Photo: Tug of War Monument Wismar by falco from Pixabay

We read textbooks, scholarly journals and articles on best practices for collaboration, touting the benefits in great detail, and barely glossing over the down sides of collaboration. The “real deal” is often messy, and no one wants to be the one who shares all the gory details, for a number of reasons. As a result, many of us go into collaborations wide eyed and bushy-tailed, not knowing the dangers that lurk within. Yet, it is these very lessons that need to be shared so that others who come after us can structure collaborations in a manner that codifies roles, responsibilities, risks and rewards; maximizes transparency and accountability; outlines the “rules of the road”, so to speak; describes how decisions will be made and how conflicts will be resolved.

While I have been blessed to have been a part of some great collaborations in which the outcomes were better than any individual or single entity could achieve, I have also been part of collaborations that didn’t work so well. I learned a lot from the collaborations that worked, but, I have learned infinitely more from those that didn’t work. I think you can relate.

There have been times I’ve invited people to work with me, only to have been outmaneuvered politically, finding myself on the outside looking in, while others reaped the economic benefits of my work. There have been other times when I have made grants to collaborations that fell apart because at least one of the…