The Partnership & Alliance Health Check is built around our proprietary collaboration diagnostic tool, designed specifically to explore the conditions that enable — or inhibit — effective collaborative working.
The tool can be deployed across whole partnerships, alliances, boards or organisations, gathering perspectives from the people involved rather than relying on the views of a small number of senior leaders.
It provides a structured way of examining different dimensions of collaboration, identifying strengths, tensions and differences in experience across the system.
Developed from academic collaboration theory, practitioner research and extensive first-hand experience of leading and working within multi-organisational partnerships and systems.
It examines multiple interconnected dimensions including:
Shared purpose and commonality
The extent to which partners have sufficient common ground about purpose, priorities and what they are trying to achieve together.
Relationships
Trust, reciprocity, communication and the quality of relationships across organisational and professional boundaries.
People and culture
The behaviours, leadership and organisational cultures that shape how collaboration works in practice.
Processes
The practical arrangements that enable — or sometimes obstruct — people working together.
Rules and governance
How authority, accountability, decision-making and formal requirements affect collaborative working.
Intelligence and learning
How information, knowledge and insight are shared, interpreted and used across the partnership.
It creates a picture of how the collaborative system is functioning — including where different parts of the partnership may be experiencing it very differently.
The diagnostic can be deployed across:
It can be used as a one-off diagnostic, as a baseline before partnership development, or repeated over time to understand whether collaborative conditions are changing.