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Just finished reading Enabling Collaboration - a book on "achieving success through strategic alliances and partnerships"
Just finished reading Enabling Collaboration - a book on "achieving success through strategic alliances and partnerships" by Martin Echavarria (@coherence360).
Getting things done invariably involves working with others and when those others are themselves complex organisations it requires some thought. This book is good framework to get started. It's a manual for handling alliances and clearly written by someone with practical experience. It is an expert's view and gives a rough outline of the range of facilitation, group psychology approaches, and various classifications before tackling a model of how an organisation may want to find partners and build strategic alliances.
Some of the theories could have been better introduced. They are cited but not described broadly and succinctly. Instead of positioning a particular approach in its research context just some parts are taken out for use. There's an assumption of prior knowledge (I probably feel this because I'm not so familiar with the literature in this area). The parts from different approaches are presented as tools - pieces of the toolkit required by the central character the partnership coach.
I enjoyed the rapid overview of Spiral Dynamics, Open Space Technology, World Café, and Deep Democracy.
The stages described that are met by collaborations offer opportunities for deploying the various strategies but it would have been enhanced, I think, if appropriate evidence or more case studies had been presented. Are these stages reproducible / universal / theory based? Are there validated tools for analysing a certain collaboration?
Source: www.enablingcollaboration.com
alliances stages strategic presented collaboration described parts various
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