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One of the advantages of working on the Emergency Capacity Building Project has been the opportunity to work with some very smart people. The Project has started to bring in external experts on a very short-term basis to add specific expertise at key points in the process, which has a surprisingly large (if unquantifiable) impact on the way that people approach the key issues.

We’re in Indonesia this week as part of the process to design the next phase of the project. The reason for being in Indonesia is to get more input from the field to balance out the HQ-centric perspective that many of us felt dominated the first phase. A single workshop isn’t going to address that by itself, but it is a healthy start, and there have been some very valuable discussions with the agency staff from Jakarta and Aceh. Hopefully this workshop will also encourage more interaction between the agencies here, which is a valuable bonus.

At the workshop with us is Jordan Lewis, an expert on alliances and collaboration. His interventions have been extremely thoughtful – nothing fancy, just targeted at keeping our feet on the ground and focused forward. They’ve helped to focus the discussions in a way that will definitely help to improve the quality of collaboration in phase 2. At the end of the workshop yesterday, Jordan presented the key factors that he believes are critical for the success of the project, which came out (more or less) as follows:

1. Don’t get fixated on having all 7 agencies involved in a particular project; remember that 2 or more agencies constitute collaboration.
2. Any collaboration must be seen as essential to their individual and combined success by the participants; both to ensure that they prioritise it, and that they are committed to each other.
3. Lessons learned from the collaboration must be attractive to the wider community – other ECB agencies, the wider NGO family, and the humanitarian community.
4. Those involved in collaboration need to clearly understand what they need to do; clear objectives with clear metrics. (Although Jordan also pointed out that having too many metrics illustrates a lack of trust between agencies – it’s better to proceed from a shared understanding.)
5. Pick low-hanging fruit; it’s easier to build on small successes than save an imminent failure.
6. Our activities must be consistent with the forces we are facing on a day-to-day basis; pushing against the flow won’t succeed.

In addition, I also note that circumstances often dictate mindset, which is one of the main external forces that drive or hinder collaboration. An example of this from our sector is that there’s generally more collaboration and/or coordination when insecurity is high; people need each other – or more specifically, need each others’ information and potentially each others’ help. These external circumstances are largely out of our control, but if we’re aware of the dynamics, we can manage our collaboration much better.

Getting beyond questions of collaboration, the breakfast buffet here at the Hotel Gran Mahakam is impressive, but not quite as impressive as Le Meridien. Ah well – at least when you step out of the front door at the Mahakam, you’re not stepping onto Jakarta’s equivalent of the M25 (which seems to be the norm for all the other Jakartan hotels).