Introduction to successful collaboration for community engagement.: Start

What is Successful Collaboration?

Collaboration means working together with consensual stakeholders towards the accomplishment of a defined objective. A successful collaboration usually involves being open to suggestions, critiques, and ideas from all team members, even if it means changing course. Innovation (and evolution) often stems from considering radically different perspectives.

According to Hackeling (2020), a truly good collaboration should have these characteristics;

• Aligning on desired results: 

• Designating clear ownership: Good collaboration requires ownership and accountability. Challenging others and adapting: When it comes to developing something totally new, good collaboration means having honesty and willingness to change to make things better Good collaboration is, "when someone takes your ideas, tells you you're crazy or impossible, and then works with you to make them better," Manager Sean Xie.

• Knowing the impact or end result you're working towards it.

• Strengthening cross-departmental communication: Clear communication among the internal team is an obvious prerequisite for good collaboration, but strengthening your cross-departmental communication is also critical.

• Maintaining a sustainable pace

• Mutual listening and risk-taking

• Ensuring opinions and skillsets are valued

• Building a regular communication cadence

• Empowering high quality work, faster: Good collaboration should make work easier for individuals, instead of adding to your teams' plates or causing overlap or overhead on tasks.

Community engagement and Team Science

There is a need for team science to promote better collaborative relationships to address community problems which are usually wicked problems. Wicked problems were characterized as complex, demanding multiple issues, marked by high uncertainty and ambiguous solutions. These kinds of problems can be considered grand societal challenges requiring collaborative solutions of cross-disciplinary teams. There are four relevant categories of integration needed to determine how teams share information and jointly tackle problems at hand. These degrees of integration were progressively divided into four categories:

Uni-disciplinary: This integration exists within a single sector, with similar methodology and conceptual approaches. The teams and their members collectively work on common problems.

Multi-disciplinary: Diverse sector/disciplines independently make their own decisions and bring it to the multidisciplinary table for discussion and decision-making. These interdependently made decisions are additive contributions to a problem at hand.

Inter-disciplinary: This degree of integration develops synergies beyond additive contributions by merging different methods and perspectives from two or more disciplines in a cohesive manner.

Trans-disciplinary: In this degree of integration, boundaries are blurred and transcended.