(Illustration by iStock/Agafon)
When different organizational cultures—the proverbial “how we do things”—come together, tensions frequently arise. Working effectively with and across cultures is even more challenging when organizations come together to tackle social and environmental challenges.
Research reveals how inter-organizational collaborations for social impact often run into structural or governance issues like power asymmetries or a focus on the wrong metric of success. For example, a coalition of actors seeking to tackle poor water health in Australia’s Great Barrier region locked in to repeatedly producing detailed report cards rather than addressing the underlying issue, due to differing interests. Even when such obstacles are addressed, an important yet often neglected challenge stems from bringing different cultures together to deliver on complex problems that often defy standard solutions.
We know from more common settings, like mergers and acquisitions, that lack of cultural alignment can stymie delivery of intended goals. Beyond bringing different cultures together, however, collaborations for social impact serve to address complex and often novel problems, so they need to evolve ways of working tailored to specific settings, across scales and geographies, in which these problems manifest. This heightens the challenge from mere cultural integration to one of simultaneous adaptation of that culture to meet the needs of the problems and their contexts.
We were surprised, then, in our research with TRANSFORM, an impact accelerator run by Unilever; the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO, the UK’s equivalent to the US State Department); and EY, to discover that these three organizations both respected and leveraged their distinct cultures while also generating an inter-organizational culture to support their collaboration for social impact. TRANSFORM supports social enterprises in low-income countries through grant funding, bespoke technical assistance, and connections into value chains, and has positively impacted more than 15 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia since its inception in 2015.
We found two key ways these organizations worked effectively with their distinct cultures to generate this impact.
First, all members became savvy at understanding the other organizations’ cultures, which enabled them to find and continuously tune to a zone of effective collaboration, while respecting each parent organization’s red lines. Such cultural savvy can support a productive and balanced decision-making environment, smoothing some of the other challenges identified with collaboration.
Second, members built TRANSFORM’s own distinct culture over time, which is tailored to the specific social and environmental contexts in which it delivers its work, supporting delivery of its goals.
Here, we describe four practices that enabled TRANSFORM members to build this cultural savvy and an effective inter-organizational culture.
Our findings reflect a perspective on culture as a “toolkit” of cultural material, which might include practices, frames, norms, meanings, and routines, which members draw on frequently and flexibly to accomplish diverse organizational goals. Seen this way, organizational culture can serve as a powerful tool for change, and can be put to use in new ways that still respect the core of “how things are done” in different organizations.
Building Cultural Savvy
TRANSFORM members became adept at understanding not only their own organization’s cultures but those of the other collaborating organizations. How they did this, and how they updated this knowledge, was particularly important to navigating how they would work together, and how they remained relevant to their parent organizations’ priorities. Two practices were key:
Sharing and Continually Updating
Each parent organization has specific ways of addressing social and environmental issues that are embedded in their larger organizational cultures. These are reflected in how they contribute to the joint initiative, through familiar ways of working, like providing bespoke technical business support such as coaching and pro-bono professional consulting, in the case of EY. (“EY” in this article refers to the global organization and may refer to one, or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity.) Further, each organization brings specific interests, priorities, and red lines rooted in their organization’s cultures, like using taxpayers’ money responsibly in the case of the FCDO. Sharing within the TRANSFORM team and continually updating each other on these cultural requirements allows the collaboration to respect all three organizations’ priorities. We observed dedicated presentations serving this purpose, but sharing also occurred routinely as part of discussions and decision-making on the work of the initiative.
Using this practice over time also enables TRANSFORM to retain cultural savvy as the larger organizations undergo changes. We observed this when Unilever team members presented on their “Unilever Compass,” detailing how the company pursues its sustainability goals. This allowed for discussions of how TRANSFORM’s thematic pillars could be framed to resonate with the Compass, while simultaneously speaking to the priorities and interests of the FCDO and EY. Over time, we witnessed such formal presentations as well as shorter updates on (evolving) priorities and developments at each of the parent organizations, suggesting updating is key to retaining cultural savvy.
