Stanford Social Innovation 5C's

Published in the Stanford Social Innovation review this organization has developed a tested framework that has been found useful in enabling effective collaboration for teams working on challenging outcomes.

The 5 C's

The 5C's in the framework are:

  • Clarifying purpose
  • Convening the right people
  • Cultivating trust
  • Coordinating existing activities
  • Collaborating for systems impact

1. Clarifying purpose

Referring back to the what is strategy section ensure the team have a unified agreement on what strategy is and its role in your business.

Ensure the purpose of the collaboration is written and established with each team member. If the purpose is to define a strategy to win in existing market, win in new larger or better defined markets or improve execution on existing choices be sure the purpose is defined and agreed.

2. Convening the right people

Convening the right people has no singular right answer but consider including those:

  • Having authority to act, such as decision-making responsibility in an organization or community

  • Influence over Resources, such as contacts, time, or money.

  • Expertise in the issues under consideration.

  • Information about the topic that no others have.

  • A stake in the outcome and an ability to speak to the consequences

  • Those willingly engaged and committed to the collaborative purpose.

3. Cultivating trust

A significant Google research project - called Project Aristotle found that high-performing teams have high levels of “psychological safety,” as measured by an equality of turn-taking in team discussions, as well as high degrees of social sensitivity, or group members’ ability to read each other’s social signals. Psychological safety, as defined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondsona, is a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,’ and ‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up ... It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’

Most simply people work together most effectively when relationships are strong and authentic. When team members are prepared to actively listen deeply to others with a willingness to accept a diversity of thought and experience enabling any team member to feel free to speak their minds.

4. Coordinating existing activities

Offer participants the opportunity early in a collaboration’s formation to publicly identify their gives and gets—what they can and are willing to give to the collaboration to support other participants and what they need to get out of the collaboration to make their participation worthwhile.
The more specific the gives and gets, the better participants will understand one another’s conditions of engagement. Consider recording the gives and gets as a terms of reference and update the gives and gets as the collaboration continues to ensure the currency of the agreements.

Offer opportunities for team members to collaborate together as a group or sub-groups on incremental tasks to build the relationships, achieve some wins and build momentum.

5. Collaborating for systems impact

Include a willingness to discover the root cause, the 5 why's behind issues and opportunities. For true systems change to occur, collaborative efforts must seek to address the root causes of problems, rather than just mitigating the symptoms.

An effective way to discover and address root causes is by looking for and identifying and taking action on a set of “leverage points”. Leverage points are directly related to collaboration’s central purpose and represent places in a system where “a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything else".

Root cause and leverage points discovery and definition will be enhanced by the previous 4 steps.