The Partnering Initiative

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5 ways to make your organization a great sustainability partner

Darian Stibbe, Executive Director and Dave Prescott, Senior Associate, The Partnering Initiative

This blog was originally published by the World Economic Forum.

The vision is clear and compelling: a world in which business prospers, societies thrive and the environment flourishes. Leaders from across all sectors understand the interconnectedness of their interests, drop zero-sum-game mentality and work tirelessly together to create ever-increasing value for all.

No longer the preserve of a few “progressive” companies, business writ large is a true partner in development, looking beyond immediate short-term financial results towards building long-term business and societal value. It adapts its business models and aligns its investments and core business activities, products and services in ways that contribute to countries’ environmental and development priorities (priorities it has had a hand in setting); it strategically invests resources of all kinds (technological innovation, funding, talent and energy) into the sustainability of its operations and supply chains, and more widely to strengthen the social, economic, infrastructure and environmental fabric in which it operates. The $12 trillion in market opportunities identified by the Business Commission are on course to being realized, creating up to 380 million jobs.

Governments, meanwhile, are doing everything in their power to encourage and support responsible, inclusive and sustainable business: to lead by example with state-owned enterprises; to build the right enabling, entrepreneurial, responsible investment and competitiveness environment; to consult on and fully include business needs in country development priorities; and wherever necessary use its regulatory and taxation powers to prevent irresponsible or unsustainable business practices, level the playing field and ensure competitive behaviour. People’s incomes improve and the increasing tax takes are funding social progress, including through better education and health provision.

And, of course, central to this vision and the hottest topic of discourse within international development: governments, business, NGOs, the UN, academia, are all working together through a rich tapestry of formal and informal partnerships, from the global down to the country level, aligning interests and combining their resources to collectively deliver on the promise.

It’s an exciting image. But unfortunately, it’s not one that our institutions, companies and NGOs are set up to be able to deliver. They are not institutionally fit for partnering, and the friction and heat that creates risks derailing progress towards the collaborative dream.

The many macro- or system-level challenges to cross-sectoral collaboration, from investors in thrall to quarterly reporting to mistrust across societal sectors, are well documented. To date, little attention has been paid to the degree to which development actors (including business) are themselves fit for purpose to be able to partner effectively.

• A multinational gas company wanted to partner with a business network NGO in a Middle Eastern country, including giving them a grant of around $10,000. The gas company’s internal procedures required the same level of due diligence as a $500M international joint venture, with a 60-page form to complete and with requirements wholly irrelevant and impossible for a small NGO to comply with. In the words of the director of social investment, “Every day, I have to break our own rules to get anything done. Fortunately, I’m senior enough and have the direct support of our CEO. Without that, I would have been fired years ago.”

• A UN agency had rules requiring any partnership with a company to involve a minimum cash transfer to the agency. The requirement set a negative tone for agency staff beginning partnership discussions: “I felt like a supplicant, appealing to the largesse of the company, rather than an equal partner together working out how we could together create value for both [the UN Agency] and the company,” says one. It also demonstrates an all-too-common mental picture of companies as funders, not co-travellers.

• A previously successful partnership between a fast-moving consumer goods company and a household name international NGO broke down completely when the NGO partnership representative changed. The new person was a very successful director, used to making quick decisions, but was not cut out for collaborative working. As the company manager put it, “we went from openly discussing problems and working things out together, to what felt like an ‘us versus them’ relationship with our motives constantly being challenged.”

From ‘us versus them’ to ‘in it together’

Can we really expect organizations to shift the way they work and operate? They have optimized their existing approach organically over years, successfully delivering their own agendas in a way that is successful, rewarded (customers buy products, donors give more funding, voters return governments) and reinforced. To deliver a collective agenda requires a shift in approach, with partnering-conducive systems and process, capacities and culture. For this to happen, all sectors of society will need to undertake deliberate and targeted organizational change efforts to become institutionally fit for partnering.

