Ten ideas about collaboration that I would still defend

A decade ago I published my first book, The Collaboration Instinct. It was a collection of thinking pieces written around something that had already occupied my thinking and practice for years: not only why collaboration matters to business but also why something that appears so natural can be so difficult to do well.

I recently returned to the book. I was not particularly interested in finding things I had ‘got right’. Ten years is enough time to test ideas more usefully than that. I was wondering about something simpler: which ideas have endured?

From that rereading I selected ten lines, one for each year since the book was published. They are not necessarily the ten best lines in the book. They are ten that I think remain as relevant in 2026 as they were in 2016. Some, perhaps, are more relevant now.

Here they are, accompanied by what another decade of thinking about, practising and observing collaboration has led me to think about them today.

1. “If collaboration does not change you then you are probably not doing it right.”

This was one of the earliest insights I gained from observing collaborations that produced exceptional results. Genuine collaboration asks participants to be open to some level of change. It asks us, metaphorically, to drop our tools, not abandon our expertise, but stop using what we already know as a crutch. Someone else brings a different worldview, trajectory and way of working, and allowing that difference to act upon us requires some vulnerability. But this is also where unexpected value emerges. Collaboration is partly an experiment and, like strategy itself, something of a wager. If everyone finishes a collaboration essentially unchanged, perhaps what occurred was really a transaction carrying the label of collaboration.

2. “The collaborative instinct is not automatic. It requires thought, intensity of purpose and a degree of strategic sophistication.”

There is a deliberate paradox in the title The Collaboration Instinct. I have always believed that the potential for collaboration exists wherever people and organisations encounter one another. In that sense, something resembling an instinct is already there: a human capacity to connect, combine capabilities, solve problems and create value together. But potential is not capability. The collaborative instinct needs to be enabled and nurtured by things that are decidedly not instinctive, careful thought, clarity and intensity of purpose, and strategic sophistication. We need to know why we are collaborating. Ten years later, despite having vastly more ways of connecting with each other, I think that distinction matters even more. Connectivity does not automatically create collaboration.

3. “Collaboration is first and foremost a culture, which becomes explicit in the way we operate.”

Few words are more ordinary in contemporary business than collaboration and culture. Yet familiarity with the words has not necessarily produced greater understanding of either. Over many years I have found organisations quick to describe themselves as collaborative but significantly less able to explain what this means in practice. In fact, the quicker the claim is made, the more inclined I am to probe it. Genuine collaborative culture does not need to be continually announced. Like trust, it becomes visible in behaviour, in how people relate, decide, share, disagree and work. Collaboration cannot sit beside culture as something switched on when convenient. When it genuinely becomes cultural, it becomes simply part of how we do things around here.

4. “A strategy has to be the driving force behind the collaboration.”

This might seem to sit uneasily beside the previous proposition, but culture and strategy perform different functions. Culture provides conditions within which collaboration can flourish; strategy gives it direction. One of the most persistent mistakes I have observed is organisations choosing collaborators before developing a collaboration strategy. Potential partners are identified because they possess something wanted, resources, expertise, access, influence, rather than because there is genuine strategic complementarity and the potential to create new value together. We should not select the partner and then manufacture a strategic rationale for the relationship. Strategy should help us discover who the right collaborators might be. Before asking who should we collaborate with?, it pays to understand why collaboration is strategically necessary in the first place.

5. “The future of sustainable social and economic enterprise will be in small entities that are better connected, rather than large entities who are rich in structures and infrastructure.”

This was probably more intuition than prediction. I was interested in where collaboration might ultimately take organisational design. Large organisations accumulate structures, infrastructure and internal capability, but those strengths can also make them less agile as more effort goes into maintaining stability and protecting what already exists. Smaller organisations may possess fewer resources within their boundaries, but strong collaborative capability enables them to mobilise knowledge, resources and expertise they do not themselves own. Ten years later, networks, platforms, distributed expertise and now AI have considerably increased this possibility. Large organisations are not disappearing, but I remain convinced that their dominance will increasingly be counterbalanced by smaller, highly connected entities. Collaboration itself can become a form of infrastructure.

6. “Collaboration is what allows us to get insights, not just the information we need to do our job.”

