Partners who contributed to creating a collaborative initiative or who joined it early might, quite naturally, prefer to look back at the times when they were most influential and able to shape priorities and contribute significantly to achievements in which they believed.
Also, quite naturally, those who joined a collaborative initiative later may prefer to look forwards towards new approaches and ways of doing things that might increase their influence and enable them to shape priorities and achieve things important to them.
When these preferences for either the past or the future clash, they will form the basis of an often heated argument about a collaboration's strategy: should it consolidate and build upon existing gains (so maintaining the esteem, credibility and influence of the founding fathers and early joiners of the collaboration)? Or should it break its mould and flow into new and innovative areas of activity (so increasing the influence of the young and thrusting sons and late joiners of the collaboration)?
Even when a strategy has been agreed, especially if the old or new guard feel they have won or lost the argument, the noise and conflicts from within which it was forged will continue to reverberate down the timeline of the collaboration. They will likely cause uncertainty and disagreements about the effectiveness of the collaboration and the value of its achievements: the old guard, set in its ways, will continue to look towards the past and point to old agreements and contracts as evidence that the collaboration has failed to live-up to initial expectations; the new guard, keen to introduce new ways, will point to new agreements and contracts as evidence of the collaboration's ability to move with the times.
Old and new understandings and agreements will overlay within people's minds in the present of the collaboration, weakening its resolve and clarity of purpose.
New partners will challenge old and founding partners about their failure to do this and that in the first place: they will 'blame it back'. Old partners will challenge new partners about their inability to do this and that now: they will 'blame it forward'.
This mutual blaming will be at its most pronounced and dangerous when old and new partners are separated by time: when old partners have left the collaboration and are no longer directly involved in its activities.
Past partners (some of which will be founding fathers) will be quick to offer their opinions and advice as they watch the future of the collaboration unfold before them. They will be especially sensitive to any criticisms of their work or decision making that are offered as justifications for changes to well-established priorities, plans and practices and very quick to launch counter-blaming offences designed to undermine these justifications and question the competence of those currently doing the collaboration's work.
In response, current partners will immediately seek to safeguard their reputations by countering the counter-blaming with increasingly strong justifications for their decisions and actions. These justifications will most likely increase past partners' perceptions of being criticised and blamed (and separation in time could quickly become separation through antipathy).
Partners preferring and fighting for the credibility and reputation of different times, agreements and achievements (perhaps accompanied by the ill-feeling this could generate) will create an unstable and damaging 'timeflux' within the collaboration. This will, slowly but surely, encourage ambiguity about the ultimate worth of the collaboration's achievements to grow within people's minds. Eventually, this ambiguity will severely weaken the collaboration's credibility and reputation (and, perhaps most importantly, threaten its legacy).
This situation is most obvious and likely to happen within a large scale "mega-project" collaboration (e.g., Crossrail, Heathrow Terminal 2, and London 2012). This type of collaboration lasts for years and often decades, which means there will be much toing and froing of partners during its lifetime and the type and mix of partners involved at the start will be very different to that at the end.
This toing and froing, together with changing pressures and demands over time (and different partners not only responding to these pressures in different ways but also adding their own vision and priorities to the collaborative mix), means that different partners from different times will very likely seek to justify and defend different decisions and actions and judge a collaboration by baselines they had a hand in creating. This situation is nicely summed up by this quip from a person involved in one of the previously mentioned mega-projects:
"They (the delivery partner) will immediately say 'it's their (the previous partner's) fault, they've stuffed up all the estimates'...and they (the previous partner) will say 'bloody amateurs, couldn't they build it for that?'".
(Lundrigan, C. Gil, N. Puranum, P./2014/The (Under) Performance of Mega-Projects: A Meta-Organisational Perspective/INSEAD The Business School for the World -- Working Paper Series 2015/04/STR)
Being realistic, this tendency to blame back and blame forward probably cannot be stopped, but it can be managed and minimised by doing the following five things:
- Being consistently open and transparent, especially about necessary changes to the work of the collaboration in response to new pressures and demands (and being patient and willing to repeat these reasons as often as required).
- Having regular meetings between partners and holding 'scouting meetings' where old and established partners can get to know new and potential partners (and where all present can discuss current activities and how these may need to be continued, adapted, changed or added to in the future).
- Ensuring meetings between partners are chaired by someone who is trusted by and credible to all, and (to further encourage transparency and promote shared accountability) giving this person the authority to approve meaningful and significant decisions at the meetings with (preferably) the explicit support of all those present (both old and new partners alike).
- Noticing blaming language and behaviour and challenging it early so that it does not become a habit which could eventually lead to a damaging culture of blame.
- Ensuring the leaders of the collaboration and other high profile and influential partners model a no blame culture and, where necessary, they receive help and support (including coaching and interpersonal skills training) to help them achieve this.
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