While the specifics vary, The Partnering Initiative’s 15 years’ experience working with business, UN and NGO leaders has shown a surprisingly consistent set of internal issues and challenges faced by those at the coalface of collaboration – whichever sector they come from. Here, we set out five steps organizations can take to optimise their ability to maximize value from partnership:

1. Undertake an audit of the degree to which you are institutionally set up to partner effectively. Do you have a clear strategy in place on how partnering can deliver value for your organizations? In what ways do your existing systems and processes support or obstruct your staff in developing partnerships? What skills and capacities do you have in-house? To what extent is our culture encouraging of collaboration? What challenges do your existing partners face when working with you? What do they most value?

2. Ensure you have the support of senior leadership and (collaboratively) develop and disseminate a clear strategic imperative for partnering, setting out the key forms of collaboration that create genuine value for your organization. Enshrine it in policy and put some dedicated budget behind it.

3. With new understanding of the pain points of partnering, introduce clear processes for collaboration, from clearly signposted entry points for others to engage with your organization, through to systematically identifying and assessing potentially value-adding partnerships; and from partnership-optimized due diligence and legal agreements to management and evaluation protocols that can assess ALL forms of value, including both direct mission achievement and longer-term organizational gains around sustainability, reputation, positioning, etc.

4. Train and hire “tri-sector athletes”, as Dominic Barton – then the Managing Director of McKinsey – called them. Support them to develop a partnering mindset (which must include humility!), an understanding of how other sectors work and operate, the necessary trust- and human-relationship-building skills, and a technical knowledge of effective partnerships.

5. Finally, encourage a pro-partnering culture by assigning staff the time to develop partnerships, and give them the freedom to be creative and innovate, including the freedom to fail. Reward staff for the building of relationships, as well as the results that come from fully formed partnerships.

Partnering, particularly across societal sectors, is difficult, often with overly high transaction costs and too much friction between organisations. If we as a society genuinely believe in Agenda 2030 as a shared collaborative agenda, we must invest in the capability of our institutions, NGOs and companies to collaborate more smoothly and effectively. If not, we are setting ourselves up for a decade of frustration, and ultimately failure.

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Building a new infrastructure for the SDGs

        
Delivering the SDGs will require partnerships across business, governments, donors, the UN and NGOs at a scale that dwarfs current efforts of collaboration. This is a significant undertaking, beyond the ability of our current systems to deliver.

TPI and C-Change are two organisations on a mission: to help to design and build the new infrastructure that can systematically engage business and deliver the unprecedented level of collaboration required to achieve the SDGs. Here we present a series of joint articles published with the World Economic Forum to coincide with their Sustainable Development Impact Summit during the UN General Assembly, September 2018.

C-Change and TPI Blog Series

1. Five ways to make your organization a great sustainability partner

2. The 6 market gaps the finance sector must address to help meet the SDGs

 

Other associated blogs and publications

TPI: Building the collaborative world we need to deliver the SDGs

TPI: Unleashing the Power of Business: A practical Roadmap to systematically engage business as a partner in development

TPI: Collaboration for the SDGs: Exploring the support system for Effective Partnering

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Partnerships and innovation at Business Fights Poverty annual conference

By Dave Prescott, Senior Associate 

Wednesday 18th July saw Lecture Theatre 4 of the Saïd Business School in Oxford packed to bursting with a highly energetic session focused on partnerships and innovation. Part of the Partnership Zone, curated by TPI and Ethicore, at the Business Fights Poverty Annual Event, the session gave a high-speed overview of innovation in partnerships; highlighted the work of six creative partnerships; and even inspired in real time a plethora of new collaborative ideas from the people in the room.

As introduced by session moderator, TPI Executive Director, Darian Stibbe, innovation is back in vogue. While everyone appears to want innovation, innovation is generally not well defined, incentivised or properly supported within organisations. The examples throughout the session demonstrated how partnerships can both be drivers of innovation, and themselves be innovative.

