This article is written by William D. Eggers, Executive Director, Deloitte Center for Government Insights.
- The problem: Cross-sector collaboration is critical to addressing government’s biggest challenges but there is often little support for those who want to do the hard work needed to build bridges across government and other sectors.
- Why it matters: We need a symphony approach to solving big problems, with everyone playing from the same sheet music, working together to achieve a great performance; in this case better social outcomes.
- The solution: Build a collaborative mindset inside government that rewards collaboration.
Nothing ignites a big argument in Kansas City faster than debating which is the best barbecue joint. And nothing separates the sides faster than the question of whether to cross the boundary from Missouri into Kansas.
Kansas City is, of course, not all in Kansas, and the Kansas Cities in Kansas and Missouri have competed for years, on everything from economic development to restaurants. When it comes to basic services — such as transit systems, schools, environmental cleanup efforts and utilities — the cities have to operate not only across municipal but also across state boundaries.
A collaborative corporation that crosses borders
To crack the problem of governmental services, the area created the Mid-American Regional Corporation (MARC), a non-profit consortium to lead collaboration between the greater Kansas City area's two states, nine counties, and 119 cities. “We work through community partners, so we meet people where they are,” says David Warm, Executive Director of MARC. The plan, he says, provides a template for all public sector organisations: “Work through trusted community organisations so that you meet people through the networks that they know and trust.” 1
MARC provides a forum to address problems that are larger than the region’s political boundaries, and it provides a strategy for tackling truly wicked problems. Whether it's climate change, pandemics, energy prices, or broken supply chains, this century's most important and difficult problems cross borders – local, regional, national and disciplinary. Every public sector organisation working to solve the problems facing its constituents must collaborate across borders. This isn’t just rhetoric. It’s an imperative.
The problem, though, is that there often is little support for those who want to do the hard work needed to build bridges across government and other sectors. In a 2022 Deloitte survey of US federal government senior executives, one official noted, “There is zero incentive or emphasis on building collaboration in any way,” adding, “This is all extraneous work and must be a desire on the part of the individuals seeking the partnership.” Too often, bridge-building is an unrewarded extracurricular activity.
Rewarding collaborative efforts
Instead, inter-agency cooperation should be central to the job of public officials and how we rate their performance. And that means building a collaborative mindset that rewards collaboration.
Some organisations have hard-wired that kind of collaboration from their very start. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, was launched in the 1950s with the aim of blending public goals with private sector incentives. Amazing inventions from the internet to the computer mouse grew out of this effort. And DARPA isn’t alone. There’s a long list of monumental accomplishments that grew out of cross-disciplinary governmental efforts, including space flight, GPS, the Human Genome Project and the mRNA vaccines used to combat Covid-19.
DARPA has a basic strategy: it funds initial research and then passes successful inventions off to private industry. Project managers come for an intensive 3-5-year appointment, to ensure a constantly fresh perspective. But here again, DARPA isn’t alone. The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) encourages assignments across agencies within the federal government.
Incentivising collaboration isn't easy. Sometimes it simply needs buy-in from an organisation's culture. But with the right strategies, that buy-in might be easier to come by.
Not every organisation has this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration in its DNA, but government agencies around the world have found ways to feed this kind of innovation. Both the UK Civil Service Awards and the P3 Impact Awards (short for public-private partnerships) promote excellence in collaborative public service. Finalists have included a team from the UK's departments of treasury, revenue, work and pensions, defence, legal and parliamentary council, which worked together to redesign the system that delivers £7.2 million in cost-of-living payments to people on low-income and people with disabilities. Winning a nomination for the P3 Awards was a collaboration between USAID, the private sector, NGOs and the government of India to build infrastructure capacity for India's healthcare system.
Many organisations now hire for collaborative skills. Deloitte’s survey found that strategic thinking, developing trustworthy relationships and creating a culture of collaboration were the top three skills public executives said were needed to achieve effective cross-sector collaborations.
At San Francisco’s Presidio Institute, more than 1,600 cross-sector leaders have received training over the years to improve their collaborative mindset. The Presidio’s strategy builds on three main categories of skills: building teams, solving problems and achieving impact.
Figure 1. Presidio Institute’s framework to build cross-sector collaboration skills
Source: Presidio Institute
In the UK, the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) now hires “Innovation Partners”. These civil servants explicitly connect businesses and citizens with government partners, which builds collaboration directly into the organisational chart.
All told, these examples reveal key strategies for developing a collaborative mindset:
Make the exchange of high-powered ideas the norm
Develop collaborative skills
Create specialised roles for leading collaboration
Find forums for in-person connection
If leaders want to develop a culture of pushing past boundaries to forge effective partnerships, they need to develop more of these skills. Incentivising collaboration isn't easy. Sometimes it simply needs buy-in from an organisation's culture. But with the right strategies, that buy-in might be easier to come by and more comfortable to deploy.
After all, travellers to Kansas City don’t visit to stay on one side of the boundary. They want to follow their noses to the best barbecue, wherever it might be found.
- Author interview with David Warm, 2022.
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