Welcome to Module 2 – Cross Sector Collaboration: Network Management.

As you saw in Module 1, managing outwards is essentially concerned with managing interactions (networks, partnerships and contracts) in challenging and complex systems. Module 2 focuses on managing stakeholder (citizen and client) relations to drive benefits for recipients and consumers of government services.

We’ll reflect on interest groups and be reminded how important non rational elements are in the process of managing change. We’ll expand on network management as a way for managers to collaborate for service delivery and innovation. We will adapt and adopt effective communication strategies and ‘fit for purpose’ participation processes to win and maintain public confidence.

We’ll consider some innovations in government business . We’ll be reminded of the importance of maintaining a ‘social licence’ to operate and of building social capital. As you will see from all of this, managing outwards presents new governance challenges and opportunities for social innovation.

Managing outwards represents a different way of working.

While systems thinking is a useful way to understand diverse perspectives, assumptions and worldviews, there are many ‘ways of knowing’ and experiencing the world around us. There are benefits in exploring Indigenous perspectives and understandings of collaboration, complexity and adaptive systems.

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Apalech Clan member from Western Cape. In his book Sand Talk (2019)^[1], Yunkaporta helps us see that the challenge of stakeholder engagement and collaboration can be transformed by thinking fundamentally differently about the way we go about our work in the communities we serve and within the networks in which we operate. Yunkaporta (2019) shows us that, in Aboriginal ways of thinking, collaboration and engagement is not a challenge or an additional process step, but the only way of being and knowing.

Yunkaporta (2019, p169) describes ‘kinship-mind’, which is about relationships and connectedness. In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places, and senior knowledge-keepers is paramount.  We can contrast this with a worldview where there is a distinction between the server and the served, the agency and the stakeholders, ‘us’ and ‘them.’

From this indigenous way of being Yunkaporta (2019, p98) sets out some helpful ideas for stakeholder engagement or for ‘those who want to work with others to strengthen a system and make it more sustainable’. He says, “Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines or network protocols or rules if you like, connect, diversify, interact and adapt.”

The cross-sector, cross-boundary world involves collaboration and is organised differently. Accountability is linked to negotiated agreements with diverse actors over whom there is little leverage or direct control. Connections are through contracts and contacts that may be ad hoc, horizontal relationships of reciprocal trust and mutual accountability.

‘Bricolage’ may be a good way to describe managing out work – working with the scraps, using the off cuts, creating something out of nothing – the challenge for managers is to ride the boundaries, to be resourceful, frugal and innovative.

The cross-sector, cross-boundary world involves collaboration and is organised differently. Accountability is linked to negotiated agreements with diverse actors over whom there is little leverage or direct control. Connections are through contracts and contacts that may be ad hoc, horizontal relationships of reciprocal trust and mutual accountability.

‘Bricolage’ may be a good way to describe managing out work – working with the scraps, using the off cuts, creating something out of nothing – the challenge for managers is to ride the boundaries, to be resourceful, frugal and innovative.