Enabling Effective Collaboration (2010)
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MMM’s 2007 report 'Towards a Healthy Ecology of Arts and Culture' stated that there is significant unrealised potential for arts and cultural organisations to leverage their own talents and those of other organisations by working together and recommended that the challenges and opportunities of developing mergers, back office consolidations and joint ventures needed to be further investigated.
Curated as a direct response to this recommendation, six collaborative working pilots in Scotland and the North East of England pilots were supported and financed by MMM during the period 2008-2010. Each with a different focus, their collective aim was to help the organisations involved move toward new operating structures and practices that could serve artists more effectively, elevate artistic achievement, and bolster organisational and financial capacity to respond to shifting external realities.
We have produced three sets of materials from the pilots:
Firstly, a guide for public and private funders to encourage them to invest in collaborative working which you can also link to below and
Secondly, a set of simple tools to help arts and cultural organisation to collaborate
- An outline of the different organisational structures that can support collaborative activity
- An introduction to the mindsets and behaviours needed in order to collaborate successfully
- An introduction to planning collaborative activity and a digest of key early stage challenges including identification of external expertise
- An outline of the different kinds of value created by successful collaboration
And thirdly, six case stories, which you can link to below.
As all those three sets of material reveal, good collaboration is hard but when it works it amplifies strength. Indeed, knowing how to evaluate opportunities for collaboration, spot the barriers to collaboration and tailor collaboration solutions is an essential part of building organisational resilience.
Material from three of the case stories ( NewcastleGateshead Cultural Venues, Exchange and Festivals Edinburgh) have been structured to illuminate a tool for thinking which we think is increasingly relevant to how we evolve our working practices and our organisations; that of the adaptive cycle.
We think this concept is important because if the sustainability of our organisation in these increasingly turbulent times is our primary goal then sustainability, at its core, is the capacity to create, test and maintain adaptive capacity.
Understanding the nature and universality of the adaptive cycle helps us realise that all systems, including our organisations, are never static. Instead, they tend to move dynamically through four recurring phases: the release phase, the re-organisation/renewal phase, the growth/exploitation phase and the conservation/consolidation phase. The adaptive cycle tells us that unless we release the resources of time, energy, money and skill locked up in our routines and our institutions on a regular basis, it is hard to create anything new or look at things from a different perspective. Without these new perspectives, and the continuous infusion of novelty and innovation in our lives, our organisations and our systems, there is a slow but definite loss of resilience, and an increase in rigidity.
Each of the case stories below offer insights into that task of change and whilst they are only snapshots of a much longer journey for each group, every one demonstrates the power of collaboration in confronting problems which have grown too large and too complex for any one actor and show how the impossibility of things staying as they are gives birth to the possibility of change.
In addition to the case stories from the six pilots above, Opera North and the University of Leeds invited us to write about their collabroation DARE which you can also read below.
Core individual resources
The resources listed below in type and alphabetical order are the key resources to use as you work through this issue.
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