seagate. This partnership was sparked from a conversation about the environmental and social impact of the dumping of e-waste. 30 people came together from 13 organisations, to see how we can address this very complex challenge and improve lives for the people impacted by toxic e-waste.
What does a transformative partnership look like?
“How can our products, our expertise benefit more people? Through partnerships,” said Jean Gong, Senior Manager — Internal Communications & Stewardship, Kohler Company, as she shared the evolution of the partnership between Kohler, World Vision and Asia P3 Hub. Adam Quek, General Manager & Commercial Director, Kohler Company, shared Kohler’s dedication to improving lives, including communities in great need, and making consistent efforts to reduce the need for resources. “Better business can go hand in hand with a better environment,” he explained.
Kohler’s global partnership with World Vision began in 1996, starting in the US with Kohler donating the Kohler Clarity™ low-cost water filter product to communities in need to enable them to access safe water. The partnership in Asia has grown to include six countries, and the partners have worked together to further identify the needs and leverage mutual resources. This is an example of how a trusted partnership can evolve to collaborate in new ways to improve lives. Holistic, safe water projects are being designed to provide and filter water and educate communities. This growing transformational collaboration has benefitted thousands of people already.
In Asia, the partnership broadened in scope in 2016 with an unlikely sharing of resources, when Kohler used its design capabilities to design the brand identity and logo for Asia P3 Hub, and has evolved to a strategic partnership that includes: a human-centred design project bringing water to a rural community in Indonesia, and a regional, multi-sector project involving Kohler, Asia P3 Hub, World Vision, Wahana Visi, and local government and community groups to provide safe water, sanitation and hygiene to school children in three countries.
What is the alchemy of partnering that creates value for all?
Panellists representing the private sector, government, academia and NGOs came together for a fireside chat, moderated by Anne Lochoff, to share their perspectives on transformational partnerships and the ‘alchemy’ or special magic of partnerships, that can create extra value for all, and comprise more than the sum of its parts.
Phearak Svay, Senior WASH & Partnership Advisor, Asia P3 Hub, spoke about the importance of having a partnership mindset and how on a professional level, he realised you can achieve more by working with others. Over the past couple of years in partnering with Kohler, he has seen that it’s not just hardware or funds that partners can bring to the table — it can be design capability, products that can change lives — a small NGO doesn’t have all of the capabilities, but can bring in expertise, resources and skills to help design solutions that will best suit the needs of communities.
Sriven Naidu, Practitioner & Researcher of Multi-Sector Innovation, and PhD Candidate, University College London, shared the Malay term ‘gotong royong’, the Filipino ‘bayanihan’ that roughly equate to ‘barn-raising’ as he reflected on his experiences growing up in Singapore, seeing how communities can achieve far greater results when they come together with a collaborative spirit.
Jean shared how internal partnerships within Kohler showed her what can be achieved when we pool resources and bring together different perspectives. The organisation’s Clarity product was created with a purpose to solve a problem. And Kohler employees also came together to reduce product and packaging waste. Kohler associates from across the globe contributed their time and perspectives to make things happen.
Hazel See, formerly Assistant Director, Strategic Planning & Organisational Development, Civil Service College, became a believer in partnerships thanks to a mentor in her career, who often suggested looking to partners that might have capabilities they lacked. When she took on a research project that looked at how the government could improve how it works with citizens, she was starting from scratch. She reached out to people with expertise to ask them to share their resources and give her guidance and was amazed at their willingness to help, and what she was able to achieve through collaboration. “Sometimes you need to come from a place of humility and realise that you lack certain capabilities, then reach out,” said Hazel. “You will be amazed by the people that step up and offer their support. Keep sharing the big vision and what you’re working towards.”
How can you move along the spectrum from transactional to transformational partnerships? And what are the tools and skills you need?
Phearak shared how in the Kohler partnership, it’s about: “how can we be more engaged as partners and allow opportunities for Kohler to come in and co-create impactful solutions with us, contribute their expertise in a way that engages their team and gives them a sense of satisfaction? Our mindset is around what our partners want from a partnership. What value does it provide? How does it meet their needs as well?” One project works with Kohler’s Innovation for Good programme to send engineers to communities in Indonesia and use their expertise to design handwashing stations for communities in Indonesia. The project also engages communities to help design solutions, hardware and software, including child-designed ‘nudges’ to change behaviour. In addition to a social good outcome, Kohler’s objective is for engineers to gain insights from the end user to help design their core products for social good.
“Moving from transactional to transformational is about creating opportunities for your partners to be engaged more, in a way that’s beneficial for them,” Phearak said.
He added that in working with partners, we are transformed in that we learn something new. From working with Kohler, we have seen the human-centred design process in action. By putting people at the centre of the process and combining resources with the community, the project achieved outcomes beyond our expectations.
