Considering collaboration — reflections from The Children’s Society
Pausing to reflect on collaboration — why its needed, what it can look like, how we do it and what we’ve learnt along the way.
Prompted by the monthly insight gathering facilitated by the Digital Fund at TNLCF, we recently reflected on collaboration. The Children’s Society operates in a complex environment and collaboration is fundamental to our work. The challenges that young people face are multi-faceted. To improve lives and enable young people to flourish, we have adapted our ways of working to facilitate effective collaboration internally and in the wider system — with our partners, other charities, supporters, fellow organisations and individuals on the journey of change.
“We recognise that one solution is not going to fix a problem, so we team up with others who are also working on the same goal.” Cat Drew
In Cat Drew’s recent blog on how design is evolving at the Design Council, designing in collaboration is one of the Design Council’s new design principles. At The Children’s Society, multi-level collaboration and cooperation underpins much of our work, some of which has been accelerated by Covid. Within our organisation we have design and systems change roles, as we seek to become early adopters of change. We collaborate, working together to co-define solutions. When we hit a barrier or problem, the instinct is to ask — ‘who else is working on this and has experience, and can we team up with them?’
The breadth and depth of collaboration within and reaching out of The Children’s Society goes way beyond this blog but the examples shared offer some learning and insight from and into our world and might spark some thinking for you.
Ways of working in The Children’s Society
Recent blogs by my colleagues have shared some of our ways of working undertaken in response to Covid. We’ve seen greater collaboration across our service delivery and central teams. With Covid, we had a clear reason to collaborate, to address immediate priorities — prior to Covid there was inconsistent engagement in meetings and project teams.
Virtual as an equaliser
In addition, with all meetings now being virtual, location is no longer an issue. We have decentralised and moved from what some said was a highly London-centric focus. We were London centric by design, since our national office is in central London — but we are actually a nationally distributed network of staff in our services for young people, our supporter base and our charity shops.
The move to virtual working became an equaliser — with people collaborating across the organisation using the same means. Attendance at the organisational wide ‘Town Hall’ meetings is a good example of this: 277 colleagues tuned in live to the last session (which is 42% of staff currently working and not on furlough) which breaks all previous attendance records.
New digital tools for collaboration
We have been collaborating online in new ways, using online tools (like the mapping software Miro, and Microsoft Teams) to facilitate projects and communicate more effectively. Colleagues in our frontline services have been some of the first to embrace new ways of working — which was not anticipated. We are now kick-starting a community we are calling ‘splendid users’ who are exploring greater functionality in different software to collaborate and share practice. The graph below shows the rapid increase in Microsoft Teams users from the beginning of the year, through to Covid hitting in March, to early July.
We secured free licences to Miro, and its use has rapidly gone from a handful of design staff using it as a design tool, to being used daily by national programme teams to develop their work to disrupt and prevent the exploitation of children and systems change processes. We are also mid-test and learn collaborating on Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons Framework in Miro. Building on the theme of collaboration and equalising our work, Miro has enabled this — allowing collaboration with staff in real time.
Cross-organisational teams
As we move to a reduced lockdown state (for some), a time limited, centrally coordinated, cross organisational team was established at The Children’s Society to collaborate and plan the re-mobilisation of shops, offices and services as lockdown is eased. The shared purpose has meant that these quite different parts of our organisation have drawn together and collaborated really well to ensure consistent practice, communication, and importantly safety.
Collaborating beyond The Children’s Society (TCS) to increase our impact
Our collaboration beyond TCS takes many forms and we are proud of our partnership working locally and nationally. A handful of new collaborations are shared below to give a flavour for some of the different ways we work with other organisations.
As a result of Covid we have developed a new collaboration in relation to our digital service delivery with young people. We partnered with Deepr and The Catalyst, who supported us with a rapid design sprint to develop practical methods that can be applied in our digital services to enable a high degree of human connection and benefit the relational wellbeing of users. The project co-created bespoke guidance for frontline staff in Newcastle, working on a young people’s missing from home service, to facilitate digital services that are tuned for human connection using appropriate tools and processes for a range of situations and users. Working with the service, we have developed prototypes of these tools that we will be testing, with a view to then develop them further across our practice base.
TCS benefited from the expertise of Deepr and the learning they were able to draw on from prior collaboration with other charities with support from The Catalyst. This is a brand new area of work and my colleague Ellen will be blogging more about this work as it evolves. A sample of cards to facilitate human connection have been developed and are currently being tested:
“I love the cards — it’s such a creative way to engage young people and also a great prompt for practitioners (…) the simplicity of it is brilliant!” — Practitioner
“It would be really interesting to be given the opportunity to explore other areas of the service in this way”. — Service manager
Following publication of the Pinball Kids report, we approached the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) to start a conversation about school exclusions. We are undertaking systemic change work in relation to school exclusions in TCS and saw potential for a connection with the RSA. A collaboration has progressed as a result of this, with a joint proposal for future work in progress. This example has shown me the importance of reaching out with a short email when you read something interesting and can visualise a spark of connectivity from the work produced by others to your own. We are really excited as to where this might lead.
