One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?
Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.
We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.
Back in the day when I was designing aspects of the Digital Leadership programme I recognised that helping people to understand the differences between problems and solutions I would use a bridge building analogy.
If you imagine a river, you know where you are and you have fair idea about where you want to be. The problem is how do you get from one side of the river to other. The solution is to build a bridge. The bridge in itself is not the problem you need to solve, it is the solution to the actual problem of crossing the river.
One of the challenges is that often people don’t know how to build a bridge. Then the focus energy and resources are pushed into bridge building. Sometimes it becomes all about bridge building and less about crossing the river.
In many ways I see collaboration as the bridge. We know that the sector is facing challenges, one solution is to build a bridge (collaboration) but the bridge itself isn’t the problem.
Generally what most communities do when they need a bridge, they get experts in to build that bridge. It’s pretty much the same with collaboration, why not get expert help, to help with the collaboration and then that allows greater focus on the actual problems that collaboration is trying to solve.
Generally once you’ve built a bridge, you use it to cross the river and then move on.
So are you building bridges, or are you still thinking about how to construct one?
