(Photo by iStock/JohnnyGreig)
Rodrigo Canales, a professor of management and organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, is always on the hunt for interesting cases to share with students. Over the years, while connecting with individuals and groups engaged in social innovation, he kept encountering the same problem. Even though talented individuals worked together across organizations to address systemic challenges and had a plethora of good ideas at their disposal, the overwhelming majority of these efforts failed.
Canales heard many of these frustrations from individuals at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The foundation had a long-standing commitment to evidence-based practice, identified talented and motivated people, and invested in interventions to create systemic change, and yet the expected outcomes rarely came to pass. Why do so many cross-sector collaborations fail, and why do some succeed?
Canales joined forces with Mikaela Bradbury, an impact investment associate at DBL Partners, a venture capital firm focused on social and environmental impact; Tony Sheldon, the executive director of the Yale School of Management’s program on social enterprise, innovation, and impact; and Charlie Cannon, a professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, to find answers. In a new paper, the researchers, supported by the Hewlett Foundation, scrutinized cross-sectoral, evidence-based work by international development organizations to determine the factors that lead to success or failure.
They found that the organizational “scaffolding” in which managers operate can be critical to success. The metaphor captures the modular and temporary structures that participants from different organizations and sectors create to enable all parties to coordinate, share evidence, leverage their various expertises, and work together under a unified rubric. Rather than approaching problems with predetermined outputs or preset solutions, successful cross-sectoral efforts will require iteration and learning just to contend with the challenges that arise when working across organizations.
The researchers began with interviews of 31 experts from various stakeholder groups who had thought deeply about cross-sectoral innovation in the context of evidence-based practice. Through these interviews, the researchers collected potential cases to study and tried to identify matched cases.
“When we talk about matched cases,” Sheldon says, “we mean relatively successful versus less successful integration of evidence into a major intervention in education, economic development, or social protection.”
The researchers eventually identified eight matched interventions in four countries—India, Mexico, South Africa, and Ghana—selecting two cases in each country.
An extensive team of research assistants conducted 226 total interviews with people involved in each case. After writing up detailed accounts and timelines with the goal of identifying critical decision points for stakeholders, the researchers coded the data across cases, which enabled them to see patterns.
“Remarkably, very different interventions in different contexts by different actors showed commonalities, both among successful cases and less successful ones,” Sheldon says.
The researchers found that even actors with experience in managing cross-sectoral innovation projects confronted unexpected challenges. Without one organization to rely on—with its shared timelines, norms, values, incentives, and established hierarchy for settling disputes—a host of new problems arise. Even for the most seasoned managers, cross-sectoral collaboration often breaks down because managing across organizations requires intentional, proactive, effective management of a different kind: one that creates novel structures for novel collaborations—i.e., scaffoldings—that enable them to get off the ground.
“Evidence-based field trials have emerged as the gold standard for identifying those interventions that are most effective in meeting a wide range of development goals,” says Donald R. Lessard, a professor of management, engineering systems, and global economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “However, many of these tests are of individual interventions and do not fully take into account that these interventions are ‘delivered’ by individuals working as part of organizations with differences among and within.”
Lessard adds, “Going forward, it would be good if more tests would connect the two levels, with controls for the nature of scaffolding and for the intervention.”
Find the full study: “Evidence in Practice: How Structural and Programmatic Scaffolds Enable Collaboration in International Development” by Rodrigo Canales, Mikaela Bradbury, Anthony Sheldon, and Charlie Cannon, Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.