The multiple forms of innovation uncovered include new business models, products and services; new internal practices; new technologies; and the application of known solutions or resources into novel new areas.

Multiple examples of all these kinds came from both panellists and participants, including Project Hero, a collaboration between Jaguar Land Rover and the Red Cross which now involves the development of drones able to land on moving vehicles, a powerful asset in remote humanitarian situations.

Several partnerships revealed that innovation often happens when an existing problem or situation is viewed from an outside perspective (and of course partnerships with diverse partners are ideal for this). When an airport, for example, is viewed as ‘a shopping mall with a runway attached’ (one of the insights mentioned by the Innovation Gateway) a whole different set of perspectives and learnings from the sustainability experiences of shopping malls can be applied.

One of the keys for success for innovative approaches is being user- and problem-centric. In the context of partnership, this means that, rather than viewing a situation through existing organisational lenses, it is important to develop a clear shared understanding of the problem to be solved, and of the intended user group. The Water Explorer partnership, which brings together Global Action Plan and HSBC, is an education programme designed to empower students to act on water challenges. While global, each implementation was fully re-designed around the specific context of the intended users, the school children.

And once innovation has been identified, a whole range of other factors come into play in order to make it happen, include the drive and tenacity of committed individuals and champions, as well as senior-level support. For example, World Vision presented an innovative, free, 24-hour child helpline in Mongolia which they had developed in partnership with the government and Mobicom, a large mobile operator. It was noted that the partnership would not have happened without the ongoing support of the country’s president.

By definition, innovation involves doing things differently and it therefore entails greater risk. In situations where there is a lack of tolerance for risk, or where there is no permission to fail, innovation is usually stifled. This reinforces the need for senior-level buy-in, including within organisations. In the case of the Growing Together partnership between Syngenta and VSO, the company undertook one the most effective possible routes to engendering buy-in from senior managers: sending them to live with the smallholder farmers that were involved in the partnership.

Many of the examples presented involved large companies, NGOs and government partners. A significant level of resource may be required in order to support learning and iteration, though a recent Acumen report identified that it can be possible for companies to partner with smaller entities such as social enterprises. In fact, innovative partnerships can themselves yield social enterprises. For example, the work of Growing Together has led to the creation of Joikko, the first social franchise for farmers in northwest Bangladesh.

Another example came from primary healthcare, where GSK, Barclays and Care International have partnered on Live Well. This partnership involves providing the goods and training volunteer health workers in Zambia to sell products such as solar lighting and healthcare products resulting in improved health and creating a small profit for themselves in the process. GSK notes that this social enterprise approach (different from the company’s traditional donation model) has also created some changes within the parent company, with colleagues taking a different view of the company’s role – more as a genuine partner rather than a donor, and one with the patience to support innovations across the relatively long timescale required to make them happen.

The Enhancing Livelihoods Fund (ELF) highlights another element of innovation. This model follows the example of the iPhone – widely seen as a highly innovative product, but which in fact simply brought together in one place a number of features that already existed in separate places. ELF brings together Oxfam, Unilever and the Ford Foundation, not only providing finance from Ford to smallholders in the supply chain of Unilever’s tier one suppliers, but also technical assistance from Oxfam to ensure a gender empowerment lens is applied through the supported programmes.

It became clear from the highly interactive discussions that in order to encourage innovation and learning, partnership managers must be given the space and tolerance to invest time and resources, make the necessary mistakes, learn and improve. This iterative process means ongoing adaptation, steered by regular reviews and partnership health checks, covering not only what the partnership is delivering, but also how effectively the partners are working together. World Vision deployed a partnership health check in one of its partnerships in South Africa, including an analysis to assess the power dynamics between partners – leading to a number of course corrections as a result.

