Helping People Collaborate

by Nathan Senge

“We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”– Benjamin Franklin

Trust began to build between NOS and the Manglito fishing community when they realized they had to work together to realize their goals.

Lots of other NGOs talk a big game about collaboration with local communities but already have a solution in hand before those conversations even begin. In turn, the fishermen often seek out their own agendas focused on commercial gains and the assistance they want from the NGO. These sort of “instrumental” orientations view collaboration as a vehicle for achieving aims. And while such progress is important, genuine collaborations necessarily opens into a broader agenda that neither party can actualize on their own.

In this way, NOS and the Manglito community gradually accepted their inter-dependence. Academy for Systems Change Fellow Christian Liñán-Rivera said, “The only ones who can restore the fishery are the fishermen themselves.”

As the Manglito community began to trust NOS better, a joint vision of restoring the fishery emerged. “Alone as fishermen we won’t be able to handle all the things that need to be done,” says fisherman Martín Méndez of OPRE. “We have to work together – us as an organization and part of the fishery sector, as well as with the NGOs and their sometimes useful toolkits…because, for them, the process of getting funds is easier because they know how to approach the authorities. Us alone, we can’t do that.”

Restoring Relationships

A new “we” starts to show up.

There is a power in the relationship of NOS and El Manglito that transcends any kind of simple business partnership. The collapse of a the Ensenada de la Paz fishery drove desperate economic conditions that in turn drove people apart as they tried to survive.

But the staff of NOS and the Manglito fishermen slowly realized that they could reverse this fragmentation. “We’re connected, and we need to stay close to each other,” says Cabo Pulmo community member Judith Castro. “I believe we can do a lot together, not only for the Ensenada and Cabo Pulmo [a naturally protected area near La Paz], but for other places too.”

Seeing reality more fully together

The limitations of “evidence-based practices”

Building shared visions forms a crucial dimension of deep change, but so too does building shared understanding of current reality. The famous physicist David Bohm characterized the problem succinctly when he said, “The whole is too much. There is no way that thought can hold the whole, because thought only abstracts; it limits and defines.” He spent over a decade exploring the fundamentals of dialogue as a way to create spaces where a more “coherent field of shared understanding” can emerge.² In this vein, Gutiérrez talks about long-term processes for learning how to observe reality more and more accurately – processes that foster “individual and collective ability to suspend mental models in order to observe and notice the changes within us and around us.”

These comments are especially meaningful in light of the modern-day demand, often driven by foundations, for stronger “evidence–based” practices in diverse change settings. Better evidence is of course important to ground change leaders in the reality of their efforts. But real understanding is never in the evidence itself, but in our ability to interpret that evidence meaningfully. Just as the music is not in the instrument, the “seeing” is not in the data. Building capacity in complex change settings demands better evidence and better reflection. This is especially so for complex stakeholder settings where there are strong predispositions to see very different things in the same evidence, and little collective capacity to hold these differences.

Expanding the circle: continually extending collaborative relationship-building processes to other actors and organizations

The importance of neutral conveners

Robles talks of NOS’s inabilities to collaborate effectively with other NGOs and adds that “We need to learn why, and how to do this better…to turn the mirror onto ourselves in these settings.” While NOS’s willingness to see how it must change is laudable, there are larger forces at play beyond its boundaries. In our experience, the problem in part lies within the larger institutional ecosystem and the complex and often conflicting agendas and motivations that prevail – a problem that no one organization can solve by itself. For example, we have found it very difficult to help NGOs collaborate when they would otherwise be competing for foundation founding by demonstrating their own particular interventions. By contrast, the challenges for NOS and El Manglito involve long-standing internal conflicts within the fishing community, and mistrust of outside organizations like NOS in general. These are two very different challenges to collaboration and need to be met by different strategies.

For example, it is possible that a neutral convener may be needed to bring different NGOs into an open space for longer-term mutual learning, and an individual NGO like NOS is simply unable to play this role. Who could play such a role in a setting like La Paz? Ideally, it could be a government agency, but, as Robles details in the failed Upper Gulf project, this may not be possible in Mexico today. It could instead be a foundation or a group of foundations, but the incentives to gain financial funding distorts relationships around foundations in general and makes it very difficult to create a neutral space where more authentic conversations can build trust. It could be an academic institution, but it is not clear in this region who is capable of playing that role. For successful collaborations to develop among otherwise competing organizations, independent convening organizations are often formed for this purpose, like the Sustainable Food Lab. But this took many years and required a start-up strategy and funding.

This lack of a neutral institutional convener is an important structural problem that needs to be addressed if the larger networks of collaboration Robles speaks of are to develop. These are basic infrastructure problems beyond the personal and inter-personal dimensions, reflected in an old saw in the organizational learning world: “Collective learning cannot be left to chance, and collaboration does not come from just good intentions.” Interestingly, this may be another example of Robles’s search for “structures on the ground” to sustain deep change.