Sermon: Acting Collaboratively

Earlier this summer, I was talking with a friend whose wife was very ill in hospital.  In the course of our conversation he went on to bewail the lack of joined-up thinking and collaboration that was occurring between different departments.  I added that this same issue is one which is very much at the top of the list of concerns within the church today.  For instance, the Director of the Foundation for Church Leadership, Malcolm Grundy has written this by way of introduction to a section on ‘collaborative working' in his recent book. (What's New In Church Leadership Canterbury Press 2007)

Now [collaboration] really is a difficult concept for many churches.  Do I really mean that? Unfortunately, yes, I do. Pages, chapters and books have been devoted to this method of working. I have spent more than half a life-time delivering training and consultancy in order to develop understandings of it. (p44)

But, as I went on to share with my friend, I find this very puzzling; surely people are cooperating and collaborating all the time. ‘Take your area' I said, for he is a director of a building company, ‘how far would the building trade get without collaboration?  Surely it is impossible to build as much as one house, never mind an estate or suburb, without collaboration.  I can't believe that this really is as difficult as we make out'.

‘We do seem to have a lot of meetings,' he said.

‘But you also get a lot of houses built,' I replied.

In our first reading we heard of plans for a building project. King Cyrus of Persia explained that he has been given a divine charge to rebuild the house of the Lord. Being a prudent man he liberated all the people to participate in this project.  ‘The heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites - everyone whose Spirit God had stirred - got ready to go up and rebuild the house of the Lord in Jerusalem.' Ezra 1. 5 Clearly this was going to be a major exercise, lots of people were to be involved, and lots of resources were gathered.  But, as we all know, the combination of people and resources is not enough to make a project successful.  There also needs to be collaboration.

Last Sunday I preached about ‘developing leadership' as this is one of the so-called building blocks of our diocesan development plan.  And I should come clean now and tell you that ‘acting collaboratively' is another. 

The word ‘collaboration' was first coined in English as recently in 1871 and is based on the Latin collaborare - to work together.  Obviously people were collaborating long before 1871. But until that time it was perhaps called ‘cooperation'.  The word ‘cooperate' has been around since the early seventeenth century (1604 in the Shorter OED) and also means ‘to work together'. And it was in the sixteenth century (1533 in the Shorter OED) that people began referring to those associated in office or special employment as ‘colleagues'.  Though I note with interest that the word ‘colleague' does not refer to partners in trade or manufacture and that we have therefore inherited a distinction between ‘colleagues' and ‘mates'. The word ‘mate' as in workmate dates back to the late fourteenth century. So people had ‘mates' to work with for 500 years before there was any ‘collaboration'.

This complicated situation might be illustrated by an example. Imagine the working life of the dean of a Cambridge college, Peterhouse perhaps.  Whenever the dean sits down to dine at high table or enjoys deserts in the SCR, he is participating in the collegiality of the fellowship - in a word he is ‘combining'. (‘Combination' goes back to 1593 and is defined as ‘the association of persons for a common purpose - usually in a bad sense.' Shorter OED.) When the dean sits on a college committee or the Governing Body it is a matter of ‘cooperating' but when he decides with a Roman Catholic liturgist to convene an interdisciplinary colloquium on the counterreformation he is ‘collaborating'.

When the word ‘collaboration' was coined in the nineteenth century it was used to refer to people working on a literary or artistic project - collaborating rather than pursuing their own vision or whim.  Collaboration, in other words, is cooperation between people who are different and who cannot be expected to find the exercise easy, convenient or congenial.  But that is not the point. Collaboration is entered into on the basis of a prior belief that drawing into of those who do not normally or easily work together into a working relationship is going to achieve something very special. 

This exploration of the vocabulary of ‘working together' is an indication of just what a complex area we are entering into when we speak, as our diocese bids us,  of ‘acting collaboratively'.  A new dean of Peterhouse might well take this phrase as watchword for his tenure of that distinguished office.  However, he would be well advised to ascertain whether at any given time he is combining, cooperating or collaborating.  For instance, if the new dean were to say to a colleague at High Table that he really has no understanding whatsoever of what this colleague is saying, and cannot imagine what might be of interest in it, that might be seen as hostile and unhelpful contribution. But to say much the same in the early stages of a collaborative project, where the success of the venture depends on the naming and transcending of difference and the adept negotiation of diversity, might be seen as the very honesty needed to break the ice and allow true collaboration to begin.  It is important to recognise that a collaborative project is doomed if the partners think that the rules of ‘combining' or easy sociability still apply. The case of Gilbert and Sullivan might be brought in as a case in point. The librettist and composer did not 'get on' and found each other difficult.  But this did not spoil their collaboration.  (I am grateful to a visitor to the cathedral who made this suggestion after the service.)

