Collaboration as an act of resistance (part two)

Now you’re on board with this crazy collaborating idea, who are you going to work with? Finding people may be a challenge. There are many networks, forums, membership groups that can be found online. Join a few and try practising a bit of vulnerability there — share your ideas and needs and see what happens. There will be people just wanting to sell you their expertise, and a few folks who like to have all the answers but somewhere in there someone might simply agree to chat it through with you over a coffee.

Try trusting your intuition — does this person or opportunity feel like a good fit? One test could be as simple as using this article. If you agree with most of the sentiments, ask potential collaborators to read it and if they agree with most of the sentiments — it’s a good place to start or at least have a conversation about what it might mean for you both to collaborate.

You might actually already have potential collaborators at your fingertips. At Goodmakers we have a tool called Hidden Assets which can help you unearth valuable resources, called assets, that you might not know you have or realise they have value. These can be what Laura Nichol highlights in her work, Rethinking Capital, skills, reputation and intellect (what you know) and/or what Chris Rabb calls your invisible capital (social capital and ascribed capital, what you were born with). Both Nichol and Rabb cited network as one of the most valuable resources we can have. Once identified, any of these hidden assets can be leveraged to help move our work forward.

This next one might take guts. Do you have a competitor that you could work with? You are both trying to achieve a similar goal, but you’ll have slightly different USP’s — could you do something collaborative together to maximise the good work you’re both doing? Charities that ordinarily might consider themselves to be competing for the same pot of funding are increasingly forming consortia to apply together and share the funding in a way that better serves all their beneficiaries. I worked for a start-up ethical business called Clean for Good (commercial cleaning company). We were very much in the business of making a profit, at the same time as paying London Living Wage or above, providing proper training, supervision and most importantly we refused to use zero-hour contracts. The cleaning industry has very tight margins and it’s extremely competitive (mostly on price). Despite this, I found a cleaning company (Just Helpers) in London, that had similar values to us and so I reached out and met Antoinette, the CEO for a coffee. We discovered we had a lot in common both personally and professionally and talked about the trials and tribulations of starting and running a business in this industry. As Clean for Good grew and we became known for our efforts at tackling injustices in the cleaning industry, many people contacted us for domestic cleaning, something we didn’t do — but my new friend’s company did. I sent all our domestic cleaning enquiries to her. Whilst we didn’t directly compete for commercial contracts, we supported each other on potential bids and current contracts. By collaborating in this way, we were able to do a lot more for our staff, our clients and the cause than we could alone.

Another challenge is to look for unlikely partners. Who might you never want to work with or think would never want to work with you? Are we perhaps too quick to judge others motives or values? The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Coca-Cola have become such partners. It is actually in both their interests to protect and sustain water sources. These two organisations have worked together across the world to do so. This collaboration was not just a large donation by Coca-cola it was a partnership where expertise was shared with farming communities. Sometimes these partnerships are criticised and one partner (usually the party is known to be more socially conscious) is labelled a sell-out. I don’t agree. When done in the true spirit of collaboration, to make the world a better place, the sheer demonstration that competitors or unlikely partners can find each other, share a common vision and work together to deliver it is quite otherworldly, and I also think beautiful.

You might end up with a partnership, a cooperative, a company, a consortium, an employee — but whatever you call it or however you structure it, if you have vulnerability, trust and generosity you’ll have something that looks like collaboration, it will be risky yes, but also creative, exhilarating and so attractive to others that they start to do it too and then you are really changing the world.