Facilitating Collaboration in Difficult Settings — Three Quick Lessons

How many times have you seen projects fail to achieve their objectives because the key stakeholders involved wouldn’t work together well or at all? Irreconcilable differences, inter-agency politics, personal hostilities, resistance to change, territoriality etc. are very common reasons given for failure to secure stakeholder collaboration. Unfortunately, these failures are often rather easy to explain away, and project/program designers and implementers are often not held accountable for them. They are often seen as inevitable, system bugs that we can do little or nothing about. In reality, those reasons are often excuses. Facilitating collaboration (especially in multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral spaces) should be a key part of program design and implementation. It is, however, generally a notoriously difficult challenge.

It is also a challenge that lends itself easily to models and approaches and how-tos as a quick google search will reveal. However, like most things, models and approaches tend to be more likely than not, developed from easy case studies. These models tend to fall apart when you find yourself in difficult spaces. Sometimes lessons and approaches just don’t translate because of how different the settings are (the concept of a multi-agency, multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral setting is one that has to be unbundled in a different piece). Leading a group of stakeholders working with and in a Primary Healthcare Development Agency to adopt the most cost-effective and future-facing cold chain equipment preventive maintenance model is a very different task from leading stakeholders in an airport to adopt an incident management system for public health emergencies. I have facilitated both, and the lessons and approaches we can glean from the latter may do very little to help us in achieving the former.

In this piece, I share lessons learnt from working at Nigeria’s largest airports (Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport, and Port Harcourt International Airport). One of the most difficult spaces I have worked in are Points of Entry (Airports, Seaports, ground crossing). They often;

• Have a high number of stakeholders working in them. Sometimes upwards of 40 individual stakeholders (MDAs and Enterprises), sometimes more than 10 distinct sectors that all have to collaborate to achieve several related objectives
• Are highly regimented with necessarily high safety standards and a high number of security, law enforcement and military agencies operating in them
• Have overlapping and conflicting stakeholder priorities (with shipping lines, airlines and the terminal operators prioritizing swift passenger and cargo facilitation over what they sometimes see as regulatory red-tape and over-reach, etc.).

To add another layer of difficulty to the setting, we were tasked with facilitating ports-wide collaboration among all stakeholders on public health emergency planning (a subject-matter completely unrelated to and sometimes at odds with the objectives of the key operators at the POE).

I have distilled some of the lessons I have learnt around stakeholder agency (power and instrumentality) and collaborative problem-solving around three quick lessons.

Facilitating Collaboration requires clarity about stakeholder needs, priorities and objectives: It needs to be clear who wants what and why. Priorities, some of which may be unstated and generally unacknowledged, need to be clearly mapped. It is important to know which stakeholders have objectives (at an organizational, departmental and personal level) that may sometimes be at cross purposes with each other and with your collaboration objective. These conflicts can, in fact, be leveraged to achieve stated objectives.

For example, turn-around time is a top indicator for airlines and safety/sanitation inspections are often already planned for and incorporated into the global schedule of airlines. A public health measure requiring additional time on the tarmac or lengthening disembarkation time for travellers will disrupt the schedule and affect the bottom line of more than a few organizations (cleaning companies, baggage handling companies, private security companies, catering companies, etc.) per airline. In designing, implementing and monitoring such a measure, it must be clear how all the relevant agencies will be affected and how to mitigate resistance and opposition by solving for the least possible disruption.

Discerning what each stakeholder priority/interest will be around each issue requires a deep immersion in the space (and the problem) and a nuanced understanding of the relationship between each player. The relationship between the stakeholders responsible for monitoring and implementing trade or public health mandated import/export restrictions — NAFDAC, NAQS, NCS, SON, NDLEA etc. — can seem rather straightforward and uncomplicated at first sight until the subtle but important overlaps reveal themselves during implementation.

The facilitator needs to create a detailed map/matrix of stakeholder goals, objectives and priorities. It may be sufficient to have these mapped out mentally, but it is incredibly helpful to have this laid out in a matrix that helps the facilitator situate herself when designing, implementing or when she runs into a bottleneck.