Let me clarify what I am saying about this overlapping vocabulary. Combining is social life where relationships are built up in a specific context, and where good manners sustain a happy superficiality which fosters community allowing it to bear fruit over a long period of time.  Cooperating is simple, effective, undramatic working together with colleagues who have a similar sense of the project's aims, an agreement about method and a common technical language. Collaboration, on the other hand, is cooperation under difficult or challenging circumstances - cooperation across difference or in the context of diversity.  And to these three we might even add synergy, which has the same literal meaning of ‘working together' but is derived from the Greek rather than the Latin. It is a twentieth century contribution to the complex and has been defined (by Stephen Covey in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) as ‘creative cooperation'.  But I would prefer to call it ‘unlikely, high-stakes, risky collaboration, undertaken in the hope of unleashing new energy and effectiveness'.  Synergy is ‘extreme collaboration' and, like the ordinary sort, is based on the belief that the whole can be far greater then the sum of the parts.

This picture is made yet more complicated, however, when we recall the use of the word ‘collaboration' in the twentieth century. A ‘collaborator' in war years was one who cooperated not with the exotic or confusing other but with the enemy.  And while it might seem that this usage is so remote from what is intended by a diocesan imperative as to be irrelevant, one always has to consider carefully the issue of who your putative collaborator or partner in a project might be.  Is the implicit suggestion that within a parish there should be more joined-up thinking at the PCC and evidenced in the practice of ministry? Or is it that neighbouring parishes should work together?  Is there an ecumenical drift in this?  Might we hope for interfaith collaboration?  Perhaps there is in this an implicit criticism of the diocesan Boards and Councils, a suggestion that they are inclined to take a limited departmental approach to their work, to subsist in what are sometimes maligned as silos. Maybe it is an invitation to build better relationships with secular bodies or a call for local parishes to do more to support their church schools. 

Set in the abstract, encouragement to collaborate is perhaps not entirely helpful.  It could seem like nagging to some (that is, urging them to do what they are already doing) while to others it will come across as permission to transgress all boundaries - an exercise which yet others in the church will interpret as treachery, ‘collaboration' in the wartime sense.  You only have to turn your mind to the situation in the Anglican Communion today to realise that the issue of deciding who an appropriate collaborator might be, or discerning what risks the church can take in forging new alliances for the sake of God's kingdom are very major matters. 

I hope that I have convinced you that earnest talk about collaboration can be unhelpful when it implies that not to collaborate represents bad faith or weak will, the wrong attitude.  But I also want to clarify that because collaboration means ‘working together in ways that are by definition difficult and problematic' much of the alleged ‘problem' of collaboration in the church is one of perception rather than substance because collaboration is always difficult. When it is not, we call it cooperation and fail to notice it. It's only when it goes wrong that people say, ‘aha, collaboration is not occurring'.  But if I am right in my analysis, failure in collaboration is to be expected, and every occasion of effective collaboration is a minor miracle.  It follows that we would all help each other quite a lot if we were to stop beating ourselves up for alleged failures in collaboration.  The church is full of cooperation that we just don't notice.  If it were not, the whole show would have ground to a halt years ago. 

The truth, in my view, is that most people are team players and that, by and large, people are highly cooperative. Nonetheless ‘acting collaboratively' is a difficult and risky challenge. But thinking positively, it is right to assert that we can dare to suggest such an audacious project precisely because there is such a solid foundation of combining and cooperating. Or, to put it in more theological language, efforts to collaborate, however faltering, should be applauded as evidence that we have arrived at a level of shared confidence in fellowship and communion and that we are prepared to step out in faith and offer the hand of friendly collaboration to people we find difficult, different or strange. But let this be quite clear, if the partner is not in some way difficult, the project is not collaborative.

‘I see that all things come to an end' says the Psalmist.  ‘But not the problem of collaboration,' we might reply.  For it is crucial to the healthy development of the church (or any other organisation) for it to stretch itself at precisely the point of finding new and challenging forms of collaboration. This will always be difficult, sometimes disastrous and occasionally wonderful.  Without it, however, we will never see, find or experience the Kingdom of God.  

Stephen Cherry