Picture the scene. You're sitting in a partnership meeting. Everyone is nodding. The language is warm and aspirational.
"Working together."
"Shared goals."
"Better outcomes for communities."
There's genuine goodwill in the room.
And yet — six months later — nothing has really changed. The same organisations are doing the same things. The same tensions are simmering beneath the surface. And someone, somewhere, is quietly wondering whether any of this is worth it.
Sound familiar?
I think part of the problem is the word itself. We call almost everything "collaboration" — and in doing so, we've made it meaningless.
Why collaboration has never mattered more
The challenges facing public services, communities and increasingly the private sector are not complicated problems. They are complex ones. Reducing health inequalities. Addressing homelessness. Building sustainable supply chains. Responding to climate change. These are problems that span organisational boundaries, resist single solutions and change shape as you try to address them.
No single organisation holds the knowledge, the capability or the capacity to tackle them alone.
We are operating in a knowledge economy — where the ability to generate, share and apply knowledge is the critical source of value and impact. Cohen and Levinthal (1990) described this as absorptive capacity: an organisation's ability to identify, assimilate and exploit knowledge from its environment. In complex problems, that knowledge is distributed across sectors, communities, disciplines and lived experiences. No one organisation can hold it all.
This is why Huxham and Vangen's (2005) Theory of Collaborative Advantage resonates so strongly. Their central proposition is that collaboration only adds real value when it produces outcomes that no single organisation could achieve alone. Not just through pooling what already exists — but through building new knowledge, new capabilities and new ways of working that didn't exist before the partnership.
That ambition is what most partnerships never reach. And most never honestly acknowledge it.
What collaboration actually is — and isn't
Not all joint working is collaboration. Huxham and Vangen describe a spectrum. At one end, networking - organisations sharing information for mutual benefit. Then coordination - changing activities to achieve a stated goal. Then cooperation - dividing resources as well as changing activities. And finally, genuine collaboration - all of the above, plus something more: actively building the capability of other partners, creating new knowledge together, and achieving things that none could achieve independently.
That last element — building capability, not just capacity— is crucial.
Capacity is about having enough resource, time or bandwidth.
Capability is about being able to do something you couldn't do before. Genuine collaboration transforms what partners are able to do, not just what they have available to do. It creates new organisational competences that persist beyond the partnership itself.
Most partnerships invest in sharing what they already know. Far fewer invest in creating knowledge together that nobody held at the start.
The private sector knows this too
It would be easy to assume this is a public sector problem — the product of bureaucracy, competing accountabilities and the particular complexity of health and care systems. But the private sector has wrestled with exactly the same challenge.
Consider the VW-Suzuki alliance, formed in 2009 with significant fanfare. Two major automotive manufacturers, sharing technology, platforms and global reach. On paper, a collaboration. In practice, it collapsed within three years into a bitter, four-year legal dispute — with Suzuki publicly accusing Volkswagen of treating it as a subsidiary rather than a partner, and ultimately sourcing diesel engines from Fiat rather than VW in a deliberate act of independence. The breakdown revealed what had been present from the start: a fundamental clash of corporate culture, an absence of genuine trust, and a failure of technology sharing that was supposed to be the partnership's core purpose. Suzuki feared a power grab. VW struggled to treat a smaller partner as an equal. Neither party was genuinely building the other's capability — and when that became undeniable, there was nothing structural holding the relationship together. Suzuki wanted cooperation. VW wanted something closer to acquisition.
Or consider the Star Alliance model in aviation — one of the more successful examples of genuine cross-organisational working, where member airlines share routes, lounges, loyalty programmes and operational systems. What makes it work is that each member retains its identity and autonomy while genuinely contributing to — and benefiting from — the capability of the network as a whole. Knowledge about customer experience, route optimisation and operational efficiency flows across the alliance and creates something no single airline could build alone. It sits much closer to Huxham and Vangen's definition of true collaboration.
The difference between these two examples isn't goodwill or ambition. It's structural design, mutual benefit and honest clarity about what each party is actually signing up to — and what new capabilities they are genuinely committed to building together.
The language problem
When we call everything "collaboration," we paper over these distinctions. Organisations that are, at best, coordinating their activities describe themselves as deep partners. Commissioning relationships are rebranded as alliances. Consultation exercises become "co-production."
This is particularly acute in health and care systems, where Integrated Care Boards leaders were once positioned as "system conveners" — a phrase that sounds collaborative but describes something closer to coordination.