The power of partnership to deliver innovation was demonstrated in a highly practical way during the session. Audience members were asked to pair up randomly, with one person stating their biggest problem and the other thinking through how to apply their own approach or resources to solving that problem (a technique introduced as ‘lateral application’) – however diverse or seemingly unconnected those resources might initially appear to be. Even in this highly non-scientific exercise, a series of highly creative ideas were generated, ranging from a pro-gender media campaign in a highly conservative British news outlet through to the development of environmentally sustainable agribusiness projects in refugee areas.

If two strangers are able to innovate together with a chance six-minute encounter at a conference, are there more systematic approaches we can take to catalyse innovation? The Innovation Gateway mentioned earlier provides precisely a mechanism to do this. The Gateway partners are diverse, large organisations ranging from local authorities to airports, working together to ‘transform the performance of buildings with high-impact innovation’. The Gateway applies a highly structured approach through dedicated tools and methodologies to specifically cultivate innovations that are now saving companies hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

Partnerships, by their very nature, force us to work in different ways. If done well, partnerships, particularly across diverse organisations, can be hugely fertile incubators of innovation. And given the urgency of the problems facing the world today, we need all the new solutions we can find.

 

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Building the collaborative world we need to deliver the SDGs

For collaboration to contribute at scale to the SDGs, significant investment in the overall enabling infrastructure, capacity and environment for partnering is required
By Darian Stibbe, Executive Director

Collaboration across societal sectors has emerged as one of the defining concepts of international development in the 21st Century. Initially a response to the limitations of traditional state-led, aid-funded, top-down linear development approaches, partnership has grown to become an essential paradigm in sustainable development: its importance has been recognised fully both by business and by all of the leading institutions in the international development field, and embedded within the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the blueprint for global development.

The SDGs explicitly acknowledge the interconnectedness of the prosperity of business, of society and of the environment. They represent a fundamental shift, naming all societal sectors as key development actors, and requiring an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration among civil society, business, government, NGOs, foundations and others for their achievement.

TPI’s vision is a new era of systematic, complex collaboration that delivers the SDGs.

It is a world in which business becomes a full partner in development working alongside states, NGOs, international agencies and academia; in which collaboration between diverse organisations is the norm rather than the exception; in which all sectors of society appreciate the interconnectedness of their interests and actively seek to align, leverage and combine their energies, resources and investments wherever value can be created; in which the Sustainable Development Goals are not just an aspiration but a real, practical focus for development – development based on innovative and transformative partnerships.

While large-scale international partnerships will continue to play a role, we need a whole range of different forms of collaboration, from those that catalyse financial investment by business to more holistic, multiple-issue partnerships at the country or local level that can address the complexity of interlinked goals. This need characterises a new era in multi-stakeholder collaboration: an era of complex partnering.

Turning the rhetoric into reality

Cooperation across societal sectors, however, is difficult. There are a myriad of challenges from the political to the institutional to the individual that stand in its way.

For partnerships to achieve their full potential, the following ‘building blocks’ need to be in place:

  1. Policy: There is strong awareness and supportive international and national policies are in place to enable governments to collaborate with business and other actors as partners in development;
  2. Infrastructure: An ‘infrastructure’ is in place that can systematically convene the different societal sectors around key issues and catalyse innovative partnership action, in particular at country and local levels;
  3. Partnerships: Partnerships follow good practice around process, transparency, setup and management to maximise their quality and impact and ensure they deliver impact and added value to all;
  4. Organisations: Organisations of all kinds are ‘fit for partnering’ i.e. they have the right leadership and strategy, systems and processes, staff competencies and support, and outwards-looking culture to partner with excellence;
  5. Individuals: Individuals have the essential competencies to partner with excellence: partnering mindset, understanding of other sectors, human relationship and trust-building skills, and technical knowledge.

While efforts in all these areas are ongoing by TPI and a variety of other organisations, we need to magnify those efforts through cohesion, collaboration and investment to be able to create scale of impact.

Shifting towards a collaborative society will not happen by chance and instead requires a deliberate, concerted and targeted effort to help make it happen. And with the clock ticking quickly towards 2030, there is no time to lose.

