Trust, Distrust, and Collaboration

Intrigued to be asked by the European Commission Joint Research Council to present about Trust and Collaboration to 87 participants from the many different DGs who are looking to collaborate more amongst the different directorates. I invited Vanja Skoric to co-present based on her experience with collaborating with the Commission over a number of years and our joint work on meaningful engagement

I kicked off with talking about the effects of trust and distrust to explore why trust really matters to collaboration.

Prior to the event we had asked participants to submit to a Slido the main barriers they have found to effective collaboration. We incorporated these into our own findings under the 4 headings shown here in this wonderful graphic interpretation of the event by Claudio Nichele.

I then talked through the three components of meaningful engagement which I thought worked well too for collaboration and linked them back to the barriers - Shared Purpose, Trustworthy Process and Visible Impact

I was particularly interested in the emphasis participants placed on the importance of spending time developing relationships and building trust at the start of a collaboration. The process of developing the purpose, process and defining desired outcomes is a great way to do that.

In fact Conrad and I did that with our TIGTech collaboration - as an NGO and a business person (who previously worked for Monsanto!) there was alot of nervousness on both our parts about the implications of the collaboration and we deliberately had two ‘trust building’ meetings (online as we were in different countries) and decided ‘The TIGTech Way’ of doing things. I may write it up as a case study!

If you would like to see the slide deck it can be found here