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Leveraging the combined power of multiple organizations in a value chain is an important practice in the world today. These collaborations may comprise multiple entities of the same type of organization, or representatives throughout an industry value chain:
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Partners
- Competitors
- Regulators
- Analysts
The core purpose of the member's organization provides a 'uniting' motivation, while challenges arise in balancing that purpose with the mutual and conflicting motivations of individual members. These situations lead to volumes of conversation around the topics where there is commonality, and where conflict is anticipated conversation is avoided or minimized to reduce disharmony, leading to 'elephants in the room' and the process getting 'stuck'. In the worst case progress is constrained to the lowest common denominator.
Symptoms of misalignment are:
- Issues over engagement - am I getting the value I expected?
- Solutions come slowly and do not seem to significantly advance the cause
- Important topics may be avoided because there is no hope to please everyone
- The community fractures visibly or tacitly into clusters and cliques
The key is having a process that respects conflicting motivations in the absence of a single leader.
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