Sriven said it’s useful to think about who is being transformed. The end-user, the organisation or the individual? He chose to focus on the individual, as organisations are made up of individuals. We can be transformed by a transaction, and it’s important to remember this rather than thinking about transactional and transformational in buckets. We can also start out in a less trusting frame and migrate later: partnerships may fluctuate over time backwards and forwards. It’s also good for organisations to ask where they are on the spectrum. If you are moving towards transactional, ask how you can move it towards transformational.
He articulated that it’s important to remember that relationships sustain us. We need people who are committed and mission-driven, with integrity and persistence. We need to have a network of people who believe in this way of operating and supporting each other. Asia P3 Hub is bringing together like-minded people through its work — this can re-energise each of us engaging together.
Hazel highlighted that it’s possible to: “start off with transactions, keeping the vision in mind, and you can form more transforming relationships.” You need to be willing to move out of your defined scope to work with each other in different ways. She gave an example of forming partnerships, and how they had to bring partners on a journey together. They started out asking: “what are the things that matter most to each gov’t agency? Is it HR? Is it the metrics from their bosses? Are they looking at how to make things more one-stop for citizens? What do they value most?” Having an understanding of what motivates partners, their vision, and what will create mutual benefit is important in order to move towards the transformational.
Jean suggested asking yourself: what can I do differently every day in my work to inspire people to make change? Keep yourself informed. Create and build informal connections, within and outside of your organisation.
An attendee shared a thoughtful perspective from his experience working within a major British telco: “We often used the word ‘evolution’ rather than transformation — transformation can be terrifying to large corporates. Have an idea of the big vision, the direction you are going in and evolve towards it, and when you look back you might see that you’ve transformed.”
Storytelling for Impact
Julian Cheong, Managing Partner & Story Seeker, Mike Bosworth Leadership, led a session on storytelling for impact, including an exercise for participants. Mike Bosworth Leadership coaches salespeople to master conversational skills of creating trust and emotional connection to facilitate the customer’s buying process. She shared that storytelling is a business skill, and some of the fundamentals are:
1. Who is the story about? Who is the ‘hero’ or protagonist of your story? Storytelling needs to create an emotional connection, so the story needs to be bite-sized. It needs to be clear who the story is about or the listener gets lost. Human-nature is that we see ourselves as heroes. But for a story to work, we need to be the hero-maker — putting our customer, end-user or problem-owner as the hero.
2. Attention span is really important. Managing an engagement requires being present and intentional about what you’re going to say. You may have only 90 seconds to begin with, but if you engage and capture someone’s attention, it buys you 5–10 minutes, an exchange of ideas. A 5–10 minute meeting might buy you an hour-long meeting.
3. Emotion — it is what makes a story memorable.
“This session showed me that storytelling is a good tool to engage with others. It’s like a magic way to connect,” Luz Yanez commented.
The why, the what and the how of Asia P3 Hub
Christy Davis also shared more about how Asia P3 Hub works, and the why, what and how of what the Hub does.
- The why: We believe that everyone has something valuable to contribute. If we work together and share our resources in a strategic, creative way, we can truly change lives.
- The what: We incubate multisector partnerships and bring together ideas to tackle poverty in Asia-Pacific, to create social impact and create value for every partner and stakeholder. We work with academia, companies, governments, NGOs — we are an open space and we enjoy facilitating unconventional conversations and relationships.
- The how: Our passion is combinatorial innovation. This means you don’t have to start from scratch; you can pool existing resources — talent, time, treasure — in new creative ways to create a multiplier effect.
What’s next? Looking ahead to 2019
Looking ahead, Asia P3 Hub will focus on:
- Building a sustainable business model for the years ahead, and that also means being financially sustainable
- Tracking stories of impact — focussing on how to measure impact, and growing the evidence base
- Expanding beyond WASH. The Hub piloted its operating model with WASH, and is considering going beyond the WASH sector in 2019 with education, health and nutrition, and livelihoods.
- The ‘Hub-in-a-Box’ replication toolbox — creating a model that can be contextualised and replicated anywhere in the world, sharing what we’ve learned and the experiences we’ve had to build this incubation hub, with the hopes others can take the model and run with it! Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see more multi-sector partnership hubs pop up around the globe?
Finally, the event closed with warmest thanks to Asia P3 Hub’s partners, volunteers, advisers, and interns for all of their contributions in 2018, and reiterated the Hub’s belief in the power of generative resources, and what can be achieved when we combine resources for a multiplier effect.
To learn more about how to use the Power of Story to create Trust in your customers conversations and drive business results, please contact Julian Cheong.
Article was written by Jaya Myler, Asia P3 Hub’s Communications and Marketing Consultant.
Jaya Myler is a non-profit manager with more than 12 years of experience working with international NGOs, corporate and consumer brands, in both developed and developing country settings. She has a strong background in managing projects and programs, and advocacy and communications, and experience working in environmental, education, and WASH NGOs. She is passionate about water and sanitation, education and poverty alleviation. She has experience working on multi-sector partnerships with NGOs, corporates, academia and governments, and is a big believer in the power of cross-sector collaboration to drive innovation and achieve impact. She holds a Master of Media Practice.
