5 Resolutions for Better Collaboration in 2022

Title image by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

by Jim Woodell
December 16, 2021

I recently came across Systems Convening: A  crucial form of leadership for the 21st century, by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner. I discovered that a name had been given to what I feel like I’ve been doing for most of my professional life—systems convening. According to the Wenger-Trayners, systems conveners “…spot opportunities for creating new learning spaces and partnership that will bring different and often unlikely people together to engage in learning across boundaries.” I have considered myself a boundary spanner throughout my career, and this book helped me see more clearly the collaboration and learning purposes that have been at the heart of my systems convening.

Systems conveners engage across six key areas of work in bringing people together: narrative work, legitimacy work, boundary work, identity work, agency work, and power work. Read the book to get more insights into what each of these mean. Here, I focus in particular on boundary work.

As I read the section on boundary work, filled with quotations from systems conveners, I was inspired to think about things that I can do better in the coming year to improve my systems convening. These ideas, I think, can be useful to anyone considering ways to improve partnership and collaboration. Please join me in adopting one or more of these resolutions for better collaboration in 2022.

1. Respect the boundaries to open the boundaries.
To begin to make boundaries (cultural, organizational, geographic, etc.) more porous, the systems convener first understands why the boundary exists and what kinds of norms (and beliefs, and passions, and practices…) have developed around it. Anyone trying to improve partnerships and collaboration would do well to resolve to better understand what existing boundaries mean to people who are on either side of them before working to bring people together across them.

2. Ask first: What can we learn?
Though it is important to understand and respect the boundaries, a systems convener does not simply accept a boundary as “the way it is.” Instead, they consider the boundary an occasion for learning. Collaboration across organizational or other divides should begin with the question “what can we learn?” Resolve to make this question central to your joint efforts with others.

3. Take time to frame the question.
It’s not only in debate, confrontation, and competition that people dig in and protect their position. Even in trying to work together, individuals will promote their own stance, or their organization’s, on various aspects of the work. Encouraging collaboration means finding ways to head off that impulse at the pass—to disarm it. One way to do this is to frame a question as the focus of the partnership. Goals are good, but they don’t serve to open people up to many possibilities. Instead, they focus people on “this is how we’ve done this before…” A good resolution for better collaboration in 2022 is to make sure you take the time to frame the collaboration in an appreciative way, through a question that invites open-mindedness.

4. Create together to see together.
In sociology, a “boundary object” is something, either concrete or conceptual, that parties representing different places or perspectives can focus on to develop shared meaning and purpose. Systems conveners often create physical artifacts that help organize conversation and shared vision. A process map is one great example of an artifact that helps groups working across intra-system boundaries to see all parts of the system and begin to consider ways to work better together. Make it a resolution to consider how collaborations can use such artifacts to help promote a sense of shared purpose.

5. Collaborate with humans, not positions.
People play roles in their professional lives. They have titles. They represent their organizations. In the end, though, these are not the sum total of their identities. People all have their humanity in common, and in considering how best to collaborate, that is a great place to start. Yes, roles, titles, and organizations come into play and will help to shape the contours of a collaboration. But the most productive collaborative conversations often begin at a deeper level, with individual beliefs, ideas, perceptions, and even feelings. Resolve to start there with your collaborations in 2022.

How do these resolutions for better collaboration sound to you? Will you adopt one or more of them for your partnership work in 2022? Please reply below with your thoughts.