Working across institutional boundaries is one of the more underrated headaches in public service. A public servant posed that challenge directly to the Life in Government Community on Apolitical, asking how to manage conflicting processes when collaborating with colleagues from different organisations. The responses drew on real experience: a researcher navigating ethics applications across ten contractual partners, an emergency manager balancing local council processes against national requirements, others who had run cross-department regulatory initiatives. The conversation was rich and candid, covering tactics that work and why default approaches so often fall short.

Mapping comes first, fixing comes second

Before any process conflict can be resolved, the conflict has to be visible. The thread kept returning to this point: teams that skip the mapping step tend to firefight the same tensions repeatedly.

Several people described building visual process maps to surface where workflows intersect, diverge, or create bottlenecks. For cross-institutional teams in particular, the approach means bringing lead representatives together early with their process and approval timelines, flagging external deadlines and hard dependencies, and agreeing on parameters before pressure builds. A public servant who had applied this in a complex multi-department regulatory change initiative described the outcome: the approach built trust through transparency and flexibility, even if frustration never disappeared entirely.

Not all process conflicts are the same kind of problem

A useful distinction ran through the conversation: not every conflict needs the same response, and misdiagnosing the type wastes time.

Tensions rooted in timeframes can often be negotiated at a senior level once competing demands are mapped clearly. Tensions rooted in requirements or deliverables call for a different question: whether two divergent processes could feed into a single combined output that satisfies both parties. A researcher working across ten partner institutions described exactly this tension around ethics applications. Each organisation applied Australia’s national ethics statement differently, making a shared minimum standard both the practical goal and the political challenge. When conflicts touch on legal obligations or government policy, the conversation was unambiguous: escalate to the level that can actually make the decision, up to ministerial level if necessary.

The thread also pushed back on treating all conflict as structural. Conflicting processes often have comfort at their root, not complexity. Org units grow attached to established ways of working. Nobody commissions a serious, unbiased evaluation of whether a legacy process still fits the current environment. Structural fixes tend not to hold unless the human dynamic gets addressed alongside the procedural one.

Shared purpose is the only reliable anchor

The most consistently recommended starting point across the conversation was not a framework or a matrix. Public servants pointed to explicit agreement on shared goals as the foundation that holds when procedural negotiations get difficult.

Teams that skip the alignment conversation and move straight to process negotiation find that structural fixes erode quickly. Several people pointed to citizen value as the goal that crosses institutional boundaries most reliably. The goal is not always sufficient, especially when institutional egos are in play, but citizen value is the most defensible common ground to build from.

The thread also surfaced a practical tactic from Simon Sinek: in a conflict, start by naming what the other person got right and what you got wrong. The tactic sounds simple. In practice, it shifts the dynamic faster than most process interventions.

This conversation captures a truth that formal guidance on cross-institutional collaboration rarely acknowledges: managing conflicting processes is unglamorous, often frustrating, and just as important as the strategic goals the work is meant to serve. Join the Life in Government community on Apolitical to connect with public servants sharing their experiences of working in government.

Join the conversation

To participate in conversations like this, join the Life in Government Community.

Join the community

This article was written with the help of AI using anonymised conversation text and edited by a human before publishing.