Dealing With Pluralism And Marginalisation Processes In Multi-Organisational Collaboration: Augmenting The Viable System Model With Team Syntegrity

Collaborations are often required to address ‘wicked’ social, economic and environmental problems, but are commonly ineffective, due to complexity inherent in collaborations and the problems they aim to address.

This study responds to calls from scholars for a systemic approach for understanding and managing collaborations. Here, the Viable System Model (VSM) is used to support collaborative partners of a multi-organisational collaboration to identify critical management functions and communication channels necessary for system effectiveness and viability. Despite its promise in supporting partners to identify and plan for improvements to collaborative working arrangements, the VSM provides little guidance on how to manage multiple perspectives or power imbalances amongst partners during such an intervention. Being able to do so is essential for joined-up thinking, learning, and collective action in multi-organisational settings. This study augments the VSM by embedding it within a Team Syntegrity (TS) process methodology to ensure meaningful engagement and ‘fair dialogue.’In trialling this combination, an action research, multi-methodology approach was followed to answer the question: to what extent can a TS augmented VSM intervention address multiple perspectives and marginalisation processes?

The intervention's effectiveness was evaluated drawing on data collected from workshop surveys, interviews, and a document review.

The TS augmented VSM intervention supported collaborative partners in this study to collectively understand the purpose of the collaboration and its activities, problem areas that needed to be addressed for the collaboration’s effectiveness and viability, and a suitable structure for the collaboration moving forward.

The study is novel in terms of the multi-methodological approach adopted, particularly how the use of TS and VSM lead to mutual benefits. This study demonstrates how the use of one informs the use of the other, and how insights from one may lead to insights from the other. Furthermore, this study suggests an original use of the VSM as a tool to define the ‘system in focus’ and a series of avenues for marginalisation that need to be taken into account in the design of an intervention.

The findings are useful for anyone wanting to use the VSM and/or TS to better understand and improve a collaboration’s effectiveness and viability.