- Organisations should be focusing on how to optimise collaboration, not whether it should happen.
- Collaboration is about survival in an environment defined by resource scarcity (e.g. critical minerals, water), volatile supply chains and rapid business change.
- Companies are finding new ways to work together by sharing data, aligning operations and building resilience through networks.
- Sharing data and insights improves information, brings expertise to bear in new ways, and unlocks our ability to tackle higher-order business problems.
The headlines tell a story of division: nations are locked in trade disputes, societies are polarised, global institutions are in disarray.
Around the world, the appetite for collaboration appears to be at a historically low ebb. Indeed, one of the five key themes for this year’s Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is, “How can we cooperate in a more contested world?” Discord and disruption are seemingly our lot these days. But that’s not the case everywhere, and not in all instances.
In fact, in the industrial sector, quite the opposite trend is emerging. Companies are finding new ways to work together by sharing data, aligning operations and building resilience through networks.
None of the big challenges confronting industry are amenable to solving in isolation. Virtually all demand cross-organisational solutions, teaming and sharing. Collaboration within industry, perhaps to a refreshing degree, is a mutual value creation.
That’s not to say this collaboration is easy or that there aren’t constraints. To take but one example, trade barriers increase the costs of exchange, driving up execution complexity. And to be sure, there are other countervailing forces in play, such as the strategic shift towards “geopatriation” and sovereign compute, where companies (and countries) look at the notion of hosting their information in data centres abroad with growing unease.
But constraints also act as incentives to innovate. Partnering with others to harness data, insights and resources that exist outside an organisation’s perimeter is proven for success with an ironclad investment case.
While leaders are justifiably focused on managing information and operational risks, and it would be naïve to suggest that information hoarding and “walled gardens” aren’t part of industry’s cultural fabric, virtually no one is opposed in principle to collaboration. It’s more a question of how to optimise collaboration, not whether it should happen.
Industrial collaboration is understood by nearly all actors for what it is: a source of competitiveness, and a catalyst for transformation. In many instances, it’s also a necessity. Collaboration is about survival in an environment defined by resource scarcity (e.g., critical minerals, water), volatile supply chains and rapid business change.
Few if any senior leaders or boards in the industrial sector question the value of connecting operations, either within companies or with third parties. Inside firms, managers at all levels that don’t foster collaboration are quickly identified as ineffective and sidelined.
Industrial collaboration is on the upswing
We should step back from cynical rhetoric and short-term news cycles and look to concrete data on collaboration. The new Global Cooperation Barometer, published this month by McKinsey and the WEF, reveals that multilateral institutions are under strain, but that cooperation is not disappearing. Rather, it’s shifting.
Where the Paris Agreement or global trade and security frameworks may falter, this analysis (and many others) finds smaller, focused partnerships are gaining traction. Innovation and technology collaboration is advancing, even as geopolitical tensions rise. Data flows, AI partnerships and digital infrastructure projects are increasing among like-minded organisations. Climate and clean technology alliances are expanding as industries and regions pursue decarbonisation and energy security together.
These trends all tell the same tale, underscoring a crucial point that’s getting lost: Interdependence isn’t going away, and collaboration is increasing. We should embrace it wherever common cause, synergy or the need exists.
The promise (and reality) of radical collaboration
Over the past 12 months, I have written about “radical collaboration,” which I have defined as “the act of breaking down silos and institutional divides, sparking shared insights that boost the quality and capacity of a team or business.”
This collaboration is radical in its extent: more organisations, more stakeholders, more data, spanning entire business ecosystems. But it is not radical in its intent. The act of collaboration isn’t at all radical in industry. On the contrary, it’s ubiquitous.
We need more collaboration today than we did last year. And we should challenge the pervasive narrative that collaboration is dimming or unworkable. Because that is just not true.
As political systems bog down, industry is proving that collaboration can continue to thrive and accelerate where a strong economic rationale compels innovation. Radical collaboration, powered by digitalisation, is how companies will navigate complexity and build a future that works within planetary boundaries.
Predictability is collapsing, and the world is more “contested” (to use WEF’s term). But these are drivers of collaboration, not brakes on it. Sharing data and insights improves information, brings expertise to bear in new ways, and unlocks our ability to tackle higher-order business problems.
I see a critical role for the industrial sector in our increasingly contested world. Industry must continue to lead by example, creating connections that serve as both a force and a template for expanding collaboration in other spheres of endeavour.
Caspar Herzberg is CEO of AVEVA.
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