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Complex Collaboration in Practice: Insights on Roles & Accountabilities

The Many-to-Many System was co-developed with experienced practitioners already navigating the challenges of complex governance. Through a dedicated learning network, these partners shared insights from their live initiatives and tested components of the Many-to-Many System in their diverse contexts. This page gathers reflections from a sub-group of practitioners focusing specifically on how they approached roles and accountability in their different contexts.

We're sharing these reflections to provide more insight on structuring roles and accountabilities in complex collaborations. They can be read alongside the Role Cards Example from the Proof of Possibility. We hope these will provide useful prompts to people doing complex collaboration work in practice - including distributed governance, collaborative resourcing, shared infrastructure, and deep relational work.

Roles and accountabilities

“M2M roles are not job descriptions - they’re living agreements. The work is to keep them alive.”

While many collaboration practices apply when working with roles and accountabilities, Many-to-Many contexts bring specific qualities and challenges:

  • High complexity and emergence – Multiple organisations, cultures, and incentives mean roles can’t be set once and for all. Clarity must be continually re-generated.
  • Fluid roles – People move between roles as capacity, focus, and energy shift. This requires 'just enough' scaffolding: enough structure to orient, not enough to stifle.
  • Visibility and shared awareness – Without explicit visibility, accountabilities blur, risks stay hidden, and invisible labour grows.
  • Co-responsibility – Accountability is built by actively stepping into shared responsibility for the outcomes of the whole, not just one's part.
  • Capacity constraints – Co-governance takes time and attention. Recognising capacity as a live, changing factor (not a static input) is essential.

Common pitfalls

“When orchestration, sensemaking, and documentation aren’t distributed, the initiator becomes a bottleneck - and burnout becomes a risk.”

We noticed certain patterns when exploring roles and accountabilities that can become missteps or pitfalls, and risk the collaboration failing as a result:

  • Fragility through over-dependence on initiators – The system never transitions to shared responsibility, and there is an 'agency vacuum' when the initiator steps away or changes role.
  • Illusion of flatness – Mistaking distributed governance for “everyone in every decision”, which slows and over-complicates decision-making to the point of inertia.
  • Underestimating and undervaluing the overhead – Neglecting the 20–30% of time and budget needed for governance, alignment, and reflection, which is critical to effective complex collaboration.
  • Invisible care work – Relational and emotional labour often goes unseen and unsupported, risking extraction from those who play those roles and undermining the collaboration by not understanding where the work is actually happening.
  • Lack of fluidity in practice – Despite good intentions, people get stuck in roles and power pools around specific people, building overreliance on them to make things happen.
  • Low collective capacity – When too many participants bring low or scattered attention, shared accountability erodes.

Tactics from practitioners

These are not prescriptions but patterns – things that practitioners have found useful to keep roles alive, visible, and adaptive over time. Working with roles and accountabilities in complex collaborations is less about finding the perfect structure, and more about cultivating living systems of visibility, responsiveness, and care.

“Describe what is known, build the relationships to act when it’s not, and create rhythms to keep both alive.”

1. Lay strong foundations

Invest early in relational infrastructure and shared culture: on a foundation of strong relationships, roles become clearer, visibility across roles is easier, and fluidity between roles is enabled. Building trust up front is key.

  • Assess “ripeness” – Be real with each other about the readiness of individuals and organisations to work with uncertainty, power-sharing, and emergence. Work through scenarios together to surface assumptions about values and deep codes.
  • Use group charters and user manuals to make your culture and ways-of-working expectations explicit. Share the structures and tools that support you, and make group agreements about how you'll work together.
  • Budget generously (for example ~20%) for alignment, learning, and governance rhythms – and factor in relationship- and capacity-building time in the set-up phase (such as a "Year 0" dedicated to setting up the collaboration). Invest in capabilities that support relational, fluid working, such as feedback skills, peer coaching, consent decision-making and deep democracy.

2. Make roles visible

“Visibility is an act of care - it makes contribution, power, and responsibility legible.”
  • Map assets, roles, accountabilities, and capacity using visual tools (for example Miro, Maptio, Mural or Kumu). It can help to visualise how things are (existing power dynamics) versus where you want to get to (your intended network structure).
  • Include both task-based roles and inner roles (for example "governance custodian", "connector", "sensemaker", "care steward"). This supports shared awareness and accountability, brings shared language to role fluidity, and makes visible work that often goes unseen – including roles like "voice of nature".
  • Keep documentation alive. It helps for someone to hold a "role of looking after the roles" (for example an enabler, system orchestrator, steward, or coordinator), including rhythms to refresh and update the shared picture of who is holding what as you go.

3. Scaffold for fluidity

  • Accept that roles will change. Integrate a "good enough patchwork" of structures that can evolve, for example a regular rhythm to review and update roles (monthly or quarterly) to avoid constant churn.
  • Embed development, handover and onboarding pathways from the start. Support people to grow in their roles and hand them over when needed: be explicit about what people want to learn and how to signal it's time to hand something over.
  • Use regular retrospectives, critique and feedback sessions to support each other's work, surface tensions and re-align. For example, in some Huddles there are 6-weekly "Power Up" sessions where everybody shares what they're working on and gets feedback from everyone else.

4. Build co-responsibility

  • Encourage stepping into leadership as a practice of care, not control. Create regular moments for people to step in to take more responsibility, or integrate this into the structure (for example rotating facilitation).
  • Create distributed sensemaking spaces – moments for alignment, cross-pollination and folding in learning to decide when to adapt to new feedback. These might be open sharing and cross-pollination sessions, or more structured learning reviews and adaptive action cycles.
  • Celebrate when people play their roles well. Celebration is a vital part of governance: nurturing positive energy and recognising contribution. Remember: "parties are governance too!"
  • Explore equity of reciprocity – ensuring contributions and compensation feel fair, even if not equal, to avoid people feeling alienated, unseen or undervalued in the system.

5. Attend to live capacity

  • Treat capacity as a changing landscape. Check in regularly on energy, attention, and bandwidth, and give people opportunities to step out and in.
  • Use lightweight tools (for example intranets, Slack check-ins, or timesheets) to sense where energy is flowing or thin.
  • Be explicit about what kind of capacity is needed – emotional, relational, or technical – and redistribute accordingly.

Open questions

These are some of the live questions that practitioners continue to explore, as an invitation to ongoing enquiry:

  • What does healthy hierarchy look like in a many-to-many context?
  • How do we continue to hold people accountable to shared culture, not just contracts?
  • How can we make “looking after the collaboration” itself feel meaningful, not administrative?
  • How do we continue to surface and work with risk in an ongoing way?
  • How do we navigate conflict and care across organisational boundaries?
  • What new or different tools might help visualise and track fluid roles in live complex collaborations?
“The work of governance is not a distraction from the mission - it’s part of how the mission lives.”