Challenges that Many-to-Many Aims To Address
If you work in complex collaborations, the challenges outlined on this page may feel familiar. They are the very issues of governance, power, learning, and value that we also grappled with while building the Many-to-Many System. The frameworks and tools we developed are not silver bullets, but rather our practical responses to these struggles. Each was designed to provide a new lens or a different starting point for building more enabling structures for your work. We invite you to explore these challenges and our accompanying insights, in the hope that they offer useful support for your own efforts.
Fizzle out
There was lots of energy and potential at the start but that faded at the turning point of turning into a collectively agreed actionable plan
Stuck start
There was lots of potential early on but we couldn’t quite work out what to prioritise first and the confusion led to the energy and conditions eroding
Tension driven fragmentation
It was going well until controversial topics like money came to the table and now there is fragmentation
Practice drift
Whilst we started agreeing and operating from shared deep codes, over time we are seeing more misalignment and self-protectionism and we aren’t living into what we set out together
Unripe conditions
We had great ambitions and possibility for our place but the conditions just weren’t present in the major institutions to warrant trying
Necessary self-protection
When there was misalignment parties referred to the contract for authority on how it would be resolved and the contract reinforced multi-polar traps - we ended up in self-protection over mutual resolution
Coherence drift
Gradually alignment and energy to the bigger picture drifted and now it feels more like lots of disparate actions than a coherent whole
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We’d love to hear from you about which challenges you are facing in your complex collaborations.
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