The Children’s Society have recently been accepted onto the JP Morgan Interns for Social Good Programme — receiving the support of a group of interns this summer (over 5 weeks), to understand a challenge that we are facing and develop a proposed solution and a set of recommendations to help solve that challenge. We are focussing this collaboration on our digital delivery, with particular focus on referral systems to ease access to our services for young people. We are excited to introduce skills and diversity of thinking into our work so we can actively engage in a two way skill exchange — hoping that both TCS and JP Morgan will learn a lot about each other as a result of the collaboration.
The Children’s Society has a long history of collaboration with charities working to support children and young people. These collaborations gained pace as a result of Covid. The emphasis shifted: working together we were aligned by a common purpose to support young people as well as we possibly could during the crisis. We had a single shared goal that we were seeking to achieve together. We’ve talked about this collaboration in previous blogs, but as a result of Covid — previously competing charities came together to a) research and make sense of what’s happening to children and young people at this time and b) lobby and influence the government / policy makers.
Recognising the collective power of the organisations working together
With partners we are collecting evidence about the issues affecting emergency financial support providers during the Covid pandemic. These might be issues relating to service delivery or challenges for service users. We are analysing and collating responses into regular evidence notes and have published five of these to date.
Despite the Covid-fueled collaboration, market drivers remain. The system is ultimately set up for us to compete against other charities and organisations. In conversation recently on the Digital Fund’s monthly learning event on collaboration, we’ve been considering the role of funders to support and enable collaboration, and for us to change the narrative. At The Children’s Society we would welcome working with other charities to identify where Covid-collaboration can be held onto and harnessed for positive change.
A (brief) story of collaboration. The CYP Ways of Working group has enabled greater collaboration across digital, safeguarding, information governance, children and young people service delivery and innovation. The shared rhythms and rituals of this group — weekly meetings and clear actions kept momentum and accountability, especially at the beginning of lockdown. With a shared purpose — to get all of our delivery online — we excelled at collaborating, collective problem solving and making things happen.
Adam recently led a retrospective to draw out what made this collaboration a success. The picture below shows some of the key ingredients — the building blocks:
- Authority to make decisions
- Multi-disciplinary (read: collaborative)
- Shared practices (rhythms and tools)
We’ve now re-purposed the group and reviewed membership. But have kept those ingredients and will test to see if we can sustain our cross organisational collaboration while the urgency of the shared purpose isn’t quite so compelling.
To add to the story, and our experience of collaboration more generally, we were encouraged by Phoebe Tickell as part of our reflections, to consider what makes collaboration a positive experience:
- A joint goal, commitment and consistency of people in groups or teams (the right people at the right time).
- Keeping in touch — not just scheduled communication but checking in and updating on wider work that may be of interest — investing time in the relationships.
- Valuing the diversity of skills, expertise and voices in collaborative work.
- Time is needed to keep collaboration effective and alive. It’s well worth spending time on this.
- For some, permission to collaborate, with the right legal framework (Non Disclosure Agreement, for example) around it to allow ideas generation and joint projects to follow.
- Inviting voices which are missing.
- Going where the energy is — teaming up with others working on the same goal.
- Fun — adding in the human aspect — our work is serious stuff. If we can work to make our collaborations a fulfilling experience for those involved to have a good experience along the way — that makes me happy.
Flipping this, when thinking of blockers to collaboration the big hitters include:
- Competitive market — the funding system is, on the whole, set up to encourage charities and wider organisations to compete against each other, not to collaborate.
- Time — too often time is prioritised towards internal developments, with less external focus. Making the time for networking and collaboration is essential to allow it to flourish.
- Funding — effective and meaningful collaboration takes investment. Funding to support, and enable collaboration, to free up time and space to make it happen would act as an enabler.
- It’s hard work — collaborating is sometimes harder than not collaborating. It’s often harder to work on a joint project or service with external organisations or people who are not in your team. It takes more effort, more time, more work. But working collaboratively is much richer and can boost the impact we are seeking to achieve.
Concluding thoughts
Reflecting on collaboration has been a useful pause for thought to recognise the value we gain when we collaborate. The greater diversity of experience, skill and thinking far outweigh the increased effort and challenge, collaboration can bring. As we think about moving from the Covid crisis into the future unknown, there are clear aspects of collaboration to maintain and from which to build. At The Children’s Society we are working to create our own set of service design principles for the organisation, collaboration will be a key feature.
Thank you to Adam Groves, Gemma Drake and Phoebe Tickell for their comments on this draft and to Lucy Wappett for co-creating the content. And to Team TCS the inspiration for all these words.
