What’s stopping us from collaborating?
Creating a collaboration manifesto together
LocalGov Camp returned in person this year — what a glorious thing! This year I facilitated a workshop about collaboration, and wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested. But they were, and it seemed to go pretty well.
Collaboration was one of the key themes at LocalGov Camp 22, with a number of workshops and discussions kicking the subject around.
Why it’s important
I truly believe that effective collaboration will save local government. When it works together it can:
- save time and resources
- cover more ground in a shorter time
- share knowledge, skills and expertise
- achieve better outcomes
The Local Digital team at DLUHC have enshrined the principles of collaboration into part of the Local Digital Declaration
We will embed an open culture that values, incentivises and expects digital ways of working from every member of our workforce. This means working in the open wherever we can, sharing our plans and experience, working collaboratively with other organisations, and reusing good practice.
For me, the need to collaborate came from when I started in working in the digital sector; I knew absolutely nothing and I had no budget to play with to try and make ‘digital’ a thing. I needed help from others to improve my understanding, get a line on what ‘good’ looks like, and avoid the common pitfalls others had fallen into.
Since then I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in some collaborative projects with local government colleagues that were inspiring and exciting. And I now work for a company that puts collaboration with its customers at the heart of how it works.
But it’s hard….
Even with the resources in place, with organisations who are signed up to play, and with clear goals to achieve
What we found out from the workshop
We asked the workshop attendees, from different councils and organisations:
- how many of them had been involved in some sort of collaborative project or initiative
- how many had experienced problems with collaboration
The answer (for both questions) was EVERYONE. Working collaboratively is really common, but so are the problems, and they are holding us back.
To dig into the reasons behind this I used an exercise called a Pre-Mortem (learned from a collaborative project) to get everyone to think about being at the end of a collaborative project that went badly — using their own experiences — to dig into the reasons behind it.
To tease these out we used five categories as a starter to capture ideas under; Culture, Tools, Behaviours, Decision Making and Communication. This generated 94 separate contributions, which were captured on a Trello board:
> Trello: What’s stopping us from collaborating?
Creating a Collaboration Manifesto
Finding out the problems people have is only half the story; we need to start offering ideas and solutions that people can work to in order to mitigate or prevent them.
One idea floated at the workshop was to create a manifesto (along the lines of the Agile Manifesto) that can serve as a starting point for organisations to work with. Attendees were up for the idea of progressing this as an ongoing project that everyone can contribute to
But on its own a Manifesto leaves people without any real guidance.
At the workshop we discussed a few individual examples of issues; one was about ensuring that everyone involved in a collaborative project gets an equal voice at the table (which sounded like a great Manifesto principle!) and I talked about how we’d used Sociocracy at Dorset Council for an internal group involving more junior staff. So how do we get to share these sorts of solutions with each other?
The idea I’ve had is to combine a set of principles with supporting guidance (again, crowdsourced from anyone who wants to contribute) a bit on the lines of how the GDS Service Standard is presented.
But we need people to get involved and help make this a thing
Getting involved
Once the Trello board went up via Twitter, LOTI were quickly in touch to offer help:
And others soon followed:
First steps will be to get this fine bunch of people together to make some sense of it all before we throw open the doors wider to milk the community of all its great ideas.
If you want to get involved DM me on Twitter or drop me an email