Information and insight are not the same thing. Information can be possessed, transferred and today more than ever, readily accessed. Insight comes from what we make of it. Collaboration creates particularly fertile conditions for this because organisations are different systems. They have different histories, assumptions, capabilities and ways of making sense of what may sometimes be exactly the same information. When those perspectives genuinely encounter one another, something new can emerge. Importantly, we do not necessarily collaborate in order to obtain those insights. They are often an additional benefit that we could not have specified beforehand. In an age increasingly abundant in information, this may matter even more. Collaboration does not simply increase what an organisation knows; it can change what an organisation is capable of seeing.

7. “The fact is that business needs both: self-interest as well as shared interest. It needs competition but also co-operation and collaboration.”

The supposed tension between competition and collaboration remains one of the most persistent challenges in thinking about collaboration. I have never regarded them as opposites. Businesses have to compete. But being a better collaborator can also make a business a better competitor. Collaboration offers another lens through which an organisation can understand its competitive capabilities: what it does particularly well, what it lacks, and where combining its strengths with those of others might create value unavailable through ordinary transactions. The reverse also applies. Understanding your competitive advantage helps you understand what you bring to collaboration. Competition and collaboration are two peas in a pod. Properly understood, each helps us understand and sharpen the other.

8. “Collaboration is not a shortcut to better outcomes.”

I have often seen collaboration introduced as a kind of organisational band-aid. Faced with resource constraints, capability gaps or an emerging crisis, organisations suddenly decide they should collaborate, as though pooling resources will automatically produce a cheaper or better result. But organisations do not become capable collaborators overnight simply because circumstances demand it. Collaboration requires conditions that need to be developed well before the moment of need: relationships, strategic clarity, trust, capability and an organisational culture able to accommodate it. Collaborations certainly fail, just as strategies, projects and marketing campaigns fail. But whenever somebody tells me, “We tried collaboration and it didn’t work,” I am interested in what actually failed. Quite often, collaboration had been treated as the shortcut it was never capable of being.

9. “The level of advantage is directly dependent on the investment we make in trusting the relationship.”

Trust is routinely described as essential to business and collaboration, but we are often less clear about what investing in trust actually means. Trust is not created by declaring it. It develops progressively as collaborators learn through experience that investing in each other is more valuable than defecting from the relationship. Contracts remain necessary, particularly for managing legitimate risks and unforeseen circumstances, but they cannot substitute for that investment. When every aspect of a relationship depends upon watertight contractual obligation, we risk outsourcing trust to the transaction. That can work, but it also limits what collaboration can become. Mature collaborative relationships retain necessary safeguards while progressively developing trust as a form of productive capital. And, perhaps more importantly, as a currency that acquires value through the way business is conducted.

10. “Risk is an opportunity which is shared between collaborators, and this is where courage becomes a vital factor in successful collaboration.”

Risk is unavoidable in business, but mature collaboration changes how we can approach it. Collaborators remain responsible for managing their own risks, yet genuine partners do not simply protect themselves and leave everyone else to do the same. Partners look out for each other. A collaborator may see our risk differently, contribute knowledge unavailable inside our organisation, or help reveal opportunity within what initially appears only as exposure. Helping a partner become better able to manage its risk ultimately strengthens the collaboration itself. This requires trust, but also something more difficult: courage. Courage allows collaborators to use the trust they have built, to acknowledge uncertainty, share exposure and recognise risk not simply as something to defend against, but as a potential source of opportunity.

Ten years later

After rereading the book, I note that it is not that collaboration has changed as much as the environment around it certainly has. We have more technology, more connectivity, more information, more complex organisational ecosystems. Not to mention diverse forms of artificial intelligence that are changing how knowledge and capability can be accessed and combined.

But many of the underlying collaboration questions remain familiar. Do we really know why we are collaborating? Are we prepared to be changed by it? Do our organisational cultures support what we claim to value? Can we distinguish collaboration from transactions and ordinary forms of working together? Can we compete and collaborate at the same time? Are we prepared to invest in trust? And do we have enough courage to accept the uncertainty that comes with creating something genuinely new with others? Perhaps that is why these ten lines matter to me still.

I would not write The Collaboration Instinct exactly the same way today.  I would be disappointed if another decade of work had left my thinking unchanged. But these particular ideas still feel alive to me. Some have acquired meanings I could not have completely anticipated when I wrote them.

And perhaps that is an appropriate test of an idea: not whether it remains frozen in the form in which we first expressed it, but whether it continues to help us see, question and do something differently.