How to create a culture of Strategic Collaboration
Strategic Collaboration draws on agile principles and lean-startup practices to create ways of working which achieve more with less, unlocking an organisation’s full potential.
Creating a culture of strategic collaboration means fostering an environment laser focused on specific outcomes, where experimentation is the standard approach, data drives decision-making and empowered teams work out in the open.
The good news is, the best way to embed a culture of strategic collaboration is by taking an approach informed by these same principles.
The Role of experimentation and continuous learning
It’s important to adopt an iterative and experimental approach to embedding a culture of strategic collaboration. Moving away from rigid plans and embracing continuous learning will allow you to quickly test ideas and respond to external and internal changes. Instead of striving for a “perfect” product, process or service from the outset, aim to develop a “minimum viable product” and then gather feedback to inform ongoing improvements.
To use this approach to help you embed these new ways of working, ask yourself:
- Which teams are keen to try new things? How can you empower them to test out tools like the team charter and retrospectives.
- How can they iterate on and improve how they use these tools?
- What opportunities do they have to share their learnings with the rest of the organisation?
Experimentation and continuous learning was at the heart of Prostate Cancer UK’s success with their “March the Month” virtual fundraising product. By repeatedly testing, gathering data, and adapting their approach, they achieved significant fundraising growth with minimal additional spend.
Data-driven decision-making
When it comes to creating a culture of strategic collaboration, data-driven approach is essential for ensuring that you are effectively allocating resources and making progress towards your shared goals. When decisions are based on data and insight – rather than intuition and personal preference – they are depersonalised. So, not only are you making decisions with a solid rationale, but you remove the risk of the loudest person’s hunches winning out. By:
- Regularly capturing relevant data,
- Measuring performance against key metrics,
- Then using this information to inform adjustments and improvements
strategically collaborative organisations ensure that their work is aligned with their objectives, maximising their impact. Begin by setting goals for the impact you want strategic collaboration to have on your work. For example, “we will cut the time it takes to go from idea to delivery by 8 weeks”. Then, you can measure the success of your collaborative efforts and make data-driven decisions about further improvement and implementation.
Transparency and visibility
Working in the open is another key aspect of fostering a strategically collaborative culture. Transparency ensures that information is readily accessible to all stakeholders.
For example, Amnesty International UK utilises Trello boards to visualise their annual organisational goals and progress towards them. They are updated in real time and available for anyone inside the organisation to see. This open approach enables better alignment, promotes accountability, and facilitates collaborative problem-solving.
Similarly, the emphasis on regular communication and feedback loops in strategic collaboration, such as daily stand-up meetings and sprint reviews, contributes to a culture of transparency where challenges, successes, and learnings are openly shared and discussed.
For example, Amnesty International UK also implemented regular reflection sessions involving all staff members, creating a space for open dialogue and continuous improvement around how they track progress towards their organisational goals.
Help people grasp the level of transparency you want them to adopt by leading this change in a radically transparent way. Share your thinking, make your documentation available to anyone who wants to review it and create new opportunities for people to hear about, question and feedback on changes you’re implementing. This could be a ‘lunch and learn’ or 1 minute update videos of achievements and challenges at the end of each week; anything that will capture people’s attention and signal that something new is happening.
