From crisis collaborations to long term partnering
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How can value continue to be created over the long term?
Numerous new crisis collaborations are helping provide immediate solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these partnerships will be explicitly temporary, designed to do a specific job in the particular context of COVID-19. Now that we are beginning to come out of the immediate crisis, could some of these new relationships develop into longer-term partnerships to tackle future challenges?
A recent article written by Todd Kirkbride and Ian Dixon (and published by The Partnering Initiative (UK) in June 2020), explores what it would take to undertake this transition and provides ‘Six Key Questions for Transition’ to help organisations of all types ( including business, NGO, academia and government) to determine the potential and process for continuing or even scaling up these relationships.
This article explores some of the crisis collaborations that occurred when the pandemic first started and draws out some emerging patterns of crisis collaboration. It then starts to look at partnering in a post-Covid world before proposing the ‘Six Key Questions for Transition’, which are:
Is there still alignment of interest between the partners?
What have we learned from the crisis collaboration?
Is partnering still the right approach?
What kind of relationship should be developed through the partnership?
Who should be involved?
How should the partners work together in the future?
Transitioning from a crisis collaboration to a long-term partnership that delivers ongoing value may be possible provided partners undertake a proper review and assessment of the options available.