Convening is about bringing people to a table you own. Collaboration is about building something together that none of you owned before.
This matters because the word collaboration shapes expectations. If a partner organisation believes it has entered a genuine collaboration — with shared power, mutual benefit and the genuine capacity to influence decisions — but finds itself in a coordination arrangement where one organisation sets the agenda and holds the budget, that gap between expectation and reality is where trust erodes.
Ferlie and Ongaro (2015) describe how organisations in cross-sector partnerships operate from competing logics — professional, bureaucratic and political. Each brings its own vocabulary, cognitive assumptions and knowledge base. When these logics meet, the dominant partner's language often wins — not through malice, but through institutional gravity.
What seems like a shared conversation is sometimes one organisation's framing, adopted by everyone else. And when that happens, the knowledge held by less powerful partners — community knowledge, lived experience, specialist expertise from outside the dominant sector — gets filtered out before it can be absorbed and used.
That's not just a relationship problem. It's a knowledge problem. And in a complex system, losing that knowledge has consequences.
Why goodwill isn't enough
Research by Pittz and Intindola (2015) on absorptive capacity in cross-sector partnerships found that the foundations for genuine collaboration go well beyond good intentions. They identified participatory decision making, trust, connectedness, goal interdependence, formalisation and cross-functional interfaces as the structural prerequisites for partnerships that actually work.
In other words, relationships matter — but they are not sufficient. Without formalised structures, shared systems and deliberate investment in understanding each other's worlds, even the warmest relationships produce inertia rather than advantage.
Jansen, Van Den Bosch and Volberda (2005) describe three antecedents that determine whether organisations can genuinely work together and build shared knowledge into shared capability.
Socialisation capabilities
the ability to develop shared culture, common language and ideology across partners.
Systems capabilities
formal processes, technology and infrastructure for knowledge exchange.
Co-ordination capabilities
cross-sector interfaces, shared learning and participative leadership.
Most partnerships invest heavily in the relational elements — the away days, the joint leadership programmes, the shared values statements. Far fewer invest in the structural ones.
Without the structural elements knowledge stays siloed, capability stays separate, and the partnership never generates anything that couldn't have been produced by each organisation working independently.
The LEGO-Shell partnership illustrates this. What began as a licensing arrangement that gave Shell branding on LEGO products had no structural foundation for genuine knowledge exchange or mutual capability building. When the reputational asymmetry became too great — driven by sustained community pressure over Shell's environmental record — the partnership dissolved without having created anything lasting for either party. Contrast this with LEGO's subsequent partnerships around sustainable materials development, where joint knowledge creation and genuine capability building were designed in from the start.
Be honest about where your partnership sits
Here is the framework I'd encourage every partnership leader to sit with honestly. Against Huxham's spectrum, where does your partnership actually sit — not where you'd like it to sit, but where it really is?
Networking
Are you mainly sharing information? Attending each other's events? Keeping lines of communication open? That's valuable. But it isn't collaboration.
Coordination
Are you aligning your activities to avoid duplication and achieve a stated goal? Also valuable. Still not collaboration.
Cooperation
Are you genuinely sharing resources — budgets, staff, infrastructure — to achieve mutual benefit? You're getting closer. But is it symmetrical? Who holds the power?
Collaboration
Are you actively building each other's capability? Are you creating knowledge together that none of you held at the start? Are the less powerful partners genuinely able to shape decisions? Are you creating something none of you could create alone?
There's no shame in being at networking or coordination. Many partnerships should be there — it's the right level for the problem at hand. The problem isn't where you are. It's when you call coordination "collaboration" and then wonder why it doesn't feel like one. And it's when you design a partnership for information sharing but expect it to tackle a complex problem that requires genuine capability building.
The most honest question a partnership leader can ask is not "are we collaborating?" but "what are we actually trying to create together — and is what we're doing capable of creating it?"
Final thoughts
The challenges we face — in health and care, in communities, in industries — are increasingly resistant to single-organisation solutions. They require the kind of knowledge, capability and collective intelligence that only genuine collaboration can build.
But genuine collaboration is hard. It takes longer. It requires structural investment alongside relational investment. It demands honesty about power, about whose knowledge counts and about what you're truly committed to building together. It requires a different kind of leadership than most of us were trained for.
Most of all, it requires us to stop using the word as a comfort blanket — and start using it as a standard to be honest about whether we're actually meeting.
That's the only kind of collaboration that deserves the name. And in a world of complex problems, it's the only kind that will actually help.
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