Leveraging External Relationships
Counterintuitively, TRANSFORM members learned about each other’s cultures through conversations with and about external stakeholders, like communications agencies, professional services firms, or potential future collaborators. Attending to what the other core organizations highlight in these conversations provides important clues as to their culture, priorities, and red lines, and how these relate to the work undertaken jointly.
These conversations enable members to learn about each other’s cultures in a non-contentious and time-efficient manner. They might also capture small details that people may not think to explicitly flag but are important to understanding the nuances of others’ cultures, surfacing and easing subtle lack of alignment that can undermine true collaboration. Cultural nuances might be harder to detect in formal presentations, but when people speak and act in line with their cultures in various settings, values and implicit priorities shine through.
We observed this in conversations about a potential collaboration with an additional corporation. Discussions surfaced potential red lines for one partner in particular, which related to products of the corporation that might attract unwelcome attention. While crucial for deciding whether and how to work with external stakeholders, such conversations naturally expose cultural sensitivities that might not arise otherwise, but are essential to developing deep and effective cultural savvy.
Building and Evolving an Inter-organizational Culture
There is no blueprint for how a specific inter-organizational collaboration should address social and environmental issues because its essence is to bring together complementary capabilities that are not available in this combination yet. TRANSFORM built and evolved over time an inter-organizational culture that is tailored to its work and the specific contexts in which the enterprises operate. Two practices enabled this:
Adapting Cultural Material to Affected Systems
The work of inter-organizational collaborations, especially ones crossing geographies, touches many complex, interacting, and overlapping social and environmental systems and thus often calls for novel, untried approaches. The cultural material leveraged—how things are done—hence has to meet, and therefore be able to be effective in, these different systems. Importantly, finding such new ways of working occurs through testing at a small scale to remain nimble and responsive to context-specific conditions of the collaboration’s work.
For example, TRANSFORM interviewees recounted how they tested the use of a delivery van with a social enterprise in Kenya. Small-scale testing surfaced, however, that this was not workable in the local conditions, where local traffic interfered with the van’s effectiveness. The idea of using a van was hence dropped and other “ways of doing things” were brainstormed and tested. This reflects TRANSFORM’s approach of working flexibly and adjusting to context-specific requirements in building an inter-organizational culture.
We also observed how members of TRANSFORM used this practice when representatives of the different organizations favored different courses of action, for example, in modifying the application materials enterprises wishing to join the initiative are required to submit. Here, team members discussed whether a video should be part of the application, and one member proposed piloting this to gauge its effectiveness for different applicants with diverse experiences before settling on a decision. Testing at a small scale and learning gradually served to find cultural material that would work for all involved while staying nimble and thus able to pivot if necessary.
Accumulating and Remembering a Repertoire of Cultural Material
Particularly when organizations collaborate to address a complex issue over time, a shared understanding of how the different organizations work and what cultural material has worked in the past will emerge. Accumulating such effective and accepted cultural material is important. This obviates the need to reinvent the wheel as the initiative continues to collaborate and enables members to draw from a repertoire of cultural material according to the current situational needs.
We observed how this happened informally, through socializing new members into existing “ways of doing things” in conversations surfacing how “we do…”—capturing risk in a risk matrix, for example.
Accumulating cultural material also occurs more formally, through capturing learnings about what has previously worked in reports like “Lessons in Partnership” that detail what ways of working together have emerged as effective. Through accumulating cultural materials in these ways, an inter-organizational culture from which team members can draw, and that is distinct from the parent organizations’ cultures and tailored to the specific work of the collaboration, arises.
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Jointly, the four practices described here allow inter-organizational collaborations addressing social and environmental issues to overcome specific cultural challenges that might otherwise derail collaboration. Bringing parent organizations’ cultures together, such that each organization’s needs are understood and met, and building an effective inter-organizational culture can be done when participants are savvy and intentional about culture.
Moreover, the case of TRANSFORM shows how culture can be a flexible tool as well as a glue that enables collaboration on tough challenges, bringing together different organizational cultures and helping overcome some of the structural and governance obstacles frequently observed in inter-organizational collaborations addressing social and environmental issues, where often structural arrangements and shared intent can erode over time.
Read more stories by Tirza Gapp & Jennifer Howard-Grenville.