Why Collaboration Can Lead to Greater Outcomes

"We can't do it alone." This phrase fills keynote speeches, annual reports, and panel discussions. And yet, the reality is that most organizations do act alone—or, at best, engage in partnerships that are performative rather than transformative.

We know collaboration is essential, but knowing isn’t the same as doing. The issue isn’t just that partnerships are hard—it’s that the structures, incentives, and trust mechanisms to make them work are fundamentally broken. The good news? There’s a way forward. But it requires a shift in how we design, manage, and sustain partnerships—moving beyond coordination and into co-creation.

The Partnership Paradox: The Talk vs. The Walk

You'll catch so much more when you fish together.

Organization leaders acknowledge that the greatest challenges they face—climate resilience, supply chain transparency, economic inclusion—cannot be solved in silos. Yet when it comes time to act, collaboration remains the exception, not the rule.

Why? Because in many cases, the infrastructure for partnerships simply doesn’t exist.

Partnerships tend to be:

• Ill-defined – A vague agreement rather than a structured, accountable process.

• One-sided – Dominated by a single entity rather than built on shared value.

• Short-term – Driven by immediate project goals rather than long-term transformation.

This isn’t just an oversight. It’s a systemic problem that limits impact across industries and sectors.

Why Partnerships Stall—And How to Fix Them

For partnerships to work, we must address several critical barriers:

1. Competition as a Barrier to Collaboration

Many companies hesitate to engage in partnerships because of a deep-seated fear: What if we lose our competitive edge? Organizations are wired to prioritize differentiation, market share, and proprietary advantage. This often leads to duplication of efforts instead of shared solutions.

Take the apparel industry. While individual brands invest millions in sustainable sourcing, they often resist true collaboration on supply chain transformation. Why? Because the instinct to protect intellectual property and branding outweighs the collective need to shift the system.

One way to overcome this is to use pre-competitive collaboration models. In these models, competitors in a sector identify challenges that exist where no one has developed a competitive advantage yet. Initiatives like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition prove that industry players can share sustainability innovations without sacrificing competitive advantage. Leaders must recognize that when the whole system improves, everyone wins.

Another way to avoid competition is by selecting partners that are not in direct competition with one another. By working with partners that broadly represent actors inside the ecosystem that surrounds the challenge you want to address, but do not directly compete, you can leverage diverse insights and resources from those actors, while avoiding competitive overlap. If competition might ever seem to pose a challenge in the future, you can build governance that will help your coalition navigate competition when it comes up. 

2. The Absence of Co-Creation

The traditional partnership model often looks like this:

• One organization sets the agenda.

• Others are invited to contribute.

• Participation happens on the terms of the first mover, which often leads to less engagement from other parties.

This isn’t collaboration—it’s coordination at best. True partnership is stronger when a co-creation process is built in from the start.

Co-creation ensures that all voices have a stake in designing solutions, not just implementing them. It transforms partnerships from transactional relationships into generative ones—where new ideas, innovations, and trust emerge naturally.

The most effective partnerships treat co-creation as a non-negotiable design principle. The Consumer Goods Forum’s Forest Positive Coalition, for instance, includes supply chain actors in decision-making from the beginning, ensuring long-term buy-in and shared accountability.

3. No Dedicated Infrastructure for Collaboration

Even when competition and co-creation challenges are overcome, partnerships can still fail—because no one is actively cultivating and managing them. This can often be addressed by inserting a third party that can keep partners on task so they can focus on achieving results. Enter the convergence facilitator. 

What is a Convergence Facilitator?

It sounds like a buzzword (in some places they call them sherpas-we like our name better), but it summarizes a lot of roles played by one function that exists in many successful partnerships—whether it’s called a neutral convenor, partnership facilitator, or strategic coordinator. A convergence facilitator is:

• One part project manager – Keeping partnerships on track and ensuring deadlines are met.

• One part facilitator – Navigating power dynamics and helping partners find alignment, using a toolkit that pulls from organizational development and design thinking.

• One part matchmaker – Ensuring the right players are at the table and that everyone benefits.

But most importantly, convergence facilitators push partnerships to greatness. They step in when collaboration gets stuck, when egos threaten progress, and when trust starts to erode. They are especially critical when a partnership needs a neutral, strategic force to drive momentum rather than let bureaucracy stall progress.

This isn’t a hypothetical concept. The UN’s Race to Zero campaign, the World Economic Forum’s circular economy coalitions, and leading public-private climate initiatives all rely on neutral facilitators to succeed. Whether or not we call them convergence facilitators, their function is critical to making partnerships work.

Organizations serious about collaboration must institutionalize the role of convergence facilitators—whether as internal team members, external advisors, or embedded facilitators. Covalent Society can serve this role, or work with your teams to develop internal team members to lead in these spaces. In still other cases, we can help establish and manage secretariats that will oversee these partnerships independently. The key determinant of what you need will often come down to how important impartiality is to the partnership. 

The Call to Action: From Rhetoric to Results

The next decade is likely to be full of change. Geopolitical shifts, impacts from a changing climate, and the potential and risk of AI all point to a fundamentally different world in the near future. The way we work together will also need to change. This means organizations must:

• Look beyond a go-it-alone mentality and approach challenges as opportunities to be solved through leveraging shared resources.  

• Embed partnership facilitation into strategy, treating it as an investment, not a cost.

• Create incentives that support long-term collaboration rather than short-term transactions.

• Embrace partners and facilitators as enablers, not as threats to independence.

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We know we can’t do it alone. The question is: how will we do it together?