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In praise of internal politicians

Why getting your own organisation behind a partnership is where most of the hard work lies
By Dave Prescott, Senior Advisor

The term ‘intrapreneur’ has emerged to describe people who stimulate innovation within their companies. A similar role describes the people who are able to navigate the various parts of their own organisations to enable them to engage in a partnership. Taking a cue from this recent HBR article, we can suggest the term ‘internal politician’ to describe an organisation’s partnership champion.

Based on TPI’s experience, it appears though internal work can represent a significant part, if not the majority, of the effort required to make a partnership successful. However brilliant an idea for partnership, however strong the strategic fit, however clear the mutually beneficial objectives, most time and energy usually ends up being invested on internal organisational issues.

Building internal alignment is difficult for at least two reasons: structures, and individuals. Organisational structures can either actively support or strongly block collaborative efforts. And then there’s the human beings. Factors such as communication difficulties, power dynamics, jostling for position, risk aversion, job security fears and clashing egos are all present. Add in the presence of an external partner organisation (or two, or more), where organisational structures and human beings differ, and problems can rapidly multiply.

How to get around these problems? As usual there is no silver bullet solution, but some analysis of an organisation’s structure and key individuals can help to provide useful context. One suggestion is to consider a spectrum with a high degree of centralisation of power at one end and a high degree of decentralisation at the other.

Highly centralised organisations have an obvious hierarchy and clearly delineated roles and responsibilities. Such organisations might be expected to have efficient systems to appoint the right people to a partnership role, and to enable partnerships to proceed efficiently through internal channels. But equally, the desire for centralisation and control can run counter to establishing innovative partnerships, where flexibility is required and decision-making needs to be shared.

At the other end of the spectrum, organisations can be highly federated, with country offices / departments / teams having a high degree of autonomy and their own strong views on partnership working. Some might be ideologically resistant to the idea of engaging business (or NGOs, or others), while others might take a far more pragmatic approach. In these cases, it may be a question of finding the right part of the organisation to work with, and accepting the limits to scale offered by that particular organisation.

Most organisations occupy different parts of the spectrum at different times. They may for example combine extreme hierarchy but have limited clarity on roles and responsibilities; in other cases, a highly chaotic-looking organisation may be very efficiently staffed. The same organisation may at different times demonstrate both types of characteristic, often as a result of who is in charge. And so, while a clear understanding of organisational structure can be useful, it does not in itself imply any particular course of action: it simply helps one to ask the right questions.

Beyond structural factors lurk human beings. As a rule of thumb, people who have worked in more than one sector are normally good allies in progressing a partnership agenda. It can also be useful to consider the length of staff tenure in an organisation. Some long-standing (not necessarily senior) staff with long institutional memories may know short-cuts to getting things done, which overt and covert levers to pull, and so on.

To take a specific case in point: when it comes to the business of getting a partnering agreement developed, it may not be clear whether the procurement department is the first port of call, or the sponsorship department, or the legal department. A sympathetic colleague can cut through the noise and provide clear direction; a suspicious one might do the opposite.

Some seasoned internal politicians bring cross-functional teams along with them to meetings at the early stages of a partnership, to help develop internal traction. Other internal politicians insist on being copied on all correspondence relating to the partnership, so that at least one person knows the whole history of the collaboration, and whenever an issue arises they know the full context and are able to respond accordingly.

Even those with long experience of internal politics find a lot of their time is spent on internal alignment. It is not unusual to spend twice as much time navigating the internal barriers to a partnership agenda (explaining, negotiating, persuading, reframing, insisting, selling, withholding, as necessary), compared to the relatively easy work of external engagement. In fact, if you are expending this ratio of effort, you are probably going along the right lines.

TPI has defined some ‘MUST-have’ competencies for individuals to be effective partnership practitioners. And its ‘Fit for partnering’ framework helps organisations think through the internal structural and cultural issues that enable them to be an effective partner.

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