Rules for Collaborative Inquiry

The IDEAL → The REAL

ENGAGE

• Bring participating grantees and consultants into program governance, including the design and implementation of the collaborative learning program from the start.
• Give responsibility, invest in it, staff it.
• Expediency, efficiency, foundation policy, and culture will limit the authority of the program officer to engage participants as fully as possible.
• Money will be short, but strive to maximize engagement.

DEMOCRATIZE

• Eliminate hierarchy, reduce power imbalance, and banish “experts”— i.e., treat all participants as both sources and recipients of knowledge.
• In particular, value practitioners as knowledge builders.
• The power imbalance between grantmaker and grantee will not disappear. Strive to make the hierarchy as flat as possible, and be ever vigilant and honest about it.

BE TRANSPARENT

• Communicate agendas and constraints completely and with honesty and integrity.
• It’s never possible for a grantmaker to discuss every last thing about the foundation’s internal constraints and agendas.
• Try to make your translucency as transparent as possible.

BE FLEXIBLE

• Create objectives, timelines, and budget line items that can evolve in response to what is being learned.
• Invest in the time it takes to build relationships.
• It’s often hard to make grants with all the flexibility needed for the learning process.
• Sometimes re-granting intermediaries can help.
• Strive to create internal foundation mechanisms that can be responsive to positive change.

CREATE SAFETY

• Reduce the stakes for failure and promote the value of learning from mistakes.
• Mistakes and even failures will happen: not all grantees will measure up to agreed-upon standards or outcomes.
• An organization might need to be dropped from the collaborative. Strive up front to establish and describe expectations and consequences as clearly as possible.

BE CURIOUS

• Let inquiry guide action. Formulate questions, gather data, test knowledge in the real world. Be willing to reject hypotheses.
• Everyone has trouble rejecting hypotheses — program officers with their guidelines and policies, and community leaders with their years of experience and organizational norms.
• Both sides need to work hard on this, and to challenge one another.

BE ACCOUNTABLE

• Hold one another to a high standard of learning skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Grantmakers will have an easier time holding others accountable than being so themselves.
• Strive to “learn along with” the group, and practice the preaching.