Actively designing and monitoring the balance in how instrumentality is distributed is essential: The balance of power and how it is expressed become hugely important in spaces where multiple stakeholders from the same sector and stakeholders with overlapping roles across sectors operate/drive towards the same goal. The question of how power is distributed, and how it is perceived is important to the design of programs, measures and communication imperatives. For instance, where an event of public health concern involving a diplomat (or any traveller under state protection) is reported and an entry/entry control measure must be applied, the balance of power becomes important. The Department of State Security, the Nigerian Police, the Foreign Affairs Office, the Nigerian immigration Services, the Airports Authority, Port Health Services, (all of whom are present at POE) may all have jurisdiction to act. To prevent chaos, protocols need to be designed to give instrumentality to the appropriate agency (preferably in the most legally appropriate and enforceable way).

Even during a routine, at-all-times tasks, like boarding and inspecting an aircraft or ship, a critical balance need to be designed into the system to ensure breach can be appropriately penalized. A protocol that gives sole instrumentality to the competent public health authority is likely to be hard to implement and enforce. A better approach will be to share the agency for enforcement between the competent public health authority and the aviation regulator, for instance.

Agency is fragile in multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral settings. Players need to be made to feel a key part of the process of decision making, especially in relation to key business, regulatory or and other reference points. A fine balance of the requisite instrumentality among stakeholders is necessary to ensure stakeholders don’t feel the need to prove a point about their usefulness/utility and relevance. The question of how much agency a stakeholder is allowed or perceives itself having is a question of how power is distributed in the stakeholder space, and how it is distributed (whether around resources or the power to enforce penalties etc.). To balance agency we need to regularly retool how power is wielded and perceived in a collaborative space. Regulatory power (such as Port Health Services, Civil Aviation Authority etc. have), for instance, and stakeholder regard for it is a function of the power to enforce penalties. It is the difference between the relative effectiveness of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency within their respective spaces.

Collaborative Problem Solving breaks walls and builds trust: A central and key part of collaborative problem solving is that all stakeholders feel a part of the problem-solving happening. The sessions through which this is done and how it is facilitated is important. The appropriate setting must foster an environment that encourages the free expression of both ideas (good, bad, wild) and frustrations. This is why the how of the facilitation is key. It is important to create vast and (and what may sometimes seem like redundant) spaces for collaborative problem-solving among stakeholders. I have used the following session types to great effect — document writing and review sessions, SOP development and review sessions, debriefing for public health events and simulation exercises. In practice, most program/projects will not have the luxury of multiple sessions to work through intractable problems, but when these sessions are done right and collaborative problem solving happens, I have found the following to also be true -;

• Institutional hostilities are often vigorously expressed then temporarily (and eventually) de-escalated. Once their expressed positions have been acknowledged stakeholders are often ready to engage with other positions and views. The job of the facilitator is to ensure the expressed views are acknowledged across the room by the relevant parties. The lowering of guards that follows the acknowledgement of the position of other stakeholders is the first step in a [therapeutic] trust-building process. This process may take multiple sessions and the breaking of walls between institutions and their agents in the room can sometimes take months.
• Resource sharing is better facilitated. Committing resources to problem-solving is often easier when stakeholders outline and map through discussions resources across agencies. The kind of detailed discussion needed to create the necessary dynamic and affordances for resource sharing in difficult stakeholder settings necessarily only happens during problem-solving discussions (as described above).
• Coordination bottlenecks are easily identified. Discussions during collaborative problem solving often imitate a tabletop-simulation-exercise style troubleshooting of coordination issues. In allowing long (sometimes rather rambling) discussions, the facilitator is able to uncover bottlenecks that are not apparent either because individuals are unable to clearly express themselves or are not willing to openly admit the reasons for the bottlenecks.

Designing programs for multi-stakeholder settings must be done with the collaboration imperative as a key goal. Solving for collaboration gaps as system bugs or some second-order effect that may or may not is bad design form.