Yesterday I was treated to a conversation with Dr. Eugene Bardach. Some years back, he wrote about the Coordinated Youth Services Council in a book about collaboration. He came back, a dozen or so years later, to find out what happened to that collaborative in the long run. What ensued was a fascinating conversation about the collaboratives he's studied, how they've fared in the long run and what difference any of it makes.

This conversation left me with a number of thoughts and questions to ponder. Thoughts about the natural lifespan of collaboratives and questions about measures of success and failure, all of which I shall perpetrate upon you now.

CYSC was a collaborative that formed in the earliest of the 90s in hopes of "changing the system". We think it worked, sort of, because cross-agency staffing, training and planning became commonplace in Marin. Much of the groundwork for that was done over the board table at CYSC. So it worked, right?

On the other hand, there is still a somewhat impenetrable "system" that is a creature of county government: located within the county offices, populated by county personnel and driven by governmental culture and policy. There are still silos and fragmentation and duplication. So it failed, right?

Is every such collaborative doomed to become a creature of the very system it seeks to change? I wonder if there is something inherently contradictory between the goal of "changing systems" and that of becoming "standard operating procedure". In other words, do innovative practices, once institutionalized, become (by force of nature?) bureaucratized? taking on the culture of the institution? Think of the 60's (if you were born yet and/or if you can recall them) and the edicts to not "join the Establishment".

An excellent fellow by the name of Art Kleiner did some work a few years back, looking at people who change systems from inside the system ("heretics") versus people who change them from the outside ("rebels"). What I strongly suspect is that collaboratives start out as a group-identified "rebel" (although its individual members are largely insider-"heretics" and possibly a few outsider-"rebels"). This change-agent group will ultimately become part of the mainstream establishment or it will die.

The question that remains is: does the collaborative change the system or does the system change the collaborative? Dr. Bardach offered an interesting anecdote about a collaborative effort that succeeded fabulously in establishing structures and protocols that effectively integrated systems. What's most interesting about this story is the fact that, according to the leaders of that effort, their models and practices have been replicated by NOBODY. I hope that's not true, I hope it's just that they haven't discovered all the people who've replicated their model. But if it IS true, then what obviously happened is that they successfully changed a microsystem without disturbing the slumber of the macrosystem.

I find this teeth-gnashingly frustrating. But perhaps it's simply the Tao Of Collaboration. Perhaps that's just how it works and maybe it takes generations of efforts like that one to change the larger systemic levels. I have a suggestion — although if what I just said is true, then this is a suggestion that no one will take very seriously. There seems to be a lot of learning taking place that is somehow failing to be translated into sweeping changes in structure or practice. Somebody, somewhere (perhaps you, Eugene Bardach? or you, Art Kleiner? or I if someone would fund it?) should study WHY this is true and HOW the learning stops at the level of the researcher and the principal investigator of the demonstration project.

Meanwhile let's remember this: "collaborate" is a VERB. Grow very suspicious when verbs get turned into nouns, I tell you. Even though I've done it a lot in this post. Collaboration in its true form is a PROCESS, not an event or a reified thing. It doesn't stand still or take a permanent shape. Our groups and organizations are strong to the degree that they are infused with the lifeblood of that process.