¿Cómo lidias con la resistencia o la renuencia de las partes interesadas en el trabajo colaborativo?

First and foremost, put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders. They seek measurable success. If there is resistance chances are they don't see how collaborative efforts are meeting their bottom line. Consider quantitative outputs like the numbers of ideas generated, etc., or think of qualitative measures like how employees feel when they get something done together. Be transparent about it all!

First, try to categorize the resistance. What are the main and secondary concerns? Are people unsure how to join the collaboration? Have they had a bad experience that makes them weary of joining in? Do they lack the psychological safety required to make themselves vulnerable enough to join the collaboration? Once you can categorize the resistance and understand the problem, you can explore options to solve the problem.

Communicating clearly and frequently is fine, but are you hearing stakeholders' internal dialogue? Our reseach demonstrates that stakeholders choose to act or not act based on the internal dialogue (what they think) rather than their external dialogue (what they say). It is essential to have a methiodology & process which enables change agents and leaders to hear and act upon these inner dialogues. This has a particular impact upon the reluctance to participate as without a belief from each stakeholders that they have been genuinely included, it will be unsurprising if the degree of endorsement for the required actions is less than optimal. Disengaged stakeholders may not appreciate clear and frequent communication.

Any change programme should secure hard data measuring stakeholders' degree of alignment (using algorithms and maths, and not averages and standard deviations) to a common purpose, including the relevant goals, constraints and current assumptions. The traditional view of alignment, as this section suggests, is binary, e.g. “on the bus or off the bus”, or “aligned or not aligned”. Rather than treating alignment as binary, consider it a dynamic characteristic of a group, which can be mathematically measured on a scale of 0 - 100. “Are we aligned?” should become “How aligned are we?”; no soft measures, unreliable commentary or informed intuition - just hard data.

Why do so many groups of people fall short of achieving identified and achievable targets despite compelling market drivers, shared objectives, well-educated people, domain knowledge, good intentions, and appropriate incentives? A critical factor is the prevalent misalignment among stakeholders' opinions, with typically 83% expressing disagreement with one another across 150+ views. Unsurprisingly this situation can bring resistance & reluctance to any community. However, misalignment has the potential for good. Misalignment is where two or more people do not agree on something. Misalignment, when properly surfaced, offers an opportunity for diverse viewpoints to converge into a cohesive understanding, expelling resistance & reluctance.