Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
One of the most simple and powerful frameworks for working out how to
achieve successful collaborative working is Morten Hansen’s idea of
‘disciplined collaboration’ which he sums up as follows: the leadership
practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and
instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when
required.
This case story has been written using Hansen’s simple framework to
illuminate the challenges this group faced as they embarked on their
collaboration. It aims to underline how paying serious attention to these three
stages offers collaborative endeavour a better chance of succeeding. By
explaining the difficulties faced by this group in each of these stages, we hope
to share valuable learning with other embarking on similar journeys.
All three organisations (two festivals, one cinema) are based in the TC
building (AV and NLFF as tenants of TC). At the start of this pilot, TC
provided financial services to both festivals.
TC had been in its new building for one year when this collaboration began
and had delivered a series of projects (including digital arts commissioning)
1 Audio Visual Arts North East
alongside its core cinema activity in this time. In the summer of 2009 TC was
in the process of revisiting its five-year business plan. Its first year trading in
the
new building had exceeded budget target (i.e. has created a smaller deficit
than predicted). TC had created many fixed term posts to ‘open’ the new
building and the business plan had always showed a reduction in its
management costs in 2010/2011 to increase profitability. For this reason,
several key contracts ended in Autumn 2009.
As outlined above, the key event in the first few months of this pilot was the
significant organisational change undergone by NLFF, namely the resignation
of key staff and a re-structure and considerable re- evaluation of the core aims
of the festival. This included a period of uncertainty, followed by the
appointment of a new director partway through this collaboration, and the re-
scheduling of the festival. The consequences were significant:
Firstly, the time available to deliver the MMM pilot project became truncated,
effectively running for one year (summer 2009 – summer 2010) instead of the
planned two years.
All three of these new realities meant that the collaboration began under
exceptionally complicated and unexpected circumstances
There were certainly some successful collaborative outputs (both artistic and
back-office), including:
Whilst the relationship between each member of the group was not
fundamentally different at the end of the process than it had been at the start,
the collaborative process did generate some key outcomes;
2In fact, throughout this pilot project, the principal point of contact at
NLFF changed three times, which arguably had a de-‐stabilising effect on the
process as relationships built up had to repeatedly be re-‐developed.
Although there has been no long-term collaborative relationship borne of this
project, there is now an incidental person-to-person relationship, beneficial in
terms of providing a sounding board, arena for sharing experiences etc,
between the two festivals where previously there had been none.
Significantly, having had the MMM experience and upon drawing conclusions
as to the project’s successes and failures, the three parties were able to have
their most frank and open discussion of the entire collaboration. This would
seem to evidence the MMM conclusions that genuine collaborations need
time to ferment before they grow, but further, one could also speculate that
each of the members involved in this initiative is probably now genuinely
more collaboration-ready, provided the context and partners were
appropriate.
The collaborative process however itself was not at all times successful. By
considering Morten Hansen’s Three Steps of Disciplined Collaboration,
coupled with some of MMM’s findings in the light of this pilot initiative, it is
possible to identify pitfalls and consider some lessons learnt as a result of this
particular collaboration.
The overall learning to be gleaned from this case story is that before it
commences, any potential collaboration should be thoroughly assessed, in
terms of the motivations behind it and its appropriateness. A collaboration is
unlikely to succeed if it is based on assumptions, if all partners do not have
equality and if the partners are not aware of (or do not have the capacity to
overcome) likely barriers. By referring to MMM’s ‘Diagnostic Framework for
Assessing Healthy Collaboration’ alongside Hansen’s Three Steps, a number
of key lessons borne of this collaboration can be identified.3
3
It
should
be
noted
however,
hat
this
framework
was
not
made
available
to
this
groups
whilst
undergoing
their
collaboration
–
had
such
a
methodology
been
suggested,
the
group
would
have
endeavoured
to
follow
it.
Step 1: Evaluating opportunities for collaboration
The Opportunities
The group felt that two sets of collaborative opportunities presented
themselves:
a) sharing back-office function
Consolidating shared back office functions in relation to volunteers,
fundraising and finance. This felt a natural progression given that the TC
already provided financial services to each festival, and the organisations had
a shared history of working with volunteers.4
The key building blocks from which it was presumed the organisations could
construct their collaboration
• the three organisations operate from the same building
• they have a shared genesis (both festivals were essentially incubated via
the creative programming of the cinema before becoming independent)
• their key personnel professionally cross-fertilise (at one point, the key
contacts from both NLFF and TC sat on the board of AV, and the CEO
of TC was additionally on the board of NLFF5)
• each festival had a history of presenting work at the cinema, and the
cinema considered the delivery of each festival as key to it’s own artistic
programming/output
• each organisation has broadly similar creative interests; film, moving
image, digital media, audiences
• At the point of application to MMM there were some existing shared
back-office relationships, and as highlighted earlier, all three
organisations had previously collaborated on a volunteer scheme.
4
‘Evolve’
was
a
volunteer
initiative
that
ran
across
all
three
organizations
and
was
one
of
a
So the group didn’t know how the collaboration would or might result in the
realisation of a developed collective vision, as the individual visions
themselves were still taking shape. With a new director in post at each festival
(and by this time a restructure also taking place at the cinema), the
organisations were not so much at risk of becoming rigid in the sense of not
adapting (as argued in the MMM report, ‘Fuelling the Necessary Revolution’)
but were keen to each forge their own way and create new individual identities
and as such were wary of compromising themselves in the pursuit of this.
In retrospect the question to ask here would have been are these the right
collaborative partners in this context? Despite their shared history, by the
end of the pilot, the organisations concluded that they whilst they have
existing important and durable long-term alliances (borne both through
historical association, but crucially through successful new working models in
2010), they weren’t necessarily the ideal combination of organisations to work
collaboratively on this initiative.6
6
Speculating
that
more
beneficial
collaborations
cold
be
forged
nationally
and
internationally,
where
there
would
be
a
greater
degree
of
shared
creative
alignment
and
less
competition
sue
to
not
being
so
proximate
in
terms
of
geography
or
scheduling
Given that this crucial question wasn’t asked at this stage, the organisations
decided to work together on three creative collaborations with the aim of
learning by doing and assessing the collaborations (and future opportunities)
as they developed.
The Barriers
This shared activity became the focus of the members, aiming to both generate
outcomes and develop learning along the way. The members worked together
(with varying degrees of success) to generate works as agreed, with overall
positive outcomes. This process was intended to enable the group to learn
together and from each other – so rather than developing CQAs and then
putting these into practice, the group chose instead to play to members’
existing strengths, with the hope that this would highlight areas for
development. Indeed the group ‘got on’ with the practice and learnt some
interesting lessons along the way;
From the outset, this group had been in reactive problem-solving mode,
working to get a ‘job done’ rather than truly having the time and space to
enter into collaborative working and it became apparent throughout the
process that each individual had a different understanding or expectation of
what collaboration means, meant, or could offer.